First Landing

The Ganymede refugees' colony town on Ilus — huts, roads, and mine pit alike — is wiped from the earth by the cataclysm's storm, leaving only mud.

Story so far

First Landing was the ramshackle settlement founded on Ilus by Ganymede refugees north of the great southern desert: dusty roads, prefab huts, a lithium mine pit, and the nearby ancient alien ruins where its bloodiest crimes were committed. It sat far enough inland to escape the three-kilometer tsunami from the seabed blast, but not the storm — sixteen hours of 300kph winds, lightning, and torrential salt rain turned the desert hardpan into flowing rivers and scoured the town away. When Amos and Wei's search party goes out for the missing Dahlke family, they find nothing recognizable: the huts gone, the roads gone, the mine pit gone or its landmarks so changed they can't locate it — '[imagine] mud and rubble without the rubble.' The colonists survive only because they sheltered in the alien towers; the settlement itself, and the ecosystem around it, is simply erased, with a sunless nuclear-winter cold now settling over the ruin.

Appearance

Once a dusty frontier town of prefab huts and two roads by an open mine pit near alien towers; now an expanse of brown-green salt mud and new rivers under a black, sunless sky, no structure left standing.

Role

The colony settlement at the heart of the Ilus conflict; obliterated by the cataclysm, its surviving people now homeless in the alien ruins.

Relationships

Ilus — The world whose seabed blast and storm annihilated the town it hosted.

Amos Burton — The searcher who walks its site and finds nothing of it left to find.

Carol Chiwewe — Its coordinator, now counting its scattered survivors in the alien ruins.

Lucia Merton — Its physician, tending the townsfolk who lost their homes in a single night.

Sources — 2 recorded facts, by chapter

Chapter 2

The ramshackle squatter township on [[Ilus]] — two rows of prefab buildings the Ganymede refugees built and never bothered to rename.

Chapter 34

The Ganymede refugees' colony town on Ilus — huts, roads, and mine pit alike — is wiped from the earth by the cataclysm's storm, leaving only mud.