Kaylee’s Lament

Part Seventeen

When the first surveyors came to this system, two hundred years ago, they found metaphorical gold in the giant mottled green ball of gas that was the fifth planet. It was a titanic Jovian sphere, and it had more than thirty moons – over half of the material in the solar system – ringing around it. Four of the moons looked promising for terraforming. Two of them were ideal. The surveyors called the emerald gas-giant Vajra, and the two moons that were eventually coerced into becoming life-harboring worlds were named Varuna and Agni. Air and Fire.

Varuna was the larger of the two, nearly 10,000 miles across, while Agni made do with a only a tad over 6,000. Both surfaces were warmed as much by the proximity of Vajra as they were the bright but relatively cool star.

Once they were simultaneously beaten into submission by the Chartered Vajra Company, they became warm, lush paradises, and settlers rushed in from the other worlds. Under the political regime in place at the time, Varuna was primarily settled by Anglo descendents, while Agni became the home for the Sino peoples. It was an experiment in peaceful cooperation. As no war ever broke out between the two closely-linked worlds, it had to be seen as a success.

After 150 years of human habitation, warm, wet Varuna was home to nearly twenty million souls, and her sister world boasted sixteen million – Varuna’s prolific oceans kept the total livable land mass on each one relatively equivalent. Varuna made up for it by hosting dozens of gigantic geodesic flying cities, where the rich and powerful descendents of the original stockholders played sophisticated and pointless games and occasionally worked.

Agni didn’t get the oceans – she didn’t have Varuna’s natural water ice to start with – but she did get an Alliance military training facility and the Alliance Exploration Academy. It also got the lion’s share of industrial production, and the eventually lavish headquarters building of the Chartered Vajra Comp