From Iron I Came and to Iron Shall I Return

To the Woman I met in Space, Long life to you and the Empire…

I am the old man who assisted you when your ship moored at Tellemacher Station. I hope your life on Cheszer 2 is free and without incident, I know that everyone there is young and unbound by traditions, the castes of marriage and military service. I have heard, although I do not know it to be true, that everyone there is a freemantle, that one can go from door to door and find unattached men and women at random, which seems strange to me as there is not a single woman in this colony. The station as you know has been retired for iron reclamation of the thousands of derelicts that float like ghosts around this system, but the “support colony” which you did not see is an all-male labor camp carved out of a mined-out strip mine. We are not even a member of the Corvian Alliance; the foreman is our “governor” and we are no longer registered citizens. When our government collapsed many soldiers fled here, some to escape sentence and when they were tracked down and served their mandatory two years they were just sent back here! Now all Corvians are second-rate citizens working next to Inerian laborers who are third-rate citizens. Imagine living in an unwatched place that is the last vestige of your culture; the headman whoever that is has to maintain conscriptions where there is no mineral wealth left to be found and no females to continue the line. He might be your cousin who was never sent to the front lines for cowardice, or he might not be!

But what I fail to understand is the Empire’s obsession with the quality of iron carbonite for shipbuilding, made worse by the war with the Gegelians. This planet was chosen because there was even more planetary iron than there is on Corvos, a place with iron carbonite cities. This station was the birthplace of the Moar-class battleship! But then more consummate ores were discovered deep in the asteroid frontier. What I fail to understand is this led to a generation of young men going into space, and yet our culture is dead. We are reclaiming iron from the broken hulls of the Empire’s own vessels, and mining the oxide that forms the dust of this planet. That’s right, we refine iron oxide which is what Inerians do.

A Brief History of our People-

As you know I am descended from the West Cronians and you from the East Cronians which is nothing to me, but my ancestors were illiterate carnivorous hunters on the plains while yours were devout fishermen and vegetarians on the coast. The near-miss with Corvos that swathed our planet in darkness separated us into two cultures, we had forgotten our origin story that we were once one people living under an extinct race called the Rasinerr in the southernmost jungles of the continent, until my ancestors rebelled and were permitted to leave while yours remained. Then we were rejoined when Cronus righted itself again and we migrated in the direction of the Sun. Your people gave us writing and religion, the felicity of expression our primitive language was missing with only twelve consonants and one vowel! I know you do not think of this but I am sorry they are gone.

Before the coming of imperialism and civil war there must have been a brief time when we were a single civilized people that was the origin of all our customs. A couple who wishes to be together disappears from society for ten months, when they emerge they have an infant who as soon as it is able to walk is released into the wild where they join a group of other children, a time when it is said they dance nude in the forest and communicate with apes in a secret language. If the parents live in an urban area the group is watched by a vrezen who leaves food out for them. Then when the child reaches about eight years and begins to speak, they return to their parents and gradually forget everything about that hallowed time. If a child does not return by age twelve they can become a nevenaver who performs various duties for the city. If they never begin to speak at all they are a rentejnejer, who remains that way for life.

These things seemed strange to the short, hairless people from Gegel who breathe from the backs of their ears. When they came in their first-contact vessel called the City it was a time of great giving. They gave us technology, aerospace propulsion, energy weapons which replaced our martial arts, and they gave us sickness. At the ceremony in Skeseszer their captain took off his glove and shook hands with a young soldier named Pelarger, son of the war hero Diater. I have heard two versions of this story, that they handed over a case of Gegelian wine or that their officers consumed the wine themselves and then shook hands, but weeks later the pigment of Pelarger’s skin started to turn green to the puzzlement of our physicians, and slowly made its way into his brain. Pelarger went mad and threw himself into the canal, contaminating the water supply.

There is no microscopic life on Cronus, we are defenseless against the germs that run rampant on other worlds. I have also heard the disease was engineered on their planet to take any form. It caused green crystals to sprout on the outskirts of cities and a green haze that filled our streets, their denizens becoming walking corpses that spewed green vapor from their mouths. Seventy per hundred of the population was lost; our government went into hiding in the Northern Wastes. That I believe is why our traditions have no meaning anymore, that and the disparity of space travel. The ambassador the Gegelians left behind was torn apart by an angry mob. There is no planet Gegel now.

On Corvos-

Just as there are words that have no equivalent in today’s speech (vrezen = someone who monitors street children, nevenaver = a town’s official homeless person, rentejnejer = a throwback to an earlier time), I don’t know where we Corvians acquired names like Mondor or Cygnyz. There was no “o” sound in our language. Our first pioneers who crawled out of primitive space capsules like cannonballs must have been grunting and that is where it came from.

Corvos as you know is an inhospitable world of poison seas where meteors fall from the sky. Cavalry lions are solitary and nocturnal rather than traveling in prideful packs; the Cronian deer looks like a skeleton. The year that Corvos took up a fourth of the sky for eight months was the most interesting example of colonization there has ever been. Space travel without guidance systems occurs only in places with extremely low gravity and the destination is extremely close by. Space travel without life support systems works only for races that are extremely hardy and able to survive the rigors of space.

Most of the volunteers were from the West whose capital is Crateegen (not Innexter) a city that burned to the ground. And volunteers were probably self-made men disgruntled with democracy replacing the old hereditary governors. I say this because every vestige of our parent world was cast aside: religion, democracy, literature, in favor of a male-dominated clan system.

At the turn of the last century both worlds were sending primitive mining vessels into the asteroid frontier, until the Corvians decided it was easier to send pirate raiders (one of which is now the oldest space vessel in existence), and soon there were only pirates. We subjugated our parent world with an embargo against space travel, in exchange for leaving our respected parent alone to feed and provide for us.

So the world I grew up in (of which this place is just a dirty shadow), was filled with the training and conscription of soldiers with the idea that we would be boarding and fighting hand-to-hand (which did not happen once during the war that I know of); conscription based not on land deeds of which the closest to the capital is the most esteemed, but on the colonies which are all enclosed settlements. So the best a Corvian captain could earn was the most desired black-walled space to have wives, retainers and sons on a planet where women were few in number. I haven’t seen a clean, black iron wall since then.

On Inerians-

The Inerian star system is a distant, isolated shipbuilding and trade civilization far older than ours. Their planet Ineria is a lifeless desert where they live underground in communal sleeping chambers and share each other’s dreams. Unlike ourselves they are pacifists who never cut or wash their hair (which is the same desert color as their skin except for the algae that grows in it). But primarily what I know about them is their technology.

The year the Empire was first formed, we Corvians were astonished by the Indri-class Inerian starship (which are yellow while all of our vessels are black or brown), a craft capable of founding, sustaining and defending colonies. So a three-world peacekeeping empire was formed with Corvos founding the idea (representing Cronus as a silent partner), and the hapless Inerians providing the shipbuilding. Eighteen years of peaceful colonization followed; they helped us spread our own culture across the universe without our even knowing if they have a government or not. (I suppose they must have one of some kind.) That is how long it took our engineers to design a superior vessel.

Inerians are now considered notoriously poor shipmakers and are the lowest-caste miners and laborers of the Empire, the irony of which is that the only way an Inerian can attain a military rank is as an engineer. The only Inerian with a household name was an engineer, inventor of the Alahadra engine system. They’re still using seventy-year-old vessels crewed entirely by engineers.

The reason for this is their planet’s only export is iron sand from which low-grade yellow or “desert” iron is made. While the Empire’s entire quality of life is based on finding ores with the most immaculate molecular structure, they see the carbon matrix as a way to make space materials indestructible so they just leave the sand in it. (Every part of the Indra has to be replaced every three years from the rigors of space travel.) Oh they’re capable of refining it, at their trade platforms one can see brown planetary iron and other grades next to it which they have been known to give to traders for free. It has no value in the Empire but is a national product to them; I have heard some traders have been known to remove the carbon matrix as soon as they’ve left the system and dump the yellow iron into the nearest sun.

