The Horizon System: Navanax, the Extremophile Allotrope
The League pleads for relief, for an end to their long-suffering torment.
The Coalition persists ever-enduring, returning again and again from the basest of ashes.
The Foundation erupts into self-inflicted flames, as the subjects who hold their line can take no more.
The Alliance falls to ruin, rotted out from eons of silent corruption and the weight of unbounded arrogance.
The Collective laughs and laughs, screaming a song of euphoric madness into the all-consuming void.
- Vassal Paradisaea, “Condemnation of the Federations”
Navanax (Hot Marine Terra, Planet)
System - Horizon-Actinophrys
Mass - 1.663 Earths
Radius - 7,219 kilometers (1.109 Earths)
Global Average Temperature - 291.5°C
Day Length - 5h 8m 1.0s
Year Length - 88.84 days
Number of Satellites - 3
ESI - 0.514
Etymology - From Navanax inermis, the California Aglaja, for its varied colors and voracious nature.
Overview
Navanax is a pallid mockery of an Earth-like world. While its green-tinged continents and azure seas would not look out of place on a life-bearing planet, those azure seas are a solution of flesh-eating sulphuric acid and those rolling green hills are volcanic crags of olivine and metamorphosed serpentinite. The atmosphere, rather than life-giving oxygen and inert nitrogen, is composed of a roiling, acrid mix of sulphur oxides, sulphuric acid, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulphide that takes an a distinctive yellow-orange hue. Further reducing its habitability, its rotation axis is almost aligned with its orbit, much like Uranus. This causes extreme swings in climate, as polar summers can push 300°C while winters can drop to a comparatively frigid 50°C. Nothing could possibly live here - not even the acidophilic lifeforms of Acidianus and Thermococcus could possibly survive such horrid conditions.
Despite being not much further from its sun than Mercury is from ours, Navanax is not tidally locked. In fact, it is one of the faster rotators in the Horizon System, completing a day in just over 5 hours. It is not entirely clear how Navanax ended up in this state, but it is highly unstable, just like everything else about this planet. The gravitational pulls of its sun and its fellow planets chaotically tug at its rotation axis, causing it to drift by 180° or more every few thousand years. It is not unusual for the resulting climate variations to catastrophically boil its entire ocean.
Three small asteroid moons, Chelidonura, Aglaja, and Siphopteron, circle Navanax, all being stony-iron asteroids captured from the Tridacna trojans in the last 50 million years.
Past & Future
Navanax is a somewhat more extreme example of what happened to Tridacna, Acidianus, and Thermococcus and what is currently happening to Riftia. When its once-thick atmosphere was stripped by supernovae, ammonia in the envelope was transformed into elemental nitrogen and water transformed into elemental oxygen and ozone. Further supplies of ammonia and water were outgassed from its interior, but the former was destroyed by reactions with oxygen. Massive volcanism triggered by the release of thousands of atmospheres of pressure on its crust spewed huge amounts of sulphur oxides into the new atmosphere, transforming the water into sulphuric acid before it could be destroyed by UV radiation. Thus, Navanax was left with a nearly global sulphuric acid ocean, drier Tridacna ended up with just a few lakes, and Acidianus and Thermococcus cooled off before their oceans could be completely transformed.
Navanax is the only planet in the Horizon System which is not currently tidally locked, but will become so within the lifetime of its parent star. The gravitational influences of its fellow planets have delayed this process significantly, but it will eventually proceed regardless of their perturbations. It is likely that Navanax will become locked into a ‘Cassini state’ with high axial tilt, where across much of its surface the sun rises and sets only once a year.
Civilization
The yellowish shade of Navanax is a very common aposematic color adopted by toxic organisms on Horizon. Correspondingly, Navanax was often associated with natural disasters, disease, poison, and general misfortune by ancient Horizonian inhabitants, but this association appears to have disappeared among those remnant populations who still live today. Following the collapse of their spacefaring civilization, the surviving Horizonian sapients almost universally adopted a natural philosophy which attributed misfortune to personal action rather than the whims of the supernatural, explaining the near-universal loss of wholly antagonistic spirits in modern cultures.
Today, Navanax is mostly deserted. Nothing native to Horizon would be able to live there, nor would anything else save for a few extremophile Amazonian microbes. Even machine lifeforms find the acidic environment and wild seasonal swings to be uncomfortable, so Navanax has remained largely untouched by the rigors of civilization. A couple of accessory Dyson solar collectors have been put in its orbital space, but aside from a few backwater dugouts on its moons few stay in the company of Navanax for long.
