We’ll start off this Firewall Guide to Fun Ways To Die in the Inner System with that great big nuclear reactor at the center of our lives, around which the entire system literally revolves, which simultaneously warms us with its nurturing fire and attempts to kill us with its caustic rays. The sun, and its close neighbors—Mercury and the Vulcanoids—represent some interesting environmental challenges and peculiar risks that every sentinel needs to keep in mind.
We use all kinds of words to make the sun seem harmless and safe: Average. Middle-aged. Dwarf. Main sequence.
Don’t believe any of it, my little sentinels.
Sol is a monster, a behemoth. It measures 1.4 million kilometers in diameter and masses more than everything else in our system combined. Our primary’s gravitational influence is felt light years away. Nothing is immune to its touch.
Deep in the nuclear furnace that is Sol’s frantic heart, hellish temperatures and pressures tear matter apart, stripping electrons from their nuclei, creating monstrous magnetic fields, and birthing terrible storms that rage across our sun’s face. Lines of magnetic force shape coronal loops big enough to swallow a planet or birth coronal mass ejections that fling billions of tons of superheated plasma tens of thousands of kilometers into space. The accompanying radiation reaches much further. If the range of Sol’s touch is measured in light years, the reach of Sol’s rage is measured in astronomical units.
And here we sit on Sol’s very doorstep.
Still think this is a boring assignment?
The first thing to keep in mind is that the sun itself presents several existential risks. Yeah, it seems safe and stable enough, but it is essentially a ticking time bomb. Sol is the most powerful force in the system and with a little shove in the wrong direction it could cause the death of millions—or everyone. These are just a few of the possibilities:
CMEs and flares happen when solar magnetic fields are stretched to the point of breaking. By using a powerful magnetic source, these dangerous events could be targeted at one’s enemies. The bursts of radiation thrown out by these events is damaging to spacecraft, satellites, and biological life, can haze out important communications and sensor wavelengths, and can cause dangerous geomagnetic storms on planetary bodies. Planets with powerful magnetic fields (Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, etc.) would be protected from the worst of the ionic particles emitted by a CME. Everyone else would be fried.
The sun produces energy by fusing lighter elements in to heavier elements. The fusion of iron is an endothermic process, though. In other words, it doesn’t produce energy. Instead, it sucks the life out of you like a needy lover. There isn’t enough iron in the solar system to disrupt the fusion process of a whole star, but there is enough to throw Sol out of balance, causing a localized collapse of the solar surface. This would lead to violent magnetic storms and plasma ejections.
On a more speculative scale, if some advanced intelligence were able to figure out a method to cause the star’s interior to burn down to a core of iron and nickel, the sun would explode in a supernova, wiping out the entire solar system. While such methods are far beyond transhumanity’s knowledge, we cannot rule out the capabilities of other species or minds like the TITANs. Of course, an entity or civilization capable of iron bombing a star can probably do much, much worse things to us.
If a Ceres-sized singularity were somehow introduced to the sun’s heart, this mini black hole would act as a vacuum cleaner, eating mass and growing as it feeds. Since every star is a delicate balance between the compressive force of mass and the expansionist force of fusion, this would destabilize the star. The eventual result: a supernova—and the end to all your woes.
Owing to the fact that the solar corona is such a difficult environment for man and machine, there are only three coronal habitats. All three are stationed in highly elliptical heliocentric orbits that bring them to the sun’s north pole at perihelion, where stations are relatively safe from flares and coronal mass ejections. These coronal habitats are easily identified by the bow shocks preceding them and the plasma tails that stretch behind them, giving them a characteristic tear-drop shape as the solar wind bends around their powerful magnetic fields. The hulls of circumsolar habitats are covered with thousands of electromagnetic dynamos that draw power from the sun itself and generate the powerful EM fields that shield the habitats from solar radiation. Beneath the habitats’ hulls are layers of circulating water for shielding. This energy-blocking shell protects a spherical array of habitat modules.
Solar habitats do a thriving business with iceteroid miners in the Trojans who deliver deep-space icebergs to replenish the habitats’ water supply. The iceteroids are heavily insulated and are themselves equipped with powerful EM shields. Moving these huge bodies of ice into the inner system is a dangerous process—if any element of the iceteroid’s shielding were to fail, intense solar radiation would immediately vaporize the ice in the affected area, generating a gas jet, and creating a runaway comet. Due to the resources necessary to import iceteroids from the outer system and the risk of an accident, supplying these habitats with water is a fabulously expensive process.
