Cadfall
Cadfall is a red planet that serves as the main Feron possession in the Conflux. It’s a resource-rich world but rugged and dangerous. It’s known primarily for the hyperevolution of its native species: Most Cadfall organisms can selectively turn off their immune response to foreign DNA that’s desirable. Cadfall organisms can “evolve” in real time by consuming prey and coopting their DNA to metamorphose into chimeras that gain their useful traits: For example, a Cadfall predator could consume birds to gain the genes to grow wings. Feron scientists have also discovered that Cadfall animals can accept grafted tissues and limbs from completely different species, much like some plants.
On Cadfall, you are what you eat.
Ilium
Ilium is the largest Feron colony in the Conflux. Ilium is the largest continent on Cadfall, but because it’s so mountainous, most of the settlements are within about 100 miles from the L-shaped coastline on Ilium’s southwest along Barbarians’ Gulf. Ilium is governed from the Magnarx, a citadel built out of a very tall, winding tower-like Curiosity called the Spiralis. The Spiralis seems to have crashed onto Cadfall thousands of years ago, piercing the planet’s surface like a spear and leaving a huge impact crater. Scientists have not yet determined how deep the Spiralis goes, but the top of Spiralis, which is also the Magnarx’s governor-general’s office and residence, reaches up to Cadfall’s upper atmosphere.
Much of Cadfall’s elite lives in the Magnarx, though not necessarily by choice. Residence in the Magnarx is a double-edged privilege: It’s a sign of prestige, but it also comes with constant surveillance and scrutiny by the regime. Successful families from elsewhere on Cadfall usually have one of their children invited to stay at the Magnarx as a “guest.” Disobedience to the regime is generally punished by summary defenestration. As a result of frequent purges, the Magnarx has a “moat” of blood and viscera, where man-eating reptiles feast. (The ground-level bridges into the Magnarx are covered.)
In addition to the regime and the upper caste, the Magnarx also houses the Misiqué, an elite paratrooper and aerial assault unit that serves as Ilium’s garrison. The Magnarx has many built-in airlocks up and down its height, often with small hangars containing dropships, gunships, and special power armor designed to make autonomous HALO jumps directly from the Magnarx. Because the Misiqué has units spread throughout the Magnarx, it can deploy most of its forces within minutes. The one time the Ismal Allies attempted to attack the Magnarx directly, survivors compared the experience to kicking a hornet’s nest, if the hornets were armed to the teeth with guns, missiles, and lasers. The Misiqué’s commander has the rank of Marquis, a post currently held by Marquess Zuhanda, secretly a conspirator in what will become the Junian Revolution.
Sprawling out from the Magnarx’s base is the lower city, Cratertown. Few Isan and Malleon live there because foreigners were moved to concentration camps during the War, and after the Armistice, those who remained on Cadfall moved south to Advena Point. Cratertown is populated mostly by Naharadi, members of the lowest Feron caste, most of whom were slaved until the Armistice emancipated them. Cratertown’s economy revolves around heavy industry, its skyline full of smokestacks. Ores and minerals come to Cratertown by train from strip mines farther inland, where they’re processed by factory workers from the Boar caste, who are a majority of the Cratertown population. The pollution is so bad that longtime workers are fitted with artificial breathing tech originally designed for victims of the Breathless Plague—but only if they have enough working years ahead of them. While Cratertown’s biggest exports are traditional steels, Cratertown is also known for weapons and armor made from Boar Iron, a Nephelium-infused iron isotope with anti-gravity properties found only in Ilium’s mines, which is wrought or cast into pieces that seem almost comically bulky or oversized but can be wielded or worn much more easily than their mass would suggest.
