"The whole Unified Solar Marine Corps could have paraded on the field outside the capital and been lost in a corner of it."Captain Rawiri Smith, Navy observer, dispatch from Hiverion orbit, May 2318
Hiverion is the home world of the Voor and the capital of the Voor Confederacy, the second planet of the Exedor system. It is a cold steppe world under 1.3 gravities, whose cities rise from the plains in towers 2 kilometres high because the Voor build up and not out. The first hearth was grown in its orbit nine centuries before contact, and the Voor Legion's grounds, fortresses and drill fields cover its surface on a scale that astonished the first human visitors. Its capital is the seat of the Krakre, the government complex where the High Council and the High Command sat and where, in the Voor telling, the first hearth's fire was kindled.
Hiverion held 6 billion Voor in 2318. The federation took it in the Siege of Hiverion of 2338, the largest landing in human history, and accepted the Confederacy's surrender in the Krakre in 2340. The Red Khanate took it in 2427 and killed 1.5 billion of its people. It rose against the Khanate's garrison in 2451, and has been the capital of the restored Confederacy since 1 January 2453.
Name
Hiverion is the human transliteration of the Voor name the first mission recorded in 2318. The Institute's linguists render it as "the ground of the order". The capital city's name is Ekhar Vin, "the first fire". The Navy named the first hearth for the world, as the Hiverion.
Description
Physical characteristics
Hiverion is a large world with a surface gravity of 1.3 g and thin, cold air. Most of its land is steppe, broken by ridges and dry rivers. Its ice caps are smaller than Indata Mog's, and its seas are cold and shallow. Its day is 29 hours long. The Voor breathe its air everywhere. Humans need masks on the plains.
Geography
Hiverion's land lies in three great belts of steppe divided by worn ranges and cold inland seas. The Voor name them by their clans' oldest grazing:
- The Ourin, the central belt, a high grass plain 6,000 kilometres long. Ekhar Vin and the Krakre stand on a plateau at its western end. The Corps' landing zones of 2338 were on its open steppe.
- The Northern Reach, colder and drier, where the polar works and the Legion's deepest fortresses were cut.
- The Hesh Lowlands, the southern belt, wetter and lower, the planet's granary, watered by rivers from the southern cap.
Between the belts run the Kaur Ranges, low and broken, and four shallow seas that freeze at their edges in winter. The steppe's ridges and dry rivers, which the Fevarians used in the wars and the Corps chose its zones by in 2338, are the remains of an older, wetter age.
Climate
A Hiverion year is 1.1 Earth years, and its winters are long. The Voor midwinter, the day the first hearth was lit, falls in the planet's northern winter, when the Ourin lies under snow for a hundred days. Summer on the steppe is short, dry and windy. The Corps' landing of February 2338 was made in the steppe winter, and a six-day storm grounded its heavy landers.
Life
Hiverion's native life is hardy steppe life. A short root-mat grass covers the plains, the same type the Acheron's colonists found on Indata Mog, with deep-rooted shrubs along the dry rivers. The Voor's herds and grains are native to Hiverion: the grazing beasts that the Institute calls steppe-kine, and the hardy grains of the river valleys. The Voor carried both to every world they settled. Hiverion's large wild animals are few, because the steppe clans hunted them out in the herding ages. A burrowing predator the size of a dog survives in the Northern Reach, and the Legion's training cohorts are sent to hunt it.
Cities and grounds
The Voor build towers of 2 kilometres in rings around open grounds, which the Legion kept for drill and for its fortresses. From orbit the Legion's grounds dominate the surface: fortresses, yards and drill fields. The first human party's Navy observer, Captain Rawiri Smith, wrote that the whole Unified Solar Marine Corps could have paraded on the field outside the capital and been lost in a corner of it.
The Krakre
The Krakre stands on a raised plateau at the centre of Ekhar Vin. It is 30 kilometres across and 3 deep, a complex of towers, walls and courts in five rings, each higher than the last. At its heart is the Kindling, the inner sanctum where the High Command sat and where the first hearth's flame was kept. Beneath it run 2,000 kilometres of tunnel.
Defences
The Legion fortified Hiverion from the Fevarian wars against the assault the Voor feared most, one from orbit. By 2338 its defences were 400 orbital platforms inside 200,000 kilometres, a planetary shield of the Voor pattern from sixty generators, and 40,000 kilometres of tunnel and fortress under the shield's umbrella. The shield covered the Legion's grounds, the cities and the polar works, and left the open steppe between them uncovered.
