The ark that fell on Ithera · Year 1 E.A.
Arca Aurora
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The Arca Aurora was a great transport ship of the Flota Aura, the fleet that brought the settlers. In Year 1, during the war between the two factions, it took fire from both sides and came down on the planet Ithera. No one knows who fired the decisive shot; the five Guilds were born from its survivors.
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Whose shot was decisive has never been determined: an open wound that no faction acknowledges.
What was the Arca Aurora?
The Arca Aurora was a heavy transport ark of the Flota Aura, the fleet that brought the settlers. Its sister ship is the Arca Custodia: they came out of the same shipyards and share the same hull.
The plan was simple. It would moor at the moon Tirane and hand its cargo to the descent modules. Then it would go down to the planet Ithera in batches.
It never reached Tirane.
What happened?
In Year 1 E.A. (E.A. stands for Años de Asentamiento, the settlers’ calendar) the war of Year 1 broke out. It split the fleet into two factions: the Zenith and the Nadir. During the fighting in Ithera’s orbit, the Arca took fire from both sides.
It was shedding pieces before it hit. Whatever it lost in orbit, under fire, ended up in the Cementerio de Aura, the band of wreckage from those battles. Fragments still turn up there.
The rest did not come down in one piece. It broke open in the air and scattered its modules over several kilometres. Each module carried survivors from both sides thrown in together: civilians, technicians, scientists.
The impact zone is now La Cicatriz, a furrow of churned earth and broken fuselage, laid out in three rings. At the core, where the bow struck with the main reactor, the cordon is still up.
Who fired the decisive shot?
Whose shot was decisive has never been established. No faction will own the wound.
There is one clue, and it settles nothing. The arks’ navigation cores shared a logbook. CUADRANTE is the compi of the Pathfinders, the explorers’ guild. The compis are rescued auxiliary cores of the Flota Aura, one per Guild. CUADRANTE came on another ark and arrived intact. But he holds the last entry made by the Aurora’s navigation core.
It has never said in public what the entry reads, though it has been asked. What it holds is a position line: it records where the Aurora was. Who fired appears nowhere in it. Its silence is not an answer held back: it simply has none.
The core that did see the moment was the one in the Aurora’s own Torre de Navegación, and it is still under La Cicatriz.
What became of the survivors?
They were cut off from the war in orbit, with no command and no rescue. They gathered wherever their trade was of some use. Each section of the broken hull became the seed of one of the five Global Guilds, the trade guilds that now take no side:
| Section of the Arca | Guild born there |
|---|---|
| The infirmary | The Pioneers, the settlers |
| The xenological containment bay | Apex Syndicate, the hunters |
| The reactor and hull workshops | The Forge, the producers |
| The bridge and armoury | The Vanguard, the military guild |
| The navigation tower | The Pathfinders, the explorers |
The engineers began stripping the Arca itself to put up shelter before the first night. Torvun Ekes, then an apprentice welder and now head of The Forge, still tells of the first plate torn off the hull. To him, that was the guild’s real Year 0.
What happened to dock seven?
On Tirane, the Arca had its berth waiting: dock seven at Puerto Aurora. Thirty-one people built eight docks there in four months, along with the lights and the cranes. They finished the day before the war.
Dock seven has been waiting forty-six years for the Arca. The welcome container is still sitting there, unopened.
Once La Cicatriz had cooled enough to be picked out from space, the team on Tirane had it in plain view. It is still there every rotation: a dark streak across Ithera’s disc, almost three degrees wide. The thirty-one were rescued in Year 3. Not one of them went back.
What is left of the Arca?
Its hull fragments are Grade V, the top grade: nobody makes them, people find them. They turn up in the core of La Cicatriz or out in the Cementerio.
They do not all fit together. The Arca’s sections came out of two different generations of the MMU, the fleet’s technical standard. When a shipyard needs to know which pieces belong to the same stretch of hull, it sends for Quill Sarn, head of the Pathfinders. Sarn cross-checks the residual serial numbers. He tells anyone who asks for the comparison:
“I can tell you which belongs to which. I can’t make two wounds from the same disaster believe they’re on the same side.”
Quill Sarn, The Pathfinders
