Territory: Frontier lending circuit; reach into charted-edge systems via contracted recovery

What It Is

Corvid Financial lends to the people nobody sane lends to. Survey crews, wildcat prospectors, salvage runners, the whole restless class of frontier chancers who need real money to chase a maybe. Corvid underwrites the expedition, takes a lien on the ship and whatever the run turns up, and waits. Most runs fail. Corvid built its whole model on that, the way a crow builds its living on what does not make it home, and named itself after the bird with a flat kind of honesty.

It is not a big house and it does not pretend to be. What it has instead is patience and a very long memory. A Corvid loan follows the borrower, not the ship, so losing the vessel to a boarding crew or a bad jump changes nothing about who owes what. The interest keeps running while you drift.

How It Works

Corvid rarely does its own collecting. It sells the ugly files, or contracts them out to specialists like Marek Solano, who work a percentage and their own reputation. That reach is the point. A borrower who skips one system finds the paper waiting two systems over, because the debt travels cheaper than he does. The lesson Corvid most wants taught is not really about any one defaulter. It is about every other borrower watching to see whether running works.

Relationships

• Creditor of Shackleton Magellan — Holds the defaulted expedition loan that ruined him; put a recovery agent on his file.
• Employs Marek Solano — Solano works Corvid's harder frontier files on contract.