Anillos de Kaldrek

What are the Anillos de Kaldrek?

The Anillos de Kaldrek circle the equator of Kaldrek, the cold, outermost planet of Aurin, the system’s star. They are inclined twenty-two degrees and reach from 8,000 to almost 25,000 km from the planet’s centre. At night they light Kaldrek more than the star itself does.

They are the remains of Mornane, la Perdida, a moon of Kaldrek. She died millions of years ago, long before the Flota Aura brought the settlers to Parhelion, Aurin’s galaxy. When the Fleet arrived, in Year 0, the ring was already there.

The phrase everyone knows survives intact: Kaldrek had a moon and lost it. Only the when has changed.

Why did people think they came from the war?

Nobody had time to study the ring. The next year the war of Year 1 broke out and split the settlers into two sides: the Zenith and the Nadir. Its battles threw hulls, reactors and armour into the band. That metal ended up embedded on top of Mornane’s remains, not inside them. Over the years, anyone who looked at the ring saw the war.

Forty years after the war of Year 1, the Pathfinders, the explorers’ guild, dated that metal. They confirmed it came from the war and concluded that the ring was, above all, scrap from those battles. They were wrong: underneath lay Mornane. In Year 47 they corrected it themselves.

They measured what shone, not what was there. The Pathfinders tell the mistake as their best story. The reason they give is psychological: everyone wanted that scar to be theirs as well.

What does their real age explain?

Knowing the ring is millions of years old explains three things:

1. Kaldrek’s heat. The tide is the gravitational pull of the moons. It does not warm a planet’s interior in a few decades, but it does in millions of years. Today Kaldrek’s two moons, Renvar and Ordrek, keep that heat going. That is why a world so far from Aurin has temperate valleys and is the most fertile in the system.
2. Renvar. It is a moon made from the ring. It gathered grain by grain, beyond the limit where the planet would tear it apart. That is impossible in a few decades. In millions of years, it is not.
3. The loss. Neither Renvar nor Ordrek is the lost moon. Renvar is her daughter; Ordrek is the sister who helped kill her. Mornane is still missing.

What can you get here?

Inside the rings sits the Plataforma Cuenca Cero, one of the system’s eight strategic points.

• It is a two-hundred-and-fifty-metre mining platform.
• It is anchored to a fragment of ice and rock in motion.
• Where the refinery’s heat turns the ice to gas, a geyser erupts every ninety seconds.
• It yields heavy ore and ice without going down to the planet’s surface.

There, where direct sunlight never reaches, miners extract the pure Cristal Umbrío that engines demand (see the resource guide). Orso Dallent is a Hull Foreman of The Forge, the producers’ guild. He spells it out for anyone who has watched a hull split because of surface crystal:

“The Cristal Umbrío you pull out of an exposed seam on the surface of Kaldrek has been cooking in the heat of the fissures for millions of years. What you need is further in — inside the Anillos, where direct sunlight has never touched it.”

Hull Foreman Orso Dallent, The Forge

What is there to fear?

Around the platform, the fragments drift without pause. No one can trust a rock to be in the same place two minutes later. It is ideal ground for ambushes by small, fast ships.

The cargo route between Kharsis, the arid planet, and Kaldrek crosses the rings. It is the most dangerous route in the system, because it runs through an active front, an area where the two sides are fighting.