Meredith Freeport

This fanfiction article, Meredith Freeport, was written by Distant Tide. Please do not edit this fiction without the writer's permission.

Meredith Freeport General Information Location Meredith Population 41 million residents (estimated circa. 2570) City Demonym Meredithians Affiliation Independent
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The Meredith Freeport, occasionally referred to as "Margret," is the largest and only organized settlement on the neutral colony world of Meredith. Part of a planetwide-declared, poorly-secured Pale Zone, the city is home to multiple species and factions independent of the interstellar great powers. Surrounded by inhospitable biomes, the city thrives on the protection fees it collects from its clients.

Built atop the remnants of an abandoned human settlement, not much is remembered from history before the arrival of refugees and vagabonds after the Created uprising. By the 2570s, the city is a freeport for all manners of business and a safe harbor to some less-morale characters. In recent times, agents of interstellar nations have used the backdrop of Meredith Freeport to fight their ongoing soft wars.

Premise

It was supposed to be the jumping-off point for another branch in the grand expansion of humanity's newborn interstellar empire. A hundred more colonies from a single, concentrated port-world. Everything was going right; the company already succeeded in their previous long-range colonial endeavors, the team and the science was air tight, the husband-wife leadership were charismatic and at the heart of the operation. Nothing could go wrong.

But then the dear lady passed; her life's work and dream unfulfilled. The husband and all her inspired decided to go the honorable route and named the new sparkling home waiting for them across the stars after her: Meredith. Her unfortunate sacrifice, just short of the finish line, would be the shining light for the next wave of colonials heading into the great dark yonder. For a time, things worked out and life in the wild spaces was good and profitable. First contact with civilizations not our own, even when hostile, seemed like a distant thought and life continued on. Then they closed in and finally the fear hit home. Meredith was abandoned as the Covenant war machine cut holes through human space.

The homemakers never returned. The Covenant War ended, vagabonds and society's lesser filled the spaces of decrepit skyscrapers and junk space ports. New buildings rose. New life sprung forth. New residents settled and businesses prospered. All the galaxy's misunderstood were welcome as the human military marked this place to be 'of or beyond the pale'.

No matter. It's still home to us. Meredith keeps us in her ever good care.

Key Landmarks

Pi Square Kilometer Array

Scarab Graveyard

Spartans walk among the Scarab Graveyard on Meredith.

Among the surrounding and inhospitable wilds of Meredith Freeport, a lack of codified laws outside the city promises that all sorts of activities are acceptable. A major physical feature born of this free space is the many rusted and destroyed frames of Covenant War-era Scarab quadrupedal military walkers. Their black-and-purple frames still glint in daylight, numbering in the thousands across foothills, flatlands, and sometimes peaking out of shallow waters.

For unfamiliar visitors to Meredith, it might appear that these wartime remnants were a product of a failed military invasion. However, in truth, they are abandoned scraps and husks left by Sangheili warlords as part of a larger dumping practice common to the colonial spaces between the old Covenant holdings and human space. Described as "Scarab graveyards," the one on Meredith is among the best-documented and among the largest in scale. As many as 3240 individual Scarab wrecks have been documented by the Freeport Office of Archives with much more undocumented or arriving.

Due in large part to lasting effects of the Great Schism, many Covenant facets of infrastructure were lost or contested in the Covenant Empire's collapse. Many unaffiliated warlords, keeps not part of large post-War Covenant polities, found it near impossible to maintain more complex war platforms like Scarab excavators. The vast majority of dumped Scarabs are of the Lekegolo worm-controlled variety, rather than mechanical, due to the ancient alliance between the Lekegolo and Sangheili species and eventual breakups on the local level.

Without maintenance or technical expertise, many Lekegolo colonies starved or found growing pains within the machine bodies. Eaters of metal and iron-rich materials, some Lekegolo colonies attempted to eat their own Scarab enclosures leading to critical disablement of the war machines. Others abandoned the Scarabs altogether and became unreliable for continued military operations to Sangheili-led factions. A part of poor communication between the Sangheili and Lekegolo parties appears to be some loss of higher-order thinking among mass/tank-breed Lekegolo gestalts. The centuries-long practice, akin to domestication, has left some Lekegolo colonies unable to work with their Sangheili hosts.

This led to dumping en masse of abandoned or unusable Scarab walkers on to neutral colony worlds that lacked the means to secure their territories. Rumors abound of improper disposal of Scarab harnesses, with some suggestion that juvenile, aberrant Lekegolo colonies now exist among the Meredith wilderness and present a navigational hazard. These reports however remain inconclusive.