Renvar

What is Renvar like?

Renvar is one of the two moons of Kaldrek, the cold, outermost planet of Aurin, the system’s star. It is a pile of icy rubble 400 km in radius.

• Gravity. 0.212 m/s², the lowest of the system’s ten moons.
• Ground. Dirty ice and loose, uncompacted dust. Ice geysers erupt from the surface.
• Air. Hardly any. It has only a tenuous coma, a very thin cloud of gas: 80% water vapour, with carbon dioxide and a little oxygen. It cannot be breathed. Going outside takes a full suit (a full EVA).
• Where the gas comes from. It is topped up by ice turning to gas (sublimation), material arriving from the ring and radiation breaking up the ice (radiolysis).

Where is it?

Renvar circles Kaldrek 26,000 km from the planet. It is tidally locked: it takes four hours to go round Kaldrek and another four to turn once on its axis. That is why it always shows the planet the same face. Its axis is tilted 28°.

It sits on the edge of the Anillos de Kaldrek, the great band of ice and rock around the planet. It is their shepherd moon: its gravity keeps the edge of the rings in place.

The planet’s other moon is Ordrek, larger and far older. Every three orbits of Renvar, the two cross over exactly the same point of the ring.

What is it made of?

Renvar did not exist when Mornane died. Mornane was the moon Kaldrek lost millions of years ago. And yet Renvar is made of her.

The Anillos de Kaldrek were already there when the settlers arrived. But the war of Year 1 embedded so much scrap in them that for decades the whole system took them for debris from that war. That was the war that split the settlers into two sides: the Zenith and the Nadir. Then the Pathfinders, the explorers’ guild, proved otherwise. The ring is the corpse of Mornane, millions of years old. The war’s metal is only embedded on top, not inside.

With that, the missing piece fell into place. A ring has time. Close to the planet, gravity tears apart anything that comes near. Beyond that limit, whatever spills from the ring clumps together. The dossier on the moons of Aurin sums it up:

“Renvar is a four-hundred-kilometre rubble pile that has been gathering grain by grain for aeons, and it is the only thing in the whole Aurin system that is being built without anyone building it.”

Dossier on the moons of Aurin

The Registro Aura, the system’s first catalogue, gave it the suffix -ar. That is the one for captured bodies or bodies with unresolved orbits.

What can you get here?

Below the surface, every few metres, scrap turns up: hulls, armour and piping. It is the metallic signature of the war of Year 1. The moon’s own gravity swept it from the ring and buried it here.

Anyone digging on Renvar finds two histories at once: Mornane’s and the war’s. It is the only mixed deposit in the system. The same cubic metre holds clean ring water and pre-war salvage: material that can be recovered.

The dig site is called El Acopio and lies at mid-latitude.

What can you see from El Filo?

El Filo is a ridge that serves as a lookout. No one fights there. From it, Kaldrek hangs motionless and fills twenty-eight degrees of sky. The ring opens like a blade of ice a hundred and fifty-four degrees wide, almost from horizon to horizon.

Kaldrek is the front where the Zenith and the Nadir clash without either winning. According to the dossier on the moons, from El Filo “you understand all at once why no one has ever won on this planet”.