At 4:15 p.m., the Everlasting Eagle landed on a dwarf planet called Blackman Star to take on supplies, and drop Tan Jize and his group off while they were at it.
The dwarf planet was much like the Moon, with solid water on its surface, relatively stable gravity, and a stable orbit. In this era, that made it habitable. After the Third Galactic War ended, back in the early days of the Common Era, some enterprising people had already built semi-permanent supply depots and repair stations there. Over time, they had grown into an unremarkable little space town. By now, beneath its ugly but sturdy dome, self-built houses of every style were scattered irregularly across the landscape, and the permanent population numbered somewhere between fifty and sixty thousand.
In the vastness of space, a ramshackle space town like this was less than a speck of dust. But in the Fermo Star Region—and even in the underworld across the galaxy—the town of Donkey with a Flagpole on Blackman Star was still a name to reckon with.
At the heart of the town was the original Donkey with a Flagpole hotel. It called itself a hotel, but was really a space rest stop offering basic lodging, repairs, and supplies. The owner's family was said to have been powerful in both the underworld and the legitimate world for generations. Pirates, gangsters, the local warlords of the Fermo Star Region, even marauders—all had to show him some respect.
So even when pirates and rebels treated the entire Fegur system as the galaxy's "Sherwood Forest," and the warlords springing up and falling just as quickly across Fermo fought battles nearby, this unremarkable space town had still made it safely through eight centuries of turbulent history.
And so the 404th "Fermo Star Region Multi-Party Talks" would