Voor Legion

"The Voor do not, in their own language, distinguish the Legion from the peace it keeps."Institute of Xenology, study of the Voor, 2320

The Voor Legion is the armed force of the Voor Confederacy, and for most of its history it was also the Confederacy's governing caste, school and church. It was formed about 1,100 years before contact, when the Fevarians came out of the Veil and burned two of the six Voor worlds, and the four that survived pooled their fleets under a single command. The Confederacy grew out of that command, and the Voor say the Legion is the older of the two. Its word for itself, which the linguists render as "the order", is the word the Voor use for the state of things when the Confederacy is safe.

In 2333 the Legion had 52 hearths, the 5-kilometre grown warships that had answered the Fevarian clans, and it was better than the Unified Solar Navy in every class of ship. It fought on a doctrine of concentration under a rigid chain of sanction, and the federation's War Plan Purple was written against that chain. The Voor War destroyed the Legion's High Command in the Kindling of the Krakre in 2338, and the Treaty of Ximpok capped it at twenty hearths. The Red Khanate destroyed it in the Voor Campaign of 2415 to 2427. It was refounded at Hiverion in 2453 under officers of the Haedus Territorial Legion, and since then it has answered to the High Council.

History

The Fevarian wars

Before the Fevarian wars the Voor held six worlds, each with its own government and navy. The Fevarians are a nomadic species, living in clans of a few million each in fleets between the stars and raiding worlds for what they cannot make. When they came out of the Veil they burned two of the six Voor worlds: Ladiom's first colony, and a world in the Gulf whose name the Voor no longer use. The four survivors pooled their fleets and called the force the Legion.

The Legion's first century was the Fevarian wars. To fight the clans between the stars it had to build ships that could live between the stars as the clans did. The answer was the hearth. The first, grown at Hiverion 900 years before contact, carried a Legion formation and its families and could hunt for a decade. The clans were driven out of the Gulf and beyond the Veil over a century of campaigns. The Confederacy that the four worlds became then secured the Gulf and settled it. Every Voor institution dates from that war, and the Institute concluded that every one of them was built to fight it again.

The Legion in Voor life

Every Voor served. Service began at the end of a Voor's first thirty years and ran for twenty for an ordinary Voor. For the Legion's own, the hereditary formations whose families lived aboard the hearths, it ran for eighty. A Voor who had not served could not hold civil office, own a ship or sit in the Council. A Voor who had served was a Legionary for the rest of a 120-year life, addressed by rank and expected to answer a summons.

The Legion's academies at Hiverion educated the Confederacy's engineers, administrators and physicians as well as its officers. Its rites marked the Voor year. The Institute's study of 2320 called it a military, a caste, a school and a church, and said the four descriptions were one.

The High Command and the Council

The Confederacy's civil government, the High Council of fourteen worlds' delegations, sat at Hiverion and governed trade, settlement and law. The High Command sat in the Council and held a veto on any matter that touched the Confederacy's safety, which it defined. The Institute counted eleven uses of the veto between 2320 and 2328. The last was the trade ban of 1 January 2328, which led to the Ciriban Incident and the war.

Structure

The chain of sanction

The Legion's structure was built to keep a unified command across fourteen worlds and two frontiers.

• The High Commander (in Voor usage the Supreme Commander) held absolute authority over every military decision, sat in the Council for the High Command, and allotted the hearths.
• The Generals each commanded a regional formation or military sector. In 2333 there were nine: three on the Maweer frontier, two on the Veil, one in the interior and three in the Gulf, at Haedus, Swur and Kastaba. Human records often render a General of the High Command as Admiral.
• The Fleet Commanders each led a segment of a General's formation: a hearth group of one hearth and its forty escorts, or a cruiser force without one.
• The Commanders of the Tactical Corps led the smaller vessels and ground forces in raids and reconnaissance. They were the only officers allowed to engage without a superior's sanction, within limits set by a charter the Institute never read.

A Fleet Commander engaged on a General's sanction, and a General moved a hearth group on the High Commander's. The High Commander sat at Hiverion, a day's Voor jump from the Gulf and a day back. The Legion's histories record with pride a hearth group at Ladiom that held its position under Fevarian raid for nine days until its General's sanction arrived, and then destroyed the clan. The federation's War Plan Purple was built on those nine days.

