At 20 years old, Sirena was a member of a generation of young Romulans with a dubious distinction: the first generation that had never seen their home planet. Romulus and Remus were both destroyed by the Hobus supernova nearly two full years before she'd been born. She was called "Romulan," but to Sirena, Virinat was home. Between the fall and self destruction of the original Virinat Colony, and the return of the Maiori and his crew to re-organize it, life had been hard.
Sirena's parents had been farmers - as had most of the colonists before the Fall - and when most of the population left after what could only be called its civil war, they returned to the land and what they knew. They were tough years. There was plenty of food and water, but Papa had to range and forage for supplies and fuel not readily available. Every few months, some bedraggled survivors of the conflict would come to the ranch. Her parents were hospitable when the visitors were kind, but more often than she liked to remember things turned violent.
Papa, a navy man in his youth, was no stranger to violence - though he abhorred it. The bedraggled would-be raiders were often malnourished or dehydrated, but also desperate. Her mother, too, was ex-military, and the two of them were a formidable pair. Even at only eleven or twelve years old, Sirena had become a competent marksman with a plasma pistol, and the half-dozen or so farm hands that Ken'tel, her father, employed were always ready to help defend the ranch. By the time the Maiori showed up on Virinat, there was a fairly large graveyard on the outskirts of the south fields.
The newcomers brought skills and equipment the ranchers didn't know they were sorely missing until it was there: engineers, who were able to repair the irrigation pumps and the reactors that ran them, as well as optimize the irrigation flow; scientists who formulated fertilizer; and even warriors to provide security and keep both the giant insects and bothersome raiders away. The family took the newcomers in, and the new Virinat colony grew up around Sirena's family's farm. The Maiori, of course, was chief administrator, doling out assignments and setting crop quotas, deciding where buildings would be constructed, and so forth. There was at least one occasion where Sirena complained to her father that it was his ranch and HE should be in charge, but Papa disabused her of that notion quickly. He didn't want that and was perfectly content letting Malem handle the order-giving and complaint-hearing.
Life in the new Virinat colony had its own challenges, but they were mundane. It was idyllic for a time...until the Elachi came.