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Description
There was nothing in the Stephara system that would have drawn attention to its corner of the Kanangar Sector – just a lone K5 star with a couple of planets and a brown dwarf lacking any strategic value. Even the most habitable world was only marginally more comfortable than Mars, but the system’s location was enough to warrant man’s consideration. Not far to the south, human colonists were still securing ground on the new world of Keras, and not far east of it lay the Sierra Sector’s burgeoning outposts. A base here could act as a waystation for ships traveling between the growing colonies and an eventual rallying point for a possible military campaign should hostilities arise with the Kerasian xenosophonts.

When the Stephara station finally arrived several probes were launched towards the identified planets, whether for simple data collection or to reexamine worlds for potentially unnoticed resources remains unknown. All that is remembered is what was found by the Meios orbiter. The planet itself had already been the subject of intense debate by astronomers as a celestial oddity but little else; massing 9.193 Earths and with only white/grey clouds visible from above, it had originally been mistaken for a gas giant, when further research revealed an even odder truth. This was actually a very large terrestrial world, a so-called “Super-Earth”, though the resemblance lies only in name; gravity is fully three-and-a-half times higher and the atmospheric pressure three-hundred and forty times that we’re familiar with. Conditions on the surface, if any land existed, would be dim, hot and muggy like a worldwide sauna, and while abundant oxygen was present in the atmosphere, the world was deemed entirely unfit for human habitation and henceforth ignored.

That was before cameras caught a metallic flash high up in mesospheric clouds, and suddenly all priorities changed, for it is not humans who gave Meios its name, rather the children we found there.

Description
There was nothing in the Stephara system that would have drawn attention to its corner of the Kanangar Sector – just a lone K5 star with a couple of planets and a brown dwarf lacking any strategic value. Even the most habitable world was only marginally more comfortable than Mars, but the system’s location was enough to warrant man’s consideration. Not far to the south, human colonists were still securing ground on the new world of Keras, and not far east of it lay the Sierra Sector’s burgeoning outposts. A base here could act as a waystation for ships traveling between the growing colonies and an eventual rallying point for a possible military campaign should hostilities arise with the Kerasian xenosophonts.

When the Stephara station finally arrived several probes were launched towards the identified planets, whether for simple data collection or to reexamine worlds for potentially unnoticed resources remains unknown. All that is remembered is what was found by the Meios orbiter. The planet itself had already been the subject of intense debate by astronomers as a celestial oddity but little else; massing 9.193 Earths and with only white/grey clouds visible from above, it had originally been mistaken for a gas giant, when further research revealed an even odder truth. This was actually a very large terrestrial world, a so-called “Super-Earth”, though the resemblance lies only in name; gravity is fully three-and-a-half times higher and the atmospheric pressure three-hundred and forty times that we’re familiar with. Conditions on the surface, if any land existed, would be dim, hot and muggy like a worldwide sauna, and while abundant oxygen was present in the atmosphere, the world was deemed entirely unfit for human habitation and henceforth ignored.

That was before cameras caught a metallic flash high up in mesospheric clouds, and suddenly all priorities changed, for it is not humans who gave Meios its name, rather the children we found there.