Erebus

The monolith arrives with no ceremony, a stygian streak that plummets from the stars and within which is reflected a world devoid of life, a sprawling desolation of silent seas without feature. It pierces the waves and the only report of its arrival is the dull shockwave as it lodges into the ocean floor.

Silence gives way to a low thrum of energy that incrementally mounts until it's a deafening roar, sucking the sea into a vortex of churning waves that burst into steam when they make contact with its surface. A dark pool oozes out across the water's surface like hot oil, cooling and hardening as a mixture of salt, silt, and stone from the sea floor sifts out of processing vents just above this obsidian layer and spreads out, a thin sheet of granules slowly thickening into a layer of artificial earth. In days it will be an island, in months a city, in years a country.

Acervus is the latest terraforming operation of the Atlas Corporation, an ever-expanding settlement built atop an ecological goldmine. Its inhabitants are bio-engineered slaves whose lifespans do not exceed thirty years. Their world is the nexus of a system caught in a perpetual cloak-and-dagger war between two rival factions whose methods and ideologies are little more than varying shades of grey.