Noricum

Land on Noricum today, and your spacecraft will scare the sheep. The planet is entirely agrarian, and the people live in wooden huts. In the settled regions, you have to look hard for signs of Noricum’s imperial past. There are clues – a wall built from chucks of ferroceramic instead of stone, an animal pen using strands of plastic cabling, a woman’s necklace made from chips of computer memory crystal – but in the settled areas, the people have deliberately tried to bury the past.   Land in the danger zones, in the ruined cities, and you will scare only the ghosts. Of course, open your airlock without a vacc suit, and you’ll be scared for the thirty seconds or so before the viruses infect you. After that, you have a few days of agonising pain before an even more painful death. Over thirty percent of Noricum is considered a death zone, where no living thing dare go. Most of the great structures of the Sindalian Empire were destroyed in the wars that ended it – there are now only radioactive craters where the Imperial Palace and the Ministry of Justice once stood. There are rumours that the treasury of the empire was moved in the final days before the end, and buried somewhere in the catacombs beneath the capital city. No would-be grave robber has ever returned – there are other dangers than viruses in the ruins, such as mutated animals and the last-ditch security systems left by the Sindalians.   The people of Noricum have learned to survive on their blighted world. They eat no meat, as meat is likely to contain toxins. They consume high doses of certain bitter herbs, and boil all the water they drink. When a man passes the age of forty, he is sent out into the blighted zones to build a firebreak and keep the ashen barriers between the farm and the deadly ruins intact. None survive this ritual, but a good man endures for a tenday or more before dying on the far side of the ash fields.   The Emperor of Noricum dwells in a small hut, and tends a vegetable garden. His ancestors once ruled a hundred worlds with an iron fist, and a hundred miles from his garden there is a statue a hundred metres tall that bears his family features, the face permanently frozen into a cruel sneer. The Emperor of Noricum, though, has a simple smile on his face as he tends his turnips.  

Name	Location	Bases	Statistics	Trade Codes	Travel Codes	Allegiance	Gas Giants
Noricum	408		D8867BB-1	Ag Lt	A		G