Reynard's Free Station began its long and storied existence far from the Twelve Worlds, as a pre-Imperial human space colony in an asteroid belt. It served as a control, habitation and manufacturing center in which asteroidal resources could be processed into higher-value products for more economical interstellar shipment. After a life support catastrophe resulted in extensive population loss and evacuation, the station was abandoned for decades before being acquired by squatters, who after a few centuries grew to prosper, expanding the original station and building others like it.
After the conclusion of a major war resulted in a large number of surplus capital spaceships, a corrupt viceroy sold some of them to the squatters, who refitted some of their stations (still collectively called "Reynard's Free Station") with engines. They embarked upon a nomadic course, driven by population pressures and the increasing competition within the original asteroid belt. For several centuries, the motely assortment of "stations" plied connected space, harvesting mostly easily-available asteroidal resources in sparsely inhabited systems, occasionally moving from orbit to orbit with slow but efficient transfers. (The "stations", each individually small enough in cross section for wormhole passage, would rendezvous and be linked together after the trip through the wormhole.)
Although RFS had numerous conflicts with other galactic denizens over the years (e.g. over mining rights and wormhole usage - it could take several weeks for its thousands of modules to pass a wormhole gate), it had generally positive interactions with them until the Antimatter Wars. By that time, it had grown to include over 1.6 million inhabitants in 7,625 wormhole-passable modules, and would monopolize a wormhole gate for over a month to pass between systems, despite outstanding logistical coordination.
The Antimatter Wars, obviously, represented an existential threat to RFS, which proceeded as far toward the pale of Imperial colonization as it could (it was already near the frontier, of course, due to its mode of operation). Unfortunately, economics in the time were not friendly to RFS, and, with Imperial forces distracted, its inhabitants turned rogue, blackmailing planets into providing them with additional propulsion components, propellant, etc by threatening them with a substantial quantity of bulk antimatter (which the station presumably had stolen from members of the Guardian sect earlier in the wars.)
In time, however, a remnant squadron of the collapsing Empire found RFS and began to pursue it. With no hope of outrunning the Empire's ships, RFS used their antimatter to destroy a wormhole gate behind them, cutting off the frontier planets that would later become the Allied Worlds from the rest of Connected Space. This action, of course, outraged the affected colonies, removing any real hope of a return to RFS's earlier mode of cooperative living with planetary civilizations. Not knowing the antimatter had been exhausted in the destruction of the wormhole gate, most of the colonies nonetheless gave into the demands of RFS as it passed through their systems. In the end, though, the colonists in the Guo's Star system called their bluff and attacked RFS and its fleet with fortified weapons they had built in their system in advance of RFS's expected arrival.
Although RFS managed to break through Dirac's forces at the wormhole, suffering moderate losses, it was attacked repeatedly by long-range weapons, forced to expend valuable propellant to avoid kinetic weapons, etc. Tricked by a false surrender into orbiting Dirac to receive propellant and tribute, RFS was finally defeated by hidden planetary defence weapons and orbital craft. Some RFS station modules were spitefully deorbited by their controllers, contributing to the collapse of civilization on Dirac during the dark age. The surviving population was mostly imprisoned in a penal colony around Iolo, the "boiling moon," using some of the more salvageable modules of RFS, as the population was too space-adapted to tolerate Dirac gravity. Other modules were reused or recycled in orbit around Dirac, and although the facilities were abandoned for a time during the nadir of the dark age, they are again in use today, forming the core of a major space station in Dirac orbit.
The defeat of Reynard's Free Station is considered an important formative event in the history of Dirac, and to a lesser extent, the Allied Worlds. (Volunteers from beyond Guo's Star participated in the battle as well, though not to a very large extent.) The station's defeat is depicted on the flag of the Empire of Dirac (Northern and Southern alike.)