Serizawa’s thin lips curled in a smile. “Hmm, what do you suppose the colonists will call themselves?” He often pondered inane questions and struck up conversations with his technicians. The largest moon, Jack, orbited closest to the ignited planet and would likely be the first moon suitable for colonization. “Do you think they’ll call themselves Jackians? Or Jackites?”

One of the techs enjoyed the game. “Jacklings sounds more appropriate.”

Serizawa looked at screens showing the restless surfaces of the other moons, George, Ben, and Christopher. Pockets of thawed gases spewed like cometary tails, the noisy and messy birth of an atmosphere from volatilizing ice. The initial gases would boil off into space, too light to be held by the moons’ gravity. Eventually, after the frozen lakes sublimated and glaciers crumbled into either liquid water or gaseous carbon dioxide, there should be enough air to maintain a blanket around the moons. Eventually.

The names of these moons—in honor of the first four Great Kings of the Terran Hanseatic League—gave Serizawa a sense of history. But humans looked upon a few centuries as a great span of time, while to the Ildirans and especially their Mage-Imperator, so many years was barely a moment. During most of Earth’s civilization, people had failed to participate in longterm planning, neglecting to look farther than their own life spans.

Serizawa went to the station’s thermostat and raised the internal temperature. Heat would radiate upward from the decks and warm them all. Rubbing his hands briskly together, he returned to the monitoring screens.

He toggled between close-up images of Ben and Christopher orbiting near each other and those of George and Jack on the other side of Oncier. He played time-lapse images of the cratered landscapes as they smoothed out and cracked in the throes of rapid thawing. Because the topology of each moon changed daily, it was still far too early to assess any permanent land features.

“Large tectonic upheaval on Christopher,” said one of the techs, switching an image of the mist-enshrouded moon to the large display screen. Clouds of newly released gases roared upward like geysers. “Look, a crevasse is opening up, a large piece of the ice sheet shifting.”

Serizawa hurried over to observe, still rubbing his arms to get warm. “The geology is still so unstable that maybe the arrival of the terraforming crews is a bit premature. We wouldn’t want an exploration team going through a quake like that.”

“The terraformers are bringing in large-scale machinery, Dr. Serizawa. Designed to withstand the end of the world.”

“Or the beginning of one.” The ten technicians and astrophysicists gathered around the high-resolution viewers, riveted to the tectonic event.

Serizawa looked up just in time to see a cluster of bright, glittering globes streak into the system and converge upon the restless new sun from high above the orbital plane. “Look at that!”