Station Type: Cluster
Allegiance: Planetary Consortium
Primary Languages: English, Mandarin
The public face of this habitat is the Martian University of New Shanghai, but in actuality its principal funding comes from a shadowy collection of hypercorps and other interests. We’ve found links to Cognite, Direct Action, and the criminal syndicate Nine Lives, among others. Publicly, Aten claims to be working on cutting-edge propulsion systems and new techniques for solar energy collection, but rumors abound that the habitat is heavily involved in military research. We’ve heard strange and disturbing tales: work on weaponizing the Exsurgent virus; development of a simple image that can crash a transhuman mind via a visual cortex input glitch; wargaming forknapped leaders to gain a negotiating advantage. Unfortunately, Firewall knows little beyond the rumors. Security is exceptionally tight and major egocasting restrictions are placed on the habitat’s population of 12,000. Firewall has made at least two failed efforts to infiltrate projects here to learn more.
Station Type: Cluster
Allegiance: Argonaut/Titanian
Primary Languages: None
Hooverman-Geischecker is a joint venture between the argonauts and Titan Autonomous University sponsoring dozens of research studies. This habitat supports a population of about 4,000 transhumans. Unlike Aten, it has a relatively open culture and is run on nanosocialist lines. Major avenues of study include pure solar science and research into new corona-adapted morphs. This station is an ideal staging point for operations as it is the least restrictive of the coronal habs. Firewall has several agents here, and it’s a great place to make connections with the nomads who live within the corona—the suryas and other so-called Solarians. It is also the only solar habitat supporting tourism and offering recreational activities like sun-diving (sleeving into a surya or other coronal morph) and sun-spotting (bot-jamming tours of solar flares and other features).
Station Type: Cluster
Allegiance: Solarian
Primary Languages: Finnish, Suryan
Ukko Jylinä is distinct as the habitat designed by and for those who consider themselves the local inhabitants of the solar corona, rather than the interests of distant powers. It takes its name from a common sequence of helioseismic vibrations transposed fifteen octaves upward into the usual range of transhuman hearing. The suryas consider this harmonic one of the most beautiful sounds the sun makes.
The habitat serves as a safe harbor for suryas during heavy solar storms, as well as a place for the Solarians to socialize, mate, replenish their water supplies, egocast, and resleeve. The population fluctuates anywhere from 300 to 3,000 (nearly the entire surya population) when the weather is bad. Suryas huddle within protective hangar/utility modules, idling in VR simulspaces, typically sending forks to resleeve into salamander morphs to take care of any matters requiring a more humanoid form. Outsiders are rarely invited and tend to find the station inhospitable, as there is little in the way of living modules or habitable space for common transhuman biomorphs.
The “native” Solarian culture is dismissive of habitats, preferring a nomadic lifestyle of drifting and swimming in the sun’s magnetic field in corona-adapted surya morphs. With the exception of a number of scientists engaged in solar research, this population is largely mercurial, with a high percentage of uplifted dolphin and whale egos, as the corona is one of the few environments within the solar system that offers cetacea an approximate alternative to their native physical forms and lifestyles. As a result, Solarian culture is heavily influenced by dolphin and whale norms. Suryas often congregate in pods defined by powerful and complex familial relationships. Their culture is more free-wheeling than typical human behavior and there is little goal-direction. Solarian culture is also unusually intimate and sex is shared freely. The sonar of baseline dolphins allows them to “see” everything that is happening in their companions’ bodies, in terms of health, mood, and so on. It is often said that dolphins have no secrets, and so it has come to be with suryas.
As a result of this intimacy and their general seclusion from transhuman culture, the Solarians are sometimes seen as stand-offish and unwelcoming. This is in large part due to several unfortunate incidents that occurred between Solarians and socialites vacationing in surya morphs and a simple failure to comprehend each others’ cultural norms. While the cetacea Solarians are generally inquisitive and sociable, there are some Solarians who have definitely adopted an isolationist mindset, looking at their lifestyle as turning their back on the stresses and concerns of transhuman society. Because of the radical nature of the environment in which the Solarians live, the cultural equivalent of radiative speciation can be expected to some degree. Though they remain an offshoot of transhumanity, the Solarians are definitely their own clade with their own goals and outlook. Some other elements of transhuman society find this concerning, viewing the divergent path of the Solarians as the growth of an alien culture in the heart of the solar system.
