Despite its favorable location as the fourth planet from the sun, Akiton is a dying world. The so-called Red Planet has lost much of the atmosphere and liquid water it once held due to the slowing of its liquid-iron core and weakening magnetosphere. Prior to the discovery of hyperspace, Akiton was the center of its system's mining, production, and trade of thasteron — an ore instrumental in creating fuel for sublight interplanetary travel. Since the advent of Drift travel, demand for thasteron has crashed, and the economic effects now play out in political squabbles and civil strife across the planet. Massive space barges that once shuttled ore now lie as rusting hulks in the deserts, inhabited by squatters and scavengers. Akiton today has no centralized government, and its cold deserts, dry seabeds, and frigid polar ice caps host never-ending skirmishes between cities, clans, corporations, tribes, and offworld factions. It's a world where unscrupulous business interests engage in unregulated research and criminals come to escape justice. The best-known indigenous residents are the ysoki, boisterous ratfolk who thrive in warren-districts or motorized traveling caravans, inevitably returning to the vast Hivemarket at the foot of Ka, Pillar of the Sky. The four-armed giant shobhads have seen a resurgence as their traditional desert life sidestepped the economic collapse, while the Contemplatives of Ashok — telekinetic beings whose physical bodies have nearly withered in favor of throbbing brain sacs — decipher esoteric truths in their legendary Halls of Reason.