Speyer was established as a small outpost in the obsfucating Sudnebel of Southern Frankfurt in 822 AS. Though it presently is of bare-bones construction and built far beyond their typical territory, the Unioner Syndicate launches raids here against the nearby trade lanes and uses the base as a checkpoint for all sorts of smuggling - Diamonds especially. The station may only prove to be a temporary supply depot, as its cheap and comparatively simple internal structure suggests a desire to linger in the unfriendly region only as long as necessary before either their foes the Bundschuh or the Federal Authorities catch wind of their activities here.

Krefeld is a small Unioner controlled base within one of the many asteroid fields in the Koeln system. The base serves mainly as a guard point for the nearby Duesseldorf jump hole, with the majority of its traffic consisting of diamond smugglers and supply ships. Placed well on the outskirts of the system, Krefeld is regarded as a safe haven from lawful activity, and is an important place of contact between Unioners and Red Hessians in Rheinland, right after Kreuzberg Depot in New Berlin.

Secretly constructed in 762 A.S., Leipheim Base lies in the south eastern reaches of the Alps Cloud. Carved out of a large asteroid within the nebula, the base is home to a large number of Unioners, many of whom prefer the seclusion that Leipheim offers, compared to the more well known Pacifica Base in Bering.

The base has seen a considerable surge of activity as the Unioners rekindled their ties to the Corsairs. Artifact smuggling out of the Sigma systems often passes by Leipheim, and Corsair raiders have begun to use the base to stage attacks on the lanes. Surprisingly, the Unioners do not seem too concerned with this intrusion on their turf.

The history of the Unioners is intimately tied to Alster.
The shipyard opened in 412 AS, specializing in commercial transports and heavy lifters. Conditions were appalling in the yards, worker safety being merely a tertiary concern of the owners. Coupled with the excessively long spaceside rotations, the workers' morale gradually deteriorated until a major accident killed several hundred workers in 512 AS.

Three months later, the workers formed the Alster Union. Because of their highly specialized skills, the management had no choice but to capitulate to their demands. During the next century the union gradually strengthened and eventually included the dockworkers on the Altona Station above Hamburg. By the end of the 80-Years War, the union demanded increasingly high wages and progressively fewer annual hours. The system was out of balance. Republican was no longer competitive with Kusari shipbuilders.

With the war over, demand for ships plummeted. The bloated headcount of Alster was now a sore point for Republican Shipping, desperately trying to restore profitablity. Management was now back in the driver's seat after almost 200 years of acceding to union demands. They fired tens of thousands and won major concessions from the remaining workers, who lost centuries of gains in a matter of days.

As unemployment rocketed towards 30 percent in Hamburg, a radicalized version of the union reformed -- more of a revolutionary cell than advocacy organisation, the Unioners gradually moved towards the opinion that if the government was going to cynically criminalise its failures out of the newly formed democratic process, then the Unioners would work towards democracy’s destruction. Eeking out a meagre living amongst the half-complete hulls that they had scuttled, the Unioners built a chain of meagre habitats to house the dispossessed scattered across the Rhein, salvaged together from ship components, planetesimal asteroids, abandoned mining sites, and bankrolled by grey and blackmarket provision of their time-honed skillsets to the fledgeling Rheinlandic mob, Junkers, and independent pirates. The presence of Freeport 2 in Bering proved alluring to the nascent Unioner movement of Rheinland during the unsettled times, and was regarded with a sense of nostalgia for many of the Hamburg-orginated Unioners who had arrived there; the emblems of Imperial Shipping still embossed in every pressure-plate. Freeport Two rapidly turned into a mecca for the fledgeling Rheinlandic diaspora as the Unioners turned the Freeport into a hotspot of overt revolutionary sentiment and not-so-overt racketeering and piracy. Following the popular uprising of 702, the station's population exploded. In 720 the Zoners, realising that their archology was in major danger of house reprisals as a veritable pirate den, laid down the ultimatum to the Unioner occupiers: Take your criminal activities somewhere else, or have the Rheinland Police take you to Viernheim. They would sell basic supplies to the rebels, but no more. Suprisingly, the Unioners, agreed to all terms, vacating the station peacably. Out of the largest planitesimals in the Tanner belt, the Unioners carved their Pacifica base, named after the largest ocean on the old Earth, representative of the idea that the Unioners had become a people of true spacefarers, bound only to be free within to the void of space, till the day may come when they could regain their lost citizenship. Over the years, the base received various upgrades, including a small shipyard module modeled as a miniturized Alster to build and maintain spacecraft. Pacifica, to this day, continues to grow and evolve, and remains the largest, most heavily populated archology within the independent worlds, filling a comparable role to Coronado’s own Barrier Gate.

