The world that was lost

Chapter one

The last morning on Veyra

On the last morning of the world, the oceans of Veyra were calm.

The fishing towns along the Saltline woke the way they always had: bells in the harbours, smoke from the bakeries, gulls fighting over the night's catch. In the capital, the great Orrery of Tessaly turned its brass rings above the market square, tracking the nine worlds of the Ilos system as it had for three hundred years. Children were taught to read the time from it before they could read words.

Nobody looking up that morning saw anything wrong. The sky was the same pale gold it had always been. The second sun, the small white companion the old songs called the Lantern, sat low on the horizon where it belonged.

Only the astronomers at the Vigil, on the high cold plateau of Mount Corran, had stopped sleeping. For eleven weeks they had been measuring something in the outer dark that should not have been there: a body the size of a world, black and cold, falling inward from beyond the edge of the system. They named it the Wanderer. They checked their numbers a thousand times, hoping to be wrong.

They were not wrong.

Chapter two

The Sundering

The Wanderer did not strike Veyra. It did something worse. It passed between the world and its suns, close enough that its pull reached into Veyra's core and wrenched it.

First the tides came: not waves but whole seas lifting off their beds and marching inland. The Saltline was gone in an hour. Then the ground itself began to ring like a struck bell. Mountains slumped. Old volcanoes that had slept since before history opened their eyes, and the pale gold sky turned the colour of rust, then of ash, then of nothing at all.

The Orrery of Tessaly kept turning through the first night of the Sundering. Survivors remembered that: the brass rings catching the light of the burning city, still faithfully showing where every world should be, as if the sky had not gone mad.

By the ninth day, the scientists of the Vigil gave the Council their final answer. The crust would not settle. The air would not clear. Veyra would not be livable again in any span of time that mattered to the living. It was not a disaster to be survived. It was an ending.

There was only one thing left to decide: who would leave, and how.

Chapter three

The great launch

Veyra had ships. It had never needed many. The orbital yards above the equator built ore-haulers and survey craft and the occasional pleasure liner for the rich. In ninety days, every yard, every foundry and every pair of hands on the world was turned to one purpose: lift as many people as possible off a dying planet.

There was no single plan. There was no time for one. The great houses and guilds of Veyra each built what they could, filled it with whoever they could, and rose on columns of fire through the black sky. The bankers of the Ledgerline launched their vaults and their clerks. The agronomists of the Verdance lifted seed banks and living soil in sealed holds. The miners, the engineers, the scholars of the Quanta academies, the shipwrights of the Meridian yards: each became a fleet, and each fleet became a nation of its own.

The last fleet to leave was the smallest. It carried the Council, the last astronomers of the Vigil, and the Orrery of Tessaly, unbolted from the market square and lashed into a cargo bay. Behind them, Veyra glowed like a coal, then faded, then was gone.

Who went was decided by lottery, and then by luck, and in the last days by nothing at all. Families were split at the boarding ramps. Engineers who had built the ships stayed behind so that strangers could have their seats. On the final night, the launch towers along the equator burned like a necklace of candles across the dark side of the world, and the people who could not leave climbed onto the rooftops to watch them go.

Twelve fleets escaped. Eleven million people, out of four hundred million. Every one of them had left someone behind.

Chapter four

The long dark

For forty-one years, the fleets of Veyra drifted between the stars.

Children were born who had never felt wind. Old captains died and were committed to the dark with the old words. Gardens were grown in corridors, and wars were nearly fought over water. The fleets traded when they had to and kept their distance when they could. Each had its own laws now, its own songs, its own idea of what Veyra had been and what should come next.

They had one thing in common. Every fleet had been built in a hurry, for a journey of years, not lifetimes. Hulls wore thin. Air scrubbers failed and were patched and failed again. Fuel was measured in drops. Every year, the long-range scanners swept the sky for a world, any world, that could be made into a home before the ships gave out.

In the twentieth year, the fleets nearly destroyed each other. The Ledgerline had hoarded fuel; the Verdance had hoarded food; the Meridian yards had the only working dry dock between the stars, and charged whatever they liked to use it. When a damaged Quanta survey ship was refused repairs and lost with all hands, the fleets armed their haulers and turned their guns on one another. It took a year of talks, and a hundred small betrayals, before the guns went quiet again. Nobody forgot.

On every ship, in every fleet, the old songs survived. Children who had never seen a sky learned to sing about the Saltline and the gulls and the Lantern rising white over the harbour. The songs got longer every year, as the singers added the names of those they had lost.

And every year, the scanners found nothing.

Chapter five

The signal

It was the Orrery that found it, in the end.

The last astronomer of the Vigil, a woman named Ysolde Marr who had been nine years old on the morning of the Sundering, had spent her life rebuilding the old brass machine to track the nearer stars instead of the lost ones. In the forty-first year of the drift, its rings stopped on a small red point of light that the fleet scanners had dismissed as barren.

It was barren. That was the point. Rubra was cold and dry and red, with a sky too thin to breathe and seas that had frozen into its soil a billion years ago. But it had ice. It had iron. It had the bones of an atmosphere. And it was close enough to reach before the ships failed.

"It is not a home," Ysolde Marr told the Council. "But it could become one. If we are willing to make it."

She broadcast the coordinates on the old common channel, the one every fleet still listened to out of habit and grief. Within an hour, all twelve fleets had changed course for Rubra.

Chapter six

Arrival

They arrived within days of each other, after forty-one years apart: twelve battered fleets falling into orbit around a red world that could not feed one of them, let alone all twelve.

For a while, it looked like the last of Veyra would die in a war over a planet none of them could live on. Fleets staked out colonies on the best ground and ringed them with guns. Warships traded warning shots above the poles. Every faction had the skills to tame this world, and none of them trusted the others to share it.

The first to touch the surface was a Meridian lander, crashing more than landing, on a plain of red dust near the equator. Its crew planted a flag and found, within the hour, that the soil was laced with ice. Within a day, three other fleets had landed beside them, and the first colony walls were going up in the dust: not to keep out the cold, but to keep out each other.

It was the Council that proposed the Accord, standing in the cargo bay beside the Orrery with every fleet listening. No fleet would be allowed to take the planet by force. Instead, every fleet would work to make it livable: warming it, filling its basins with water, thickening its air. And every step a fleet took toward that goal would earn it standing in the new world: land, votes, the right to lead. The Council called that standing Viability.

"We will build this world together," the old Councillor said, "and we will remember who built it."

The fleets signed. Not out of trust, but because every captain knew the alternative. The colonies stayed armed. The rivalries stayed bitter. But from that day, the war for the red world would be fought with seed banks and reactors, reservoirs and forests, contracts and achievements. Whoever did the most to make it livable would be remembered as the founder of the new Veyra.

Chapter seven

Your fleet

That is where you come in.

You command one of the fleets that escaped the Sundering. Your people have survived forty-one years of dark to reach Rubra. They are tired, they are hungry, and they are counting on you.

Choose the cards that make your fleet strong. Build colonies on good ground, and plant biomes beside them. Fill the basins with water, warm the frozen soil, and give the red world air. Claim achievements before your rivals do, and fund the contracts that reward what you do best.

The other fleets are doing the same. Some of them are better at it than you. All of them want to be remembered.

Rubra will be a home again. The only question is whose.