In 191 AL a cascade failure in the Ring's hydroponics cut belt rations by a third for two years. The belt called it the Dust Famine. The Throne's response was to raise ore quotas to pay for the repairs.
The rising began at the Slag Yards, where a shift crew welded their cutting beams onto an ore hauler and burned an imperial tax cutter out of the sky. Within a month every rock in the outer belt was in revolt. The miners had no warships, so they made them: salvaged plating bolted over mining rigs, mass drivers built from ore launchers, drills that could tear armor as easily as rock. The Empire's beam fleets had been built to fight a monster from the dark. They had not been built to dig men out of asteroids.
The Throne sent envoys with an offer: amnesty, doubled rations and imperial citizenship for any crew that laid down its tools. Not one crew accepted. The belt has called itself the Unbought ever since.
The war ended at Bedrock, the largest hollowed asteroid in the belt, which held out through a nineteen-month siege until the Empire's treasury broke before its walls did. The Accords of Bedrock in 204 AL left the outer belts free in all but name, and gave birth to the Miner Rebellion. Meanwhile, the crews who had run ore and weapons through the imperial blockade by unregistered lanes found they had no wish to go back to honest work. They became the first cells of the Void Syndicate.
“Every rock in this belt was paid for in our lungs. We are not selling it back.”
— Declaration of the Slag Yards, 191 AL