Lumenna-Súnáris System (11): Raziké

I/10. Raziké

Class: Alessán
Orbit (period): 32.4 au (184.424 T-years/67,362.71 T-days)
Orbit (ecc.): 0.06
Radius: 37,668 miles
Mass: 1.01 x 1027 kg
Density: 1.08 g/cm3
Cloud-top gravity: 1.86 g

Axial tilt: 4.1°
Rotation period: 12.1 T-days

Black-body temperature: 46 K

Satellites: 4 close moonlets (including Hyníne). 2 major moons (doublet). 6 eccentric moons.

Lumenna’s outer ice giant, a brooding dark blue-green, is a backwater in an otherwise busy system. Very few sophs travel as far out into the system as Raziké and its moons, beyond even the three stargates in the Lumenna sub-system (orbiting in a stable rosette at 24 au), trans-solar transit traffic excepted. There’s not much reason to, the options for doing so are limited, and the light-lag is extraordinarily inconvenient.

There are three principal qualities that bring sophs here: cold, ice, and privacy. Combine as you will, and you see a region whose inhabitants – if we discount the Distant Early Warning stations operated by the IN – are a few batch-mode computronium nodes, deep time data vaults, comet herders and ice miners, and the scattered communities and hermitages of those wanting to get a long way away from it all. Total population is below a quarter-million sophs.

I/10/a. Múrazór and I/10/b. Múrnamár

Class: Gelidian
Barycenter orbit (period): 1.356 million miles (10.17 T-days)
Barycenter orbit (ecc.): 0.04
Total Mass: 1.42 x 1022 kg
Density: 1.71 g/cm3

Black-body temperature: 46 K
Surface temperature (avg.): 42 K

Atmospheres: Trace. Primarily carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

Raziké’s major moons are a doublet; a pair of ice bodies orbiting around their common barycenter, which in turn orbits Raziké proper. The statistics given above are for the Múrazór-Múrnamár pair as a whole; the mass of the doublet is split two-thirds/one-third in Múrazór’s favor.

Múrazór houses much of the local population, in the form of an IN base for the outer-system picket, a scientific research station, and the Comet-Herder’s Gather, a meeting place and floating market for the population of the sub-system and nearby Senna’s Belt.

Múrnamár, by contrast, is almost untouched.

Things to See, Places to Go (2)

Hyníne: One of the inner moonlets orbiting the ice giant Raziké, the 10th and outermost planet in Lumenna orbit, Hyníne is a largely undistinguished chunk of water ice some 400 miles in radius. While a few private getaway habitats are recorded as existing here, there are no major domes or orbiting habitats.

Hyníne would have gone entirely unremarked in history were it not that in 3130, Hyníne witnessed the last act of the Consolidation. A rogue starship of the Cerenaith Alliance-in-Exile, fleeing an unsuccessful attempt to seize propellant tankers off Melíeré, was on course to use Raziké in a dangerous gravitational slingshot maneuver cutting through the plane of its faint rings. This course took it close to Hyníne, and it was near the point of closest approach, a mere 6,800 miles range, that this starship was caught and destroyed by an AKV operating from CS Enfilade, an escort destroyer of the Imperial Navy. This action is historically notable both as the final action of the Consolidation before the surrender at 32 Avénan and the start of the Aeon-Long Peace, and as the first known action in which a fully autonomous sophont AI destroyed a crewed starship on its own initiative.

The Hyníne Action is commemorated by a small solar-powered memorial beacon constructed at what would have been the point of nearest approach on Hyníne’s surface, jointly sponsored by the Office of Imperial Veterans and Sophont Software Sovereignty.

– Leyness’s Worlds: Guide to the Core Worlds