A desert world, incompletely terraformed, the planet possessed but five major centers of human population, all existing under sealed domes, when the Xenophobes emerged from the ground in C.E. 2498 and attacked, apparently without provocation. The second incursion—alerting the Hegemony that this was an interstellar threat—was in 2508 at Sandoval, a mining colony on the tide-locked world of Ross 906 I.But the first world with a large population and a viable environment to be attacked by the Xenophobes was Herakles.…—A History of the Xenophobe WarsConstantine Li XuC.E. 2543For some billions of years before the coming of Man, Herakles—Mu Herculis III—had remained a typical prebiotic planet, a place of liquid water oceans beneath stormy and opaque skies of carbon dioxide. Such worlds were common; life, requiring such factors as tides—in order to create the gentle pools where life might arise—and a precise balance between an environment too hostile and one too mild, was comparatively rare.Just over thirty light-years from Sol, the Mu Herc system had been surveyed by the Imperial Sekkodan, the Scout Service, in the early 2200s.
