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establishes the plane of ecliptic for this star system. Because of the severe angle of Satlin’s orbit, twice a year she experiences heavy meteor showers of debris wandering inward from the belt. Since terraforming, most of this matter is burned up in the atmosphere, but occasionally larger chunks of rock have to be bumped out of the way.) The planet’s general unlikelihood lends some credence to the legend that the pilgrims were steered toward this world by an “angel”—the same angel that delivered “the Savior” to them and gave them Choice. As with many other aspects of the world, even its material sciences are bound up in mysticism.
    The planet has no life native to it. Before terraforming, it was a hard-baked ball of rock, almost totally lacking atmosphere, and bathed by actinic radiation strong enough to kill. The planet is 15,140 kilometers in diameter, larger than Earth, but with far less heavy metals and density. Gravity is only .84 Earth-normal. There are three small moons, massing less than one-third Luna (total), and scattering of asteroids. All of them are more than 300,000 kilometers out and exert only minor tidal effects. To the unaided eye, they are point-sources, not disks.
    The early colonists beheld a world that was barren and pocked; its cratered face was forbidding to look upon—she was world battered by cataclysm, lonely and hostile. If she had water, she held it within herself; what polar caps she wore were mostly CO2. What atmosphere she wore was thin and inhospitable, less than 1.2 psi. She turned upon her axis only once every 53:33:12 hours, producing extremes of day and night beyond the parameters of viability. The 26:46:36-hour day was too long and too hot, even before high noon temperatures on dayside became lethal; oceans, if any, would have boiled. Conversely, the equally long nights were too cold; freezing temperatures on nightside were generally reached eight to ten hours before dawn. In the higher latitudes, it was not uncommon for CO2 to crystallize out of the air was the night progressed. This continual heating and cooling put the planet’s crust under heavy strain, making it prone to volcanism and a great number of (usable) geothermal vents. Earthquakes were not uncommon.
    After more than nine years of surveying and simulations, preliminary terraforming began with the construction of an atmosphere. Several ice-asteroids had been nudged out of orbit and pushed into eventual collision course with the planet; they began to arrive within a year of the completion of the primary simulations and their courses were corrected for specific target areas. The largest of these ice-asteroids was more than nineteen kilometers in diameter. When melted it would provide enough water to cover the surface of the planet to a depth of one centimeter. To import a whole ocean in this manner would take several centuries, more energy than the colonists had to work with, and probably would have reduced Satlin to rubble by the continual battering of asteroid collisions. The colonists were gambling instead that the small polar caps already in existence, as well as the core samples they had taken, were evidence of additional water trapped in Satlin’s mantle. The asteroid collisions opened thousands of holes in the planet’s surface and vented billions of tons of rock and hot gases into the air and created both an atmosphere and an ocean in a single generation. The pilgrims watched from their safely distant orbit and waited, not without prayer. Of course, the water that they did import was not wasted; although its primary purpose was to startle the mantle of the planet into releasing more of the treasure, eventually it flowed downward to its destined lake and ocean beds—the seven asteroids used added less than six percent of the total resultant atmosphere and ocean; the bulk of the planet’s resources were already there, waiting to be tapped. A few hard knocks were