=New Dazhai= 
Set near the foot of the northern escarpment of the Argyre Planitia impact basin, Dazhai is your regular type of large company town. About 350,000 people live under a good-sized (800-meter) permanent [[domes|dome]], several smaller 100-meter pressure domes, and the usual collection of prefabs, [[tin can habitats|tin cans]], warrens, and outbuildings. They share their digs with a couple other hypercorps: Brokenridge, a terraforming corp; Pecos, who’ve got the security contract for the town and nearby settlements; and Leong Admintech, one of those catch-all back country admin outfits that’ll do everything from legal rep to supply chaining to infomorph brokerage (that last being where they get the talent pool for everything else they do). The population fluctuates as people come and go from a string of nearby mining camps along the escarpment, which so far’s been a mother lode of copper and bauxite. Great Southern, a maglev line that’s also a [[Fa Jing]] subsidiary, has a large railyard here. They run an arterial line connecting Argyre Planitia to the rest of civilization and a bunch of spur lines serving a string of nearby communities and their own mining camps. New Dazhai is the vegemite on their regional economy.
Fa Jing ain’t what you’d call good neighbors, though. They hate visitors in the town itself, and the fares and freight charges they level on the local towns’re pretty near extortionary. People pay, though, because the maglev’s their lifeline. Nobody’s built a highway out to Argyre yet, and Fa Jing likes it that way. Preservationists and nano-ecologists hate them, too, because while you can’t do helluv damage to a dead world with your usual mining pollutants, Argyre Planitia ain’t dead anymore; it’s a major terraforming zone. There’s a lot of concern about heavy metals leaching off the mine tailings and poisoning the northern basin, but when the nano-ecologists have tried to do sampling to find a solution, Fa Jing’s chased them off. It’s tense, and the weird part of it is that the mines are a really low-margin operation for a corp like Fa Jing; they’re making all their money down there off the Great Southern subsidiary. There’s rumors they dug up something else to sweeten the deal—uranium is a popular matter of speculation—and that’s possible. But all the conspiracy theorists who think they dug up another Pandora Gate or something under that scarp need to shut up and keep their nonsense to themselves. Security there ain’t that tight by half. I prefer the simpler explanation: Fa Jing are a bunch of assholes.

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