Created by Captain Michael Turlogh Kane on Aug 16, 2016 @ 4:29am

LAVENZA II

LAVENZA II is the second planet in the Lavenza star system, and the location of a secret Neo-Essentialist genetic research base.

The solar system was first charted by the USS Godwin in 2373. It is a binary system of red dwarfs that orbit a common barycentre. Their combined light emission is less than one-tenth that of Sol, making the day-night cycle on the system's two planets much more gloomy than Earth.

The first planet is a J-class gas giant, but Lavenza II is a P-class ice world. It orbits at some two-point-nine billion kilometres from the red dwarfs, and has no satellites. The surface is made up of water, ammonia, and methane, all frozen into a global cryosphere. A layer of permafrost covers the planet at almost a kilometre deep. Wind speed is high, and it whips up the frost into perennial storms that make visibility barely possible. Although gravity is present at one-point-two G, the surface temperature is minus two-hundred-and-twenty degrees centigrade.

The atmosphere is primarily composed of nitrogen and oxygen, but there is also a significant proportion of argon, meaning that the air is breathable, but only for a short time. It is probable that the ice world has a sub-surface ocean many kilometres down, perhaps warmed by the planet's molten core, but without sunlight to enable the growth of underwater plants, the only life-forms would be extremophile bacteria that generate their energy through chemosynthesis.

In 2431, the USS Phoenix tracked a privateer ship to Lavenza II and discovered a secret base buried in the permafrost. Upon investigation, it was revealed that the base was the headquarters for a deadly Neo-Essentialist genetic project, code-named 'Promethean'. The Promethean project was so advanced that it was able to create new genetic templates from existing Starfleet medical and transporter records, raising the spectre of clones and eugenics, and giving further proof that the Neo-Essentialists were working to modify the Human genome to make Humans the 'master race' of the quadrant.