Bagger Station
As someone once said, Bagger Station is “where you went when you had something unpleasant that needed doing, but also required someone with the moral flexibility to say yes. For a price.” Existing in Vertov, Bagger Station lies outside the influence of any government or ideology beyond its own idiosyncratic way of life. Bagger Station is where itinerant mercenaries go to find work and sanctuary.
“Bagger had been dug out of an unremarkable rock drifting in a lazy elliptical solar orbit through a system that was both a commercial hub and slipway nexus. Center-web, so ideal for snagging business. There must have been a hundred mercenary outfits from across the philosophical spectrum—Pact, GuardCorps, neither—who called Bagger home. None of them would ever mess with Auntie.”
It isn’t easy being accepted at Bagger. It starts with being given a drawer in a room with one bed among many. Your bed and whatever you leave in your drawer will be there when you return. In time a person can be considered local, and Bagger protects its own (outside the bounds of contractually obligated business).
No one who acted against another resident—theft, assault, or worse—has ever gotten away with it on Bagger. Somehow Auntie always knows. Those who try are turned out, never to return.
Bagger itself is protected by the value of the services Auntie’s odd little halfway house provides, and the friends and favors those services have earned it: with a hundred mercenary companies loyal to Bagger Station, any person, organization, or government that were to act against it would find themselves cut off from an interconnected web of influence and favor that spans the Hundred Suns.