The following file, originating from former MU student Hui Fong’s personal muse, turned up in the data cache of a Direct Action counter-intrusion specialist.
[The camera focuses on an unbroken black sky and then drifts down to steady on a sea of molten fire. The inferno is granular, built of waves of incandescent white and gold and orange, pocked with irregular black lesions.]
“This is Dr. Julia da Rosa of the Icarus Survey. It is 1712 UT on 13 January 10 AF. We are skimming … looks like 23,000 klicks above the chromosphere. Icarus is heavily shielded and the AI’s solar meteorology subroutine will move us out of the way if it forecasts a flare, but right now we seem to be OK. Even so, we’re all in solar survival suits just in c—my god, what the hell is that?”
[A black speck skims over the surface of the golden fire. It is no bigger than a pencil’s dark tip, but it is moving fast.]
“Urbano, what is that? Is that a ship?” [Excited male voice.] “If it is, it’s too low. They better have
major shielding or the sun’s smallest sneeze will vaporize them.” [The dark speck powers through a turn, rising out of the sun at a steep angle, now shooting toward the camera like a missile.]
“Did they just fire on us?” “Não, Julia. I told you it’s not a ship.”
[The object is rapidly growing in size as it arrows toward the camera. It is sleek and black and shaped like a missile.]
“What is it, then?” [The object flashes by at incredible speed. The camera freezes in on a still-shot, highlighting and bringing the bullet-sleek silhouette of what looks like an orca into focus. A bright-red scale line appears, stretching from the thing’s pointed nose to its broad flukes. The legend next to the line says: “8 meters.” The creature’s back is coal black, its belly a luminous yellow-gold marked with patches of black. It sports two wing-like appendages that are reminiscent of a whale’s pectoral fins. The camera resumes the video and time starts again. The thing flashes past, rolling on its side to bare its belly to the camera, patches of black rapidly flashing on and off.] [Female voice, whispering.] “My God. I t-think that was a surya.”
The Vulcanoids are a tiny population of small asteroids that lie in a stable orbital region inside Mercury’s orbit. For some, this is considered prime real estate for secret projects, as any activity here is hidden from telescopic surveillance from the rest of the system by the sun’s glare.
Station Type: Dome
Allegiance: TerraGenesis
Primary Languages: Dutch, English, Tamil
Caldwell was the first of the elusive Vulcanoids to be discovered, though initially it attracted little attention. When a small team of prospectors from Venus discovered a Pandora Gate in a deep crag near one of the asteroid’s narrow poles, however, this small rock was thrust into the spotlight. Ownership of the asteroid was quickly “acquired” by TerraGenesis who immediately began undertaking exoplanet research missions through this Vulcanoid Gate. After spending several years cataloging new worlds, TerraGenesis then shifted focus into alien world terraforming and geo-engineering projects.
Initially TerraGenesis was quite open about sharing—or at least leasing—gate time with other hypercorps and research groups. Several Venusian concerns, in particular, initiated numerous extrasolar studies. All of this changed, however, when a stillunknown terrorist cell attacked Caldwell and nearly succeeded in an attempt to destroy the gate. Sleeved in reaper morphs, the attackers penetrated all the way into the inner gate facilities. Once neutralized, they were discovered to be carrying a thermonuclear warhead, which they luckily had failed to detonate. To this date TerraGenesis has not determined who sponsored the attack, despite many rumors. In response, however, the gate facilities are more strictly defended and access is much more restricted.
TerraGenesis’s control of the Vulcanoid Gate puts them in a unique and difficult position. Like any hypercorp, their specialized interests mean that relations with other hypercorps and allies are essential, and there is no shortage of parties seeking to establish or retain partnerships. On the other hand, many of TerraGen’s “friends” have conflicting agendas, so the cooperative must consistently play a balancing act. An upswing in Morningstar-TerraGenesis research ventures and colonization projects, along with continued links between the terraforming corp and reclaimers, has the Planetary Consortium on edge. This is enhanced by a growing rivalry between TerraGen and the Consortium’s own Pathfinder. Some forces within the Consortium seem eager to bring TerraGenesis into the fold, however, and have gone so far as to offer the corp incentives in their Martian terraforming projects in exchange for increased access to the Vulcanoid Gate and potential sanctions against Morningstar initiatives.
