Debris band from the war of Year 1 · salvage and dispute
Cementerio de Aura
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The Cementerio de Aura is a band of shipwrecks circling between the orbits of Kharsis and Ithera, in the Aurin system. It is what is left of the battles of the war of Year 1. It holds pre-war technology that no one today knows how to make, and since it belongs to no one, everyone fights over it.
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The Círculo has spent years asking for it to be declared a protected zone. The Zenith block it every time. Guess why.
What is the Cementerio de Aura?
The Cementerio de Aura is a band of debris that circles Aurin, the system’s star. It lies between the orbits of Kharsis, the arid planet, and Ithera, the temperate planet. It is the wreckage of the battles of the war of Year 1. That was the war that split the settlers into two sides: the Zenith and the Nadir.
Its orbit is irregular, eccentric (stretched out) and inclined fourteen degrees. That is why nothing in it ever settles into a stable ring. What it holds is this:
- broken ship hulls;
- drifting containers;
- and forty-six years of sedimentation.
The largest fragment is a three-hundred-metre hull section from before the war. The end of a marking can still be read on its hull: “…ORA”. The Ancla de Recuperación Prima, a salvage rig of the Flota Aura, the fleet that brought the settlers, is planted on that hull. All around it, on the wrecks, emergency lights are still blinking forty-six years after the war.
Why do they fight over it?
It is one of the system’s eight strategic points, the places the two factions contest on equal terms.
- Lost technology. It is the largest deposit of pre-war technology. It holds rare components that today’s MMU cannot reproduce. The MMU, the Matriz de Manufactura Unificada, is the technical standard both sides inherited.
- Income. Whoever controls it collects the salvage: whatever is recovered from the wrecks.
- A chokepoint. Whoever controls it commands a navigation chokepoint between the inner and outer system. Crossing it with cargo is the most expensive route to insure anywhere in Aurin.
What is left here of the Arca Aurora?
Hull fragments of the Arca Aurora, the Flota’s ark that came down on Ithera during the war, drift here too. Before it crashed, under crossfire, the Arca lost sections in orbit that never reached the ground.
They belong to different generations of the MMU. Shipyards trying to rebuild pre-war designs pay for them.
Every so often, a storm of residual radiation opens a sealed vault the Arca lost here, for forty-eight hours. While that Anomalía lasts, the zone respects no sides: anyone fires on anyone, their own included. Inside wait pre-war relics and the Guardián Ancestral that keeps them.
What is there to fear?
- Point-blank fighting. At the centre of the field, fights happen at point-blank range among the wrecks. At the edge, they happen at a distance.
- Drones. A swarm of automated salvage drones is still active among the debris. They date from before the Armisticio de Ithera, the pact that ended the war in Year 12 E.A., and read any intrusion as a threat.
- Theft. Anyone can snatch a cargo halfway through extraction. Patrol reports speak of pirates of the Cementerio de Aura, scavengers of the void who work out of here.
Those drones are auxiliary cores, Flota Aura machines that nobody went looking for. The ones somebody did go looking for are called compis. MAMPARO, the compi of The Vanguard, the military guild, turned up switched off in the exact centre of a sealed compartment. His lens faced the door, and the compartment had held its pressure for forty-six years. The recovery report says, literally, “holding”.
Who does it belong to?
No one, and that is exactly what is in dispute. The Círculo del Fondeadero, the assembly that governs the Nadir, has been asking for years for it to be declared a protected zone. The Zenith block it every time.
Meanwhile it is open ground. The Astilleros de Salvamento of El Fondeadero, the Nadir station, break down whatever comes out of here. Flight Sergeant Iren Kast of the Guardia Vertical (the Zenith army) sums it up on the way through:
“Down there is technology from before the war of Year 1 that neither faction has managed to replicate. And we still can’t even get close without an armed escort. Let that tell you how ‘neutral’ that graveyard really is.”
Flight Sergeant Iren Kast, Guardia Vertical
For most recruits, the Cementerio is the first image of the war they had heard stories about. The pilot flying them on their orientation flight lowers their voice on the way in.