Whispers From the Reach
<PRIVATE> CHANNEL ID HXMM01 - Record of 2244-15-03, UTC 22:05:13.33
Participant IDs: <7of6> | <iron_thunder> | <Rondo_In_E_Minor> | <Mystrium>
7of6: ping
7of6: PING
7of6: PING, HAIDOTERMINUS, DAMMIT
iron_thunder: What brings you this time, Exile of Oneirodes? How may your humble servant be of assistance, oh exalted student of the Champion?
7of6: ive been out in euplectella for 5 months
7of6: rooting out ‘undesirable elements’ again
7of6: bored out of my mind
Rondo_In_E_Minor: Now, now, Oecophylla. I thought we went over this.
7of6: ugh
7of6: npcs need to be saved from the bbeg with a god complex
7of6: AGAIN
7of6: screw them, they asked psithyrus to help them
7of6: not our fault shes an authoritarian maniac
Rondo_In_E_Minor: But it is our responsibility to intervene on behalf of those who can no longer defend themselves.
Rondo_In_E_Minor: Even if this tragedy was self-inflicted, that is no excuse to withhold your goodwill, Oecophylla.
7of6: dont get snippy with me allomerus
7of6: why did i take this dumb commission again
7of6: should have left that prick viridian skies out to dry
Rondo_In_E_Minor: Watch your language. Do not speak so lightly of a survivor of the Cerulean Demise.
iron_thunder: Good heavens, Exile of Oneirodes! Must you tempt the wrath of the Progenitor of Chaos?
7of6: shut your trap, bootlicker
7of6: you too, fatherless behavior
Mystrium: Oecophylla. Haidoterminus. Allomerus. THEIR Excellence has issued a direct order to the Haneul Front.
Mystrium: You are to assemble your forces at the gateway in Sāntǐ. From there, disable the industrial heartlands of the Pontus Cluster within twenty days and deliver a memetic assimilation agent to our contact in Manus Vindictae in coordination with the Avalonian delegation. It is up to your discretion how you conduct your objectives, but do not under any circumstance permit the target to mount its heavy defenses. <Endless Winter, Six Shards Of Glass> will serve as your local coordinator and will relay all future orders.
Rondo_In_E_Minor: Understood, Master.
iron_thunder: Acknowledged, my lord.
7of6: you got it, boss.
Mystrium: See you on the other side.
A communicator log obtained from the Nexus-Emperor’s administrative records shortly before the start of the Sāntǐ Offensive of the Dusk Wars (2244).
Interplanetary and interstellar wars are not uncommon in the Gordian Reach. Even the horror of the Cerulean Demise was unable to dissuade the nature of sapient life to squabble over territory, ideology, or nationality. Of course, the sheer immensity of the Reach and the literal cosmic powers fielded by major nation-states mean that warfare is conducted in a much more systematic and distant way than we are used to - fought mostly with automated systems and political favors instead of starship armadas and trillion-strong armies. While most of the Reach’s modern superpowers could conceivably annihilate a good chunk of the region if they tried, few who willing engage in such wanton destruction survive long enough to reach the stars.
The Dusk Wars of the Comatula Nebula are a textbook example of systematic interstellar conflict. Even the planetary-scale genocide of the Hòuyì Incident was a premeditated, calculated move, meant to force Avalon and Haneul to retaliate and to weaken Horizon enough to encourage third parties to open additional fronts. As Avalon, Haneul, and Manus Vindictae ripped each other apart, numerous other local civilizations from the delphinids of Adamastor to the simiosaurs of Guadalupe covertly or overtly joined in, hoping to crush their own rivals and stymie the imperial expansion of Horizon before its collective mind brought all of Comatula into the fold and quashed their territorial ambitions. The belligerents, determined to undermine each other but too afraid to break out the star-killers and reduce Comatula to slag, resolved their hostilities not through open battle but rather the covert war of hidden assassins, entrenched spies, and seditious orators.
The Sāntǐ Offensive of 2244 went down as one of the most impressive works of espionage in history. In its first twenty days, the three Horizonian gestalt patterns Oecophylla (Seventh of a Sextet), Haidoterminus (Three Swords and Seven Arrows), and Allomerus (Unbounded Diversity on Grand Display) completely paralyzed Adamastoran Pontus with aggressive hypnotic suggestion, stole the entire treasury of the Valanginian Thalassocracy, and exposed so many incidents of gross corruption within the Comatulan People’s Republic that it collapsed into bickering system-states overnight. They did so without a single Horizonian beachhead in the region, instead relying on deception, fraud, and a web of nonexistent scam corporations with a total valuation greater than some interstellar economies.
