Thirteen hundred worlds, and within a decade most if not all of them would have their own versions of the TSL-5. Hand-off stations that marked the bubble of void where the planet’s sphere of control ended and the union’s began. Anything that the colonies needed from humanity’s first home or from each other went up the gravity wells. That was the inner’s problem. Moving it from one system to another belonged to the Belt. Old terms. Inners. Belters. They stuck because language held on to things that way, even when the reality around them had shifted.