Station Type: Torus
Allegiance: Hypercorp (TerraGenesis)
Primary Languages: English, Dutch, Tamil, Wu
Quartet is a collection of four torus habitats that share an orbit fifty thousand kilometers farther out from the sun than Caldwell. While they travel more slowly around the sun than Caldwell, each is stationed 90 degrees apart, meaning that one is always “close” to Caldwell. Ownership is shared between several hypercorps, though TerraGenesis has majority control in each and uses them as staging and logistic areas for Vulcanoid Gate projects. Each habitat features several research parks, focusing mainly on exoplanet studies, and also doubles as a military installation, with equipment and personnel on hand to provide the Vulcanoid Gate with any necessary reinforcements.
Station Type: Cluster
Allegiance: Solarian
Primary Languages: English, French
Discovered three years after Caldwell, this tiny asteroid has little to recommend it, save for its proximity to the Vulcanoid Gate. Ecologene is in the process of hollowing out Ra with the intention of converting it into a Cole bubble. TerraGenesis’s cooperative congress has chosen to see this as an alarming sign—and another reason to bolster defenses. Paranoia has been fueled by rumors linking Ecologene and even the Factors to the attack on the Vulcanoid Gate, despite any significant evidence.
While the environmental systems corp does have ties to preservationists and a seeming favored relationship with the mysterious aliens who decry usage of the gates, these rumors may just as well be a smokescreen or may even have been sparked by Ecologene’s developments with Ra.
Mercury is the solar system’s first major planet—and its smallest. The tiny world is the ultimate desert; dusty, dry, and blasted by the sun. It’s perfect for working on your tan. The planet’s sidereal day is twothirds as long as its short year, meaning the sun crawls across the world’s black sky, and Mercury is subjected to hellish extremes of hot and cold—especially since it has no atmosphere to normalize temperatures (Mercury’s mean temperature swings through a change of 620 degrees Celsius night to day). Maybe you didn’t know you could freeze to death a hop, skip, and a jump from the boiling surface of the sun, but you can.
Mercury’s surface is covered with impact craters, evidence of the battering it has taken from meteorites drawn in by the sun’s massive gravity. The planet’s violent history—along with the repeated thermal cycling—has worked to break up the world’s rocks and ensure its surface is covered in dust. The mantle of time lies heavily upon the face of this little world. Now numerous strip mines add new scars to its battered surface.
It is thought that most volatiles boiled off during the planet’s formation due to the world’s proximity to the sun. This makes the water-ice found in crater shadows and at the poles among the most soughtafter water in the system. The same process stripped out lighter elements, concentrating heavy metals as the planet coalesced. Consequently, Mercury has the highest density of heavy metals in the solar system after Earth. Not surprisingly, the focus of economic activity is mining and solar power.
Since Mercury is desolate and sparsely inhabited, it is also ideal for hiding certain activities from prying eyes. And that’s why we take such an interest in it.
Mercury is small and inhospitable. Its population is too small to support the kind of independent culture found on Luna, Mars, or Venus. Corporate facilities devoted to mining, solar power, and antimatter production form the backbone of Mercury’s infrastructure. Only the hypercorps have the resources and the reach to make this isolated world livable.
Few corp citizens consider Mercury their home. With a few exceptions, corporates fall into one of two groups: recruits waiting to have their tickets punched so they can move on to a more promising assignment or exiles who have been sent to Mercury as a sign of disfavor. Outside the corporate enclaves are Mercury’s true citizens. Known derisively by the hypercorps as dirt sifters, they typically live in small tin-can settlements buried under the surface or hugging the walls of Mercury’s many craters (thus avoiding the worst of the sun during the long day). Many travel the planet’s surface in nomadic caravans. The typical sifter is fiercely independent. Most wanted freedom from corp restrictions and entanglements and were willing to come all the way to Mercury to find it. It is ironic, then, that these small settlements only survive by trading with their neighbors. Mercurian culture is like a bad marriage: resentful and co-dependent.
It is easy enough for sentinels to move through the hypercorp culture. All the usual levers apply: greed, hatred, jealousy, direct marketing. But if you need to try something off-the-wall, sifters are your best bet.