Cities
Ekhar Vin
Ekhar Vin, the capital, grew from the oldest assembly ground of the steppe clans, where the clans first built in stone to hold their seals and their dead. It is laid out as every Voor city is, as a camp: the clans' towers in rings around assembly grounds, the Legion's grounds on the side that faces the frontier, and open pasture beyond. In 2338 it held 400 million Voor in some 1,600 towers. The Krakre stands on a raised plateau at its centre.
The city's outer towers were reached by the Corps on 19 March 2338, and its towers were not entered in the siege. The Khan's troops burned a third of them in September 2427. The city was rebuilt under the Voor Reconstruction Agreement from 2462, and the burned towers' shells were left standing in the outer rings, as on Indata Mog.
Other cities
- Dur Halkesh, on the Ourin's eastern edge, the city of the Legion's academies, where the Confederacy's engineers, administrators and physicians were schooled with its officers.
- Vosh Telan, in the Hesh Lowlands, the largest grain city and the seat of the oldest clan assemblies after the capital's.
- The polar works, in the Northern Reach, a fortress city cut into the rock under the shield's umbrella, where the Legion kept its reserve formations and records.
History
The first hearth
Hiverion was one of the six Voor worlds before the Fevarian wars and one of the four that survived them. The Legion was formed there about 1,100 years before contact. The first hearth, the Primus-class Hiverion, was grown in its orbit 900 years before contact, and the Voor say the order was kindled in the Krakre at the same time. The Confederacy that the four worlds became governed itself from Hiverion through a High Council of fourteen worlds' delegations.
Contact, 2318
The first human mission, the Asimov and the Unity under Ambassador Halima Rahal, entered orbit around Hiverion on 30 April 2318. The party spent six weeks at Hiverion. Dr Wanjiru Kamau's study of the Legion's command, written from those weeks and the Asimov's year in the Confederacy, became the basis of War Plan Purple. The Cirban Protocol was signed on 11 June 2318 in the outer court of the Kindling's hall. Rahal served as ambassador at Hiverion until the Confederacy expelled her on 6 August 2333.
The Voor War
The Grand Armada reached Exedor in March 2336 and won the Battle of Exedor (2336), but could not reach the hearths under Hiverion's shield. The High Council's civil members left for Vi Simni on Ximpok in March 2338. The Corps landed 800,000 troops on the steppe from 14 February 2338. They reached the Krakre on 20 March and dropped into it on 22 April. On 30 April the High Commander and eight Generals died in the Kindling. On 3 May the First Hearth left orbit against the Republic's line and was destroyed with 130,000 aboard. The Corps' military government took the capital on 4 May 2338. Hiverion's 6 billion did what Indata Mog's 200 million had done, and waited.
The Confederacy surrendered in the court of the Kindling on 21 December 2340, the Voor midwinter, the day the Voor calendar marks as the lighting of the first hearth. The Treaty of Ximpok left Hiverion to the Confederacy under a Corps military government limited to five years, and dismantled its yards.
The treaty years
The High Council sat at Vi Simni from 2338, and Hiverion was not its seat for most of the First Republic. The world was governed by its own assembly under the Council, and the Krakre stood half empty, its Kindling kept as a shrine by the Hearth Guard's descendants. Its shield was rebuilt after 2338 with Republic generators.
The fall, 2427
The Council moved back to Hiverion in August 2422, after the fall of Vur Duri. The planet held against the Red Khan from 2425 to 2427 with 5 billion people, seven hearths and 3 million Legionaries, and 8,000 Republic volunteers fought among them. Its shield held the monoliths' beams for two years. It failed on 2 August 2427, when the Khan's engineers built a field that let a monolith close under the umbrella and destroy the generators from beneath.
The Council refused submission on 5 August and ordered the evacuation. Thirty million Voor reached Haedus. The Khan landed on 20 August and took the Krakre on 4 September 2427. He sat in the hall where the Legion's High Command had died and received the submission of the Voor of Hiverion there. Those who refused were burned in their towers over the following month. The Institute's estimate of Hiverion's dead is 1.5 billion.
Under the Khanate
Hiverion was a tributary world of the Khanate for twenty-four years, its yards and people put to the Khanate's use. The Khan's household stripped the Kindling in 2448.
