Brennigan’s Landing, also called The Jackpot by the locals is rumored to be the first and the biggest town on the planet K’Tharsis. This hub of human civilization was named after Marcus Lee Fang Brennigan, a smuggler, whose private spaceship (extravagant hybrid made of several donor-ships remains and salvaged parts) emerged in the uncharted star system Tarsis831 due to the critical hyperdrive malfunction. Brennigan was not only lucky enough to find an Earth-like planet within the reach of his crippled ship but also managed to land without killing himself and a two hundreds of runaway corporate slaves stacked in stasis pods in his cargo bay. The unbelievable lucky strike followed when captain Brennigan accidentally discovered a natural antigravium deposits near his virtuous nearly-crash-landing site.
There are lots of controversial and fantastic legends about the actual discovery of the antigravium crystals on the K’Tharsis, one of the most exotic and favored by the locals says that Brennigan’s passengers, who had their loyalty brain-chips removed and were on their way to their happy new life (as they naively believed) in the Frontier worlds, were quite mad at their brave captain, who threw them in the hot, scorched by the radiation of the unstable star hell, which the K’Tharsis was before the terraformation program started. Desperate survivors were just about to shoot down mister Brennigan with his own gun and ordered him to dig his own grave. Imagine his enthusiasm when he has found some extremely pure antigravium shards at the time he’d almost finished this unpleasant process. Hope and dreams about getting rich works miracles with people, so the first colonists of K’Tharsis managed to build shelter, find water sources and grow some edible plants etc. They number halved but they survived and adapted to their new home. In mere 4 years, using the most advanced methods of field repairs, raw antigravium, miles of duct tape and constant swearing Brennigan fixed the hyperdrive (to some degree) and left the system with every free inch of the space in his ship filled by the finest natural grown crystals humanity have ever seen. Two years later, when the first wave of the new greedy colonists arrived as the harbingers of the upcoming Antigravium Rush madness, some people started to call the first settlement simply The Jackpot.
Brennigan didn’t enjoyed his wealth for the rest of his life, he was found dead (violently murdered) on of his private orbital villa aimlessly circling around the old Terra. The town bearing his name existed for 800 years and even sometimes prospered. The Jackpot has experienced many cycles of glory and decadence, growing 10 times larger and shrinking to one half-populated street, sometimes utterly destroyed to the ground during the corporate wars and then raising again like a phoenix from the radioactive ashes. Always a dangerous and wicked place, filled with lots of opportunities and traps for those who can scrape a fistful of green crystals in his pocket. The hardest of all times begun for the the Jackpot and the whole planet after the defeat in Human-Orha war and of the collapse of the Terran Federation. The star system Tarsis831 now was situated deep in the territory of the Orha Theocracy regime, which means nearly complete isolation from the rest of the humanity. Currently The Jackpot is the one and only town that has something resembling a spaceport with one-two smugglers “flea” class freighters visiting it in a standard year – that is the actual number of the free traders crazy or skilled enough to sneak behind the patrols of the most aggressive and chauvinist race in the known space. Large antigravium deposits are depleted, K’Tharsis has become a planet of no return, the human population of this ghost colony is declining but the town called Jackpot continues to survive.
Our thanks to the creator of this concept art, Anton Fedotov. You can check his other artworks here.
Here is the view at the main street of The Jackpot town at night as the wallpaper:
