The megafleet that crossed the intergalactic void
Expedición Aura and Flota Aura
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The Flota Aura was the great fleet in which the civilisation of Solmera fled its dying galaxy. After centuries of travel it reached the Aurin system, and a year later it split into two hostile sides. The shared technology and the machines the settlers still use all come from it.
Este conteúdo ainda não foi traduzido. Exibindo a versão em English.
The void gave us a second chance, not to repeat the same mistakes, but to learn to put down roots.
What was the Flota Aura?
The star of Solmera, the home galaxy, entered its terminal phase: it was dying. Its civilisation, humans and integrated allied species, then launched the Expedición Aura, its plan to escape. It built the Flota Aura, a megafleet with three kinds of ship:
- Ark ships, for the population.
- Mobile shipyards, to build and repair along the way.
- Stellar refineries, to keep it all fed.
The fleet set out into the intergalactic void, the space between galaxies, with no confirmed destination. The crossing, the Éxodo, took centuries.
On board, all technology was standardised in the Matriz de Manufactura Unificada (MMU). That way any shipyard in the fleet could turn out the same modular ship chassis, suits and prefabricated structures. A culture of fleet survivors grew up too. Today’s two sides, the Zenith and the Nadir, still share it whether they like it or not.
During the Éxodo, the fleet’s astronomers named Parhelion, before they knew where they would end up. A parhelion is a phantom sun: the second point of light that ice in the air throws up beside the real one. The fleet took the name as an omen. It did not suspect it would end up split in two, each half sure it was the true light.
Who kept the books on board?
Nobody aboard lived through the whole crossing. And the engineers did not trust a central computer, because it is a single point of failure. The fleet ran on two kinds of thinking machine, and no others:
| Machine | Where | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| Administrator | One per ark | Kept the census and arbitrated. |
| Auxiliary core | One per section | Commanded nothing and recorded everything: the air compartment by compartment, the state of every sleeper, the fatigue of the hull. |
Of the administrators, only CUSTODIA remains, aboard the Arca Custodia. According to its file, it catalogued crew members “before there was an ‘us’ and a ‘them’”.
The cores had a huge job. In the infirmary of a single ark, four thousand people slept in cryogenic sleep. Its core took one reading per person every forty minutes.
How was it going to reach the planets?
The file on the moons opens with one short line: “Tirane was the staging post.” In Year 0 E.A. (the first year of the settlers’ calendar) the fleet entered the Aurin system. It drew up the Registro Aura, the system’s first catalogue.
The plan was never to go straight down to Ithera, the temperate planet. It was this:
- The heavy arks would moor at Tirane, a moon of Ithera.
- They would transfer their cargo to descent modules.
- They would go down in waves.
A team of thirty-one people got the staging post ready in four months. They left the guide lights, the markers, the cranes and the eight numbered docks of Puerto Aurora ready for use. They finished the day before the war.
Why Aurin? Because it was the only system in the region with habitable worlds that the fleet could reach in time. In time means before its propulsion and life-support reserves ran out. There was no next system then, and there is none now.
How did it break apart?
In Year 1 E.A. the Alto Consejo, the fleet’s human government, was debating how to colonise. The debate ended in the war of Year 1, and the fleet split into two armed sides. The sections were divided between them, and their cores with them.
The two named arks met different fates:
- The Arca Aurora, the heavy transport ark, took fire from both sides in Ithera’s orbit. It never reached dock seven.
- The Arca Custodia, its administrative sister, came from the same shipyards. It survived because neither side could afford to destroy it or keep it.
What is left of it?
- The MMU. Both factions inherited it intact. In thirty-five years neither has substantially improved its base blueprints.
- The Cementerio de Aura. This is the debris belt of the battles of Year 1. Emergency lights still blink there.
- The Astillero Meridian. It lies abandoned in the outer orbit of Kharsis, the arid planet. It holds fragments of pre-war hull blueprints.
- The Silo Perdido. This is a half-buried depot on Kharsis. Its terminals still hold navigation data.
- The Palio. This is the field generator inherited from the arks’ armour engineering. It sits at the core of each station.
- The auxiliary cores. The ones someone went looking for are called compis. The ones nobody went looking for are called sentinels.
