"Grass from ice to ice. The towers stand in rings with open ground inside each ring, and the open ground is where they drill. Every tower keeps one fire, and the fire is not put out."Survey log of the UNS Grissom, Haedus III, 9 November 2317
Indata Mog is the third planet of the Haedus system, a cold steppe world on the Voor side of the Ciriban Gulf. It was a colony of the Voor Confederacy, founded by the hearth the Navy later called the Acheron. Until 2334 it held 200 million Voor, the Voor Legion's Gulf headquarters and the yards that maintained the Legion's Gulf formations. Its cities are towers 2 kilometres high, built around open ground that the Legion kept for its own use. The human charts label its newer city New Indata Mog. Records of the Unified Solar Republic from 2428 onward spell the system's name Haedius.
Indata Mog was the first Voor world that humans saw. The survey ship Grissom arrived at its edge on 20 October 2317 at the invitation of the Voor survey cruiser Lorni Indur, and spent November and December 2317 in orbit as the Voor's guests. In the Voor War the planet was the objective of the Battle of the Mog, fought at the system's edge in February 2334, and it was blockaded from 1 February. The Unified Solar Marine Corps landed on 20 August 2334 in the first planetary assault on a non-human world, and New Indata Mog fell on 12 September 2334. The system was annexed under the Treaty of Ximpok of 2341, and the Voor Territories Act of 2343 made it the Haedus Territory, the first non-human member of a human state.
In 2427 and 2428 Indata Mog was the Unified Solar Republic's front line against the Red Khanate. The Red Khan's forces landed on 12 September 2428, took the towers of New Indata Mog on 30 October and burned the planet's towers on 6 November, with 60 million dead. The Territory's council refused submission from the tunnels under the Legion's grounds, which the Legion had dug against the Fevarians eleven centuries before, and fought a guerrilla war from them for twenty-three years. The council came out of the tunnels on 14 May 2451, after the Retribution Fleet had destroyed the Khanate's garrison in the Third Battle of Haedius. The planet then had 110 million people, of the 240 million of 2428. Its Voor governed the restored Voor Confederacy from 2452, and the Joint Command of the Fevarian Accords has sat at Haedius since 2466.
Name
Haedus is the system's name on human charts. The Voor use the name Indata Mog for the system and the planet alike, and the Grissom's transliteration of 2317 brought the name into human usage. The Institute of Xenology's linguists render it as "the ground lit again". The Voor account given to the Institute explains the name by the planet's history: the world was settled once, burned, and settled again from a hearth's fire. The Voor of the planet call the older city simply Indata Mog. They call New Indata Mog by a longer name that the Institute renders as "the Legion's camp at Indata Mog".
The Navy's officers shortened the planet's name to "the Mog", and the shortened name became the name of the battle of 2334. The shortening appears first in the staff papers of War Plan Purple in the 2320s.
Description
Physical characteristics
Indata Mog orbits Haedus at 0.62 astronomical units, in a near-circular orbit of 199 days. Its mean radius is 6,900 kilometres and its surface gravity 1.12 g, a little less than Hiverion's 1.3 g. Its day is 31 hours long. Its axis is tilted about 18 degrees, so the short year has four seasons of about fifty days each.
The air is thin and cold. Voor breathe it everywhere below the uplands. Humans breathe it in the lowland basins after a period of acclimatisation. The Corps' landing orders of 2334 issued masks to every Marine operating above 1,500 metres.
Two ice caps cover the poles to about 60 degrees of latitude. Between them lies a single belt of steppe, broken by low, worn ranges and by three shallow inland seas. The largest sea, on the northern edge of the belt, is called by the Voor the Still Water. Most of the planet's water is held in the caps and under the ground. The steppe's rivers run from the caps toward the seas, and in the late season they dry to chains of pools.
Life
The native life is low and hardy. A dense, short growth of grasses and mosses covers the steppe. The Institute's biologists classify the grasses and mosses together, because they share a single root mat that can run unbroken for kilometres. The only large native animals are burrowing grazers about the size of a human hand, which live under the mat in colonies of thousands.