Advena Point
Far to the south of the Magnarx and Cratertown is Advena Point, at the continent’s southern tip at Barbarian Gulf. Advena Point is the only city on Cadfall where foreigners are relatively tolerated. The city is split into Feron, Malleon, Isan, and Catallax Quarters. Foreigners are not allowed into the Feron Quarter except to use Advena Spaceport, the only port on Cadfall outside of the Quarantine Zone where foreign passports are accepted. The Feron Quarter is populated mostly by a particularly violent branch of the Klykovy caste, who often organize pogroms into the Malleon and Isan Quarters, which usually turn into street fights with those quarters’ respective gangs. The Catallax Quarter generally goes unmolested because it’s patrolled by the White Gentleman, a six-story tall mech capable of being piloted from a cockpit or remotely. The White Gentleman does not carry any weapons, but its armor is invulnerable to small arms and low-yield explosives, and its limbs are strong enough to crush anyone foolish enough to get in its path. (The White Gentleman is officially tolerated by the mayor-colonel’s office because the Catallax demanded it as a condition for their ongoing work in the Quarantine Zone.)
The Isan Quarter is, quietly, the best place to get bionics on Cadfall. Feron normally patch themselves up with bloodsteel, a unique Cadfall alloy that bonds crimson steel to scar tissue. Nina Harker, the daughter of a Feron-Isan biochemist father and an Isan artisan mother, invented a superior form of bloodsteel that, instead of merely being able to replace damaged tissue or patch damaged limbs together, could fully replace a lost limb. Rumor has it that she’s now experimenting with a yet-more-adaptable form of bloodsteel, which can disperse into a gas on command then re-form itself into whatever form the user needs most.
The Malleon Quarter, situated around the docks, is known mostly as the only major supplier of seafood on Cadfall. (The Feron hate oceans and don’t like to fish.) While Feron have traditionally viewed seafood as disgusting, the way we think of eating insects, the quality and quantity of seafood coming out of Advena Point has made many converts. Fried fish and fish tacos have become popular street food among the Naharadi, who had less of a taboo against fish in the first place. The higher-end seafood finds its way to parties thrown by Avidae sophisticates, though even among them, sushi is considered too outré. Advena Point fish, particularly sashimi-grade, are extremely sought-after: Red Reef Seafood Company, the largest foreign company operating there, pays extravagantly for Catallax time-bending technology to keep catches fresh for interplanetary voyages. The high price has led to an epidemic of smuggling, with smugglers hiding live fish in their ships’ water tanks to sneak them off-world. The Feron regime doesn’t mind the smuggling much because all the unlicensed launches serve as good target practice for pilot cadets and provide field data for orbital defense systems.
Junkport
Several miles off the coast of Advena Point is the floating city of Junkport. It began over a century ago as a seasteading project from a converted oil rig that had gone dry. Gradually, victims of the Advena Point pogroms would take their belongings, get on a ship or boat, then anchor themselves at Junkport, until it reached its current state as a semi-permanent agglomerated city. It’s loosely organized, some areas having ships and rigs bound together in tight formations, while some “suburbs” are just groups of nearby anchored ships. Water taxis run a brisk business, with taller ships and rigs having some kind of elevator down to the waterline.
While it’s officially subject to the same rules as Advena Point, where foreigners can’t become full citizens, in practice it’s only patrolled lightly from the air by a division of the Advena Point Police Department that only lands to apprehend high-value fugitives. Most Feron can’t swim and don’t like being on the water, and so they spend as little time as possible on a city made of boats and rigs.
The de facto government of Junkport is called the Hammerport Planning and Zoning Board (HPZB). “Hammerport” is the official name of the settlement, but no one calls it that. It doesn’t do much planning or zoning, or any other kind of governing: It’s real purpose is to collect enough taxes from its many black markets and smugglers’ dens to bribe the Feron authorities to ignore Junkport and to provide passes on- and off-world.
Junkport is known across the Conflux as a city of vices. Just outside the city on the water to welcome newcomers is a colossal gilded statue of a woman dressed as a cocktail waitress holding a bottle of booze in one arm and martini glass aloft in her opposite hand. Junkport’s floating casinos are a destination for gamblers across the Conflux: No one’s considered a true professional gambler without a Junkport travel visa, which are highly sought-after prizes. Almost anything in the Conflux can be bought and sold in Junkport’s many black markets, provided you have the right password: Most of them pay Easy Kyle, Junkport’s infamous crime boss, for protection. (Falling between two boats while wearing cement shoes is a common cause of death on Junkport.) Junkport’s prostitutes are notorious throughout the Conflux, specializing in prosthetics to act out johns’ kinkiest fantasies. (Easy Kyle’s other main source of revenue is blackmail.)
