The Oceanus System: The Primordial Waters
“This Court holds the fine folks at Tantalus in contempt for ties to the Farallon Insurgency, the Nereis Disappearance, and the Tommotia Atrocity, along with fifty-four other incidents of lesser magnitude. The prosecution has thoroughly connected this company with four armed international conflicts and ten interstellar-scale civil uprisings spread across a thousand parsecs beyond reasonable doubt, in the process indicting it for the deaths of ten trillion beings.
And yet, I speak with the certainty that this Court will charge my clients with nothing.
…
From the cross-examination of Items #3301-3429, the circumstances of these incidents can no longer precisely fit the allegations. Though this legal body strictly prohibits for-profit involvement in undeclared regional conflicts, we find compelling evidence of a valid, extant casus belli in all fifty-seven cases of interest. Nor has the prosecution been able to provide conclusive evidence of my client’s involvement in any activities covered by the Referendum on Ordered Interference of 2233. As previously remarked, the conditions of the Noninterference Clause logically preclude contractual requests of the injured parties, which the prosecution is unable to conclusively exclude the existence thereof.
I am sure that your gracious Honors would never suggest that the downtrodden peoples of the Galaxy would be forbidden from seeking their just desserts for the convenience of their betters, would you?
Now then, what do you say about ‘innocent until proven beyond reasonable doubt’?”
- Oceanian Regent “Trieste“, in an excerpt from the proceedings of the All-Worlds’ Court of Interstellar Affairs in the case Tantalus Integrated Securities Ltd. v. League of Non-Aligned Powers (2307)
Overview
The Oceanus System is a wide binary near the edge of the Comatula Nebula, close to several low-mass star-forming regions. Though it belongs to Passiflora’s relatively young thin disk, at nearly 3.7 billion years old it has long seen off its stellar siblings and begun to wander the cosmos alone. With a total of nineteen planets circling its two stars, Oceanus is crowded with unique worlds.
Only one world within the system has life - its namesake Oceanus. This is likely due to a lack of suitable habitat; all the planets of the secondary star Hemiaulus are far too cold, while the oceanic worlds of Bacillaria are too acidic or devoid of vital nutrients. Though Oceanus has its own native lifeforms, around half of the biota in an even split from prokaryotes to megafauna are not actually native to Oceanus; rather they are inhabitants of Horizon that were brought over around 350 million years ago.
Oceanus is the home system of a semiaquatic, siphonophore-like sapient species native to the swampy margins of its small continents. This species is of Horizonian descent and appears to have evolved its sapience naturally, though the artificial circumstances of their ancestors’ introduction to the system has raised suspicions of genetic tampering. They have a strong psychological compulsion to wander, which in the present era translates into an exploratory spirit that helped foment a vast interstellar dominion stretching across five thousand light-years.
The First Sun: Bacillaria, the Fragile Heart
The primary star of the Oceanus System is Bacillaria, a G8 yellow dwarf 60% as luminous as the Sun. Despite its dimness, its visual luminosity is nearly 100 times greater than the secondary Hemiaulus. It does not exhibit any notable flaring or other irregular behavior. Bacillaria and Hemiaulus orbit each other every 5800 years or so at a distance over 10 times that between the Sun and Neptune, far too distant for them to have any meaningful effect on each other at any stage of their life cycles.
Bacillaria’s planetary system resembles that of our Kepler-90 or TRAPPIST-1, with a large cohort of planets crammed close to their star. In its case, this cohort includes the seven worlds of the Plinian Series and the five of the Acidian Series, which pack together in the central 1.2 AU of the planetary system thanks to a complex array of crisscrossing orbital resonances. Though largely stable, the gravitational influence of the outer gas giant Eurosta introduces a ~10% chance that the inner planets will be perturbed enough to destroy each other in a series of catastrophic collisions over the remaining 10.4 billion years of Bacillaria’s lifetime.
The Plinian Series
At the farthest interior of Bacillaria’s planetary system is the Plinian Series, a constellation of seven worlds locked in mutual resonance. Ranging from slightly less massive than Earth to just under 4 Earth masses, this series of arid terrestrial worlds resembles closely the hot resonant chains found in nearby systems like our Kepler-11 or HD 110067. Unlike those systems, all of the Plinian Series planets are relatively volatile-poor, with visible surfaces and non-supercritical atmospheres. All save Thermocladium adopt a Venus-like appearance, with sluggish-lid tectonics intermittently interrupted by global melting and crust recycling events.
