The year is 2156, and man has left his ruined Earth behind.
Processed by Minerva Terraforming since the 2080s, Harriet 952 is an arid, barely-terraformed ball of sand, a world of genetically-engineered scrubland, sheer cliffs, inhospitable deserts and ancient fissures. Its wealth of natural resources have made it a mining and manufacturing hub for much of the frontier; the planet is home to dozens of companies and hundreds of thousands of workers of every class and color, working in mines, steel mills, factories, refineries, offices, warehouses, and Harriet’s orbital shipyards.
Unlike many of its fellow colonies, Harriet is officially governed not by a nation-state but by the joint American-Canadian Colonial Authority, under the hard-nosed Governor Ford, and is organized into four counties: Cross County, home to the colonial capitol of Hollisburg and the majority of Harriet’s heavy industry, and the surrounding counties of Butler, Sheridan, and Stanton that encompass most of the outlying mining towns.
Like the other colonies, however, the planet is dominated by the star-spanning corporations that dominate the colonial frontier – names like Rembrandt International, Colonial Steel, Harper-Logan and Lytek. Their influence over politics and the economy is undisputed: food and housing for low-ranking employees is a common practice, and many employees are loyal to their employers, but regulations and unions are quashed in the name of building the frontier, and union organizers and other voices of dissent can very quickly find themselves on the wrong end of a nightstick – or a corporate rent-a-cop’s gun.
Life on Harriet is a web of contrasts: lower-class immigrant families in Harding live in crowded brick tenements and die in mines and quarries, watched closely by corporate pinkertons, while freighter captains argue with tight deadlines and sealed cargo at St. Therese Spaceport just miles away; human traffickers move young girls in St. Therese’s filthy, maze-like alleyways while, high above, zero-g welders swarm across cutting-edge battleships in the Harriet orbital shipyards. The hustle-and-bustle of the Colonial Works grows day by day, and decades-old ruins in the Highwire Gap, untouched by the harsh sun, gradually crumble into the chasm's unfathomed depths.
Amidst all this are a population of workers from all corners of human space – Can-Americans, Russians and other slavs, Colonials, mostly middle- or lower-class, trained and untrained alike – and somewhere in the middle, if he doesn’t fall victim to one of many industrial accidents, run afoul of his shift supervisor, or cross the Colonial Authority and its corporate masters, a man can just barely get by here.
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