The Unioners today are known as some of the most brutal pirates in Rheinland, ranging from the upper Omegas even as far as Texas to the stellar North. Most of their attacks are focused on the Alster Shipyard in Hamburg, which has alienated them from some of their still employed brethren. The bulk of their Trade Lane raids are directed against Republican ships in New Berlin. Historically their Syndicate is infamous for holding little loyalty to anything but profit, with rumours suggesting that they have proven quite adept at smuggling a vast variety of goods and acting as middlemen for many groups, even those in conflict with each other. Evidence of this can be seen in the Unioner tendency to avoid participation in affairs that do not directly concern them – they take little interest in the wider narrative of the K’haran infection, for example, and only directly hunt down members of the bounty hunters guild when they are known to be hunting Unioners specifically. The Unioners have even managed to bridge the gap between the Hispanias, retaining basic trade connections with the Maltese whilst remaining firm partners-in-crime with the Corsairs against the Bundschuh and for the artefact trade. Indeed, the Unioners have even succeeded in bridging the blood feud between the Junkers and the Hogosha, preserving key trading ties to the Junkers as cosmic neighbours and a source of protection, and to the Hogosha through the far-reaching diplomatic manifesto of the artefact trade. The only place where the Unioners stand to lose diplomatic face is in their dealings with other Rheinlandic unlawfuls; Unioners do not approve of the the

Wedel is a Unioner base in Hamburg. Originally a Kruger mining facility, it was abandoned when resources in the Alsterfeld became too scarce to mine in 631 A.S., and lay abandoned for several decades. In the wake of their revolt, the Alster Unioners repopulated the base and partially restored it in 676 A.S., and started launching raids at Altona and Alster from it.

Wedel is a dangerous station. Many sections are still decompressed, and the Unioners seem in no hurry to repair them. The station is used as a waystation for smugglers heading into Liberty with Blood Diamonds and Artifacts. The Unioners skirt a dangerous road in dealing with both the Corsairs and Hessians to obtain these, but they and their Liberty Rogue partners benefit considerably from the trade.

Wedel remains the first space station repurposed by the Unioners, once it had become clear that the local Hamburg goverment showed little interest in acquiescing to the demands of its alienated working class. Since the existence of the station is a matter of public record, the Unioners have worked diligently to maintain the station’s sense of general disarray and disrepair without allowing for Wedel to degrade to the point that its habitation would remain unacceptably dangerous. However, Wedel is still an extremely dangerous station due to the extremely poor quality of life experienced by those that call the station home, serving as an overcrowded handoff point for every artefact trader heading up to the Liberty borderworlds, and every gunrunner taking the long road home. As the Unioners cannot viably add additional modules to the station without raising the suspicion of the law, the meagre habitable volume of Wedel remains highly contested by the embittered yet influential Unioner traditionalists who vie for breathing room. The station is simultaneously unexpandable yet indispensable, commanding the critical black market connection upon which both the eastern and North Western Unioner cells depend.

Primary: Bering, Hamburg, New Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Cologne, Thuringia, Texas.
Secondary: Bremen, Puerto Rico, Hudson, Stuttgart, and the Triangle Sigmas (Sigmas 13, 21, 15), Kansas.
Tertiary: New Hampshire, Dresden, Omega 7, Omega 11, Omega 54, Omega 55, Omicron Xi, Vespucci.