Alpha was a small Syndic town on the planet Wendig One. At the time of the Lost Fleet's passage through the Wendig system, Alpha represented the sole inhabited settlement in the system. It contained 563 civilian residents, all of whom were in dire need of rescue.
When the Syndics pulled out of the Wendig system, the supervisors of these last residents departed on ships sent by another corporation, promising that more ships would come to evacuate the rest of the civilians soon. These ships never came. As a result, by the time Captain Geary and his fleet encountered them, the residents of Alpha were living on borrowed time. They had closed down and cannibalized most of the town in an attempt to stay alive, but their life support systems were failing, and the planet was too hostile to survive without these systems. Fortunately, Captain Geary diverted his fleet and launched a humanitarian rescue effort, successfully extracting all 563 residents, who then spent twelve days aboard Alliance warships before being deposited on an orbital mining facility in the Cavalos system.