Meredith Freeport

The Meredith Freeport, also called "Margaret" after a , is the largest and only organized settlement on the neutral colony world of Meredith. Part of a poorly-secured, planetwide Pale Zone, the city is home to multiple peoples and factions independent of the interstellar great powers. Surrounded by inhospitable biomes, the city thrives on the protection fees it collects from its clients and transiting frontier commerce free of UNSC regulation following the .
Built atop the remnants of an abandoned human , little history remains from before the arrival of refugees and vagabonds post-. By the 2570s, the city is a freeport for all manners of business and a safe harbor to some less-savory characters. In recent times, agents of interstellar nations have used the backdrop of Meredith Freeport to fight their clandestine soft wars.
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==Premise==
==Key Landmarks==
===Pi Square Kilometer Array===
===Scarab Graveyard===
Among the inhospitable wilds of Meredith Freeport, even a lack of lawful guidelines city promises all sorts of questionable activities are acceptable. A major physical feature born of this free space is the many rusted and destroyed frames of quadrupedal military-walkers. Their black-and-purple frames still glint in daylight, numbering in the thousands across foothills, flatlands, and sometimes peeking 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 warlords as part of a larger dumping practice common to the colonial spaces between the old 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 3,240 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 , 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 . The vast majority of dumped Scarabs are of the 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.