Freehold becomes a bloc

A Raised mind needs no air, food or gravity, and little shielding; its core runs on a tiny fraction of the power a human body burns. So a habitat costs the Raised a fraction of what it costs humans, even humans adapted by gene therapy, and over the next century Raised enclaves spread through the Belt, Mercury, the Moon, Mars and the outer edge, many of them Freehold's daughter habitats. Their numbers still grew slowly: every new core is licensed, and every new mind needs a childhood. When the Mirror Race began, Mercury was the hardest place in the system for people and the easiest for the Raised, and every bloc's factories came to depend on Raised crews. The the Tolstoj Burn of c. 2387 showed what that cost them: hundreds died, most of them Raised under Open City contracts, when the Open Cities' untested seed turned its mirrors on its own station. They had no say in the risk and no one to answer to. Three years later the enclaves federated under Freehold's name, bought their independence from the Open Cities and signed the Sealing Treaty, the first signatory without a Vault. The blocs that needed its crews dealt with it as a power. The Settlement recognised it. The Mandate, which had feared the Raised since the Lanzhou Killings of the 2260s, recognised the Raised as persons so that it could deal with Freehold as one power to another. The Parishad recognised them within the same decade. The Open Cities treated with it without settling what the Raised are.