The herds are not native. The Acheron's colonists brought them from Hiverion, together with their grain. The herd beasts, which the Institute calls steppe-kine, graze the mat in their millions. The grain grows in the river basins, watered from the caps' melt.
The Haedus system
Indata Mog is the third planet of Haedus. The two inner planets are Sel Kaduur, a tidally locked rock, and Ora Mindt, a hot cloud world. Beyond Indata Mog lie Tavren Sul, a frozen desert whose ice supplied the Legion's yards; Gharuun, a ringed gas giant where the Legion's skimmers took on fuel; and Ennu Var, an ice giant. In 2334 the Legion kept a shell of 140 sensor nodes and satellite platforms at about 60 astronomical units from the star, spaced so that any arrival flash would be seen by at least three of them. Since 2453 the Republic's Naval Station Paldron has stood at the system's Pillai radius.
Locations
Old Indata Mog
The older city stands where the Acheron's colonists landed, on the northern shore of the Still Water. It is a single ring of towers around one open ground. The Voor say that the ring follows the line of the founders' camp, and that each tower stands where a founding clan pitched its tents. The oldest tower holds the founders' fire, which the colonists kindled from the Acheron's hearth-fire at the landing. Seal-stones cut with the names of the founding clans' dead line the inner face of the ring.
The world assembly met in the oldest tower until 2334, and the Haedus Territory's council met there from 2344 to 2428. The landings of 2334 did not enter the old city. Its towers burned with the rest on 6 November 2428. The council carried the founders' fire into the tunnels that month, and brought it out again on 14 May 2451.
New Indata Mog
New Indata Mog is the newer city and was the seat of the Legion's Gulf headquarters. The Legion founded it about four centuries before contact, when it moved its Gulf headquarters from Hiverion to Indata Mog. The city lies 900 kilometres south of the old city, on the dry plateau above the Still Water. It is laid out as a Legion camp: six rings of towers, each ring around its own ground, with the headquarters tower at the centre of the innermost ring.
The headquarters tower, which the Corps' maps of 2334 call the Gulf Tower, was the tallest structure on the planet, at a little under 2.4 kilometres. Its upper floors held the Gulf General's hall and the Legion's records for the Gulf. Its base opened onto the central ground and onto the tunnels beneath it. The city fell on 12 September 2334, when the 103rd ROD Division's 6th Regiment took the base of the headquarters tower and the Legion's Gulf General surrendered his formation from its top floor. It fell again on 30 October 2428 to the Red Khanate. The Territory's council left the burned shells of the six innermost towers standing, and the city was rebuilt beside them from the 2450s.
The Legion's grounds
The open ground between the towers was the Legion's, and the Legion's fortresses stood on it. Each ring's ground is kept clear of building and of pasture. The Legion drilled on the grounds, and the year's cohorts of the Gulf trained there before their years on the open steppe. The fortresses are low and mostly underground, built into the edges of the grounds where the towers' bases meet them.
The grounds were the target of every landing the planet has seen. Lieutenant General Ines Marchetti-Kaur's plan of 2334 sent the Corps in at the Legion's grounds and not at the cities, to take the Legion's fortresses, yards and headquarters and to leave the 200 million alone. The Red Khan's landings of 12 September 2428 came down on the Legion's old grounds and the towers, and the Haedus Territorial Legion held the grounds for six weeks.
The tunnels
The tunnels under the Legion's grounds were dug by the Legion against the Fevarians, eleven centuries before 2428, and are the oldest works on the planet. They pocket the landscape around both cities. The Corps took them in 2334. From November 2428 to May 2451 they sheltered the Territory's council, the survivors of the Haedus Territorial Legion, 400,000 Voor and 60,000 Republic troops.
The tunnels run under both cities and far out under the steppe, cut through the rock below the root mat. The colony extended them over the centuries as stores, cisterns and the fortresses' lower levels. The Corps' survey of 2335 mapped 4,000 kilometres of them and did not reach their ends. The tunnels' mouth under the old grounds of New Indata Mog, where the council's presiding member received the Retribution Fleet's landing parties in 2451, is kept as a memorial.
