El Fulcro

What is El Fulcro?

El Fulcro is the midpoint between the two faction stations: El Pináculo, of the Zenith, and El Fondeadero, of the Nadir.

The five Guilds, five trade organisations that take no side, keep their customs post there. From it they run the Mercado Global de Aurin, the market both sides share.

Among those who fly the route, El Fulcro is known as the only place in Aurin where the two factions mix without tension. Dez Calloway, a veteran pilot of the Flotilla Libre, the Nadir militia, knows it well. He flies from El Fondeadero to the Astillero Meridian, an abandoned shipyard of the Flota Aura. The first leg passes close to El Fulcro.

From the cockpit of his Tortuga, a heavy transport (see the canonical fleet), there is mixed traffic in view. Zenith and Nadir ships trade with no friction anyone can see. Calloway points out to whoever is aboard how far that is from the cold war everywhere else.

Where exactly is it?

Each station is anchored on a rock in the orbit of Ithera, the neutral planet:

• El Pináculo at Delvar, at the L4 point.
• El Fondeadero at Trasvar, at the L5 point.

L4 and L5 are two stable points on Ithera’s orbit. One lies sixty degrees ahead of the planet, the other sixty degrees behind. So the numbers work out like this:

• Each station lies about fifteen million kilometres from Ithera.
• The two stations lie about twenty-six million kilometres apart.
• El Fulcro is the geometric midpoint of that span, about thirteen million kilometres from each station.
• That point falls on the line joining Aurin and Ithera, some 7.5 million kilometres from the star and as many from the planet.

Why does it belong to no one?

The Armisticio de Ithera, the pact that stopped the war, set both stations the same distance from the neutral planet. That way neither has the quicker response time. El Fulcro follows from that symmetry.

Aurin has eight strategic points, the fixed sites the two factions fight over. Of the eight, only El Fulcro meets two conditions:

• It is equidistant from both stations, by definition.
• No guild dominates it.

It controls the neutral trade routes that cross the centre of the system. With them come the toll on traffic between factions and sensor dominance over both stations.

Who runs it?

The five Guilds, from their customs post. The Mercado Global is the system’s third trade channel. The other two belong to each side:

• the Gran Subasta at El Pináculo, the Zenith market;
• the Tablón de Trueque at El Fondeadero, the Nadir one.

Each station has a Terminal de Cambio Global for trading on the Mercado Global. It is the only listing that a Zenith and a Nadir see exactly alike.

Neither faction would accept the tariff on its trade with the rival going to the other side’s treasury. So the Guilds collect it, the only neutral power both stations recognise. The dossier on economy and trade puts it like this:

“It is the same argument that sustains the Armisticio de Ithera, applied to money: no faction can afford to boycott the only infrastructure that keeps its own economy flowing.”

Dossier on economy and trade

How much does it cost to trade here?

Anyone can buy or sell on the Mercado Global without leaving their station. But closing the deal in person, at El Fulcro, cuts the frontier tariff from 22% to 15%. Those seven points are the reward for risking the crossing rather than trading remotely.

Even so, the tariff is higher than the Zenith auction’s levy and well above Nadir barter. That is deliberate: it lets each station keep its own way of doing business.

How you trade	Tariff	Where it goes
Remotely, from any station	22%	12% to the Guilds’ joint fund and 10% withdrawn from circulation
In person, at El Fulcro	15%	10% to the Guilds’ fund and 5% withdrawn from circulation

Money “withdrawn from circulation” simply disappears: it is taken out of the system to hold back inflation.

The joint fund pays for the Supply Contracts. These are the jobs that restock guild vendors at both stations equally.