Ashkar

What is Ashkar like?

Of the eleven satellites in the Aurin system, Ashkar is the only one that is not a moon. It is an asteroid that Kharsis, the arid planet, caught in its orbit.

• Size. 45 km in radius, irregular in shape.
• Gravity. 0.034 m/s² (microgravity). The Registro Aura, the system’s first catalogue, had estimated it from afar at about 0.03 m/s².
• Spin. It turns once every two and a half hours. Its axis lies almost on its side, at seventy-five degrees.
• Rock. It is chondrite, a kind of asteroid rock, fractured by the capture itself: porous and cracked, with the iron of its veins in plain sight.
• Air. None: it is the only body in the system you can stand on in vacuum. No wind raises dust. The only thing that moves on its surface is ejecta, the fragments thrown up by each impact.
• Working outside. As on any airless body, it takes a full suit (a full EVA).

Where is it?

Ashkar goes round Kharsis every five and a half hours, 120,000 km from the planet.

It is the outer link of Kharsis’s Laplace chain, with the moons Kravane and Kharun. Their periods keep the exact ratio 1:2:4: Ashkar takes twice as long as Kharun and four times as long as Kravane. And the phase of the chain forbids all three from lining up at once.

Its name carries the suffix -ar, the one the Registro Aura gave to captured bodies.

What is the Ancladero?

In Ashkar’s orbit runs the Ancladero de Ashkar, a port for refuelling and cargo transhipment. It serves cargo between the inner system and the Cementerio de Aura, the debris band left by the war of Year 1.

• Why it matters. It is one of the eight strategic points: the places that the Zenith and the Nadir, the system’s two factions, contest on equal terms. Whoever holds it extends the reach of their patrols and logistics across the region.
• Who wants it. The Forge, the producers’ guild (mining, refining, hauling), has most interest in it.
• Who owns it. No one for good: it is contested. It is also the system’s cheapest deposit to reach.
• Who works there. Nadir dockers work its quays. The routes coming down from the Cementerio loaded with scrap pass through them.

Who passes through its quays?

Dez Calloway is a veteran pilot of the Flotilla Libre, the Nadir militia. He was flying to the Astillero Meridian, an abandoned shipyard in Kharsis’s outer orbit, and put in at the Ancladero.

He paid the Nadir way: he left a docker the “legitimate consignment” in his hold in exchange for cut-price refuelling.

Earlier on that same flight, he had picked up a faint, repeating, uncatalogued signal. He decided to look into it before reporting it, by a veteran’s logic:

“If I report it first and it’s nothing, I’m the alarmist; if I sit on it and it’s something, I’m complicit.”

Dez Calloway, Flotilla Libre