Planet I · the white world of the interior
Ormek
In a nutshell
Ormek is the planet closest to Aurin, the system’s star. From afar it looks like a blinding white disc, but beneath its clouds there is breathable air, savannah and water. It is held by the Zenith, one of the two factions, who take energy and metal from it.
It was estimated from afar and measured on arrival.
What is Ormek like?
Ormek is the first planet of Aurin, the system’s star. It lies 6 Gm from it, closer than any other world. It is 6,050 km in radius.
- Air. Breathable, at 95 kPa.
- Gravity. 8.88 m/s².
- Day. Six hours long.
- Climate. Hot. Humid in the valleys and dry at the equator.
- Landscape. Golden savannahs, gallery forests (woods that grow along riverbanks) and running water. Red deserts along the equator.
- People. Almost everyone lives in the temperate belts at high latitudes.
Below the clouds, the archive records little. Its fauna is not yet on record, and neither are its named towns. The archive does not fill them in.
Why does it shine so brightly?
Ormek receives six and a quarter times the light that reaches Ithera, the system’s temperate planet. Almost all of that light goes back into space before it touches the ground.
A high veil of white cloud covering the whole planet sends it back. It is a cirrostratus: a layer of ice crystals between 14 and 22 km up, at more than fifty degrees below zero. That is why Ormek is the brightest object in the inner sky. Seen from its moons, it glows like a white ember.
Down below, the day is white and the shadows are soft. The sun looks diffuse, ringed by a 22° halo. Beside it appear the parhelia: ‘ghost suns’ that ice in the air casts next to the real one. They give the galaxy its name, Parhelion.
Why was it thought to be hostile?
The glare fooled the Registro Aura, the system’s first catalogue, drawn up from afar. The Registro gave every body a suffix. The suffix -ek meant “hostile, no permission to land”. The dossier on the system explains why this planet got it:
“It was given to Ormek because from afar all that could be seen was a blinding white disc, which the Registro took for a world in flames.”
Dossier on the Aurin system
The Zenith went down in spite of the Registro. The Zenith are one of the system’s two factions. They were the first to find that Ormek had air. That discovery is part of their founding story: measure rather than accept, and land where others will not.
The suffix stuck. Settlers now read -ek as “hard world”.
What can you get here?
Two things: energy and metal.
Energy. On the surface stands the Colector Solar Prima, the installation that powers half the system. It only works this close to the star. It is one of the eight strategic points, the sites the two factions fight over. Whoever holds it earns an energy bonus for their whole faction. They also take on a risk: Aurin’s flares, bursts from the star that black out sensors in the inner orbits.
Metal. It comes from the Calderas de Ormek, geothermal basins full of brine (very salty water) laden with metal. They follow a daily cycle:
- Every afternoon, the water evaporates.
- A crust of clean metal is left on the ground.
- Before dawn, the basins fill up again.
The metal is gathered off the ground, with no drilling. You have to be out before the water comes back. There is no time to work it down there, so it goes up to Pyra. Pyra is Ormek’s tidally locked moon: it always shows the planet the same face. It is the Zenith’s forge and descent shipyard.
Who is in charge here?
The Zenith. The Nadir, the other faction, do not contest Ormek with weapons. They watch it from Ormek’s other moon.
In Year 29 E.A. (E.A.: Años de Asentamiento, the settlers’ calendar), the Nadir bought the salvage concession for the moon Cinera. That is, the right to recover wreckage there. They paid a laughable sum. The contract came with a clause on “passive navigation-safety instrumentation”. The Cátedra, the Zenith high command, took it for a joke.
That instrumentation is now the best listening post in the inner system. It has a permanent line of sight over the Colector Solar Prima. So the split runs like this: energy and metal for the Zenith; intelligence and sabotage for the Nadir.
