Tirane

What is Tirane like?

Tirane is one of the three moons of Ithera, the temperate planet of the system. It is a lunar-type moon: dry rock, like Earth’s Moon.

• Size. 1,500 km in radius.
• Gravity. 1.38 m/s².
• Air. Tenuous: a layer of gas so thin it is almost vacuum. It never reaches half a pascal, and the sky stays black. But it is the only lunar-type moon that holds on to a real atmosphere.
• Where the air comes from. Ithera’s tide wrings some fifteen kilograms of carbon monoxide a second out of its fractures. The frost in its polar craters, in perpetual shadow at 38 K (235 degrees below zero), sets the pressure.
• What you see. Plumes of gas rising from the ground, and frost mists. Ithera fills almost three degrees of its sky.
• Going outside. It takes a full EVA, which means a spacesuit.

Where is it, and who holds it?

Tirane is the middle one of Ithera’s three moons. With Melvara and Selvane it forms an exact chain: it takes twice as long as Melvara to go round, and half as long as Selvane.

Nobody holds it: it is a sanctuary where nobody fights, builds or mines. No treaty requires this, only custom. The Armisticio de Ithera, the treaty that stopped the war, was signed out of a calculation of risk, not trust. Tirane is the one place both sides respect for the opposite reason.

The Zenith and the Nadir make pilgrimages to its docks. They are recent archaeology and the classic viewpoint over La Cicatriz. That is the furrow the Arca Aurora, a great ship, tore open when it crashed on Ithera.

What is Puerto Aurora?

Puerto Aurora was meant to be the stopover for the Flota Aura, the great fleet that brought the settlers. The plan was not to go straight down to Ithera:

1. The heavy arks, the great transport ships, would moor at Tirane.
2. There they would hand their cargo over to the descent modules.
3. The modules would go down to Ithera in waves.

A team of thirty-one people was sent ahead. In four months, on a mid-latitude plain, they built the guide lights, the markers, the cranes and the eight docks, all numbered. They finished the day before the war of Year 1, the civil war that split the fleet into two sides, broke out.

What happened to the Arca Aurora?

Dock seven was waiting for the Arca Aurora. It never arrived: it fell onto Ithera, the planet you can see from Tirane. When La Cicatriz had cooled enough to be made out from space, the Tirane team could see it. It can still be seen, every rotation, as a dark line across a disc almost three degrees wide.

The thirty-one were rescued in Year 3 E.A. (E.A. stands for Años de Asentamiento, the settlers’ calendar). None of them went back. The dossier on the moons of Aurin records how the port was left:

“Puerto Aurora remains as they left it: the guide lights on because their reactor has not shut down, the eight docks empty and, at seven, a welcome container that no one has opened.”

Dossier on the moons of Aurin

What was taken out of it?

The Pathfinders, the explorers’ guild, brought CUADRANTE out of Puerto Aurora. He is one of the compis, the small machine minds rescued from the Flota Aura: the navigation auxiliary core.

• It now maintains the Tabla de Fases, the system’s table of measured orbits.
• It holds the last entry made by the Aurora’s own core, the Arca’s onboard mind. It is a position line with the Arca’s exact location. It does not record who fired.

Half the system believes CUADRANTE came out of the welcome container. He did not: what was opened was the module next to it. The container is still closed, and no one knows what is inside. Neither the Pathfinders nor CUADRANTE have corrected anyone.

Because Tirane is a sanctuary, getting CUADRANTE out did not cost a single shot. It cost asking permission.