Members of the Plinian Series
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Observe a world on the brink. Orbiting its sun once every eight days, this massive, iron-rich world achieves temperatures of well over 1000°C under a thick, choking atmosphere of water, acid, and various evaporated metals. Only its immense gravity prevents its bulk from evaporating straight into space.
Geogemma proudly proclaims its invulnerability to all who would bother to listen.
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Investigate a farther-gone version of our Venus, tidally locked to a harsh star with an atmosphere drenched in searing acid. Nevertheless, this torrid desert remains forever dry, its surface far too hot to accommodate any kind of rain.
Pyrolobus burns steadily with not a sound of protest.
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Witness a truly shrouded world. Few know what lies beneath the crushing atmosphere of this heated world, for all who enter may never return. The land of glass and lakes of fire beneath its gleaming clouds is privy only to those who peer with invisible light.
Modest Pyrococcus deflects all attempts at investigation.
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Rendezvous with a world all too far gone, shrouded in hazes of hydrocarbons and tholins inappropriate for a mature planet to bear. This Earth-sized orb remains just as it was billions of years ago, locked in a stasis of eternal juvenility.
Methanopyrus does not speak, for it has never learned how.
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Visit a planet made subservient to its own creation. This smallish world’s enormous atmosphere has taken a life of its own, buffeting its rotation and metastasizing into a roiling, violent mass presided over by the never-blinking eye of an eternal cyclone. Though there are many worlds like this, few are so dominated by these features.
Aeropyrum wastes away, forever in the shadows of its own undoing.
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Glance at the luminous rage of a world cast into flame. A billion years of accumulated heat now bursts through its fragile crust, sinking its ancient continents into vast seas of molten rock and splitting its once-expansive plains into scattered sinter. As the last rafts of solid rock sink in fountains of geological ichor, all trace of the old world will be destroyed.
Pyrodictium hungers, unleashed from its mortal shell for the first time in eons.
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Travel to a world far removed from the hazy, choking hells of the Plinian Series. This unusual desert world is almost devoid of water, allowing nitrogen to fill its thin atmosphere instead. Nevertheless, this is still an inimical world, ringed with vast tesserae and folded belts of once-molten rock.
Thermocladium welcomes the warmth of the sun.
The Acidian Series
The Acidian Series represents an outward extension of the Plinian Series consisting of five small planets that did not finish growing like their inner siblings before the protoplanetary disk dissipated. All have somewhat greater volatile fractions than the inner planets, though in no case is there enough to support global superoceans or a thick atmosphere like proper aquaria. Due to their small size and relatively high temperatures, stellar effects are significant; all but Oceanus have replaced varying fractions of their original water oceans with sulphuric acid. Though this acidic replacement helps slow the loss of liquid, all will eventually dry out like the Plinian Series.
Members of the Acidian Series
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Travel to a world straddling the edge of existence. The acidic, hypersaline lakes of this searing desert are almost due to evaporate even with shading and extensive cloud cover to reduce the local temperature, as the sulphuric acid that keeps them liquid is rapidly eroding. It will not be long before this erstwhile lacustrine joins the baked-dry ranks of the Plinians.
Aquifex spins onward, seemingly aloof to its imminent demise.
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Experience a vision of an alternate past. Unlike its Solar System counterpart, this Venus-like world retains its oceans, albeit in the corrupted form of nearly-pure sulphuric acid. Though inhospitable for life as we know it, these striking violet seas nevertheless represent what could have been.
Pyrobaculum lives on in marked defiance of a preordained execution.
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Marvel in the determination of a world gone wild. Though heated well beyond the bounds of even acidic oceans, this small Venus-like world nonetheless maintains its seas in a new form. A vast sea of acidic clouds replaces the grounded seas, waves and currents drifting through in memoriam.
Thermoproteus questions your limited mortal perspective.
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View a planetary fragment of the past. This clouded, anoxic world seems to have stepped straight out of the Archaean, its seas green with metal and its skies red with methane. In spite of its archaic appearance, its grandiose rings indicate this is just as dynamic and active a world as any other.
Thermotoga indulges narcissistically in its own stolen beauty.
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Marvel in the presence of a living world split in halves. With two parallel biospheres side-by-side, this oceanic paradise is like practically no other place in the universe. Swinging from brutal cold to tropical heat every year, the ecological dynamism of this unusual biosphere is rivaled by none.
