Hearth (Voor ship)

"There are three of them in high orbit. Each is five kilometres long. The Navy has nothing that could fight one."Captain Rawiri Smith, Navy observer, dispatch from Hiverion orbit, 30 April 2318

The hearth is the capital ship of the Voor Legion, a vessel of about 5,200 metres that carries a Legion formation, its escorts' crews and all their families. The Voor grow hearths rather than build them, in yards at Hiverion, from a biotechnical composite that heals. The first was grown about 900 years before contact, in the Fevarian wars, to hunt the Fevarian clans between the stars. In 2333 the Legion held an estimated 52, and the hearth was the largest, strongest and most self-sufficient warship any human had seen.

The human mission to Hiverion saw three hearths in high orbit on 30 April 2318, and its Navy observer, Captain Rawiri Smith, called the type a dreadnought. The Navy's histories date their modern doctrine from the day his dispatch reached Sol. The Voor War of 2333 to 2341 was planned around the hearth, and the Navy's victory at the Battle of the Mog in 2334 was the first time hearths had been defeated in a large engagement since the Fevarian wars. The Treaty of Ximpok capped the Legion at twenty hearths in 2341. The Red Khanate destroyed the Legion's hearths between 2415 and 2427, and the restored Confederacy rebuilt its fleet from 2454.

Name

The Voor call the type by a word the Institute of Xenology's linguists render as "hearth". A hearth is built as a household, around a fire, and the word is the one the Voor use for the fire every Voor household keeps for its dead. The human party at Hiverion called the type a dreadnought from its first night in orbit. The name was Smith's, taken from the British battleship of 1906 that made every earlier battleship obsolete on the day it was launched. The Navy's histories use the word without capitals.

Ship names

Each hearth carries a long Voor epithet, which the Institute renders literally: The Hearth That Keeps the Order at the Threshold, The Hearth of the Long Watch Over Green Fields. An epithet is a statement of what the hearth's crew and families owe their dead. Hearths carry no other Voor name. The Navy gave hearths short reporting names for use in signals. Some were the names of the worlds they were seen guarding, as with the Hiverion, the Vur Duri and the Vi Simni. The five hearths of the Haedus group in 2334 were named for the rivers of the Greek underworld, after the Acheron. The hearth captured at Media in 2334 was reported as the Voor Aegis.

Classes

Primus class

The Primus class is one ship: the Hiverion, the Legion's first hearth and its flagship, grown about 900 years before contact. The Institute renders her Voor name as The First Hearth, From Which the Order Was Kindled. She never left Exedor. Her field took its first human slugs at the Battle of Exedor in March 2336, when the Republic-class battleships' rails opened her hull along 2 kilometres, and she broke at 1120 on 3 May 2338 with 130,000 aboard, when she sortied from under Hiverion's shield after the Legion's High Command had died in the Kindling.

Praetor class

The Praetor class was the Legion's standard hearth from the Fevarian wars to the Red Khanate. In 2333 the Navy counted 51 of them. The Acheron, the oldest Praetor-class hull in the Gulf, founded the colony on Indata Mog. Twelve stood in the Gulf's three formations in 2333, and twenty on the Maweer frontier.

Tribune class

The Legion laid down fifteen new hearths at Hiverion in 2416, under the Republic's Mutual Aid Act, the first grown since the Treaty of Ximpok had held the yards. The Institute's later histories call them the Tribune class. They were grown in under four years by forcing, and they carried Republic field generators of the Voor Aegis pattern and Republic projectors fitted to the grown hull, the first hearths armed with another species' weapons. Their forced hulls healed more slowly than a Praetor's. Twelve of them fought at Vur Duri from 2420.

Legate class

The restored Confederacy's first four hearths were built at Europa under the Republic's licence and commissioned in January 2454 with Republic fields and projectors, the first hearths built for the Voor since the Mutual Aid Act. The Institute calls them the Legate class. They were the first hearths raised on a human frame in a human yard, with a composite grown from stock carried from Hiverion. The Confederacy's own yards at Hiverion, Swur and Vi Simni, rebuilt by 2475, grew hearths again from 2476, the first Voor-built hearths since 2420. They followed the Legate pattern. The Legion held twelve hearths by 2490 and twenty by 2510.

Design

The figures are the Navy's estimates, from the Asimov's sensors and Smith's observations in 2318 and the Institute's study of 2320. The Voor showed the human party the hearths from orbit and from a shuttle at 2 kilometres, and showed them nothing of the interior. The Voor Aegis, captured at Media in 2334 and studied at Cirban for the rest of the century, later confirmed most of them.

Hull

A hearth's hull is a biotechnical composite that heals. The Voor told the mission of 2318 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. Hearths are grown in yards at Hiverion that the Asimov's telescopes measured at 8 kilometres. The Voor had four of them in 2320.