Doctrine

The Legion's doctrine was concentration. A hearth leads, its escorts flank and finish, and the whole formation arrives together, engages together and destroys the enemy in place, so that the enemy's survivors have nothing to rally to. It favoured annihilation over manoeuvre because it was written against the Fevarians, whose fleets scattered when struck and re-formed elsewhere if any part survived. The Legion learned in its first century that a clan half destroyed was a clan that came back.

Ships

Every Legion ship jumped 25 light years and charged in a day. Every one carried a field, and every one from the destroyer up mounted a plasma projector. A Voor destroyer's smallest projector outranged a Thalanx-class light cruiser's heavy drivers by ten times. The Navy's estimate of the Legion's strength in 2333 was a count of what its pickets could see:

Each hearth carries a long epithet in Voor use, such as The Hearth That Keeps the Order at the Threshold. Human records use Navy reporting names, some taken from the worlds a hearth was based at, such as the Vi Simni and the Vur Duri. In the war the Legion added the Harbinger-class cruiser and the Fury-class destroyer, refitted and new hulls with arrays of small projectors against strike craft. Later hearth classes were the Tribune of 2416 and the Legate of 2454.

The Voor War, 2333 to 2341

The Gulf formations

The Legion spent five years before the war moving strength into the Gulf. In July 2333 its three Gulf formations held twelve hearths, 30 heavy cruisers, 50 light cruisers and 120 destroyers, the largest Voor force the Navy's pickets had ever counted in one place. Their plan was a northern offensive through Myrum into Nomotar in October 2333.

Mirage, the Mog and Media

The chain of sanction failed the Legion exactly as Purple had predicted.

• In Operation Mirage the High Command took nine days to sanction a response to raids on Myrum and Kastaba, then cancelled the northern offensive on 4 October 2333 and moved the Gulf's strength south.
• At the Battle of the Mog on 2 February 2334, General Volar Vex sortied on sanction against a decoy. His formation held for orders under attack from three sides. When his flagship, the Acheron, broke, his four Fleet Commanders acted in four different ways, and four of the five hearths were lost.
• At the Second Battle of Media in May 2334, General Ahnar Varn's seven hearths held their concentration for three days. His flagship, the Voor Aegis, led as doctrine required, drew ahead, and was boarded. Varn died on his bridge, and the first hearth to be boarded in nine centuries was captured.

By May 2334 the Legion's Gulf strength had fallen from twelve hearths to four. Its Gulf headquarters surrendered at the Fall of New Indata Mog that September.

The Maweer frontier

The Legion's twenty best hearths, under three Generals, stood on the Maweer frontier beyond Faenov. In February 2334 the High Command ordered six of them home. The frontier's senior General countermanded the order in April with one line: the Caretakers had come to the frontier. From the summer of 2334 the Maweer massed fleets along the whole north-western frontier and said nothing. The twenty hearths stayed opposite them for six years and never came south.

Exedor and the Krakre

The Legion fought its capital on a new doctrine: hearths sortieing in pairs from under Hiverion's shield, with the High Commander among them so that no sanction was needed. The Veil frontier sent nine hearths, six for Exedor in 2335 and 2336 and three in April 2337. At the Battle of Exedor in March 2336 fifteen hearths met the Grand Armada and lost five. At Leesak in June 2337 six lost four. In the Siege of Hiverion the Hearth Guard of 200,000 held the Krakre for six weeks. On 30 April 2338 the High Commander and eight Generals died in the Kindling, and the ninth, dying, ordered the Guard to stop "so that the hearth would not be cold with no one to tend it". The First Hearth was destroyed on 3 May 2338.

The surrender

Without a High Command, the Legion's remaining formations had no one to sanction them. At Ximpok in August 2339 the Commanders of three hearths asked the Council for a sanction and were told to use their judgment. One of them surrendered, the first hearth in the Legion's history to strike. The Confederacy surrendered on 21 December 2340, and no officer of the Legion was present. The Legion had lost 25 of its 52 hearths.

The treaty years, 2341 to 2415

The Treaty of Ximpok abolished the High Command and its veto, and capped the Legion at twenty hearths, the frontier's twenty, with no new hearth for fifty years. Its yards were dismantled, and a Republic inspectorate could enter every Voor yard and anchorage. The Legion now answered to a Council governed by the civil factions, which had never commanded a war.

