(AP Photo/NASA) ( / AP)
In a disused, shabby corner of the galaxy lies an old red giant, just beginning to tremor with age, and around that crimson solar body orbits a lone planet, a world of continuing natural beauty that once played host to a now-fallen star empire’s great passion project: a biological preserve on a planetary scale. The Kadarach were a violent, shockingly successful people from a world laid waste by rapid industrialization, and so, for all of the destruction and death they brought upon the sentient races of their surrounding star clusters, the Kadarach saved and established reserves for an equivalent number of the galaxy’s fascinating xenobiological specimens—a balm on a civilization’s guilty conscience, some have said. The Kadarach Planetary Life Preserve, established in an uninhabited star system with no name in any language outside of scientific designations, was their greatest project, and one of the finest masterworks of terraforming ever seen.
The Kadarach Planetary Life Preserve was, for one hundred revolutions of the lone planet around the bloated star, changed into a paradise for thousands of diverse organism and species. Biomes were established: temperature, gravity, chemical composition, plant life, moisture, all made perfect in hyper-localized patches of up to .01 square light seconds. The atmosphere was filled with self-replicating nanomachines, and through them the air is made breathable for all beings, according to their needs (assuming they breath). There were mountains, valleys, steppes, craters, deserts, and wild ecosystems established each according to the liking of a single non-sentient alien colony. It was a paradise of unimaginable beauty and craft, the artisan masterwork of planets, over-engineered down to its smallest pebble.
But today, it is ruined. The keepers, Kadarach’s greatest minds, have all left, or died a long time ago. The thin boundaries between biological systems have blurred and meshed, leaving the world no better than the chaos of any boiling evolutionary stew seen on any regular planet. What was once a place of restrained order is now another blind agent of entropy quickening the chaos that will one day subsume the universe.
If a traveler were to find their way to the Former Kadarach Planetary Life Preserve, these are some of the things they might see.
The Graveyard of the Grand Marsh Worm
Most life on the Former Kadarach Planetary Life Preserve has been able to avoid total extinction either by carving out an ecological niche on the now-wild planet or simply continuing to live elsewhere among the stars, either on their worlds of origin or other former Kadarach preserves (often established in the wild places of conquered peoples). The same can not be said, however, of the Grand Marsh Worms, who have now gone extinct from all but the long rolls of xenobiological historians.
The Grand Marsh Worm was once the dominant species on its world of storms and shallow seas, a hundred meter long behemoth made of chitinous shells and heat-exhaust gills, three gaping retractable mouths, ten eye-sensors for detecting visible and infrared radiation, and unbridled determination. On the Grand Marsh Worm’s home world, every species evolved in the shadow of its roving, ever-hungry bulk, carving out slim ecological niches on the margins of the apex’s planet, or else simply adapting to be a part of the Grand Marsh Worm’s life cycle, breeding fast enough to be its livestock or feeding on its remains. The Grand Marsh Worm had little need for a complex brain, such was its efficiency of form and skill at hunting, and through its reign of terror it made sure that no other species could be given the evolutionary chance at becoming any smarter than it.
That world, though, was brought to the brink by problems even a giga-predator could not solve: a solar flare, fast and indiscriminate. The Kadarach saw the incredible waste at hand and quickly spirited a breeding population of the Grand Marsh Worms away to the preserve, where they lived as masters of a bog that was one of the largest patches of unbroken ecosystem anywhere on the planet, fed constantly by new meat imported from the most digestible populations of alien livestock animals.
They were one of the first species to collapse, of course, once the Kadarach fell. A predator is more reliant than any prey on a carefully cultivated ecological system, and the sheer biomass needed to sustain the Worms could scarcely be found within the marsh, even after they started eating each other. Today, you can see their exoskeletons, chitin as thick as a spacecarrier’s hull, dotting the windswept gray landscape, massive maws sticking out of the tall grass like the disintegrating shrines of a Stone Age god.