The Talbar
The Talbar is a vast continent east of Ilium, full of fertile plains and steppes. It’s the Feron’s breadbasket in the Conflux. Originally, the Talbar was populated almost entirely by slaves of the Bull caste, but, as part of the Armistice, they were freed. Returning Feron veterans were granted plots of land among them, and it’s now the only place in Feron society where members of different castes commingle.
The Talbar colony’s capital is a city called Harsissi, named after a mythical falcon-god born from an egg laid by a dead god. It’s built on the ruins of the Talbar’s former capital, Usyr. In the late stages of the war, the Malleon dropped a tungsten rod from space onto Usyr, and the impact obliterated the entire city along with everything else in a twenty-mile radius. Though this attack led directly to the Armistice, many in the Conflux consider it a war crime because Usyr was primarily an agricultural center.
Harsissi was rebuilt quickly on Usyr’s ruins—many say too quickly, amid rumors of worker exploitation—so that the First Triumvirate could use it as propaganda about the resilience of the Feron spirit in the face of a Malleon atrocity. Harsissi is a planned, walled city. At its center is a huge red obelisk made from a Curiosity uncovered by the impact, topped by an iron-black statue of Harsissi with its wings spread defiantly and head pointed skyward, called Harsissi-Kherox. Harsissi is known as the City of Hours because the obelisk acts as a sort of massive sundial, and the city’s twelve main boulevards radiate from the city’s hub like hours on a clock face.
Harsissi is home to Elekstut, the Feron Institute of Electricity. The Talbar is littered with shockstones, so called because they store electricity, enough to give someone a light zap. Elekstut was founded in the years before the War after a new refining technique opened up the possibility of using shockstones as power sources or weapons. The initial technology was ineffective: In the early years of the War, the quality of the shockstone weapons and shields the Feron could mass-produce was a punchline among Feron troops, but later prototypes—most of which were requisitioned for field testing by Nazzaretes, the admiral of what was then the First Fleet and now the Phalanx—were fearsomely effective. False intelligence that Elekstut was developing a weapon of mass destruction, a shockstone-based EMP bomb that could destroy an entire planet’s electrical systems and satellites, drove the Malleon decision to annihilate Usyr. As a result of the rebuilding, Elekstut’s research was set back several years, and it has yet to recreate prototypes of the same quality as the ones in Phalanx hands.
While the Feron regime pitched the farmland program for returning veterans in its propaganda as idyllic pastoral retirement, the Talbar is full of aggressive beasts that morph and evolve in real time. The initial militias formed to fight off these beasts were organized like the Feron Legion itself into units by caste, which proved ineffective because the beasts could quickly evolve to counter the tactics favored by each caste. As a result, the Feron were forced to put aside their caste-based prejudices to form a new militia known as the Mongrel Army, a mixed-caste force using combined-arms tactics to keep up with the beasts’ rapid evolution. Though originally a term of derision—mixing castes is generally taboo elsewhere among the Feron—the Mongrel Army has proudly adopted the name, wearing a patch that shows a wolf’s head with a lion’s mane and a bull’s horns, a chimera that represents the three main castes that comprise the militia.
The steppes of the Talbar are also home to Cadfall’s Academies. Academies are colleges that combine a classical curriculum of the arts, sciences, and engineering with the study of warfare. Most students are from the Avidae caste, though some Klykovy and Makhla are admitted, with some restrictions on what they can study. For the same reasons the beasts of the Talbar bedeviled the farmers prior to the formation of the Mongrel Army, they were thought to be good training exercises for cadets, as well as convenient in making it unnecessary to have to expel underachievers. The Academies also run leagues of sports, hunting, and gladiatorial combat, which are popular among all Feron, not just Academy alumni.
