[03A] Nevada System

"Ooh ooh ah ah ah!"

Once upon a time, in a tiny forest moon orbiting the Nevada 2 gas giant, the animals of the jungle were going through the waves of their boring lives: strange four-handed chimp-like creatures roamed the trees like crazed maniacs, capturing alien fruit from the branches and munching down on the juicy flesh within. Like any other alien ecosystem, Nevada 2-VI was full of wonders of nature, a testament to the power of evolution: life had managed to defeat the horrors of nature. Once more, on a tiny little moon several lightyears from Earth, life had found a way.

And then humanity had found life.

"T-minus sixty seconds..."

The wave of creatures scaling the trees and crossing the branches finally reached a clearing, where a few of their brethren had already assembled to observe a most curious object.

"Thirty..."

They were not sapient, of course, but they had some basic intellect: they knew that the green, metallic object hanging in the middle of a tall tower was foreign, but they could not comprehend the threat it posed.

"Ten..."

With reluctance, one of the monkeys took several cautious steps towards the massive assembly, its eyes drifting upwards to look at the scale of the structure standing above it. There were strange shapes painted on the device, glyphs that might as well have represented language, but the creature was not close enough to see the details: poor vision was one of the features the species had lost the mutation roulette on.

"Five..."

Scaling the titanium lattice of the structure, the creature had to jump multiple times to reach new points of leverage, but after a few moments it did it. Several dozen meters above, it stopped on the same level as the device, its curious eyes scanning the strange glyphs. "F-CAW 08X" one label identified the strange object as, although the creature could not comprehend any of the symbols, and another piece of text had been spray-painted on it. "XENOBUSTER".

"One..."

Sidestepping to the right, the creature came upon another series of glyphs, this one smaller than the rest; it had to squint to make out the strange language.

The words "MADE IN THE USC" were the last thing the creature's eyes saw before it, and every single thing within a radius of fifty miles, was atomized in a gigaton thermonuclear blast. The fireball reached all the way up to the upper atmosphere, while the blast wave was enough to level every piece of plantlife within two hundred kilometers. When the sphere of superheated plasma and radiation cooled down, the only thing that was left was a mushroom cloud reaching all the way into the upper levels of the thermosphere.

---

Discovered during the early 22nd century, the Nevada system was considered bland by astronomers from day one: its young main sequence star was orbited by only four planets, three of them gas giants and the other a barren rock with surface temperatures in the hundreds of degrees. There was absolutely no reason to warrant further exploration of the system, and so few expeditions bothered with fully mapping out the moons of the gas giants, most of them too small to house an atmosphere. For centuries the system was forgotten, and nobody batted an eyelash about it.

During the Second Stellar War, the Coalition found itself becoming desperate: it had no terran planets to test its nuclear weapons on, and the military was unwilling to run nuclear tests on the two vulnerable colonies of Chicago and Washington in fear of making them targets for hostile attack. Then, one General thinking off the box decided to review some old survey data: there were no terran planets in the Nevada system, but one of the moons on the first gas giant was awfully similar to one. Indeed, the forest world had been deemed 'useless' due to the lack of natural resources other than timber. But its conditions were ideal for what the Coalition wanted to do.

And so, the secretive Nevada Munitions Testing Range was formed. The small bunker was built deep beneath the ice and soil of the northern ice cap, and work immediately begun on choosing the most optimal position for the testing sites: the goal was to limit interaction between the blasts, even in the form of residual radiation, in order to get accurate measurements of the fallout a single warhead on its own could cause.

For almost a decade, the Coalition has continued performing the majority of its land-borne nuclear testing on Nevada 2-VI. But in the past few years, the mission has shifted from its original priority: in examining the violent interactions that occur within a nuclear fireball, the Coalition hopes to gain further insights into the plasma physics that it so desperately requires to achieve viable self-sustained antimatter annihilation reactions.

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On the very borders of the system itself, stretching to what could be defined as very much in-system a lot of jumping occurred. Nothing big. Twenty two small objects had entered the space, and were transmitting data, coated in black paint, only really visible when they crossed over stars or other planets to the naked eye, these things appeared to be gathering information. Sending information to each other, and bouncing information away from their position. Something had drawn them here, maybe it was the nuclear explosion, but one thing was clear; Someone was watching, or trying to watch, as all the probes were sending live signals.