The Confederacy recovered its trade and not its Legion. The twenty hearths moved to the Veil frontier in the 2340s. In 2391 the Council asked the Republic to lift the cap, reporting raids from beyond the Veil. In 2416 the Chamber forbade the Republic's citizens to serve in the Legion, which closed it to the Voor of the Haedus Territory.

The Voor Campaign and the end, 2415 to 2427

The Red Khan's monoliths came through the Veil frontier in October 2415. Forty of them met the Legion's twenty hearths and destroyed six. Their shields absorbed the hearths' projectors, and their beams cut a hearth's field in minutes. For the first time in its history the Legion fought a defensive war. Under the Republic's Mutual Aid Act it fitted Republic fields to its hearths and Republic projectors to its platforms, and laid down fifteen new hearths of the Tribune class at Hiverion.

• The eight eastern worlds fell between 2416 and 2420, and the Legion lost eleven hearths defending them.
• At Vur Duri in Aethos, twenty-one hearths, nine old and twelve new, held for twenty-six months from March 2420 against 150 monoliths. The last fourteen were destroyed or scattered on 9 June 2422 in a sortie their General led and did not return from.
• Seven hearths and 3 million Legionaries held Hiverion from 2425. Its shield failed on 2 August 2427. The seven held the Khan at Exedor's edge for eleven days while the Confederacy evacuated to Haedus.

The last of them, the Vi Simni, The Hearth That Was Kindled in the Long Watch, broke on 16 August 2427 with the Council's presiding member aboard. The Confederacy and its Legion ended that day. One hearth, which had escorted the last refugee convoy, reached Haedus with its field gone.

The Haedus Territorial Legion

In November 2427 the Republic's Chamber voted to raise a Haedus Territorial Legion of the Territory's Voor, under the Republic's flag and the Voor's own officers. It was the first Voor force raised under a human flag, and it was 2 million strong by the summer of 2428. It held the Legion's old grounds on Indata Mog against the Red Khan's landings for six weeks in 2428. Its survivors fought a tunnel war from under the grounds for twenty-three years, and 90,000 of the 400,000 Voor who had gone underground came out on 14 May 2451.

The refounded Legion, 2453 onward

The Confederacy was restored at Hiverion on 1 January 2453. On 1 February the Chamber released it from the Treaty of Ximpok's military clauses. The Legion was refounded at Hiverion in March 2453 under officers of the Haedus Territorial Legion. The High Command was not restored, and the Legion answers to the Council.

Its first four hearths, of the Legate class, were built at Europa under the Republic's licence and commissioned in January 2454. With The Hearth That Waits, a captured hearth whose Voor slave crew killed their Fevarian officers and brought her over to the Republic at the Battle of Saolea in 2434, they sailed with the Retribution Fleet from 2454 under their own Commander. From 2455 four hearths and the Legion's ground forces fought on the Voor front with the Republic's Southern Command, siege by siege, until the Fejantris Peace. Under the Fevarian Accords of 2466 the Legion contributes to the Joint Command at Haedius.

The Confederacy's yards at Hiverion, Swur and Vi Simni were rebuilt by 2475 and built hearths again from 2476, the first Voor-built hearths since 2420. The Legion held twelve by 2490 and twenty by 2510. Service is no longer universal. Since 2460 it has been voluntary, and a Voor who has not served may hold office and sit in the Council.

Culture

The Legion's cohorts keep their cohort names for life, and its hereditary formations lived aboard the hearths with their families. Every hearth keeps a fire, kindled in the Voor telling from the First Hearth's flame, which was kept in the Kindling. The Hearth Guard of the Krakre, hereditary formations that served nowhere else, swore "to hold the hearth until the order returns or the hearth is cold". The Guard carried ancestral blades. The Institute's observers recorded that at the Krakre it treated the dead of the 103rd ROD Division, whose troops carry blades of their own peoples, with a courtesy it showed no other division.

BOOK SOURCES

1. Solar Eternal, Part VII, §7.6 "Alone No Longer: The Voor Confederacy"
2. Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.4 "The Voor Legion"
3. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.1 to §9.7
4. Solar Eternal, Part X, §10.5 "Republican Stagnation"
5. Solar Eternal, Part XI, §11.4 "The Voor Campaign"
6. Solar Eternal, Part XIV, §14.3 "The Voor Worlds"
7. Solar Eternal, Part XV, §15.3 "The Fevarian Accords" and §15.7 "The Confederacy, the Maweer and the Veil's Edge"