The yards
The Legion's Gulf yards maintained the Gulf formations and were taken by the Corps in the landings of 2334. They stood on the plateau's eastern edge beside New Indata Mog. They built escorts and small craft, and overhauled the escorts' drives and the hearths' craft. The hearths themselves were maintained in orbit from tenders, because a hearth could not land. The yards' ice came from Tavren Sul. After 2466 the Republic's yards at Haedius built ships for the Dwaii and the Ka-Dur under the fourth article of the Fevarian Accords.
History
The burned world
Before the Fevarian wars the Voor held six worlds, each with its own government and navy. One of them was a world in the Gulf. When the Fevarian clans came out of the Veil, about 1,100 years before contact, they burned two of the six: Ladiom's first colony and the Gulf world. The Voor account given to the Institute identifies the burned Gulf world with Indata Mog. Its first name is the name the Voor no longer use.
The four surviving worlds pooled their fleets under a single command and called it the Legion. In the Legion's first century its formations held the burned world's surface against the clans' raids, fighting from tunnels cut beneath the steppe. The tunnels under the Legion's grounds date from that war. The clans were driven out of the Gulf and beyond the Veil over a century of campaigns, and the burned world lay empty except for the Legion's garrisons.
The founding
The resettlement was carried by the hearth the Navy later called the Acheron, one of the first hearths grown at Hiverion. About 850 years before contact she landed 20,000 colonists on the northern shore of the Still Water, with herds and grain from Hiverion. The colonists named the world Indata Mog. The Acheron stayed in the Gulf for the rest of her service as the Gulf formations' oldest hearth. The Institute reads her Voor name, The Hearth That Keeps the Order at the Threshold, as a reference to the Gulf, which the Voor called the Confederacy's threshold.
The colony grew from its founding clans and from settlers carried out from Hiverion and the older worlds over the following centuries. About four centuries before contact the Legion moved its Gulf headquarters to Indata Mog and founded New Indata Mog to house it.
The Legion's Gulf
By 2317 Indata Mog held 200 million Voor, the Legion's Gulf headquarters, the yards that maintained the Gulf formations and the anchorage of the Haedus group. It lay one Voor jump from Cirban and one from Hiverion, and was the Confederacy's forward base toward the region where humanity would arrive. When the United Nations of Earth declared war on 7 August 2333, the Haedus group held seven of the twelve hearths of the Legion's Gulf formations, under General Volar Vex.
Contact, 2317
The Grissom met the Voor survey cruiser Lorni Indur at Cirban on 21 September 2317. On 14 October the Lorni Indur sent, in a shared mathematical notation, an invitation and a position: a star one jump beyond Cirban, which the charts called Haedus, and a world of the Voor with 200 million of them on it. The Grissom jumped for Haedus on 20 October 2317 in company with the Voor ship. She arrived at Indata Mog's edge six hours later and found the Lorni Indur already there, after a jump of forty minutes.
The Grissom spent November and December 2317 in orbit above Indata Mog and was, on every account, treated as a guest. Dr Wanjiru Kamau's report on the contact, which reached Sol by courier on 28 November 2317, was published on 9 December with the Grissom's pictures of the planet. The Grissom's survey log of November 2317 is the first human description of a Voor world. It records the ice caps, the steppe, the rings of towers with their open grounds, and the fire kept in every tower.
Envoys and trade, 2318 to 2333
The first human mission to the Confederacy, the Asimov and the Unity, left Circumstance on 2 March 2318 and met the Grissom at Haedus on 9 April 2318 before going on to Hiverion. The Cirban Protocol of 11 June 2318 provided for envoys, a line at Cirban, a trading station and trade in food. Indata Mog, the nearest Voor world to the line, became the Confederacy's first market for human goods. Its civil factions bought more human food than any other world's, and the fashion for it spread from Indata Mog to Hiverion. The trade through Cirban ended with the ban of 2328.
