No Man Left Behind

First Encounter

The starship macrocluster Nomina released its insubstantial grip on the fabric of the universe. The complex supergeometry of contorted space-time unfurled before it in a burst of gamma radiation, revealing a sun-like star seven light-hours away. After a few days' deceleration into the untouched star system, Hiruta was awoken from his prolonged biological inhibition. Free floating in the environmental confines of the starship, he gazed out at his family's new world. A small, icy protoplanet, completely covered in mainly frozen water among other compounds, and bound by an iron-silicon mantle, frozen just as well.

The engineers hijacked a few of the system's metal-rich asteroids and began an extraction and refinery process. As the autonomous machines refined hundreds of thousands of tonnes of raw iron, copper, nickel, silicon, lithium, hydrogen, etc., the engineers began building the astronomically large orbital mirrors. The mirrors, when completed, would be thousands of kilometers across, and would focus enough starlight onto the icy world to melt the frozen ice, kickstarting the terraformation process. When a subsection of the whole array was completed, it was placed at the gravitationally stable region between the star and the planet. After the first few hundred mirror subsections were emplaced, the extra sunlight started to make its effect. The water began to evaporate into the near-vacuum, gravitationally collecting itself at the planet's surface. Due to the planet's lack of any magnetosphere, a sizeable portion of the water vapor was carried off with the solar wind, though not nearly enough to counteract the outgassing en masse, however. And due to the planet's fast rotational period of eighteen hours, the mirrors were making good rotisserie work of the overall surface.

Come two of the planet's centuries, a tangible atmosphere has grown around the globe as liquid oceans spread through the frozen ravines and craters, forming wide valleys and gullies. It was then that individual ships in the Nomina macrocluster set their habitat sections to rest on the planet's surface. Inside the globular habitats, vast red and orange jungle vegetation flourish across the mini seas of sky-grey water, and more elaborate canopies of maroon vegetation sprout from the soil of the mainlands within.

Hiruta often visited the outside. He had trod the arid, frozen desert, which his people gradually crafted, with the care of a protective suit, sometimes for weeks or months at a time. It wasn't often he went alone, either; the trek was a journey his entire kindred enjoyed. Hiruta regarded the frozen landscape to be much similar to the frozen poles of his homeworld, which he too had spent collective decades of his life venturing, except this environment was far more hostile. The winds were stronger, the storms were heavier, and the sun was far too dim for his photoelectric cells to make any practical use of. However, the orbital mirrors were surely making progress on that matter by reflecting more and more sunlight, heating the atmosphere and consequently the surface below it. They appeared as a clustered dotwork of bright spots in the sky, close to the sun's relative position.

When the atmospheric density and composition reached expected values, a much larger operation began. Elements were harvested from a nearby gas giant by a series of specially outfitted starships. The starship would extend probes and other superstructures into the planet's immense atmosphere, and lower them to certain altitudes were the desired elements were most prevalent. The gases were processed and refined by the starships, and mass drivers sent them hurling across the solar system to enter the gravity well of the newly remodeled planet.

Huge auroras spanned the sky whenever one of the dense gas clouds collided with the upper atmosphere. Shimmering green, violet, and cyan bands of evanescent illumination stealing the sky from the stars for several days. In a thousand years' time, the planet would become hospitable to all unmodified life from the homeworld; a life-bearing gem added to the hundreds of others conceived across the local star cluster.