Introduction

Nu Phoenicis is a relatively young system, sporting an age that is "merely" 3.5 billion years.  As such, it's planets are still wracked by major impacts every few hundred years or so from the left over debris of the forming solar system, but by and large the era of heavy bombardment has long since ended.  The planets themselves have matured and, in most cases, are representative of the worlds that they will be for the next two billion years or so, until the somewhat overly massive sun, Selgate, begins to evolve off of the main sequence.

But the worlds have not been untouched.  The primary planet, whimsically named New Phoenix by the Hegemony Period colonists, was terraformed by the Eiyogsha some 450 million years ago, and due to the continued presence of that species, the planet retains a viable, evolving biosphere.  The planet beyond New Phoenix, named Concho, is also a water world.  But this planet possesses a large amount of helium in its atmosphere, retained by the world's higher mass and gravity, and so the atmosphere remains toxic to Humans, as does its oceans, which reflect a chemical mix of the atmosphere.  Even though simple single-celled life exists on this world, New Phoenix itself proved to be the ideal site for a colony.  But that world, as we shall see, was not without its own challenges.