The Horizon System: Chironex, the Deceptive Giant
Azure skies like unbound waters
An ill serenity, an illusory calm
Patience infinite, celestial arbiters
Rigid order in gravity’s palm
A thousand years with nary a shift
So does the reef set adrift.
- Allusion to the Lord of Water, ‘Rhizophora’ [Calm Waters Aboard a Reef Sent Drifting]
Chironex (Warm Neptune, Planet)
System - Horizon-Actinophrys
Mass - 12.77 Earths (0.745 Neptunes)
Radius - 22,773 kilometers (3.356 Earths)
Global Average Temperature - 114.5°C
Day Length - 18h 59m 43.6s
Year Length - 190.8 days
Number of Satellites - 17
ESI - 0.552
Etymology - From the Sea Wasp Chironex fleckeri, one of the deadliest box jellyfish of the Indo-Pacific.
Overview
First of the eleven Resonant Worlds, this azure blue ice giant is a false twin to our Uranus and Neptune. While largely identical in color and only slightly less massive than them, Chironex’s raging storms are composed of silicone oils and gasoline, rather than methane ice and ammonia. While the 100°C temperatures would be survivable for some of Riftia’s lifeforms, the atmosphere of Chironex is a powerful reducing agent that easily digests flesh and metal alike, ensuring no life could possibly persist on this world.
Though fairly typical for warm Neptunian worlds, Chironex has a few unusual features. The concentration of deuterium in its atmosphere is some 100 times higher than typical of the universe, while many other heavy isotopes are also enriched to lesser degrees. Hydrogen overall makes up only about half its atmosphere, the other half being helium, water, ammonia, and various carbon compounds, as opposed to Neptune’s ~90% hydrogen. All of this is attributable to the same supernova which nearly blasted the Horizon System to kingdom come - Chironex having retained its Neptunian atmosphere only by a hair.
It is accompanied by a retinue of twelve irregular and five round moons, the latter of which are baked-dry remnants of former ice worlds like Europa or Ganymede. All five are coated in thick layers of evaporites and phyllosilicate minerals which formed at the bottom of now-vanished primordial oceans, which have retreated to mud or salty brines locked deep within their mantles. Occasionally, the trickle of primordial heat that leaks out of them sparks the formation of cryovolcanic features not unlike those of our Solar System’s Ceres. Also in accompaniment, but not as closely, are swarms of trojan asteroids scattered all around its orbital space.
Past & Future
Chironex is one of only six Actinophryidan planets which kept their primordial envelopes of hydrogen and helium. As the first member of the Resonant Worlds, its gravity was responsible for dragging the rest of its kin from the icy reaches of the outer solar system into the habitable zone. They would have likely kept going if the supernova which ripped Chironex apart and flayed its kin of their atmospheres did not occur, plunging into the searing interior of the Horizon System as a system of hot mini-Neptunes.
While worlds like Elysia and Navanax change their faces every day and even the sleepier Tonicella has changed immensely over its 1.7 billion years of existence, Chironex is little different from the day it formed. The same storms churn through its atmosphere, the same white sun beats down on its searing surface, and the same five airless rocks circle its great bulk in monotonous eternity. The only thing new at all about Chironex is its rings, formed 300 million years ago by a catastrophic collision between two of its asteroid moons.
Civilization
From Horizon, Chironex appears as an azure-blue star nearly identical to the rest of the Resonant Worlds save for its slightly deeper hue. It can wander as much as 18 degrees away from Actinophrys, a visual distance comparable to that between Mercury and the Sun in optimal conditions. Unlike all the Actinophryidan planets interior to its orbit, at least one of its moons (Chirodectes) is visible under optimal conditions. Chironex’s azure shade identifies it, along with Changxing and Panthalassa, with the ocean. As the brightest of these three azure worlds Chironex is usually assigned a dominant role, as a patron of deep seas and violent ocean storms.
Today, Chironex is a major center of Horizonian civilization, its great mass and central position allowing it to act as a gateway between the scorching reaches of the inner series, the lush lands of the other Resonant Worlds, and the cold chromaticity of the Frigid Exterior. Large-scale mining operations steadily deconstruct its trojan asteroids swarms, domed cities sprawl across its airless moons, and fusion-candle gas extractors hover ominously in its whipping winds, all under a sky teeming with traffic of a thousand worlds. Save Horizon itself and the great relay worlds of the Radiant Corridor, few places are quite so busy.
Whispers From the Reach
Hello, esteemed Adamastoran guests! Welcome to the Horizonian Empire!
We’re quite impressed by your performance so far. Sure, we expected you to make it through the beachheads in the Outer Expanse eventually, but never in our wildest dreams would we have predicted that you’d figure out how to reverse the assimilation process and hack the star streams! We’ll ensure that won’t be happening again, even if I now owe Miss Allomerus a rendezvous at the casinos of Pterois. We must also congratulate you for your stunning victories at Damocles and Marsyas - excellent use of entrenched planetary positions to project control over systems the enemy is unwilling to lose! We’ll be sure to congratulate your commanders once we fish them out of their foxholes and line them up to be shot.
However, I am saddened to report that the office of THEIR Majesty the Nexus-Emperor has some grievances with your conduct that must be addressed before we can go back to happily painting the Reach red with each other’s blood.
Firstly, our wartime journalists have helpfully informed us that you have placed the populations of Paradisaeans you captured in involuntary servitude. While the victor is entitled the spoils of war, the people of the Reach do not look kindly on those who impress service upon others. While it is a conflict of interest to prosecute the citizens of a nation we are at war with, please be aware that Miss Pleuromeia is, shall we say, protective of her charges. Do not be surprised if you receive some… unexpected advances from her side.
Secondly, my Outer Expanse nodes inform me that your forces attempted to use planet-killer weapons to break our Amazonian strongholds. While the Galactic Community does not consider doing so a war crime, it frowns upon the use of biocidal munitions on developed ecologies. Sure, we were able to stop you from drowning Phoneutria and Electrophorus, but I don’t think the civilians who were living there will find much comfort in that fact. I’m certain that Master Atropa in particular will have some choice words for you in the near future.
Finally, our operatives in your own territory have uncovered an order by your civilian government to liquidate the Horizonian citizens you have taken captive. Evidently, you distrust us enough to sentence those who did not take part in the fighting to death. While I’ll admit that most of the people you are trying to kill have already reserved backup nodes outside the territories you conquered, I imagine the flood of property-loss claims that follows will make the higher-ups in Administration & Public Relations quite upset with you. Perhaps you’ll be speaking to Mister Corybas about that?
By the time you receive this missive, we will have kicked your technicians from the star streams and cut off your armies in the Actiniarian Periphery. From there, the materiel advantage should rapidly shift back to us; I estimate that your armies will be completely liquidated within the next fifteen days, even if they manage to crack the local defenses and regroup. In the meantime, Master Haidoterminus and Miss Oecophylla will be on their way to collect you and your staff. We look forward to your presence in the Pan-Comatulan Court of International Justice.
Best Regards,
Rhizophora
Missive sent to the Supreme Commander of the Adamastoran Empire’s military forces by the Lord of Water in response to Adamastoran aggression in the Dusk Wars (2246).
