BAGLEY

Red Star = main settlement   Red Dot = active/open mine  Blue Dot = abandoned/closed mine 

BAGLEY


3034 Delphi/Breda

D100434-9

Primary: M5 red dwarf

Other Inhabited Worlds:

Atheris: X445500-8
Tomino (GG moon): Y219434-9

Bagley has one of the best kept secrets in the sector: a world in its system that is the end result of a ‘covert’  terraforming project and left to its own devices once the Rebellion broke out.

BAGLEY

Bagley has a surface gravity of .2 standard.  It has a population of about 9500 scattered in various settlements and mining bases.

Bagley is a small, barren, airless moon of the gas giant Levar and is very rich in rare minerals.  It has been inhabited for nearly a thousand years, and in that time has been used almost exclusively for mining.  The world is honeycombed with ancient mine tunnels and dotted with equally ancient and abandoned bases and outposts.  It has a reputation for being haunted, a claim which is occasionally bolstered by the discovery of the mummified remains of some long-forgotten prospectors from previous eras.  The locals love to play this up with newcomers, some even going so far as to sell newbies 'psychic' charms which can supposedly protect them from the ghosts and bad luck.

Bagleyans tend to be a tough, cynical lot, most coming from lines of hard-working miners and their families.

They tend to be tight-lipped about Atheris.  Though the world is no longer a secret, they are still very protective of it.  They suffered only a few minor raids during the Rebellion, and they don't want 'outsider poison' coming in and doing to the Bagley system what they've done to the rest of known space.  The world is run by a council, whose members are chosen from the general populace by other council members when a vacancy opens up.

Even so, they recognize the necessity of dealing with outside systems, and Bagley is a member of the Willow Accord.  It represents not only itself, but Atheris and Tomino as well.

TOMINO

Tomino has a surface gravity of .31 standard.  It has a population of about 1500, concentrated mostly in a cluster of bases near the moon's north pole.

Tomino is a world covered over in ices--methane ice, dry ice, and water ice.  As Bagley has almost no native water, an extraction center was set up here to provide its industries with volatiles.  At first the facility was fully automated, but as it was expanded over the centuries, maintenance crews were added, and the community grew very slowly from there over the centuris.

Despite its somewhat exotic setting, Tomino has a definite small town feel.  Almost everyone knows or knows of everyone else.

ATHERIS

Atheris has a surface gravity of .45 standard

Atheris was an experiment in terraforming originating a few centuries ago by the Imperial scientific hierarchy.  Its existence was kept secret not for any nefarious reasons, but to prevent possible sooners from colonizing it before the biosphere could be fully stabilized.

Atheris was a poorly kept secret on Bagley and Tomino, but for their own reasons those populations were willing to be tight-lipped about the project to outsiders.  They even became protective of the world once the Imperium was forced to pull out.

Atheris orbits close to its primary, but is tidally locked to it, meaning one side is perpetually baked by the star, making it an unlivable desert with temperatures climbing to nearly 300 degrees, and the other is perpetually frozen, locked forever in glaciers.  There is a planet-wide atmosphere that helps to mitigate the temperature extremes, but it was easy to see why the world never evolved life of its own.  Instead of trying to remake the whole world, the terraformers took the unusual approach of trying to terraform just the twilight band between the lighted and dark hemispheres. where there was just enough light and heat to support a human-friendly ecology.

After several centuries, they succeeded in a limited way.  The twilight life zone is about 100 miles wide, and is centered around a single great Ring River that completely circles the planet and feeds back on itself.  Centrifugal force from the planet's tight, two-week orbit around its star keeps the river flowing steadily.  The river is fed by melting glaciers from the cold side, which can often be seen as mile-high cliffs in the distance, frequently calving off thousands of tons of ice at a time.  On the other side of the river is artificially sculpted highlands that help to channel the river and functions as a crude thermal barrier to protect the lifezone from super-heated air masses from the hot side.

The biosphere is populated by many genetically modified plants and animals.  Terrestrial crabs and their gene modified cousins make up the bulk of the animal lifeforms, chosen because of their hardiness in surviving in varying extreme conditions on Earth.  There are some specimens large enough to threaten humans, and though they've been engineered to find humans bad to the taste, they can still be provoked.

After the Rebellion started, a few of the project scientists remained behind on the world as the rest of the staff left to either fight or join their families.  Slowly, over the last few decades, various refugees have found the world by various means and have settled down on it.  At first by mutual consent, and then by enforced societal pressure, no attempt was made at forming any kind of formal government.  People were free to do what they wanted as long as they threatened neither their fellow refugees nor the planet's delicate artificial biosphere.  Many people considered the idyllic, untouched world a form of divine deliverance after the horror they were fleeing from, and consider Atheris the next best thing to an unspoiled paradise.

Atheris now has a population of just about 100,000, all refugees or descended from them, all spread out along the roughly 12000 miles of the Ring River valley.  They live in either small communities or by family, with some smattering of hermits here and there.  Some of them have very unusual beliefs or practices, some are non-humans of various types.  Most agree that the planet has become a haven for oddballs and outcasts.

The planet has a very loose, libertarian society with a barter economy.  However, as more refugees are showing up all the time, infringements and conflicts are starting to happen more often, and some resources are becoming strained.  This is in turn forcing some to call for a more organized government, but they have met with resistance so far.

The original scientists who stayed behind are still alive and active, doing what they can to shore up Atheris' still fledgling biosphere.  They have a small orbital station, but are mostly found in a small floating gravitic 'town' that slowly courses its way along over the Ring River, taking samples and monitoring things.

All is not perfect in paradise, however.  The scientists maintain that the terraforming was only partially complete, and left on its own the biosphere will collapse in only a few thousand years, returning Atheris to a lifeless world.  That is, if the growing human inhabitants don't end up accelerating the process greatly.

Bagley more or less acts as 'patron' to Atheris, and protects its interests as best it can.  Many Bagleyans often visit Atheris, and trade with the locals for some of the valuable bioproducts the terraformers set up the ecology to produce.  Bagley does worry that Atheris is vulnerable to any kind of major attack, as Bagley and Tomino only have enough ships to protect themselves, and even then only from minor raids.