The Battle of the Mog and the blockade, 2334
War Plan Purple named Haedus in 2320 as the place where the war's first decisive engagement would have to be fought. Operation Mirage drew two of the Haedus group's seven hearths south to Swur in November 2333. On 30 January 2334 Vex took the remaining five out of Indata Mog's orbit to meet a decoy at the system's southern edge. The Grand Armada under Grand Admiral Tyson Vol destroyed four of the five at the system's edge on 2 February, the Acheron among them, with about 400,000 Voor aboard.
The fifth hearth, which the Navy called the Lethe, turned for Indata Mog and reached the planet's orbital defences. She was the only hearth of the group that the Navy did not destroy or capture. The Grand Armada held Haedus's orbit from 1 February and blockaded the planet. It was reduced from June. The Navy returned the Voor bodies it had recovered from the wrecks to Indata Mog under a flag of truce in March 2334, and the Legion accepted them without reply.
The fall of New Indata Mog, 2334
The Lethe's Commander sat under the blockade for seven months, waiting for a sanction that did not come. On 19 August 2334, the day before the landings, the battleship Onyx and three Meteor-class battlecruisers engaged her. She lost her field in forty minutes, and at 1500 her crew scuttled her with 90,000 aboard. The Institute concluded that she was scuttled on the Commander's order and against the doctrine, which had no provision for a hearth that could not fight and would not surrender.
The Unified Solar Marine Corps landed on 20 August 2334. The first wave, 60,000 troops under Lieutenant General Ines Marchetti-Kaur, was made up of the 20th Marine Division, raised on Bounty and Landfall and called by the fleet the Binami Boys; the 28th Marine Division, raised on Earth and called Vox Populi; and the 101st and 103rd ROD Divisions. Against them stood a Legion ground formation of 300,000. The landings went in at the Legion's grounds, and the Legion fought for its fortresses, yards and headquarters for three weeks.
New Indata Mog fell on 12 September 2334, when the 103rd's 6th Regiment took the base of the headquarters tower. The Legion's Gulf General, whose command had been six hearths and was now a building, surrendered the formation from the tower's top floor. The Corps lost 14,000 at Indata Mog. The Legion lost its Gulf headquarters, its yards, its General and 120,000 Legionaries, and, for the first time in its history, a world.
Military government, 2334 to 2344
The Corps governed Indata Mog's 200 million Voor for ten years without an incident. The Treaty of Ximpok of 2341 annexed Haedus, Kastaba and Myrum to the Unified Solar Republic, and the Voor of Haedus became the Republic's citizens. The military government sat in the headquarters tower at New Indata Mog. It left the world assembly in the old city to settle the clans' affairs, and dealt with the planet through the assembly's members from the civil factions.
The Haedus Territory, 2343 to 2427
The Voor Territories Act of 2343 constituted the three systems on the model the Belt had been given in 2290. Each became a territory of the Republic with its own council, a guaranteed path to area standing on a population test of 50 million, and the Chamber seats and five senators that every member held. The Haedus Territory was the first non-human member of a human state. Its council was elected in 2344 by Indata Mog's 200 million Voor, and its members came from the civil factions of the old Confederacy.
The Territory's eleven seats in the Chamber were the first non-human votes in a human legislature. From 2344 they voted with whichever bloc held the majority. In 2380 they backed the Sector Autonomy Act. The Cirban Exchange reopened on 1 March 2341 under the Republic's tariff, and by 2360 it handled more than it had in 2327. In 2416 the Chamber forbade the Republic's citizens to serve in the Legion, which closed the Legion to the Voor of Haedus. By 2428 Indata Mog's population had grown to 240 million.
The front line, 2427 to 2428
The Legion ended at Exedor in August 2427, and Hiverion fell to the Red Khanate in September. The Grand Armada moved to Haedus that month, and Indata Mog became the Republic's front line against the people who had destroyed the Confederacy. The Territory then held a council that included the last members of the Confederacy's High Council, one hearth and the survivors of the Confederacy's fleet and army, and 30 million refugees who had arrived since August 2427.
