Akiton

At a glance, the rocky surface, grisly impact scars, and forbidding ice caps of Akiton seem uninhabitable. Even so, life has clung to the surface for untold eons, even as the planet slowly dies. In a process that has been occurring for millions of years, Akiton’s core has cooled, its atmosphere has thinned, and its liquid water has frozen, killing off all but the hardiest plant life as much of the arable soil has simply blown away. What might have once been a lush paradise is now a desert world on which truly tenacious creatures have evolved to survive. The rise of space travel brought new life to Akiton, for within its rocky crust run immense veins of thasteron, a substance key to the production of starship fuel for sublight travel. The centuries-long boom brought in unprecedented businesses, immigrants, and wealth, making the poor rich and the rich even richer. With the advent of Drift travel shortly after the Gap, though, the need for thasteron quickly plateaued and then plummeted. Within decades, most operations’ cost of extracting thasteron outweighed the potential profits, and today only a handful of reserves are pure enough or so easily accessible to be worth excavating. Those who had the means to do so left the planet long ago. Those who inherited Akiton were the desperate poor, the opportunistic raiders, the rugged traditionalists, and the stubborn plutocrats who hoped to keep their crumbling thasteron empires together. After several centuries of economic depression, the situation has largely stabilized, but the vibrant survivor culture is still a long way from prosperity. (Pact Worlds, p. 48) Akiton is the site of the first Empyreak Skylark adventure, The Moorglade Incident, and is the homeworld of the venture's instigator and the title ship's part-owner, Brister Fen.

Type

Planet

Location under

Pact Worlds

Included Locations