A diorama of Halcyon.
“Prosperity awaits you in Halcyon - humanity's furthest colony, located on the very edge of the frontier! Come bask in a lifetime of guaranteed full employment*, with only a minor term of [REDACTED] years of service!
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Halcyon is a star system on the fringe of known space. It is part of the Halcyon Cluster, so named because Halcyon itself is the brightest star in the cluster when viewed from Earth. Halcyon is proudly advertised as the only system entirely owned and operated by corporations. Most of the planets in the system are named after locations, deities, or creatures from Greek mythology.
Background[]
In the 23rd century, ten corporations pooled their resources and joined together to form the Halcyon Holdings Corporation in order to purchase the rights to the Halcyon system from the Earth Directorate. Although it was not unusual for corporations or even individuals to purchase star systems, Halcyon's remoteness meant that colonizing it would be an exorbitantly expensive effort. The HHC arranged for two ships to transport colonists to Halcyon: the Groundbreaker (UDL-001) and the Hope (UDL-002). The Groundbreaker arrived on schedule and the effort to colonize the system began on Terra 1, a small moon orbiting the gas giant Olympus, and planet Terra 2. When Terra 1 failed due to complications with the terraforming process, which caused most of the native flora and fauna to violently mutate and become hostile, the Board refocused their efforts on Terra 2, abandoning the moon, now rechristened as Monarch, and sectioning it off from the rest of Halcyon.
The emblems of the Hope and the Groundbreaker, the two colony ships sent to Halcyon.
Meanwhile, the second transport ship, the Hope, failed to arrive on time and was assumed lost by the Board. In 2320, the Hope was finally found adrift at the edge of the Halcyon system several decades later- having suffered a skip drive malfunction that forced it to finish its journey at sublight speed - the colonists had spent far too long in cryo-stasis and were deemed impossible to safely revive. The Board decided to hide the vessel in the Typhon orbit, leaving the colonists frozen. However, by 2355, the rogue scientist Phineas Vernon Welles had developed a safe method to do so. Welles breached the Hope and revived one of its colonists, the Stranger, to help him liberate the ship's thousands of passengers in defiance of the Board's corporate tyranny.
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