A hearth is grown on a frame. The yard lays a frame of alloy the length of the ship, seeds the composite onto it and feeds it, and the hull grows outward from the frame over about a decade in peace. In war the Voor could force the growth, feeding the hull harder so that it grew in three or four years. A forced hull is weaker and heals more slowly than one grown at its own pace. The drive, the plants, the projectors and the field generators are fitted into the hull as it grows, and the decks are shaped by the growth rather than cut into it.

Drive and endurance

A hearth's drive translates 25 light years on a charge of under a day. The Voor survey cruiser of 2317 made the jump from Cirban to Haedus in forty minutes, which the Grissom took six hours to match. Like every drive known, it cannot jump inside a gravity well. A hearth's torch sustains 0.3 g, ten times any human torch of 2318. A hearth is self-sustaining for a decade, and the Voor said that hearths had spent that long between stars in the Fevarian wars, hunting.

Weapons and field

A hearth's plasma projectors come in three calibres, the largest of 40 metres bore. They reach 200,000 kilometres and arrive in under a second. Its hypervelocity missiles fly at 400 kilometres a second. Its field held every human weapon of the 2330s for long enough to make the first exchange one-sided. On the Consortium's later reading of the Voor Aegis, the hearth's field was the Maweer field's elder: the same principle at ten times the power. The 108th ROD Division left eleven of the Voor Aegis's projectors intact when it took her. The Consortium copied her field generators from 2337 and built a projector from her pattern at Magellan in 2338.

In 2334 the Navy's heaviest rail could hurt a hearth only at 80,000 kilometres, two and a half times inside the hearth's own reach. Every battle of the Voor War began with the human fleet closing through that band under fire it could not return.

Complement

A hearth 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 strike craft, and the families of all of them. The Voor, who live 120 of Hiverion's years and serve, in the hereditary formations, for 80, do not separate the Legion from the people it is drawn from. Each hearth carries its own seal and its own dead, and the Voor of a hearth's line count their descent from the ship as a clan does from its founder.

Interior

The Navy's knowledge of a hearth's interior comes from three sources: the boarding of the Styx at the Mog in February 2334, the accounts of the prisoners taken from the Cocytus, and the Voor Aegis, which the Consortium and the Institute studied at Cirban from 2334. A hearth's decks are laid out in rings around a central hall. The families live in the inner decks, around the hall and under the heaviest part of the hull.

• The hall. The Fleet Commander sits in the hall at the centre of the ship with the commanders of its decks, and the hearth's fire burns there. Orders to the projectors and the escorts pass outward from the hall, and orders to the hall come from the General. The fire stands in a bowl of grown composite at the hall's centre, and the names of the hearth's dead are cut into the hall's walls.
• The family rings. The households of the crew and the Legion formation live in the rings nearest the hall. They hold the households' quarters, the hearth's schools, its nurseries and the stores and farms that keep it fed for a decade. The Styx's boarding party found grain growing under light in the inner rings.
• The Legion decks. The formation of 20,000 lives and trains in the middle rings, with its armouries, its armour and its landers, which launch from bays along the hull's flanks.
• The weapons rings. The projector mounts, missile cells and field generators fill the outer rings, under the hull's surface. The Navy's histories record that most of the Legionaries aboard the hearths at the Mog died there, where the rails and missiles struck.
• The drive section. The drive and the main plants lie in the stern. At the Mog the Meteor-class battlecruisers' rails opened the Styx's drive section, and the boarding party of the 3rd Marine Battalion entered through the breach.
• The escort cradles. The forty embarked escorts and strike craft travel in cradles along the hull and launch before battle. Their crews and families live aboard the hearth between voyages.

Doctrine

The Legion's doctrine is concentration, written against Fevarian clans that scattered when struck and came back if any part survived. A hearth leads, its escorts flank and finish, and the whole formation arrives together, engages together and destroys the enemy in place. A hearth group is one hearth and its forty escorts, ten of them destroyers in its screen. A Fleet Commander engages on a General's sanction, and a General moves a hearth group on the High Command's.

The Navy's War Plan Purple was built on that chain of sanction. The Legion's histories record with pride a hearth group at Ladiom that held its position under Fevarian raid for nine days in the wars' second century until its General's sanction arrived, and then destroyed the clan. At the Mog in 2334 the Navy drew the Haedus group into the open, attacked it from three directions and killed its flagship first. The four hearths left without a General acted as four separate ships and were defeated one at a time. The method, to draw the hearths out, find the General and strike from more than one side, was the Navy's for the rest of the war.

History

The Fevarian wars

The Legion was formed about 1,100 years before contact to fight the Fevarian clans, who lived in fleets between the stars. Fighting them there meant building ships that could live there as the clans did, and the hearth was the answer. The Hiverion was grown 900 years before contact. Over a century of campaigns the Legion's hearths drove the clans out of the Gulf and beyond the Veil. After the wars the Confederacy expanded with them: each new colony was founded by a hearth that arrived, landed 20,000 colonists and stayed in orbit for a generation.

