Armisticio de Ithera

What is it?

It is the treaty that ended the war of Year 1, the civil war between the system’s two factions: the Zenith and the Nadir. It was signed in Year 12 E.A. (E.A. stands for Años de Asentamiento, the settlers’ calendar).

Nobody had won. The treaty began the cold peace: a tense truce between the two houses that still stands thirty-five years on.

Why was it signed?

Both factions depended on the same MMU, the manufacturing technology inherited from the fleet. Neither could afford to wipe out the other’s supply.

So they signed a fragile treaty. It is held together more by a reckoning of mutual risk than by trust.

What does it say?

Its two key rules:

• Ithera stays free of armies. It is demilitarised in practice and in the hands of the five Guilds, neutral collectives. That won them a status recognised by both stations, and they no longer had to feign loyalty to anyone. Neither the Guardia Vertical, the Zenith army, nor the Flotilla Libre, the Nadir militia, deploys there in force. Its surface is never conquered.
• Both stations sit at the same distance from the planet. This is the Cláusula de Equidistancia.

The clause places the stations at two stable points on Ithera’s orbit, the libration points. El Pináculo, the Zenith station, rides sixty degrees ahead of the planet, on Delvar, a rock that shares its orbit. El Fondeadero, the Nadir one, rides sixty degrees behind, on Trasvar, another such rock.

If neither station can reach the planet before the other, neither can claim a military edge over the world both swore not to touch. The clause was drafted by the handful of engineers on either side who were still on speaking terms.

And three more rules:

• The Arca Custodia, the ship that registers settlers, is anchored at a neutral point, equidistant from the two stations.
• The Vanguard, the military guild, may stop and inspect any convoy entering La Cicatriz, the Guilds’ capital.
• No one may deny emergency docking to a civilian ship.

What was left unwritten?

• Melvara. The treaty never defines what counts as orbit. Melvara, Ithera’s large moon, has a radius of 1,950 km and a horizon of its own. The Registro Aura, the system’s first catalogue, crossed it out by hand on discovering that it circled Ithera. In thirty-five years neither side has given way. Both factions have built “strictly civilian” installations there, four hundred kilometres apart. Between them, the Guilds count whatever goes in from an inspection station.
• Tirane. Nor does the treaty mention this middle moon of Ithera. What protects Puerto Aurora, its eight-dock port, is custom.

What happens if someone breaks it?

Attacking other settlers, Guild people or their infrastructure inside Ithera, outside the rules, has a name. It is a desecration of the Armisticio. The offender’s faction and all five Guilds punish it at once. It is the only case where faction politics touches Guild trust (see reputation).

Fighting off the fauna is allowed. When a migration of Ombrasks (giant predators) or Rolvaks (armoured grazers) overruns La Cicatriz, the Zenith and the Nadir fight side by side.

Will it hold?

• The Cátedra, the Zenith high command, regards it as temporary. Its observers on Ithera log resources for an eventual “reassessment”.
• The Círculo, the assembly that governs the Nadir, regards it as sacred. Each year they mark its anniversary, the Fondeo, by switching off every non-essential light for an hour.

Today, in Year 47 E.A., incidents are rising at the strategic points, the contested sites. CUSTODIA, the Arca Custodia’s intelligence, greets every recruit like this: “The two houses need hands again.” At El Amarre, a tavern in El Fondeadero, people wonder every year whether it will last another.