After their victory in the war, the Three-Nation Alliance divided up the M'tok Union's territory. The region allotted to Xi Yan became the M'tok Sector under the Empire's rule.
The Faus System lay within the Interstellar Human Military Junta's borders, in the middle of the M'tok Sector. Although its location did put it on a major transit route, only one hyperlane connected it to other systems, leaving it somewhat isolated.
This was a binary system consisting of a red giant and a brown dwarf. However, the tiny, dim brown dwarf looked utterly inconspicuous beside the enormous red giant.
Brown dwarfs were substellar objects without enough mass to sustain hydrogen fusion. They were about the same size as large gas giants, but much denser. With their weak light and meager heat output, brown dwarfs could scarcely provide orbiting planets with the conditions necessary to support life.
Red giants, meanwhile, had enormous radii and relatively low surface temperatures. They were the form that stars of moderate mass took in the declining stage of their evolution. Their expanded atmospheres and intense light could create habitable zones extremely far from the stars themselves.
To the naked eye, the entire system was dark red.
Despite being a binary system, the Faus System's orbital layout still resembled that of an ordinary single-star system. The slightly elliptical rings on the Starmap represented planets revolving around the two closely neighboring stars.
Faus VII lay extremely far from the red giant, on nearly the outermost planetary orbit.
Phaeus A, the red giant, had an intensely bright glow and an enormously expanded atmosphere that gave it a truly terrifying size. As a result, the nearby planets-from Phaeus I to Phaeus V-had become molten or barren worlds.
For Faus VII, however, that vast distance from its star was just right. Although