Skogrya
North of Ilium and the Talbar sits the subcontinent of Skogrya, a resource-rich land of taiga and tundra covered almost completely by a conifer forest called the Sklithra. Its only major settlement is Bombshell, so called because the Feron cleared the forest where the city was built by bombing it, and also because basement excavations occasionally uncovered unexploded munitions. Bombshell is in the foothills of Mount Chiramavra, the infamous Cadfall headquarters of the Falconroost (FR) secret police.
Bombshell’s main purpose is as an airport for transporting raw materials elsewhere on Cadfall and as a docking station for Spinnewerks, the spider-like mobile factories that harvest Skogrya’s lumber and mine its minerals. A Spinnewerk is a modular platform built on articulating spider-like legs, with a “mouth” on the underside that can be modified with “teeth” to rip trees up from above, drilling equipment to extract oil, or blasting equipment to strip mine hilltops. Spinnewerks are powered by coal and lumber, each of them fitted with a large smokestack. To harvest resources, Spinnewerks can bend their legs to “crouch” down, and from a distance it looks like they’re biting and chewing the trees or hilltops, or, in the case of oil resembling a mosquito biting a victim. Despite the very unsafe working conditions, Spinnewerks have no trouble finding laborers because Skogrya is far enough from Ilium that the local companies can get away with paying workers in smuggled Malleon banknotes, which are officially banned outside of Advena Point and Junkport. (The FR tolerates trade in banknotes on its doorstep because it gives them a pretext to arrest anyone for treason.)
Overlooking Bombshell is Mount Chiramavra, which the Cadfall branch of the FR has made its headquarters. On the mountainside overlooking the city is a huge relief carving of a falcon scanning the city below. The FR hollowed out the mountain to make room for its day-to-day work processing signals intelligence from Cadfall’s many high-powered cameras or intercepted from the Wires. The FR is overseen by a committee called the Top Floor, or at least that’s what the many propaganda shows promoting the FR would have viewers believe. In fact, the Top Floor is a decoy, and the FR’s real sensitive work—assassination and political blackmail—happens in a secret underground bunker below the mountain.
Though rich in traditional resources and Nephelium, Skogrya’s most important export is its lumber. Known as trollwood, the tree that makes up most of the Sklithra forest has evolved the ability to keep growing after it’s been cut. Except for surfaces that have been finished by cauterization, trollwood will grow as long as it has access to minerals and water, eventually growing roots and sprouting into a new tree. Builders take advantage of this to create self-healing structures: Instead of having to make repairs, they can simply trim the new growth back to its desired shape, like maintaining a hedge. There’s a popular long-running Feron sitcom called Treebeard about a Spinnewerk lumberjack who gets a trollwood splinter, and by the time he returns to his wife and children back at the Talbar, he’s turned into a walking tree-man. (It’s a comedy, this wouldn’t actually happen.)
Trollwood weapons and tools are also sought after: A soldier can “fix” a broken trollwood spear by planting it in the ground, taking it out a few days later, and removing any roots and growths. Trollwood loses these properties over time when taken off Cadfall, eventually becoming normal wood. However, on many planetside battlefields of the War, you can find the occasional trollwood growing, its miraculous healing factor long-since gone, and a spearhead hidden somewhere in its crown being the only sign that it’s a living grave, dropped by a slain Klykovy warrior and abandoned there to grow and bloom. Trollwoods don’t produce cones off Cadfall either, but there are still groves of trollwoods where entire platoons of Klykovy spearmen died together.
The Fracture
Bordering Skogrya to the northeast is a zone known as the Fracture. The Fracture was originally part of Skogrya, the site of an experiment gone wrong attempting to drill deep into the Nephelium-rich planetary core to see if it could be tapped directly as an energy source. How the Incident happened is a tightly held state secret, but the result was undeniable: A massive underground Nephelium-based explosion blew an entire tectonic plate off Cadfall’s surface. Saturated with Nephelium, it split into millions of chunks that float in space due to concentrated Nephelium’s anti-gravity properties, from a few feet above sea level all the way up to the lower atmosphere. This explosion also disrupted the velocity of Cadfall’s orbit: After the incident, a Cadfall year (Cadfall’s orbital period) doubled.
