Galhemna was one of a triad of systems that formed the beating heart of the region. Jan-xhai was a nexus of trade, a port of call for the thousands of ship and cargoes – legal or not – that helped provide the Veiled Reaches with everything it needed. Natuos was the nerve net that controlled that heart, the epicenter of corporate and governmental control that guided and directed every action and effort in these sectors and Galhemna… Galhemna was the immune system, purifying and protecting.

A Security Force of nearly two hundred warships protected eight planets and thousands of transports, personnel transports, construction vessels and shipwombs. Freighters came in laden with raw materials and equipment and either left divested of their cargo, or laden with the industrial offerings to bequeath to the smaller military bases throughout the Veiled Reaches and its adjacent sectors, each of them fed from Galhemna’s relentless industry. Citadels hung across the orbital tracks like scattered pearls, there to defend the system from any invader. Minefields, far denser than the one that had greeted Yunl’ro, had been laid down across libration points, and where they had not been, networks of augur drones and pickets prowled, ensuring that any attempt to slip into the system would be doomed to failure.

Deeper in-system, sullen formations of battleships stood watch over garrison moons and strip-mined planets, awaiting orders to deploy. Vast networks of shipwombs sprawled through asteroid belts and hung in orbit over the cracked remnants of the inner planets, the ore and metals of the shattered worlds feeding Galhemna’s armouries, factories and construction yards. Despite all this, the system was consuming resources faster than it could harvest them. For the past decade and a half, Galhemna’s rate of production had been rising, its demand for more workers, more ships, more raw materials and refined products increasing steadily. The number of shipwombs, factories and armouries had more than doubled and the system’s output of war material had trebled. A response to the piracy in the region. That was the official explanation. The Veiled Reaches were wealthy and far from the Compact proper. Such a combination always attracted a criminal element and the Unbound in this region were annoyingly persistent, unexpectedly aggressive and frustratingly capable.

Galhemna is a location featured in the Angelverse scifi universe, a fascinating set of original novel-length stories created by Proximal Flame. The quality of his writing exceeds that of many professionally published authors by a good margin, and I would urge everybody who looks at this map favorably to at least take a look at his free first novel here. Should you like his work, feel free to support him on Patreon. I already do.

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