The Fallow
What patrols the sectors - pre-Cinder machinery still executing, a sector that remembers being left alone, the Gleaners that come to a wreck, and the Leviathan pods that walk a spine each season.
The Fallow is the game’s word for what lives in the sectors. It is not a faction. Nothing in it wants anything, nobody commands it, and it eats itself: what patrols a rung is equipment that outlived the world that set it running. Every sector carries a patrol; a home, a belt and a port carry none, which is why the Shallows and the Cinder are the places you cut rock.
The patrol
| Hulls on a rung | 4 × threat - four in a threat-1 lane, forty in a threat-10 one |
| Hull | 2 600 × (1 + 0.25 per band above the first) |
| Damage | 70 a second - one is a nuisance, three at once is the trouble |
| Provoked by | a shot, or coming within 300 m of it |
| Then | chases to 1.4 km, gives up at 3.2 km and goes home |
| Fires inside | 1.2 km, holding at about 720 m - inside your cannon’s reach, so opening the distance is an answer |
| A wreck | back on its post after 45 s; scatters 5 units of silicon to scoop |
| Callsign | the sector’s last word and number: WATCH 12-03 |
A patrol is something you can watch, follow and choose. Shooting one starts the fight; flying into its face is the other way. They fly the same physics you do - nothing here out-turns a rule you are bound by. A sector nobody is in is not simulated: its patrol sleeps where it stood and wakes, mid-chase if that is where it was, when the next pilot arrives. Combat and death.
The grade - a sector remembers
Each sector past threat 1 keeps a count of how many of its patrol were culled this week. The quota is one full patrol, 4 × threat. Miss it and the week was quiet; quiet weeks in a row raise the grade, and any pilot of any Compact culling it back to quota resets it. Ember weeks count double.
| Quiet weeks | Grade | More on the patrol | Their hull | Wrecks and cull writs pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | in grade | - | ×1.00 | ×1.00 |
| 1 | patch | +2 | ×1.15 | ×1.25 |
| 3 | field | +4 | ×1.30 | ×1.50 |
| 5 | sovereign | +8 | ×1.50 | ×2.00 |
The nursery lanes (threat 1) never bloom; threat 2 stops at a patch. The extra hulls come from a pool that sleeps in the sector from the day the map was made and wake through respawn, so nothing changes in the middle of a fight; when the grade falls they do not come back.
The chart card says it in the survey’s own words - a quiet week is a patch · the wrecks pay a quarter more, a quiet month is a field · the wrecks pay half again, the survey word for that is sovereign · the wrecks pay double - and the map rail reads THE FALLOW · PATCH / FIELD / SOVEREIGN. The Arms wing’s cull writ for that sector grows with the grade, and /cull on the relay calls the others: a sovereign rung is written to be more than one pilot can clear.
The Gleaners
A wreck that goes cold in a sector - a pilot’s death, or a convoy run lost there - is not left alone. Two hours later a package of two comes to it from the sector’s sleeping pool and works it for eight hours; killed on a warm wreck they come back to it, on a cold one they go back to sleep at their post. One package per sector at a time. The Circular tells a returning pilot where they are: A wreck went cold in Iron Shoal 3 hours ago. The Gleaners are already stripping it.
The Leviathan pods
Each season the pods walk one Compact’s spine - which one is the season’s own roll, never the common ladder - from week 3 to week 6, one sector-rung a week from the frontier inward. A rung they are on reads one grade up: more on the patrol, harder, paying better, through the same tables. The chart foretells it at the season’s opening - Chart warning: Leviathan pods due down Ashaari Long Watch, week 3. Graded traffic advised. - and the map rail reads THE FALLOW · MIGRATION while they are there. Today the pods are a grade, not a hull you can see.
What is not Fallow
The one heavy hull at each home is the same machine flying for its Compact: foreigners on sight, never its own side. Siege. And the cutters that go out from a Mining post and come back are the belt’s own shift, not a patrol, and cannot be shot. Stations, the zones.