"To ask on what terms the hearth may be kept warm."Resolution of the High Council of the Voor Confederacy, Vi Simni, 3 October 2340, as translated by the Institute of Xenology
The Treaty of Ximpok was the peace that ended the Voor War. It was signed at Vi Simni on Ximpok on 21 January 2341 by the newly renamed Unified Solar Republic and the Voor Confederacy. It confirmed the terms of the Confederacy's surrender at the Krakre on 21 December 2340 and added the clauses the war's end needed: the return of prisoners, the reopening of the Cirban Exchange, mutual recognition of borders, and a transit right for the Maweer that neither signatory had asked for.
The settlement took little territory. The Republic annexed three Gulf systems, Haedus, Kastaba and Myrum, and left the Confederacy eleven worlds and 29 billion Voor. Its weight lay in its military clauses. It abolished the Legion's High Command, capped the Voor Legion at twenty hearths with no new hearth for fifty years, dismantled the Voor yards, and gave a Republic inspectorate the right to enter every Voor yard and anchorage in perpetuity.
Background
The Council at Vi Simni
The Siege of Hiverion ended on 3 May 2338 with the High Command dead in the Kindling and the First Hearth destroyed. The High Council's civil members had left Hiverion for Ximpok in March 2338 and sat at Vi Simni from April. The Confederacy then held five hearths under a failing shield at Hiverion, two at Aethos, three at Ximpok, and twenty on the Maweer frontier that would not move.
The Council took two and a half years to decide. For the first time in its history it divided into factions without the High Command. The civil factions, which had wanted the trade in 2319, now wanted the war ended. A frontier party of the Maweer frontier's Generals and the frontier worlds' Council members held that the order could be rebuilt from the twenty hearths. They argued that surrender was the cooling of the hearth, which no Voor had the authority to order.
The last campaigns
The Navy shortened the argument. Through 2339 and 2340 the Grand Armada took, one at a time, every system the Confederacy still held that a fleet could reach.
- Ximpok's orbit fell between 14 and 17 August 2339. Of its three hearths, two were destroyed and the third surrendered, with 110,000 aboard. She was the first hearth in the Legion's history to strike.
- Aethos was blockaded from October 2339, and its two hearths did not come out.
- Through 2340 the fleet advanced to Omaggus and Faenov. In September 2340 Fleet Admiral Izabel Beattie's fleet reached the edge of the Maweer frontier and stopped there, on Vol's and O'Neil's orders.
The decision
On 3 October 2340 the Council voted, nine worlds to five, with the frontier party dissenting, to send a delegation to the federation's fleet. Its resolution asked "on what terms the hearth may be kept warm". The Institute's linguists concluded that this was the nearest the Voor language came to the word surrender. The frontier Generals neither obeyed the Council nor defied it. They stayed on the frontier, and the surrender was made without them and, in the treaty's words, on their behalf.
Negotiation
The terms were negotiated through November and December 2340 at Vi Simni and Hiverion. The federation's delegation was led by Halima Rahal, aged eighty, who had signed the Cirban Protocol in 2318 and been expelled from Hiverion in 2333. The Council's delegation was led by its presiding member, the Trade-Speaker of Vi Simni, who had negotiated the trade treaty of 2319. The Institute supplied the federation's linguists, and every clause was drafted first in the shared notation and then rendered into both languages, so that neither text could be said to be the translation of the other.
The surrender, 21 December 2340
The Confederacy surrendered at the Krakre on 21 December 2340, in the court of the Kindling where the High Command had died. The Corps' military government chose the day because it was the Voor midwinter, and the Voor calendar marked it as the day the First Hearth was lit.
The surrender was accepted by President Elliot O'Neil, aged eighty-six, who had travelled five weeks from New Luxor; by Grand Admiral Tyson Vol; and by Rahal's delegation. The Voor delegation was the Trade-Speaker and four members of the civil factions. No officer of the Legion came, because the Council had no officer left whom it could order to come. The 103rd ROD Division stood in the court at a third of its strength, carrying its blades. The instrument was signed at 1200. O'Neil's remarks were four sentences long and did not use the word victory.
Terms
Territory
The Republic annexed three systems:
- Haedus, with Indata Mog and its 200 million Voor;
- Kastaba, with its anchorage and yards;
- Myrum, the northern route to the Maweer, so that no Voor patrol would again follow a Maweer fleet into Nomotar.
It took no other world. The Confederacy kept Exedor and Hiverion, under a Corps military government the treaty limited to five years. It also kept Ximpok, Aethos and eight worlds to the north and south beyond Faenov and Omaggus, which the federation's fleet had never entered.
Military clauses
- The High Command was abolished as an organ of the Council, and its veto with it.
- The Legion was capped at twenty hearths, the frontier's twenty, and forbidden to grow another for fifty years.
- The yards at Hiverion, Swur and Kastaba were dismantled or held by the Republic.
- No armed Voor ship was to pass the treaty line of 2319, now drawn at Kastaba and Myrum, without the Republic's leave.
- An inspectorate, the federation's first beyond the Sun, was given the right of entry to every Voor yard and anchorage in perpetuity.
The seven hearths left at Hiverion and Aethos fell outside the cap. They were surrendered to the Republic in 2341 and held at Kastaba under the inspectorate.
Clauses of the treaty
The treaty of 21 January 2341 added:
- the return of the war's prisoners: 400,000 Voor from the wrecks and the surrendered hearths, and 11,000 humans, most of them the 108th's and the Corps' taken on Hiverion;
- the reopening of the Cirban Exchange under the Republic's tariff;
- each signatory's recognition of the other's borders;
- a transit clause guaranteeing the Maweer passage through Myrum to Nomotar.
The Maweer had proposed the transit clause through the Voor court. Their fleets used the route again from March 2341, and they never said a word about their six years massed on the Voor frontier.
Reception
The Council accepted every clause. The Institute's reading of its minutes is that the civil factions accepted them with something the Voor language has no word for, which the linguists render as relief. In the Republic, the Chamber's critics called the territorial terms modest for a war that had cost 406,000 human lives. The Navy's histories call them small territorial concessions by the standards of what the federation held.
Implementation
The Cirban Exchange reopened on 1 March 2341, and by 2360 it handled more trade than it had in 2327. The Voor Territories Act of 2343 made Haedus, Kastaba and Myrum territories of the Republic, and Haedus became the first non-human member of a human state. The military government on Hiverion ended on schedule in 2345. The Navy withdrew its frontier to Aethos in 2352 and to the treaty line at Kastaba in 2361, and its stealth pickets were withdrawn in 2365.
Legacy
The treaty's military clauses outlived the Navy's interest in them. The Republic stopped watching the Confederacy in the 2360s. When the Red Khanate struck in 2427, the Legion ended at Exedor in August, and Hiverion fell in September. The Confederacy was restored at Hiverion on 1 January 2453 under a presiding member from the Haedus Territory, and the Legion was refounded that March under officers of the Haedus Territorial Legion.
BOOK SOURCES
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.5 "Taking the Krakre: The Siege of Hiverion"
- Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.7 "Solar Ascendant: The Voor Surrender"
- Solar Eternal, Part X, §10.5 "Republican Stagnation"
- Solar Eternal, Part XIV, §14.3 "The Voor Worlds"