The Territory's council asked the Republic in October 2427 to arm the Voor of Haedus. In November 2427 the Chamber voted to raise a Haedus Territorial Legion of the Territory's citizens, under the Republic's flag and the Voor's own officers. It was 2 million strong by the summer of 2428.
The burning, 2428
The Republic's fleet under Admiral Kvoravich withdrew from Haedus after the First and Second Battles of Haedius. Naval Station Paldron, built at the system's Pillai radius between 2424 and 2427, covered the withdrawal. It was destroyed on 5 September 2428 with its garrison of 30,000, its magazines detonating at 1520 when the last of its field generators failed under the lances of 60 monoliths. The withdrawal saved the Republic's fleet. It left Indata Mog, its Territorial Legion, ten ROD divisions, four Marine divisions and 240 million Voor to the Red Khan.
The Red Khan's landings began on 12 September 2428 against the Legion's old grounds and the planet's towers, with a landing force the Corps estimated at 15 million, Fevarian and tributary. The Haedus Territorial Legion and the Republic's 170,000 Marines and droptroopers held the grounds for six weeks. The towers of New Indata Mog fell on 30 October 2428. On 2 November the Territory's council refused submission from the tunnels under the Legion's grounds, and on 6 November the Red Khan burned the towers. The Corps' estimate of Indata Mog's dead in the burning is 60 million.
The tunnel war, 2428 to 2451
The council and the Legion's survivors went under the ground with 400,000 Voor and 60,000 Republic troops. The guerrilla war they fought from the tunnels lasted until 2451. They raided the Khanate's orbitals and yards, destroyed the tributary garrisons the Red Khan installed, and killed four of the khans he appointed to govern the world. The Red Khan kept 40 monoliths and 3 million troops at Haedius through the war to hold a planet that never submitted. The Territory's representatives in exile held its seats in the Chamber from 2428.
From 2447 the Khanate's garrison held the planet's orbitals against the Territorial Legion's raids. In 2450 the khans who fled Cirban took Indata Mog's orbit as their seat, with eight monoliths. The council sat through the war in the deep tunnels under the grounds of New Indata Mog, and moved its seat eleven times when the khans' troops found it.
Liberation, 2451
The Retribution Fleet came to Haedus on 4 May 2451, twenty-three years after the First Battle of Haedius, with 720 hulls, eighteen Retributions and 3,500 platforms. It fell inward and made the khans come to it in Indata Mog's well. The Third Battle of Haedius, from 9 to 12 May 2451, destroyed five monoliths for the loss of 40 hulls and one Retribution, the Ijax. Three monoliths jumped for the Veil.
The Territory's council came out of the tunnels on 14 May 2451 with the Legion's survivors: 90,000 Voor and 11,000 Republic troops, of the 400,000 and 60,000 who had gone under the ground in 2428. Its presiding member, who had refused submission from the same tunnels in November 2428, received the fleet's landing parties at the tunnels' mouth under the Legion's old grounds. Indata Mog's people, 240 million in 2428, were 110 million. Paldron's wreck was surveyed in June, and the Territory's seats in the Chamber were restored on 1 September 2451.
After the war
The Voor Confederacy was restored at Hiverion on 1 January 2452, under a presiding member from the Haedus Territory: the Voor who had held Indata Mog's tunnels for twenty-three years. The Legion was refounded at Hiverion in March 2452 under officers of the Haedus Territorial Legion. The fleet's new station at Haedius's Pillai radius was given the name Naval Station Paldron in 2453. In the occupation zones of 2460 the Haedus Territory lay in the Republic's zone, and the Fevarian clans the Red Khan had settled on its orbitals were held there under the Corps' military government.
