The Long Rim (2020)

Publisher Blurb:

The Long Rim: a Lancer Setting

Towards the proximal end of the Orion arm, far from Cradle and the Capital worlds of humanity, is a patch of space with no official designation; this “empty” corridor is known as the Long Rim. On paper, the Long Rim is a barren no-man’s land choked with space junk, littered with mined-out rocks and the remnants of old battles — a place where humanity’s debris coalesces either through the complex ballet of competing gravities, or by deliberate direction.

In reality, the Long Rim is the primary thoroughfare for ships in transit between the most distant active blink gate from the galactic core, Rao Co Station, and the Dawnline Shore, a hotly contested frontier territory. Often passed over by the larger narratives that grip the galaxy, the Long Rim has become one of the largest and most heavily trafficked sub-blink shipping lanes in known space, moving millions of tons of food, medical supplies, construction materials, electronics, colonists, and sensitive materiel in a steady stream.

Pilgrims and wanderers, landhunters, small-time mercenaries and charter captains, Horizon collectivists and Horus adherents — the people in Union’s margins find a perilous, but potentially profitable, home in the Long Rim. It is a wild place, often violent, with no central power to claim total control. As much as there can be a consensus of the Rim’s population, a lack of a central power is not a bad thing: Free of Union’s vast bureaucracy, a person can disappear; free of Union’s vast bureaucracy, legends can be made.

But for every legend made in the Rim, there are many more who die in obscurity. The Rim's freedom is only guaranteed as long as one can keep it, and only the people who live get to tell their stories...