Neutral Zone

The Neutral Zone is a political and strategic region between Accord and Theron territories. Veridite fields give its access routes value, while listening posts keep neutrality under observation. Earth’s position offers leverage over a gateway into this contested region.

At a glance

• Between Accord and Theron territories
• Veridite resource access
• Surveillance and competing strategic interests

In the novel

Selected passages from P.X: No Man’s Space.

AV-565 drifted in orbit around the red dwarf Lacaille 9352, known to the Arcanians as Vespera. The station held position at the threshold of the Neutral Zone, where the Harmonic Accord and the Theron Empire scrutinized one another across an invisible frontier. It was a place of vigilance, one of many listening posts serving as sentinels in a long, cold contest of ideology and expansion.

Only eleven light-years away lay Earth, now drawn into the heart of that contest. Its position made neutrality impossible. Control of Earth meant command of the gateway behind it, and Oron did not need the projections to tell him what that gateway was worth: access to the Neutral Zone’s vast veridite fields, the resource on which faster-than-light power ultimately depended. The planet was no longer a distant curiosity. It had become a variable in every calculation, a risk neither side could ignore, and the prize both powers were learning to name.