Where the plate that became the Fracture sat, water flooded in, lowering Cadfall’s sea level. It’s called the Blood Sea because reddish-purple energy from deep below Cadfall’s surface was exposed, bright enough to glow all the way through to the surface. From space, it resembles a bloodsteel scar on the planet. It’s this same energy interacting with the Nephelium of the Fracture to keep the pieces levitating. Feron engineers have not attempted to close that energy source because the worst-case scenario, the entire Fracture falling back to Cadfall under normal gravity, would cause an extinction-level event.
Feron authorities initially barred everyone other than politically reliable scientists from surveying the Fracture, classifying everything related to the investigation a state secret and maintaining the excuse (which no one believed) that it was caused by natural tectonic activity. These scientists determined that, at least for elite Feron soldiers dosed with Nephelium as part of their conditioning, adverse health outcomes from spending time on the Fracture were “within acceptable bounds.” Entrance into the Fracture is still restricted, but the regime now releases more information about it, in a propaganda effort to downplay the significance of the accident.
The Feron built a training facility there for Academy students called Excelsior, open only to cadets who’ve attained certification in at least one style each of high-, low-, and micro-gravity combat. Cadets conduct maneuvers using the pieces of the Fracture to jump and fight on. They wear special power armor called Tyzbronya or just “Tyz,” which are infused with Nephelium to tap into the power of the Fracture to simulate different levels of gravity, as well as jump jets to travel between platforms. By allowing the wearer (or a scenario computer, for wargames) to adjust relative gravity on the fly, it allows these students not only to prepare for different levels of gravity, but also for battlefields where the source and relative power of gravity is shifting, such as between bubbles on ships or where Nephelium bombs are warping gravity.
In addition to standard combat exercises, students at Excelsior all compete in a sport called the Melee. In the Melee, players wearing Tyz armor fight solo or in teams using one of the Fracture’s many large floating platforms as courts, to knock each other off until there’s a last man or team standing. Players fight with Nephelium-based training weapons, gloves, and special tools, which don’t damage an opposing Tyz, but each time a hit is scored, the Tyz is knocked backwards. As players take more hits, their Tyz computers adjust so that they’re knocked back farther each time, and because the rules limit use of the Tyz’s jump jets, eventually players lose the game by being knocked off the court and unable to get back.
The culmination of each Excelsior graduating class is a Melee tournament called the Trial of Stone. In it, the top student from each tribe competes in a series of one-on-one single elimination bouts. Each student competes for the honor of her caste and tribe, wearing a Tyz garishly styled after her tribe’s patron animal. The tournament takes place in a court on an arena at the summit of the Fracture, where the atmosphere is so thin, the stars and Cadfall’s moons are visible even during the day, and the spectators “tailgate” from their starship bubbles. The winner of each class’s Trial of Stone wins a trophy called the Heart of Stone, and the top military leaders come personally to size up the athletes for top positions. The Trial of Stone is also a popular broadcast: The regime favors it because it reinforces the caste system and normalizes the Fracture, but many everyday Feron enjoy it as departure from the usual gladiatorial bloodsport.
Utlagat
Utlagat is a long, narrow island just west of Ilium and Advena Point, across Barbarian Gulf. It has few beaches, mostly cliffs and bluffs. Because of the limited points of exit by sea, it began as a penal colony, but everyone who spent time there, including the guards, began growing mad and practicing cannibalism. The cannibals claimed that they needed to eat humans to evolve, like Cadfall’s beasts eat other beasts. Cults began springing up, attracting misfits from the mainland, declaring that Cadfall’s ever-mutating chimeras are the New Gods, casting down the Feron’s traditional animal-based tribes and castes. (For religious Feron, who believe in the Great Chain of Predation, a strict hierarchy of purer predators over inferior ones, chimera-worship is akin to witchcraft and occultism.) Some cults managed to capture beasts to worship as living gods. Others tried to live among them, getting eaten less than you’d expect, as though succumbing to Utlagat’s madness makes humans more tolerable to the beasts.
