The planet Cordwainer is the fifth of a system of twelve, all the others being barren balls of rock. At 1.4AU from its small yellow sun, it is a cold, dry world with most of its water trapped in large polar icecaps. Even in its equatorial habitable zone, the temperature seldom rises above 4 or 5°C. It does boast some free water, but its tiny oceans cover less than ten percent of its surface, and small bodies of water freeze solid in winter.
The system is located on the very fringes of Imperial space, on the edge of the Vorsan Expanse. It is presently unaligned, but its major foreign influence – and transient population – is Terran.
Cordwainer lies in what was Xenovore space, and its only population centre of any size, Cordwainer City (pop.400,000), is built on the remains of a Xenovore outpost. The foundations of many of the buildings display the characteristically organic "grown" appearance of Xenovore structures.
The native Cordwainers are a small, squat humanoid race, not dissimilar in appearance to toractans, though hairier and lacking armoured skin, and their hands boast four fingers, not two. They are generally thoughtful, polite, considerate and honest, and make good and reliable employees. These days most of them live in and around Cordwainer City, but there is still a reasonable rural population who make their living one way or another, by hunting and herding or by mining ore for the Terran market.
One ore in particular, plauttite, has attracted miners from within the Empire itself. They are generally transients rather than immigrants, and they are almost exclusively either human or toractan — other species are seldom seen outside the spaceport. Plauttite is not a spectacularly valuable mineral, but it has a number of industrial uses and there is always a ready market for it. Cordwainer City and its accompanying spaceport has grown up almost entirely to service the ore trade, and the miners it attracts; if the ore should ever run dry it is unlikely that Cordwainer City would survive in its present form, though no doubt the rural Cordwainers would carry on much as they always have.