The Black Gardens of the Fighting Rocketfly
Throughout thousands of natural worlds, xenobiologists have observed creatures that have evolved to exploit all kinds of natural phenomena: flying creatures in worlds with the right atmosphere, creatures who have adapted to thrive in vents that spew volcanic gas, even organisms so large they graze on smaller creatures using nothing but their own gravity. Life can be considered a series of chemical reactions, however there is only one known species that has successfully harnessed rocket-level combustion in order to achieve locomotion: the Ygarian Fighting Rocketfly.
Ygar is a high-gravity world with a dense, murky atmosphere: a less than ideal place for life to arise, though arise it did. While the low-to-the-ground Ygarians for whom the planet is named scrabbled with tools in the dust, the Fighting Rocketfly developed its own method of locomotion that allowed it to generate enough force to achieve flight, putting it at an evolutionary advantage over all other small creatures. By utilizing natural fluids secreted in poisonous thoracic sacks, in combination with the high-oxygen atmosphere of Ygar and a spark creation appendage attached to its metallic hind legs, the Fighting Rocketfly achieves a combustion reaction, propelling it forward with speed and (some) grace using the same technology most civilizations use for rudimentary space flight. This insectoid’s superfast midair antics are said to have inspired the Ygar to reach for the stars, building mechanical Rocketflies of their own and sending brave souls soaring out of the oppressive world.
Then, as most intelligent species statistically do, the Ygar reached too far, and when the Kadarach saw the insect insignia the united Ygarians wore, their whole civilization became a target for conquest.
As such, the Fighting Rocketfly was given ample room to zoom through fields of fire-resistant plants and flowers on the Planetary Life Preserve, forming one of the core visitor-friendly areas as the rarity of the bugs themselves and the beauty of a galaxy’s worth of magma flow foliage came together to form a dizzyingly beautiful garden. Collision with a Rocketfly during flight was always a risk, but one the keepers and visitors alike were willing to take to see the incredible speeds and bright displays achieved by the largest males.
Today, the Fighting Rocketflies live on in their garden, but only barely. Without cultivation, the heat resistant foliage withered and was replaced by eminently burnable grasses. Thus, the habitat has become a burnt wasteland, and is besides rife with other scavenger species who pose little threat to the Rocketflies but some threat to an intrepid visitor.
The Chill Waste of the Order-Seeking Pale Beasts
The strangest lifeform on the Planetary Life Preserve by far, scientifically speaking, are the Pale Beasts. The bogeyman of a pre-space travel civilization at the fringes of the galaxy, the Pale Beasts are adapted perfectly to hunt atop a planet-wide ice sheet. With thick fur covering a massive lumbering frame, the Pale Beasts can reach the size of a small island, causing earthquakes with each step as they create their own miniature blizzard with the snow falling from their pelt. A single Pale Beast could make quick work of the primitive sentients on their home planet, perhaps setting the development of technology back centuries each time they swallowed a village whole, though they are primarily semi-aquatic filter feeders.
What makes the Pale Beasts truly remarkable, however, is how they have adapted to deal with the inherent issues caused by their bulk. Heat throughout the universe is generated by the kinetic energy of atoms: the faster atoms vibrate, the hotter things get. Through one of the most remarkable biological processes known to science, however, the Pale Beast is able to actually cool itself from the inside by swallowing ores that feed its internal analog of a nuclear demagnetization refrigerator, which uses a strong magnetic field to align the spin of nuclei within the cooling organ. As such, the Pale Beast converts energy into what exterior organisms would define as coldness, making it a fascinating living machine with an untold number of scientific and engineering applications.
Today, the Pale Beasts are few and far between, still roaming the polar region of the Former Kadarach Planetary Life Preserve. Without sufficient feeding and due to the disruption of the carefully cultivated planetary ecosystem, their massive demand for energy is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, leaving most remaining individuals malnourished and weak. The mating cries of the Pale Beasts, deep and rumbling yet scarcely answered, can be heard over the freshly fallen snow every dawn.