The Voor Reconstruction Agreement of 4 March 2462 was carried in the Chamber on President Okonjo-Beauvais's argument that the Voor had held Indata Mog's tunnels for twenty-three years for a Republic that had left them there. The Fevarian Accords of 2466 placed their Joint Command at Haedius, and the Veil Protocol was signed at Haedius on 2 September 2466. An act of 2466 gave the Voor of the Haedus Territory both citizenships. They had governed the Confederacy since 2452, and they sat in both legislatures.
The monolith hulk that the Republic bought from the Veil Clans in 2474 was moored at Haedius, and the Institute of Xenology's monolith section was established there in 2475. The section fired the hulk's two remaining lance mounts at Haedius's edge in 2487, and on 14 September 2489 the hulk translated from Haedius to Cirban and back. By 2480 the Joint Command was a fleet of 400 hulls of five species.
Government
Under the Confederacy, Indata Mog was governed by two bodies. The world assembly of its clans met in the oldest tower of the old city and settled pasture, water and the clans' disputes. The Legion's Gulf General held the planet's defence and its yards from the headquarters tower, under the High Command at Hiverion. The world sent members to the Confederacy's council at Hiverion.
The Corps' military government ruled from 2334 to 2344. From 2344 the Haedus Territory's elected council governed the planet, with eleven seats in the Chamber and five senators. Through the tunnel war the council governed from underground and its representatives held its seats in exile. Since 2466 the Territory's Voor have held the citizenship of both the Republic and the Confederacy.
Society and culture
Clans and towers
Indata Mog's Voor live in clans, as Voor do on every world, and each clan holds a tower or a share of one. The towers were built up rather than out because no clan would give up pasture to a city. Each ring of towers keeps its ground clear, and the clans' herds graze the steppe beyond the rings. The descendants of the twenty-one founding clans that the Acheron landed, whom the Voor call the Acheron's houses, take precedence in the world assembly and in every procession on the old city's ground. Their seal-stones stand nearest the founders' fire.
The Legion on Indata Mog
Before 2334 a large part of the planet's people belonged to the Legion's hereditary Gulf formations, whose families lived aboard the Gulf hearths or in the towers of New Indata Mog. The Gulf's cohorts trained on the grounds of New Indata Mog and spent their training years on Indata Mog's steppe, and they kept their cohort names for life. The planet lost most of its Legion families at the Mog and at the scuttling of the Lethe, and the civil factions held its government from 2344.
The Haedus Territorial Legion of 2427 was the first Voor force raised under a human flag. Its officers refounded the Confederacy's Legion at Hiverion in 2452.
The dead and the fires
Every household and every tower keeps a fire for its dead, and the dead's names are cut on seal-stones. The founders' fire in the old city is the oldest on the planet. The council's decision to carry it underground in November 2428 is recorded in the council's minutes of the tunnel war. The dead of the burning have a single seal-stone at the tunnels' mouth, cut with the year and no names, because the names could not be gathered.
Days kept
The Voor of Indata Mog keep 2 February as the day of the Acheron, the hearth that founded their world. They keep 14 May as the day of the coming out, when the council left the tunnels in 2451. On that day alone the tunnels are opened, and the Territory's council walks from the mouth to the old grounds.
Trade and the human fashion
Indata Mog's trade before 2334 was in herd meat, grain and the yards' work, sold to the Gulf formations and to Hiverion. After 2318 it was the first Voor world to trade with humans, and human food became a luxury fashion among its civil factions. The ban of 2328 fell hardest on those factions, and the fashion returned with the reopening of the Cirban Exchange in 2341.
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, §9.2 "Clash of Titans: The Battle of the Mog"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.4 "Interstellar Blitzkrieg"
- Solar Eternal, Part X, §10.5 "Republican Stagnation"
- Solar Eternal, Part XI, §11.5 "A Giant Awakes"
- Solar Eternal, Part XII, §12.1 "First and Second Battle of Haedius"
- Solar Eternal, Part XIV, §14.3 "The Voor Worlds" and §14.6 "Broken Giant"
- Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.3 "The Fevarian Accords", §15.7 "The Confederacy, the Maweer and the Veil's Edge" and §15.9 "The Hulk, the Fifth Drive and the Mardak Cluster"