But most came to Utlagat because they heard the call of the Ambler, the leader of the Hooded Men. Not much is known about the Ambler, except for his trademark sackcloth robe, dyed a deep green. Newcomers are brought to the Radix. It’s not known what kind of indoctrination goes on there, but within a few months after arriving, most find a place somewhere high up overlooking the ocean to sculpt a Thin Man out of a green clay that bubbles up from underground all over Utlagat. A Thin Man is a simple clay structure, a narrow cylinder exactly as tall as the Sculptor, with the only decoration being a simply drawn face with a large beak-like nose. After forming the clay, the Sculptor finishes the statue by building a fire around it as if burning the Thin Man at the stake. This causes the clay to harden and weatherproof, turning a mossy green-gray. After finishing, the Sculptor returns inland and jumps to her death from Sculptor’s Bridge, which crosses Ithak Gorge, next to the Radix. Those who pass through the Radix but don’t become Sculptors are initiated into the Hooded Men by ritually eating a Sculptor’s corpse from Ithak Gorge. If you were foolish enough to sail along Utlagat’s coast, you’d find thousands upon thousands of Thin Men looking down on you.
The Hooded Men themselves are cannibal sky pirates who consume every part of the catch, including the captives. They’re called that because they wear executioner’s hoods to battle, in the belief that every human who doesn’t want to evolve (through cannibalism) had been judged and found guilty. They build their skyships in homage to chimeras, often with twisted or nonsensical designs that only stay airborne through unstable Nephelium hacks. They attack in force, swarming like locusts and using tactics with little regard for their own lives. For example, airdropping onto a ship that’s already sinking without having a plan to escape or even knowing how to swim. However, they don’t attack ships with large Feron Navy escorts, and they stay out of the Misiqué’s primary patrol zones.
The Ambler also seems to send out some of the Hooded Men incognito to Cadfall’s other settlements. They paint a stick figure of a green walking man, representing the Ambler, in thick strokes of spraypaint. These are known for turning up in strange and surprising places. It’s assumed that many of these are hoaxers, but the more fearful of the Feron wonder about the true extent of the Hooded Men’s reach. It’s not known why, or whether it has anything to do with the Ambler graffiti, but seemingly normal young men, and sometimes young women, abandon their lives without warning to make their way to Utlagat–mostly fated to become Sculptors.
Quarantine Zone
The Quarantine Zone was once called Arena Island, the former site of the Abora Games, an interplanetary athletic competition held every three years. (This was held on Anak’Ai before the Feron discovered the Conflux, but they moved it to Cadfall to allow Malleon and Isan to compete, in a propaganda effort to prove Feron “superiority.”) The main colosseum is massive, capable of recreating ancient historical battles to scale. Perched next to it is the statue of Cadfall Ferox, the symbol of Cadfall: A Roc lit like a flaming phoenix with eyes made from huge, extremely rare red diamonds. It’s meant to symbolize the Feron regime, run by the Roc tribe of the Avidae caste, as below only the gods in the Great Chain of Predation. This firebird sits on a huge totem pole, the tallest structure on the island, which depicts not only all the Feron tribes in the Chain of Predation but also representations of what the Feron saw as the “tribes” among the Malleon, Isan, and Catallax. But it hasn’t been maintained since the Plague struck and has begun to lean. When the Breathless Plague began spreading, victims were quarantined on Arena Island because the Games were suspended during the War, and the island was isolated, with substantial medical facilities and few permanent residents.
Feron doctors, who are more temperamentally inclined to vivisection than surgery, made little progress against the contagion. Instead, Catallax relief workers were allowed entry into the Zone because they offered to share some of their proprietary prosthetic technology to produce the Demilungs, cybernetic breathing apparatuses that replace a victim’s entire lungs, throat, and mouth. Demilungs allow Breathless victims to survive, as well as filter their breath so that they can’t spread the Plague, but only with diminished lung capacity and anemia.