The Many Fishes of the Fermented Sea
Along an interior coastline of a vast arid steppe lies The Fermented Sea, an ecosystem that shows the marvels of Kadarach ingenuity, along with their sheer force of will. The Fermented Sea, just as its counterpart on Ulqiazar, The Sea of Strange Depths, is a body of liquid water mixed with the potent secretions of dying undersea fruits known as Knockout Berries (rough translation). These berries are so numerous and so successful, having been integrated into various complex organisms’ life cycles because of their psychoactive qualities, that the sea itself has an alcoholic concentration of roughly 30% in parts, which should be well above the limit for undersea creatures.
Life under the surface of The Fermented Sea, however, is a marvel of color and movement. One is free to watch dazzlingly bright piscoids and amphibians make hazy loops around the reefs and natural formations of the sea in seeming bliss. Life moves slower in The Fermented Sea; even the predator fish, toothy and sleeker than the others, seem a little spaced out. A visitor, doubtless also imbibing small amounts of the salty brew, would be likely to spend hours on the seafloor, watching the patterns of life play out more like a dance than a battle.
The Fermented Sea itself, like all things on the Planetary Life Preserve, will not last. Without humanoid cultivation as is still done on Ulqiazar, the Knockout Berries are liable to run wild, filling the ocean with their sweet nectar. In short, the proof of the sea is raising. Eventually, the entire body will be too toxic for any but the most extremophile invertebrates to survive: whispers on the galactic market are filled with speculation at what price such finely aged and deliciously narcotic barnacles may fetch.
The Shattered City of Halak-Tubei
The Kadarach Planetary Life Preserve is full of great ironies, but perhaps the greatest is that Halak-Tubei, and the organism for which it is named, will likely survive far past any of the natural ecosystems. The Kadarach did not only import non-sentients into their pet planet, of course; some species, such as the Halak-Tubei, required a built environment, and so the Kadarach needed a city and that city needed people. Thus, the city of Halak-Tubei was constructed, monumental estates built for Kadarach visitors while the rest were forced to scrape by in concrete huts, their job-function always defined in some way by keeping the massive habitat-city running efficiently. Life sacrificed for the sake of life.
A Halak-Tubei is a rare and remarkable creature. Called on its homeworld “The Ghost of the Slums”, it is vaguely humanoid in appearance, though it has mastered tool use to the extent that it typically wraps itself in heavy blankets and robes to avoid overt detection. The Halak-Tubei feeds on waste, showing particular affinities for the minerals found in used electronics and anything that can hold an electric charge. It makes a low, haunting moan at night as it knocks down garbage collection bins and slams at doors, at times driven seemingly mad by hunger. In the day, it huddles in alleyways, looking for all the world like a down-on-their-luck beggar, or perhaps a discarded pile of laundry. What it does not know, of course, is that the whole city was built for it: the hellish conditions a near perfect recreation of where the poor creature was found.
Research was ongoing on the Halak-Tubei until the withdrawal. To this day, it is unknown if the creature breeds, or how many there might be within its personal kingdom of huddled sentient masses.
The rest of the city, the sentients and more common urban non-sentients (including Rocketflies, which brave entrepreneurs breed and sell for their thoracic sacks), live on, however. The Halak-Tubei, though known to menace children, is something of a small concern. If you visit Halak-Tubei today you will find the Shattered City, so called for the cartel wars that erupted over the fine real estate and things left behind by the Kadarach. The newly-converted estates turned pleasure houses are good places to gamble, perhaps, though a visitor will find little else to welcome them in Halak-Tubei. The locals don’t like tourists. Yet there, underneath the abject piteousness of the conditions, the sickness and the violence, life goes on, families mostly still work the job-functions they had before the withdrawal, and the city thrives.
When all the constructed ecosystems collapse, when the Pale Beasts and the Marsh Worms are nothing but memories, there will be a beautiful, though strange, virgin world for those unlucky few to conquer. It has already started, over the intervening years, settlements much like any other settlement in any other frontier land, slowly spreading to retake the world for the forces of sentience. Perhaps one day, these beings will take up the mantle from the Kadarach, and remake the world into a paradise once more. Or perhaps they will find another world, in another forgotten part of the galaxy, to visit the same fate upon.