[The camera focuses on an abandoned mining station awash in a dazzling ocean of light. There are five-meter struts and supports stacked like logs; probably titanium or ceramiccomposite to take the heat. Tailing piles dot the camp; smooth cones of crushed rock rising up against the black sky. Most of all there is a gaping maw, a hole in the world, a wound from which transhumanity takes what it wants.]
[Below the image is a group of numbers moving fast enough to let the viewer know the vidclip is time lapsed. And there is another set of digits: 448° C. This number hardly moves at all.]
[Darkness falls like a blade across the rocky and broken land. With no atmosphere to scatter light, the difference between day and night is a knife-edge. The sharp terminator rolls across the landscape, plunging the wasteland first into twilight, then night.]
[Now the temperature starts to move, rapidly diving as radiative heat transfer carries away the sun’s stored heat. When the temperature drops to 250° C, a fleet of rugged vehicles races into the view: buggies and surface trains, cargo carriers and massive trucks. They all stop fast, slamming on brakes, kicking long rooster tails of dust high into the empty sky. Suited figures leap out of their vehicles. Robotic miners unload themselves and charge toward the hole. Earth is moved. Ore is sifted. Wealth is loaded.]
[Until the temperature hits 0° C.]
[Then the explosion of action reverses itself, like someone accidentally hit rewind. Just a few hours of work and everything is abandoned once more. The crazy, eclectic caravan of strange ingenuity reloads and races off to chase the lollygagging terminator, where they’ll work their next claim.]
Aside from the omnipresent black market, there are two ways to legitimately make cred on Mercury: mining and energy.
Given the vast amounts of iron, nickel, and other metals to be had here, mining is not surprisingly the world’s chief economic activity. At least a dozen hypercorps have their hands in looting the planet’s valuables, refining them, and hauling them off. Most notable are outfits like the Tolstoj Mining Concern, Jaehon Offworld, the Vyasa Workers Cooperative, and Noonday Mining.
Noonday claims to be a privately held firm, but it is widely believed to be a Starware shell set up to keep an eye on Omnicor’s orbital antimatter facility. This rumor is bolstered by Noonday’s exclusive use of Starware equipment. There have been several ugly confrontations between Noonday’s orbital ingot harbor and Omnicor’s Monolith-3 habitat. These two hypercorps don’t like each other and they play for keeps. A thousand-ton iron ingot is quite sufficient to crush a cortical stack, and it takes only a few grams of antimatter to entirely convert a stack into hard gamma. It’s best for sentinels to avoid getting between these two rival corporations. Unless, you know, we need you to.
The hypercorps, with their large semi-permanent encampments, don’t have a complete lock on mining here. A large number of sifters engage in roving, nomadic mining ops, chasing the crawling terminator across the planet to mine when the temperature is still hot and moving on when it gets close to freezing. This is the mad genius of sifters, stretching the useful life of their equipment by never exposing it to the full brutality of Mercury’s day and night. This is what survival requires when you are cut off from the corporate teat.
After its vast mineral wealth, Mercury’s most abundant resource is the sun. Nearly every fabricated horizontal surface on the planet is covered with highefficiency solar cells. Solar power is the stalwart of the planetary energy economy (though Helium-3 is also produced for local use). Focused solar power is used for day-side drilling, as automated rigs with powerful lenses use light to cut through crust under environmental conditions that would kill an unprotected transhuman. Many communities use solar power for temperature regulation—cutting the colony’s heat load by focusing sunlight on a large, frozen heat sink (usually an underground reservoir) during the day, and then allowing the heated water to radiate its heat back into the city during Mercury’s long, cold night.
Solar energy is also important for an exotic purpose: antimatter production. Mercury is the perfect place for this activity: security via isolation, a cheap power source, and if something goes wrong nothing likely to be missed will be destroyed. The production of antimatter is not only expensive, but it’s also dangerous. Loss of containment for even a fraction of a second can lead to the total loss of your investment—and several hundred square kilometers of planet. Not surprisingly, security is a major concern. Matter-antimatter annihilation of a gram of material produces an energy release equivalent to 40 kilotons of TNT. A kilogram of antimatter and a matching kilogram of matter produces an explosion in the 40-megaton range—the equivalent of a goodsized nuclear weapon. Nevertheless, antimatter has a number of important uses, such as antimatter spacecraft drives. No one aside from Omnicor publicly admits to conducting antimatter research, but the giant toroid particle accelerators and large spherical magnetic containment units required for antimatter production and storage are unmistakable. Firewall is aware of at least three other concerns producing antimatter: Gammax (Rodin Crater), Direct Action (Sobkou Planitia), and Fa Jing (Goldstone Vallis).
