The Laurel
The prize awarded to whichever clan pulls the most helium-3 in a quarter: extra food and comforts. A very effective way to make slaves fight one another.
The contest is rigged, and has always been so. Gamma always wins, and Lambda never will.
It's awarded once per quarter across the twenty-four clans of Lykos. It means more food than you can eat, more burners to smoke, and quilts imported from Earth. As Darrow says, it's always Gamma.
The Laurel is the whole of the system in miniature: scarcity engineered from above, so that the people underneath spend their fury on each other. Lambda's loss in the first chapters is not a matter of bad luck.