Biotech & Card Transformation
The Terran Compact is humanity, long after leaving Earth behind: an institutional alliance of trade, science, and military power bound together by necessity rather than affection. Compact worlds are crowded, its shipyards run day and night, and its census takers stopped publishing numbers a decade ago. The new system is not an opportunity for the Compact. It is a requirement.
The Institute is the Compact's research arm, and it has been starving. Every biosphere humanity controls has been catalogued, sequenced, and exhausted. Multiple untouched habitable worlds in a single system is the greatest scientific prize in living memory, and the Institute will not let soldiers and merchants trample it first. Its survey ships push ahead of the battle lines, its field labs go up before the colony domes, and its researchers have quietly learned that in a contested system, science only gets done by those willing to defend the data.