The Vanguard

What do they do?

The Vanguard is the Military Guild, one of the five Global Guilds, which take no side. It sells to whoever pays:

• security;
• zone defence;
• armed escort.

It works on Ithera, the temperate planet, and beyond it too.

How did they begin?

They began on the Puente de Mando y Armería of the Arca Aurora, the ship that crashed on Ithera during the war.

At the moment of impact, the bridge was manned by military police from both of the newborn fleets, on a single rotating watch. It was an administrative coincidence from before the war. After the crash, it became the guild’s founding decision: they would keep the tactical truce with no expiry date. They would not dissolve it when the order came from above. The order never arrived in a form that satisfied anyone, and the truce still holds.

Of the five guilds, it is the only one whose neutrality was a deliberate military act. The other four owe theirs to where each of them landed in the wreck.

Who leads them?

They are led by Colonel Reyna Ostrach, “El Muro”. She served as joint military police on the Arca, before “joint” stopped meaning anything to almost everyone.

• She is disciplined to the point of discomfort.
• She treats her neutrality as a standing order she refuses to disobey.
• She almost never smiles.
• She knows the name of every recruit who fell under her command, whether Zenith or Nadir, the system’s two factions. She says them aloud every year on the day the Arca fell, the day the Cuarenta Días de Fuego began.

Where are they?

Its seat is El Bastión, in La Cicatriz, the Arca’s impact zone and capital of the five Guilds. It is a fortified checkpoint over the remains of the command bridge, overlooking the main routes into La Cicatriz. It is the only guild seat:

• with an armed garrison on view twenty-four hours a day;
• with a right written into the text of the Armisticio de Ithera itself, the pact that stopped the war. It is the right to stop and inspect the convoys of any faction entering the zone, and both factions recognise it.

Beyond La Cicatriz:

• On Kaldrek, the cold planet where the Zenith and the Nadir clash, it escorts any side that pays. It also escorts the extraction crews of El Yunque, a massif with heavy ore.
• At Puesto Meridiano, the Guilds’ neutral settlement on Ithera, it organises the defence when the fauna migrates.

What does a newcomer find there?

Its shop, the Armería, sells standard ammunition and armour parts.

Ostrach also measures people at the strategic points, the sites the Zenith and the Nadir fight over. For anyone after a corvette, the fleet’s capital ship, she sets the bar like this: “Taking a point is luck shaped like victory. Holding it for two full days is the only proof that really convinces me you can handle a corvette.”

Who are they on good and bad terms with?

• With the Zenith, admiration and resentment. The Guardia Vertical, the Zenith’s standing army, treats Ostrach’s officers as second-rate subcontractors. She admires it and loathes it in equal parts, and cannot stand the condescension. But she cannot deny that its tactical precision and doctrine are the best in the system. In private, she sends her best recruits to learn from them.
• With the Nadir, sympathy and distrust. She shares their instinct to protect the weak. But the Flotilla Libre, the Nadir militia, has no single command and turns up late or not at all to joint defences. That has cost lives Ostrach does not easily forgive.
• With the other four guilds, friction. Its checkpoints and curfews annoy them all equally, and Ostrach counts that as a virtue.

What do they keep?

• MAMPARO, its compi, one of the Flota Aura’s small machine minds, rescued. He is a hull core who spent forty years deciding which bulkhead (which sealed wall) closed and whom he left outside. A guild patrol found him in the Cementerio de Aura, the belt of wreckage from the war. He sat in a sealed compartment, pressurised for forty-six years: powered down, in the exact centre of the room, lens facing the door. The recovery report says “holding”.
• The Placa de Mando del Puente, a relic of the original bridge.
• Those who reach Leyenda, its highest rank, can aim for four pieces. They are the Muralla Ostrach, the Armadura de Asedio Vanguard-V, the Núcleo Táctico Bastión and the Estandarte del Muro. The Estandarte flies only over bases under Vanguard guarantee.