=Ariel= 
**Allegiance:** [[Ultimates]]
**Primary Languages:** English, Hindi, Mandarin
**Population:** 2,000
Less than 1,200 kilometers in diameter, Ariel is a small moon that is half rock and half ice. The moon is most noted for its cratered surface and the long, smooth rift valleys that were likely carved out by ﬂowing liquid, most likely ammonia, methane, or carbon monoxide. The moon has little strategic value within the Uranian system, but it is rich in volatiles and the tidal heating it endures makes them relatively easy to extract. Most outsiders assume the ultimates on [[Xiphos]] want a second source of CHON that’s more reliable than that offered by the skimmers, which certainly ﬁts the survivalist and self-reliance proﬁle of the movement as a whole. Ariel’s resources are not enough to offset the massive amount of funds and time the ultimates have sunk into establishing a base there, however, even if the bulk of those resources have gone into the construction of Xiphos. The same tidal heating also makes the moon very tectonically active, yet the developments there have all involved extensive subterranean excavation that would be unstable and costly to maintain. Further, the mining operations that are nominally the reason for the base would require at most a few hundred personnel to run, yet close to two thousand ultimates are stationed on the moon.
Possible explanations are easy to come by, and none of them bode well for non-ultimates. Ariel’s harsh, cold environment is somewhat analagous to many other outsystem moons—or nearby ice moons like [[Oberon]], home of the [[Fissure Gate]]—and even some large asteroids, making it a ready-made staging ground for wargames. Others claim that the head of operations for Ariel, Autarch Myron Chalmers, is using it as an R&D facility for experiments deemed too dangerous to perform on Xiphos or that other ultimates might disapprove of. Given Chalmers’s disdain for non-ultimates, there is a fear he may be using the facilities as a harsh prison for captives or internal dissenters, for researching TITAN or exhuman artifacts, or for developing or reﬁning new WMDs. There also exists the dim possibility that the ultimates may be preparing some option to deliberately destabilize the subcrustal tidal action and destroy the moon itself, either to deny others access to the moon, as a proof-of-concept for planet-busting weapons, or as a way of creating a debris ﬁeld that would signiﬁcantly impact cargo access to Uranus. Given the near-obsession with survivability in the movement, there would also be value to preparing Ariel as a fall-back position to use if Xiphos were ever compromised.

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