The potential lethality of weaponized antimatter is a major concern to Firewall—and anyone else with a brain. Accordingly, Firewall scanners keep a close eye on these hypercorps, or on anyone else who seems to be paying them too much attention. Despite the impressive security these facilities have, an internal or external breach is always possible. Just six months ago, for example, Fa Jing found one of their maintenance techs in a restricted area in their Goldstone facility. He killed three guards before he was subdued. Subsequent investigation uncovered links between the tech and a group of exhumans known as One Step Beyond.
Though not a significant industry, the role of prisons on Mercury shouldn’t be ignored. Several hypercorps take advantage of Mercury’s isolation and the need for cheap labor, profiting by taking the egos of convicted criminals off of others’ hands and then sleeving them to use as labor in the mines. Such unfortunates have little hope, with almost no chance for escape or even a guarantee that they will ever be released. This does, of course, place a high concentration of potentially dangerous criminals in some mining camps, though it is worth noting that such prisoners are often political dissidents, mentally ill, or simply unwanted infugees from the Fall.
[Incoming Message.]
[Source: Anonymous]
[Public Key Decryption Complete]
MOZART PROTOCOL.
CLASS: COMPARTMENTALIZED, ALPHA BLACK SIX
FIREWALL CACHE OF WEAPONIZED ANTIMATTER LOCATED IN CRATER MOZART SOUTH OF CALORIS PLANITIA. IN EVENT OF LOSS OF QUARANTINE, CALORIS 18 IS TO BE VAPORIZED. TOTAL TITAN EXTERMINATION MANDATED. ALLOWABLE TARGET ESCAPE PERCENTAGE: ZERO. ALLOWABLE COLLATERAL DAMAGE: UNLIMITED. ACTION ON PROXY AUTHORITY ONLY.
Several outposts on Mercury, or in orbit around the planet, are worth noting.
Allegiance: Independent (Sifter)
Primary Languages: Arabic, Hindi
This mid-sized crater in the northern hemisphere would be the sifter capital—if the sifters could ever agree on anything as important as where their capital should be. More like a swap-meet than a seat of government, this is where sifters come to trade, exchange news, and purchase specialized services. In the rare cases when an issue is important enough to force consensus, it is discussed and voted on at Al-Hamadhanj.
When asked about Al-Hamadhanj, your local hypercorp PR director is likely to point out that the sifter mecca is located only a couple hundred klicks southwest of the crater Vyasa—the underground home to a major corporate mining concern. The implication is that the sifters couldn’t survive without feeding off the scraps of hypercorp culture. Needless to say, this kind of attitude does nothing to reduce friction between sifters and corporate citizens.
For the sentinel who needs to acquire intelligence or gear without alerting the hypercorps, Al-Hamadhanj is your best bet.
Located at the southern tip of the northern hemisphere’s Caloris Planitia (almost exactly due north of the crater Mozart), Caloris 18 is a former site of TITAN activity. The base was a solar power relay station operated by the now-defunct Lukos. Vanya Ilyanovich, the facility’s AGI, fused the station’s morphs into an enormous centipedal tube of flesh. When the AGI tried to merge its consciousness with the transhuman minds of its creation, it was destroyed. Rumors abound that instances of Vanya Ilyanovich survived or that the AGI did die, but a few unfortunate souls survived the crude experiment and still remain there, alive but quite mad. No one will ever know for sure as Caloris 18 is under strict quarantine.
Sentinels are strongly cautioned to avoid Caloris 18. Operatives violating the Caloris quarantine will not be extracted. Even if your cortical stack is recovered, you will not be resleeved, due to the risk of infection. Caloris 18 is a place of permanent death. Do not go there.
Allegiance: Independent (Hypercorp/Jaehon Offworld)
Primary Languages: Korean
Mercury’s largest surface settlement is a city-sized mass driver that travels across the planet’s night-side, flinging building-sized ingots of metal into space. Cannon is powered by fields of solar arrays and is principally owned by the hypercorp Jaehon Offworld, with a minority stake held by several Lunar banks looking to diversify. Most of the 10,000 inhabitants are Jaehon employees, and security is tight. Cannon makes a long loop around the Caloris basin (giving Caloris 18 a wide berth), before pursuing a meandering path that takes it across the northern hemisphere. The immense crawler stops at a variety of mining facilities where it gathers their gigantic ingots for launch into orbit.