Contact, 2318 to 2333

The Asimov's party saw three hearths in high orbit at Hiverion on 30 April 2318. The Navy's estimate of 2320 was 50 in service. The Institute's study of that year concluded that the hearth could be seen coming at a system's edge weeks out, that a hearth and its forty escorts were one formation and the Confederacy had at most fifty of them for fourteen worlds and two frontiers, and that a human cruiser could be built in numbers in yards that existed while a hearth was grown in yards the Voor had four of. The Naval Act of 2318 and War Plan Purple were built on that judgment. In 2333 the Navy counted 52 hearths, twelve of them in the Gulf.

The Voor War, 2333 to 2341

The Legion lost 24 of its 52 hearths in the war, by the Navy's final count.

• The Battle of the Mog, 2 February 2334: four of the Haedus group's five hearths, the Acheron among them. The fifth, the Lethe, was scuttled in Indata Mog's orbit on 19 August 2334.
• The Second Battle of Media, May 2334: three hearths, among them General Ahnar Varn's flagship, the Voor Aegis, boarded and captured by the 108th ROD Division on 19 May with 70,000 Voor alive aboard.
• The Battle of Exedor, 10 to 16 March 2336: five hearths, of fifteen led by the Hiverion.
• Leesak, 22 June 2337: four of six hearths from Aethos.
• Hiverion, 3 May 2338: the Hiverion and four hearths with her.
• Ximpok, August 2339: two of three hearths, and on 17 August the third struck to the Navy with 110,000 aboard, the first hearth in the Legion's history to surrender.

The Legion's twenty frontier hearths sat opposite Maweer fleets on the Maweer frontier for six years and never came south.

Under the Treaty of Ximpok, 2341 to 2415

The Treaty of Ximpok capped the Legion at twenty hearths, the frontier's twenty, forbade it to grow another for fifty years, and gave an inspectorate the right of entry to every Voor yard and anchorage. The eight hearths above the cap were laid up at Hiverion and broken up under the inspectorate's supervision by 2345. The Voor Aegis was never recommissioned. She sat at Cirban's Pillai radius as the Republic's largest laboratory, and every human warship since the 2340s carries something read from her. In 2391 the Confederacy asked for the cap to be lifted, and the Republic declined.

The Red Khanate, 2415 to 2427

The Legion's twenty frontier hearths met forty monoliths at the Veil frontier in October 2415 and lost six. The monoliths' ancient shields absorbed the hearths' projectors, and their beams cut a hearth's field in minutes. The Mutual Aid Act of 2416 lifted the cap, and the Legion fitted Republic fields to its hearths and laid down the fifteen of the Tribune class. It lost eleven hearths in the eastern worlds from 2416 to 2420. Its surviving hearths, nine old and twelve new, held Vur Duri from 2420 to 2422, and its last fourteen there were destroyed or scattered on 9 June 2422. The Legion's last seven hearths held the Khan at Exedor's edge for eleven days in August 2427. The last of them, the Vi Simni, whose Voor name the Institute renders as The Hearth That Was Kindled in the Long Watch, broke on 16 August 2427 with the Council's presiding member aboard. One hearth reached Haedus with its field gone, escorting the last refugee convoy.

The Khanate took hearths as well as destroying them. Six captured hearths fought in the Khan's fleet at the First Battle of Haedius in 2428, and two were lost there. One captured hearth, The Hearth That Waits, came over to the Republic with her Voor crew in 2434.

Restoration, 2453 to 2510

The Treaty of Ximpok's hearth cap was lifted on 1 February 2453, and the Legion was refounded at Hiverion in March. Its first four hearths, of the Legate class, were built at Europa and commissioned in January 2454. The Confederacy's fleet, The Hearth That Waits and those four, sailed with the Retribution Fleet from 2454 under its own Commander. The Voor Reconstruction Agreement of 2462 committed the Republic to build the Legion's hearths at Europa and then at Hiverion's rebuilt yards, and the Confederacy grew its own again from 2476. By 2510 the Legion held twenty hearths, under a Council that appointed and dismissed its Generals, and its Commander sat in the Fevarian Accords' Joint Command at Haedius.

Known hearths

BOOK SOURCES

1. Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy" and §7.7 "The Voor Dreadnought"
2. Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.4 "The Voor Legion"
3. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.2 to §9.7
4. Solar Eternal, Part XI, §11.3 "Mutual Aid Act" and §11.4 "The Voor Campaign"
5. Solar Eternal, Part XII, §12.1 "First and Second Battle of Haedius" and §12.3 "The Sector War"
6. Solar Eternal, Part XIV, §14.3 "The Voor Worlds"
7. Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.7 "The Confederacy, the Maweer and the Veil's Edge"