Cinera

What is Cinera like?

Cinera is one of the two moons of Ormek, the first planet of Aurin, the system’s star. Its ground is carbonaceous regolith: loose dust and gravel, rich in carbon. It reflects less light than charcoal. In the inner system everything looks bleached white by the sun, and Cinera looks like a hole cut out of the sky.

• Size. 620 km in radius.
• Gravity. 0.399 m/s².
• Day. Five hours, with the axis tilted at 24°.
• Air. It is dry and has hardly any: just the CO₂ and water vapour the regolith gives off in plumes when the sun strikes it. Electrostatic dust hangs among them. It cannot be breathed, and outside work takes a full suit (a full EVA).
• Metal. Not one gram to repay the fuel spent getting there.

The Registro Aura, the system’s first catalogue, never even listed it. It was catalogued later, like the moons Pyra and Erran.

Where is it and who holds it?

Cinera goes round Ormek every nine hours, 37,442 km from the planet.

For decades it was the one place in the inner system that the Zenith, one of the system’s two factions, had no interest in. That lack of interest is what the Nadir, the other faction, bought. The salvage concession over Cinera, the right to recover whatever is usable, was signed in Year 29 E.A. for a laughable sum. (E.A.: Años de Asentamiento, the settlers’ calendar.) It came with a clause on “passive navigation-safety instrumentation”. The Cátedra, the Zenith high command, took it for a joke.

Today that instrumentation is the best listening post in the inner system: El Tizón. It has a permanent view of the Colector Solar Prima, Ormek’s great solar plant and one of the strategic points. The dossier on the moons explains why:

“The Zenith know it and can do nothing, because the contract was signed by an Arquitecto who is now dead, and breaking it would mean admitting that the Armisticio can be broken.”

Dossier on the moons of Aurin

An Arquitecto is a senior figure in the Cátedra. The Armisticio de Ithera is the pact that ended the war in Year 12 E.A.

What is El Tizón?

El Tizón is the Nadir listening post on Cinera. They work in the dark there. The light from each of Aurin’s flares, the star’s outbursts, takes about twenty seconds to reach Ormek’s orbit. At El Tizón, every flare goes up on a chalkboard that no one has digitised, so that no one can intercept it.

From here the Nadir run intelligence and sabotage against the Zenith’s energy operation. They use the windows the flares open, when the sensors of the inner orbit go dark.

What can you get here?

Its regolith holds carbonaceous material: the only natural source of polymer and the only organic resource in the inner orbits.