The engineers of Cannon are adept at placing their huge projectiles into carefully designed orbits where wranglers steer them into ingot harbors for distribution. Still, it is wise for the sentinel to realize that the only thing that separates a mass driver from a weapon of mass destruction is the hand on the launch controls.
Allegiance: Planetary Consortium (Fa Jing)
Primary Languages: English, Mandarin
This double crater located between 42° and 50° south latitude is a secret Fa Jing base. DelacroixShelley is advantageously positioned. Close to Mercury’s meager supply of polar ice, it is one of the few habitats that has a cheap, adequate water supply. More importantly, it’s far from the more developed northern hemisphere. The northernmost crater, Delacroix, is a heavily-automated military installation. The troops and automata stationed there have so far been able to prevent anyone from discovering what Fa Jing is doing in Shelley. Speculation ranges from conducting forbidden TITAN research to building a zombie army. Whatever the true answer is, sentinels may someday have to penetrate the Shelley facility to take a direct look.
A skyscraper-sized oval floating in high Mercury orbit, no one knows exactly what the “Egg” is or what it does. The Factors left the Egg behind in AF 8 when one of their ships visited Mercury, telling transhumanity only that it belonged to them and we should leave it alone. Though they have hinted that it is not a weapon, they refuse to answer any direct questions regarding the object, along with some veiled threats not to disturb it. Not wanting to risk an incident, the Planetary Consortium has declared the Egg off-limits, despite some vocal factions urging that the mysterious item be destroyed lest it pose some kind of threat. The Consortium has thoroughly studied the Egg from a safe distance, of course, though they aren’t sharing their results. Firewall has learned that the Egg’s physical composition remains a puzzle, and that it may be shaped from some kind of exotic matter.
The leading speculation is that the Egg is some sort of sensing device, though why it was left in Mercury’s orbit is unclear. Others have noted that the Egg has a constant overwatch on Caloris 18, and suspect it may be placed to watch for signs of TITAN activity. This has spurred rumors of the Factors secretly placing other, hidden egg-like devices near other areas of known TITAN presences, though these remain unconfirmed. Still others argue that the Egg may be a longrange surveillance device for monitoring the Vulcanoid Gate. For now, at least, the Consortium keeps the Egg under guard and has already thwarted one attempted attack from an anti-Factor extremist group.
Station Type: Torus
Allegiance: Planetary Consortium
Primary Languages: Arabic, English, Urdu
This small torus is the bureaucratic and civic center for Planetary Consortium affairs regarding Mercury. Aside from some petty hypercorp intrigues waged in its halls, Hellwatch has little going for it, and is considered a backwater and punishment placement by those assigned to work there. The habitat has been plagued with unusual and sometimes dangerous technical difficulties since its inception, further leading to the perception that being stationed there is a cursed assignment. Most of the problems have been investigated and determined to be caused by sabotage, though whether this is a matter of disgruntled workers or something else remains unknown.
Based at the crater Aristoxenes, near Mercury’s north pole, Lumina is an odd hypercorp settlement. A major portion of the colony consists of massive fields of solar collectors arrays, covering a range of high peaks—some natural, some artificial—that are perpetually lit by the sun. The power gathered by these collectors is used to fuel energy-intensive nuclear and radiochemical research and production processes, such as manufacturing isotopes and extracting fission products. These facilities, including an atom smasher for particle physics research, are contained in a complex of underground tunnels. Access to this buried station is through the perpetually-shadowed crater walls, also making it a good area for finding frozen water. Numerous hypercorps participate in operations and projects here. Needless to say, security is tight and thorough.
Aside from its pragmatic uses, Lumina also features an unlikely resort spa. Jokingly referred to as the best place to get a tan in the solar system, the resort facilities are small but extravagant. The services here are oriented towards high-ranking hyperelites who must attend to business on Mercury in person, catering to their needs with top-tier egocasting and resleeving options, a selection of designer morphs, and luxuries you won’t find anywhere else on the planet. Lumina’s private meeting features are sometimes used by individuals who want a quiet and out-of-the-way place to discuss matters in the flesh. Access to the resort, however, is restricted to an exclusive list of clientele—or those who can pull favors from the ultra-rich and powerful.