Tchernik
Aquila 661 DA792167 Low Population[edit]
Tchernik is a large planet almost completely covered in water. The only land is one vast mountain that reaches high into the atmosphere. The settlement lies on a crag near the top, the air being so dense and laden with water vapour lower down as to be uncomfortable to breathe even with a filter mask. It is recommended that people who do go down to lower altitudes take care against the bends.
The 500 EU citizens are recent arrivals, and are struggling to acclimatize to the gravity and the soupy atmosphere. They are all mostly employees of Tchernik Enterprises, an agribusiness/genetics firm that is trying to turn the mighty mountain into a massive vineyard, once they have got the grape varieties just right. Their test farms at various altitudes are linked by cable car and the winery dubbed 'The Chateau' lies at the highest point. It has been going maybe 20 years and is beginning to look more like a town than a collection of labs and test factories, with houses made from the local stone, gardens and flocks of sheep and goats in the high pastures.
There is the mystery of what the hell the mountain is and where it came from. The geologists reckon Tchernik to be a world with a heavily fractured crust that has dozens of microplates, that never crunch into each other for long enough or with enough force to create any actual land, though undersea earthquakes and hot geysers are frequent. The sea is even deficient in algae, since more accessible energy comes from sulphurous compounds coming up from the sea floor than from the sun, usually hidden by low lying sea fogs.
The upper reaches of the mountain are bright and sunny and subject to only minor tremors, but native life is small and sparse. The lower slopes are covered in fungal forests full of the biggest and most ugly insectoids you ever saw. This zone is comparatively unknown and unmapped in detail, but Tchernik has allowed a couple of pharma companies to take expeditions down and check through the local flora for useful compounds and a mining corp to look for metals, though the best place to look would be on the sea floor.
