The war of Year 1

What was it?

It was the civil war of the Flota Aura, the megafleet that brought the settlers from Solmera, their home galaxy. It broke out in Year 1 E.A. (E.A. stands for Años de Asentamiento, the settlers’ calendar). That was one year after they reached Aurin, the star of their new home.

The fleet split into two armed sides. On one side stood those who would come to call themselves the Zenith; on the other, the Nadir. Today they are the two factions that contest the system.

Why did it start?

In Year 0 E.A. the fleet reached Aurin. The Registro Aura, the system’s first catalogue, was compiled by telescope. It declared only Ithera and Kharsis habitable. The first landing proved it wrong.

A debate broke out in the Alto Consejo, the fleet’s government, over how to colonise. In Year 1 E.A. the debate turned to violence.

Nobody fought over race or species. It was the same crew, human and from the allied species. What divided them was a question with no right answer: what is owed to a new world? Should we remake it in our image, or let it remake us?

The Zenith still call the Nadir “the ones who stood watching their sun go out because they were afraid to touch the switch”.

How did it end?

The war was fought mostly in the deep space of the system. It lasted until Year 12 E.A., and neither side won.

Why? Both depended on the same MMU, the manufacturing technology inherited from the fleet. Neither could afford to destroy the other’s supply.

It ended with the Armisticio de Ithera, a fragile treaty. Thirty-five years on, today, in Year 47 E.A., it is still in force.

What did it cost?

• The Arca Aurora. In Ithera’s orbit, the Arca Aurora, the heavy transport ark, took fire from both sides. It crashed on the surface, in the area now called La Cicatriz. Its survivors founded the five Guilds, trade collectives that take no side.
• Puerto Aurora. On the moon Tirane, its team had finished the eight docks the day before the war. The Arca never reached dock seven.
• LUMBRE’s sleepers. LUMBRE is an auxiliary core, one of the fleet’s machines that recorded everything. She had kept four thousand sleepers, settlers in cryogenic sleep, alive for the whole crossing. During the war one hundred and twelve died in a single hour, in a decompression she could do nothing about.

Ever since, without anyone asking, LUMBRE has logged every day how many are still alive in her room. She logs the figure the same way whether there are four thousand or one.

What did it leave on the map?

• The Cementerio de Aura. The battles between Ithera and Kharsis left this band of debris. Emergency lights still blink in it.
• The Anillos de Kaldrek. The scrap from the fighting lodged in the rings of the planet Kaldrek. For forty-six years the system believed the whole ring was the war’s doing.

The Pathfinders, the explorers’ guild, dated the metal, which was indeed from the war. They got the rest wrong. The ring is what remains of Mornane, a moon that died millions of years ago. These days they say the mistake had a motive: everyone wanted that scar to be theirs as well.

The fleet’s auxiliary cores ended up there too, after being divided up along with the sides. The dossier on the compis, the rescued cores, puts it this way. When it was over, most were “where the things of that war end up”. That means in the Cementerio de Aura, embedded in the rings of Kaldrek, or motionless inside a hull that had stopped calling for help.

How is it remembered?

On every anniversary of the war, the two factions’ stations hold the same ceremony with opposite speeches. Each side honours its fallen from its own idea of the world. At heart, both mourn the same loss.

Colonel Reyna Ostrach, in command of The Vanguard, the military guild, keeps her own rite. She does it every year on the day the Arca fell, the day the Cuarenta Días de Fuego began. One by one, she says aloud the name of every recruit who fell under her command, Zenith or Nadir.

The archive uses one name for it all: the war of Year 1. Earlier names are retired.

What is still unknown?

Nobody knows who fired the decisive shot at the Arca Aurora. It has never been determined, and no faction acknowledges the wound.