Under the terms of the Armistice, the Catallax were officially granted jurisdiction over the Quarantine Zone. It’s now considered sovereign Catallax territory, which makes it the only legal way to get on or off Cadfall without passing through a Feron-run spaceport. (The Feron Navy heavily patrols the skies just outside Catallax airspace to prevent anyone from seeking asylum there, although the Breathless Plague itself is a substantial deterrent.) The Quarantine Zone project is now run as a joint medical program by the Coronal and Silviana Colleges. Among the original Feron doctors and scientists prior to the handover to the Catallax, those who refused to join the Catallax were expelled under accusations that they were trying to reverse-engineer the Breathless Plague as a bioweapon.
The real reason the Catallax got rid of them was that the Breathless Plague was already a bioweapon, one that the Catallax designed but had gone out of control. The Catallax originally designed the jiaohou virus to attack the respiratory systems of Feron supersoldiers who were proving a decisive advantage for the Feron during the middle years of the War. These supersoldiers received genetic grafts from cloned organs, all of which had the same genetic markers. Jiaohou was engineered to that it would only affect people with those markers—the supersoldiers—while everyone else could carry it safely, serving as a disease vector. As a failsafe, the jiaohou virus was designed to have a short half-life, so that it couldn’t evolve in a victim’s or carrier’s body to change its genetic programming.
What the Catallax who’d designed jiaohou hadn’t counted on was Cadfall’s hyperevolution effect, which previously was only known to affect organisms that had evolved on Cadfall. On Cadfall, the mission to expose the supersoldier population to jiaohou was successful, and the supersoldiers became the first victims of the Breathless Plague, effectively neutralizing the Feron’s greatest combat asset. But then the carrier agents who’d remained on Cadfall also became symptomatic, and both they and the supersoldiers became contagious to everyone.
As a result, the true Catallax objectives of studying the victims at the Quarantine Zone are to cover up their own war crimes, figure out what went wrong with jiaohou and why, and to learn how to make more reliable bioweapons in the future. Silviana College, founded to explore the possibility of transcendence through mutation and genetic engineering, is interested in the project because, as the only non-native organism seemingly affected by Cadfall’s hyperevolution effect, it’s also a possible vector that could potentially allow humans to hyperevolve like Cadfall’s native beasts. Coronal College, founded to explore the possibility that the anomalies of the Conflux are the results of a time loop, is interested in the project because some professors there believe that jiaohou—or an equivalent of it from an earlier timeline—may be the original cause of Cadfall’s hyperevolution.
As a bonus, sovereignty over the Quarantine Zone allows the Catallax to smuggle people and goods past Feron authorities. While the Feron Navy keeps constant patrol around Catallax airspace, the Feron don’t know about Manta Station, a submarine base the Catallax built in secret under the island. From there, the Catallax operate Manta subs, stealth craft specifically designed to dive deep and have a low profile against aerial or satellite surveillance equipment. This has allowed the Catallax to build by far the most effective foreign spy operation on Cadfall, unbeknownst to any of the other powers, and with little suspicion from the Feron, who view the Catallax as emasculated and weak.
The Egg
Cadfall has a single moon, named Ovo but popularly known as the Egg because it’s roughly egg-shaped and has a massive crater on the side of the thick end, called the Marevitelli, that resembles a yolk. The reason the Feron hate water isn’t merely because their home planet of Anak’Ai lacks large above-ground bodies of water, it’s also because the Egg rotates along both its north-south and east-west axes, making Cadfall’s tides violent and unpredictable.
The Egg has special significance to the Feron religion, which holds that planets are made from the bodies of ancient celestial beings, and that the Egg will one day hatch into a new such celestial elder. The only settlement on the Egg is a temple compound at the center of the Marevitelli called the Sitting. It’s one of the holiest places to the Feron, a fertility temple where women who want to conceive or are already pregnant go to pray to the gods. The centerpiece of the Sitting is a huge open-air bubble with a platform at the center and pews radiating in all directions. At the center, chained to the platform, sits a huge beast, rotating among creatures brought as gifts from devout Feron all over the Conflux. The beast is symbolically incubating the Egg, and worshipers pray to hasten the coming of the baby celestial.
