=Mercury= 
The closest planet to the sun has a mass comparable to Luna but is a great deal denser due to its iron-nickel core. Mercury rotates slowly and has no atmosphere, so that its day side is hot enough to melt most metals, while its night side is bitterly cold. Because it lacks many of the elements needed for transhuman colonies to be self-sufficient, Mercury is sparsely inhabited, save for a handful of solar power relays, a few underground mining stations, and a single large surface mining concern, Cannon.
==Resources and Economics== 
Most of Mercury’s economy is based on mining. Iron, nickel, and other metals make up 70% of the planet’s mass, making it the richest source of ferrous metals outside of the asteroids. Mercury also does a brisk business in relaying solar power and serves as a jumping-off point for solar research concerns unwilling or unable to support stations in the solar corona. Mercury has limited Helium-3 deposits, although these are predominantly mined for local use. It is an open secret that several powers have antimatter production stations here. Officially, these stations are massive solar power relays, but the immense toroid particle accelerators and large spherical magnetic containment units required for antimatter production and storage are nearly impossible to disguise.
==Caloris 18== 
The only known site of TITAN activity on Mercury during the Fall, Caloris 18 was a sparsely-crewed solar power relay station belonging to Lukos, a now-defunct Russian corporation. Vanya Ilyanovich, the AGI administering the facility, rounded up all of the station’s transhuman inhabitants and fused their morphs into a gigantic, centipede-like abomination before destroying itself in a failed attempt to merge consciousnesses with all of the minds in its creation. Since then, Caloris 18 has been under strict quarantine.
==Cannon== 
Mercury’s largest surface settlement is a city-scaled solar-satellite-powered mobile mass driver that crawls along the cool side of the planet, flinging apartment building sized ingots of extracted metal into space. The habitat is owned almost entirely by the hypercorp Jaehon Offworld, which built Cannon with backing from Lunar banks looking to diversify in anticipation of a post-He3 Lunar economy. Most of the 10,000 inhabitants are Jaehon employees, and security is tight. Cannon makes a long loop of the heavily-mined Caloris basin during the long Mercurian night before following a route that takes it around the planet’s northern hemisphere, avoiding the blasting rays of the sun. Along the way, it stops at a series of mining operations, collecting the gigantic ingots for launch into orbit.

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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 two- thirds 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 sought-after 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.
==Society== 
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 Habitats|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.
===Sidebar: Nomadic Miners=== 
[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 ceramic-composite 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.]
==Economy== 
Aside from the omnipresent black market, there are two ways to legitimately make cred on Mercury: mining and energy.
===Mining=== 
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|Starware ]]shell set up to keep an eye on [[Omnicorp|Omnicorp’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 Omnicorp’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.
===[[#Energy and Antimatter]]Energy and Antimatter=== 
After its vast mineral wealth, Mercury’s most abundant resource is the sun. Nearly every fabricated horizontal surface on the planet is covered with high-efficiency 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 good-sized nuclear weapon. Nevertheless, antimatter has a number of important uses, such as antimatter spacecraft drives. No one aside from Omnicorp 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.
===Prisons=== 
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.
==Important Sites== 
* [[Al-Hamadhanj]]
* [[Caloris 18]]
* [[Cannon]]
* [[Delacroix-Shelly]]
* [[The Egg]]
* [[Hellwatch]]
* [[Lumina]]


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