Neo-Terra

Codex introduction

The newest of inhabited worlds, Neo-Terra serves as the home of the Starkin Federation. After the shattering of Old Earth in 2640, what little remained of Humanity was scattered across the solar system, a scant hundred million souls, half of which would be lost before the end of the war. Large outposts remained on Mars, Venus, and the newly free-floating Luna, a million more scattered amongst the asteroids, and this was all that remained, for the Iapetian colonies, too, had been lost in the war, lost to the micro-nova.

As the new Federation resettled on the relatively cold, but terraformable, Mars, it mourned, in the way that only an Orphaned race can, grieving for its lost Mother Earth, and for the eleven billion men and women dead in an instant. But, as Men are wont to do, they began to move forwards, unleashing old technologies of cloning and fertilization, buried in the face of religion and superstition, to restore their population, while others studied the captured machines of the Scranja. By 2680, nearly a billion men and women lived beneath the light of Sol once more, and a tenth that beneath the light of alien suns.

In 2701, it was discovered that the new artificial gravity generation systems could be used to rebuild Earth. It took a mere day for the Federation to make the decision and commit the funds. It would be done.

For twenty years, the ships of the federation began the process of sifting through the remains of Earth, seeking among the dust and devastation for every part of her biosphere that they could scavenge DNA from, to eventually restore her to a shade of her former glory.

Within the next twenty years, a new world was accreted from the remains of the old, Luna gently nudged into her new orbit, to assist in driving the lumpy mass into roundness once more, and to help reestablish her mighty magnetic fields, a process that would measured in centuries, slowed only by the distraction of the Starkin Federation during the Wars of Vengance, ending only in the death of the last of the Scranja, who destroyed Earth. Vast portions of the Oort Cloud would be sacrificed to build a new atmosphere, thick with methane, ammonia, and water, much of which would soon rain down upon the cold world, to form new seas.

Still, by 3247, the declaration was made. Earth, Terra, was reborn, a phoenix arisen from the ashes. Even as they seeded her young seas with engineered protobacteria and von Neumann micro-machines to begin the process of building a suitable atmosphere, the construction of the first dome cities would begin. With Life bolstered by uncountable micro-machines, it would take a mere half century for the air of new Terra to become breathable, if not quite yet healthy for humanity, and by 3300, over a half billion men would again call her home. Immediately, they turned their efforts to the creation of soil and new life here, augmented by the skills of the Kel’Regar, with whom first contact was made in the 32nd century, their aid purchased with the raw bio-data scrounged from the ruins of old Terra. By 3600, a rudimentary ecosystem would be established.

In 3619, the capital of the Starkin Federation would be returned to Terra proper, nearly a thousand years after its destruction. Young and raw, the planet is yet thinly populated, with dense clusters of humanity centered around various artificially created oasises of life. Much of the world is still bare, exposed rock, though the lichens and bacteria unleashed in the atmosphere are well into the process of breaking it into the sandy patches where more advanced plants can begin to take hold. Many old marine systems have been revived, and are beginning the slow process of evolution once more. It will take thousands, if not millions of years, before Neo-Terra begins to approach the diversity and beauty of old Earth, but once again, humanity has a home.