The Acheron was a hearth of the Voor Legion, the oldest Praetor-class hull in the Gulf and the flagship of the Legion's Haedus group. She founded the Voor colony on Indata Mog, in the Haedus system, and served in the Gulf for the rest of her life. At the Battle of the Mog on 2 February 2334 the Grand Armada built its attack around her destruction. She broke at 1158 that day with General Volar Vex and 120,000 Voor aboard.
Acheron is the Navy's reporting name. The Institute of Xenology's linguists render her Voor name as The Hearth That Keeps the Order at the Threshold.
Name
Voor hearths are named with long epithets, which the Institute renders literally, and the Navy gave them short reporting names for use in signals. The Navy named the Acheron for a river of the underworld in Greek myth. It gave the other four hearths of the Haedus group names after the underworld's other rivers in the pattern the Acheron had set: the Phlegethon, the Styx, the Lethe and the Cocytus. The name was first used in the intelligence summaries of the Cirban station in 2330, when the stealth pickets began to count the Haedus anchorage and needed a name for the flagship.
The Institute reads her Voor name as a reference to the Gulf, which the Voor called the Confederacy's threshold. A hearth's name is a statement of what its crew and families owe their dead, and the Voor of a hearth's line count their descent from the ship as a clan does from its founder.
Design
The Acheron was a Praetor-class hearth. In 2333 the Legion was estimated to hold 52 hearths: the Hiverion, the Primus-class first hearth, and 51 of the Praetor class. Hearths are grown rather than built, in yards at Hiverion that the human mission of 2318 measured at 8 kilometres. The hull is a biotechnical composite that heals. The Voor told the mission that a hearth which had lost a third of its length in the Fevarian wars had grown it back in a year, and the Institute concluded that the remark was a statement of fact.
The Navy's estimates, drawn from the Asimov's sensors in 2318 and the Institute's study of 2320, give a Praetor-class hearth a length of 5,200 metres and a mass of about 300 million tonnes. Its drive translates 25 light years on a charge of under a day, and its torch sustains 0.3 g. It carries plasma projectors in three calibres, the largest of 40 metres bore, with a reach of 200,000 kilometres; hypervelocity missiles at 400 kilometres a second; and a field that no human weapon could break quickly in 2334.
A hearth is built as a household. It carries about 120,000 Voor: the ship's own crew, a Legion formation of 20,000 with its landers and armour, the crews of forty embarked escorts, and the families of all of them. Its decks are laid out in rings around a central hall where its commanders sit and its fire burns. The families live in the inner decks, under the heaviest part of the hull. A hearth is self-sustaining for a decade.
History
The founding of Indata Mog
Each Voor colony was founded by a hearth that arrived, landed its 20,000 and stayed in orbit for a generation. The Acheron founded Indata Mog. She was one of the first hearths grown at Hiverion after the Hiverion herself, about 870 years before contact. About 850 years before contact she carried the resettlement of the Gulf world the Fevarian clans had burned, landing 20,000 colonists on the northern shore of the Still Water with herds and grain from Hiverion. The colonists kindled the founders' fire in the old city of Indata Mog from her hearth-fire. She stayed in orbit for a generation and then joined the Gulf formations, where she remained.
Service in the Gulf
The Acheron served in the Gulf for more than eight centuries, as the Gulf formations' oldest hearth. Her hereditary formation drew its Legionaries and families from Indata Mog's clans, and the Voor of the planet count descent from her. In 2333 she was the flagship of the Haedus group under General Volar Vex, at the anchorage above Indata Mog. The Grissom's survey log recorded her there in November 2317, as the largest of the hulls at the anchorage.
Loss
On 30 January 2334 the Acheron led the Haedus group out of Indata Mog's orbit to meet a decoy at the system's southern edge. When the Home and Binami Fleets appeared at the northern edge on 31 January, Vex turned the formation about to meet them. On 2 February the Haedus group opened fire at 200,000 kilometres at 0820. The battleship Orion, which took the Acheron's projectors, held her field for fourteen minutes, failed at 0902 and was gutted in a minute, with Rear Admiral Prince George Tupou and 4,000 of her crew.
From 1000 the Navy's focus was the flagship. Grand Admiral Tyson Vol's order, passed at 0955, concentrated every rail and missile in range on the Acheron. For two hours the Odin, the Octavians and the four Meteor-class battlecruisers put slugs into her, while the carriers' second wave, launched at 1030, went for her escorts and then for her. Her projectors destroyed the battleship Osiris, the light cruiser Triarii, the frigates Charon, Cossack, Cicero and Calvary, and eight corvettes.
Her field failed at 1108, after an hour and eight minutes under the fire of eleven rails. The Institute has never established whether it failed from damage or from the power the hearth had spent on her projectors. The rails went through her hull from 1110. The strike craft went in at close range from 1130, in the sixth wave of the day. The fighter-bombers, whose crews had been told what the target was, put field-piercing missiles into her projector mounts, her drive section and, at 1152, a magazine. The Acheron broke at 1158 on 2 February 2334, with her General, his staff, his Legionaries and their families, 120,000 Voor in all. The Navy's histories record that the fleet did not cheer, because it had been told what a hearth carried.
Wreck
The Acheron broke into three large sections and a field of debris, which fell outward along her course toward the system's northern edge. The Navy did not board her, because no compartment answered and the sections were still burning on 5 February. The Haedus Territory's council asked in 2344 that the wreck be left where it lay, and the Republic has charted it since as a closed area.
Legacy
The Acheron was the first hearth the Navy set out to kill and the first it killed by design. Her loss showed the method on which the Navy fought the rest of the war: find the General, concentrate on the flagship, and strike from more than one direction. The Voor of Indata Mog keep 2 February as the day of the Acheron, the hearth that founded their world.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy" and §7.7 "The Voor Dreadnought"
- Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.4 "The Voor Legion"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.2 "Clash of Titans: The Battle of the Mog"