Liberation
The Retribution Fleet destroyed Hiverion's garrison of six monoliths in the planet's gravity well in the Battle of Exedor (2451). The Corps landed on 2 October 2451 with the 103rd ROD Division, which had dropped on the Krakre in 2338. The surface was taken by December. The orbital ring, held by 6 million Fevarian settlers and the tributary garrison, fought on for fourteen months and fell on 30 November 2452. The Voor of Hiverion, 800 million of them, rose on the day of the landing and killed 400,000 Fevarians and tributary troops in a week. The Republic's histories record that the Corps did not stop them. The Kindling was found empty.
Restoration
The Voor Confederacy was restored at Hiverion on 1 January 2453, under a presiding member from the Haedus Territory. The Legion was refounded there in March 2453. The Voor Reconstruction Agreement of 4 March 2462, signed at Hiverion by President Okonjo-Beauvais and the Council's presiding member, committed the Republic to rebuild the Confederacy's yards, orbitals and towers over twenty years. Hiverion's yards were rebuilt by 2475 and grew hearths again from 2476.
Government
Hiverion was the seat of the High Council of the Confederacy's worlds and of the High Command until 2338, and again from August 2422. The planet itself is governed by a world assembly of its clans, which settles grazing, water and the clans' disputes and sends Hiverion's delegation to the Council. Before 2338 the High Command held the planet's defence directly, and the assembly had no voice in it. From 2338 to 2345 a Corps military government held the capital. Since 2453 the High Council has sat at Hiverion under a presiding member, and the Legion answers to it.
Economy
Hiverion's wealth was its herds, its grain and the Legion. The steppe-kine and the Hesh Lowlands' grain fed the planet, and fresh food was a mark of standing in the great clan halls. The hearth yards in Hiverion's orbit grew the Legion's hearths for nine centuries. The Treaty of Ximpok dismantled them, and the Khanate rebuilt them for its own use. The yards were rebuilt by 2475 and grew hearths again from 2476. After 2341 the planet's trade ran through Vi Simni and the Cirban Exchange, and human food, sold through the Exchange, returned to the clan halls of Ekhar Vin as a fashion.
Society
Clans and towers
Hiverion is the home of the clans. Every Voor belongs to a clan by birth, carries its seal and is buried under it, and the precedence of the clans at every assembly is fixed by a roll kept at Hiverion since the Fevarian wars. Each clan holds a tower or a share of one, and its household halls are the oldest buildings in any city. The towers of Ekhar Vin's innermost ring belong to the clans that sat in the first assembly, and their seal-stones line the ground before the Krakre.
The Legion on Hiverion
Hiverion was the centre of the Legion's life. Its academies educated the Confederacy's engineers, administrators and physicians as well as its officers. Its training cohorts spent their years on the steppe, in the cold, on short rations. Its rites, which marked the Voor year and read the names of every Legionary who had died since the last, were held on its grounds. The Hearth Guard of the Krakre, hereditary formations that served nowhere else, were raised from the capital's oldest lines. After 2341 the Guard's descendants kept the Kindling as a shrine, without arms, until the Khan's landing of 2427.
Fires and the dead
Every tower keeps a fire for its dead, and the Voor believe every hearth fire was kindled from the first. The Kindling's fire was relit on the Voor midwinter of 2452 from the hearth fire of The Hearth That Waits, the captured hearth whose Voor crew brought her over to the Republic at Saolea in 2434. Since 2452 the Council has kept 21 December twice over: as the lighting of the first hearth, and as the day of the surrender, which the Voor call the cooling. The dead of 2427 have one seal-stone in the Krakre's first ring, cut with the year and no names.
Humans on Hiverion
The first human mission was received on 2 May 2318 by a rank of 10,000 Legionaries on the Legion's field between the landing site and the Council's hall. The Institute later recorded that the Council had given this welcome only twice before, both times to the Maweer. The federation kept an embassy at Hiverion until Ambassador Rahal's expulsion on 6 August 2333.
The Corps landed 800,000 troops on the planet in 2338, and 230,000 of them died there. The Republic's 8,000 volunteers fought on Hiverion from 2425 to 2427 under the Haedus Territory's flag, and 2,000 came back. The 103rd ROD Division landed again in 2451. The Corps' memorial to 2338 stands on the Krakre's first ring, on ground the Confederacy gave in 2341, and the Republic's embassy, reopened in 2453, stands beside it.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"
- Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.4 "The Voor Legion"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.4, §9.5 and §9.7
- Solar Eternal, Part XI, §11.4 "The Voor Campaign"
- Solar Eternal, Part XIV, §14.3 "The Voor Worlds"
- Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.7 "The Confederacy, the Maweer and the Veil's Edge"