The Freewheeler --------------- > The pirate mothership turned out to be a mile-wide torus, rotating about its axis once a minute. The spacers got a good view of it while a magnetic field funneled them into the central hub; the ring appeared to be made of inflatable segments, and the rest was a hodge-podge of recycled spacecraft parts, haphazardly connected together. It must have been about as mobile as a beached whale in normal space, but in hyper mode that hardly mattered. > > -- _Arrow in the Sky_ Originally built as a mobile correction facility (the initials MCF can still be found stamped in unlikely places on board), the Freewheeler got its new name after guards and prisoners banded together and hijacked it, turning to piracy. While ongoing maintenance was difficult due to lack of resources, the Finders lovingly cared for their only home, and for many years kept it spaceworthy against all odds. It ended up orbiting the (formerly lost) planet of Lundalur, to serve as a space station again. The Freewheeler has a complement of armed scout ships, good enough to patrol commercial traffic within a small star system. The Finders ----------- Originally the guards and prisoners of a mobile correction facility, that changed when the former -- being fed up with poor treatment -- sided with the latter and hijacked their own prison, turning to piracy. After several years spent in search of an out-of-the-way rock where they could settle down in peace, a strange series of events led to them discovering the location of a lost planet called Lundalur, whose original colonists eventually accepted them. The Finders still maintain an informal separation between "guards" and "prisoners", with the former having a paternalistic attitude towards the latter. Both sides however work together, and fiercely defend their new home and friends. Lundalur -------- > The planet was anything but friendly. Just large enough for gravity to be a burden, just close enough to its K-class sun for the warmth to be suffocating, its surface evenly divided between rolling black hills and sickly green oceans. Somewhere in that desolate landscape, there was a valley covered in clouds, in no way different from its neighbors. > > ... > > It was a sea of flickering lights that covered the valley floor and climbed the slopes around it. The cloud cover hung like a ceiling over it all, swarms of luminous insects standing in for the unseen stars. A few metres away, children played around a jumble of bricks like a giant mushroom cross-bred with a house. A woman in rustic attire came out to yell at them, only to gasp and run away as she noticed the intruders. The kids merely froze and stared at the trio. > > ... > > She led them across the stream on a stone bridge, then past a water wheel and up a windy path lit by gaslamps and bordered by shops. More than one sported steam engines in adjacent yards. Into a small grotto they went, then out into a smaller depression, bordered by cliffs on all sides. The artificial cloud cover was much thinner here, or rather the sunlight passing through it was stronger and whiter than the three visitors would have thought possible with the local sun. Row after row of vegetable plots took up the middle, surrounded by a ring of fruit trees. > > -- _Arrow in the Sky_