Oceanus stares like an unblinking cosmic eye.
The Cryogenian Series
Beyond the habitable zone of Bacillaria lies a large region occupied only by a pair of giants. With eccentric orbits and significant inclination, this region may have once been more populous before most of the inhabitants were ejected in mutual encounters. Whatever happened here seems to have miraculously spared the inner planets, possibly since the masses of the objects involved were small; even today Eurosta is not much more massive than Saturn. Unlike the outer regions of systems like Horizon, Polynoe, or Amazonia, there are no grandiose constellations of cryogenic ocean worlds or shattered remnants of once-proud giants here; only simple things condensed from traces of ice and metal.
Members of the Cryogenian Series
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Stop by in the gravitational basin of a greyed-out Jovian ringed with ice and fire alike. Its raging magnetosphere strikes its attending moons with deadly radiation, inking their trailing hemispheres in strange, greenish tones.
Eurosta hovers indifferent in the ever-expansive abyss.
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Settle at the edge of a planetary system, cut off by the unseen gravity of a distant star. This azure ice giant, conventional as it may be, nevertheless hosts a unique system of attendant worlds from frozen, cratered wastelands to a shrouded giant cloaked in seas of life-giving oxygen.
Belgica invites you to brave the frozen wilds.
The Second Sun: Hemiaulus, the Frigid Uncertainty
Hemiaulus, the secondary star of the Oceanus System, is a relatively unremarkable M3 red dwarf star with around 23% of the Sun’s mass and less than 1% of its luminosity. Due to its low mass, it will shine dimly for nearly 700 billion years, far longer than the universe has existed in Passiflora’s time or ours. By its standards, it is still a young star, and as such it still bursts with irregular superflares like many red dwarfs. During its most violent flares the optical brightness may increase by as much as 70 times the normal amount, slightly dimmer than a full moon on Earth but condensed down to a pinprick of orange light.
With only five planets to Bacillaria’s fourteen, one would be forgiven for thinking Hemiaulus a dull place. However, even a cursory inspection of these worlds will reveal that reputation to be undeserved. The five worlds, all laying far beyond the habitable zone, host a great diversity of visuals and environments rivaling some of the Authors’ collections in sheer disparity.
With just five worlds of questionable distinguishability, no series have been designated in the planetary system of Hemiaulus. The planets are distributed widely in a miniature parody to the likes of Phyllodoce or our own outer Solar System, but the exceptionally low luminosity of the host star means that the icy region extends to just a fifth of the distance between the Earth and Sun. It is believed that the planets of Hemiaulus have not migrated very far from their birthplaces, condensing from ice-rich material close to their present distances in close to their present number; only Stomias seems to have encountered any post-formation impacts.
Planets of Hemiaulus
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Encounter an odd, frozen world. With lakes of liquid nitrogen and mountains of water ice, this super-aquaria resembles a larger, warmer version of Pluto twice the mass of Earth. Its oceans may partially boil when scoured by stellar flares, returning to their basins as torrential rain.
Chauliodus glitters with cryogenic rain.
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Gaze upon a world drenched in crimson, converted by the rage of a dim sun. Thanks to a weak magnetic field, the ionizing flares of Hemiaulus can reach the surface and spark the synthesis of tholins, painting a once snow-white world in russet shades like dried blood.
Malacosteus drifts, invisible to all but the most attentive.
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Skim by a small Neptunian world, draped in hazy tones of ghostly grey. Largely silent, this world changes over the scale of billions and not millions of years, its erstwhile surface crushed under thousands of atmospheres of hydrogen.
Aphyonus floats serenely through the endless black.
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Tour a world gone weird. With thin rings, a massive moon, a tholinaceous surface, and lakes of liquid nitrogen, this Venus-mass aquaria resembles an over-massive mashup of our Kuiper Belt’s greatest hits. Just beneath its scarred, cryovolcanic surface lies a roiling ocean of warm liquid water.
Stomias beckons as an envoy of the deep.
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Dip into the gelatinous bulk of a massive ice giant. With rings like Uranus and storms like Neptune, this seemingly-generic planet holds a secret; four icy moons, all with vast internal oceans populated with hydrothermal vents and volcanic fissures that might host all manner of strange life.
Enigmatic Psychrolutes holds onto its secrets for another day.