As a civilization entirely dependent on others, apparently their system is considered a trader’s paradise where a small-time trader is treated so well (as strange as this is to say) they can get something for nothing, including a tour of the desert.

Using their respect for engineering to our advantage, the new Moar-class was made the official starship of the Empire and it was those ships that subjugated Ineria into slavery. They put up no resistance; we marooned them on their desert planet and militarized their own orbital platforms to police them.

On War-

I am sad to say you and I will never see a Gegelian or know much about them. As in all things what I know of them is mostly mechanical. I am told the population of their world was in the billions. They were centuries ahead of us in technology before reaching very slowly into space having only their own ingenuity (unlike the three Cronian homeworlds where contemporary technology was thrust on us). 

Centuries I said; their hyperdrive was the only purely mechanical one known to exist and the only one to use hypermatter, essentially shrinking a mechanism with the mass of several planets down to the size of a sublight engine. I know what the words mean but I honestly do not know how that was accomplished. Their zeppelin-like zirconium vessels were able to destroy each of ours with a single blast; our first encounter with a squadron of their little fighters revealed even they could simply target our fuel stores and it was all over. We knew nothing of defensive shielding. That is where our obsession with fighter craft began and the rivalry between our pilots and theirs (although at the time they were only armed pods).

The diary of the second officer of the warship Mondor has become the most-read work of Corvian literature. It is a “pilot saga”, the most popular reading among military empires although he was technically not a pilot. The story begins with the recruitment and training of a crew of young men on Corvos, dispelling myths about us particularly Corvian women (although he does remark that his comrades all spoke of settling on the colonies, a conscription that includes prostitution rather than on our own world). Also worth noting is the day he discovered the deer meat they were served on board was not real.

His account of the infamous Battle of Gegel and its aftermath is now standard reading. Out of twenty-two battleships eighteen were destroyed before coming within sight of the planet, a loss of an entire generation of men. It was launching fighters however and the scremesen (dogfight) that ensued that turned things around; once the dogfighting had moved from our side to theirs we engaged their fleet of a mere seven ships and there were no survivors.

The Mondor arrived late on the scene having assisted a fellow warship that was on fire, and reached the planet to discover the biggest genocide there has ever been. The engineer on the warship Cygnyz (which had run out of munitions) came up with the idea of converting the ship’s hyperfuel into improvised biological weapons on its hangar deck, and started bombarding their cities. Their captain is now considered the worst mass-murderer in the Empire’s history.

It is said that his original posting was on Ineria guarding the slave trade when the Cygnyz was towed from the front lines with the loss of all hands. (It must have been slated for demolition to be taken there.) He had it rebuilt using slave labor and Inerian parts (which he credited to himself propositioning his clan to bring Inerian slaves to Corvos, but in my opinion the credit goes to the Inerian engineers). Whether he made himself captain or was actually commissioned is another matter, offering conscriptions to his crew that included slave labor.

The captain of the Mondor remarked his disappointment that there was no plunder to be had from an entire planet rich in resources that could have paid tribute according to our tradition, including the plan to bring back enemy prisoners. This statement is the source of the rumors that some Gegelians were brought back to Corvos as household slaves, but the ship’s log puts that speculation to rest. There were no survivors.

Word of the genocide combined with our losses eventually split our government into anarchy, some of the clans fleeing to places like this one and some of them reaching out to our parent world which finally developed a spine and took control. Here comes the most interesting part of the officer’s tale; eight months afterward the Mondor found itself at Usnea colony where the captain arranged new conscriptions for his crew (prostitution included) in exchange for protecting the colony from being raided by the Empire’s own warships. (Originally a zirconium mine, Usnea now has underground sileni (artificial food) and textile factories, and the highest rate of women-to-men in the Empire, although they tend to be short and shave their heads like your ancestors did. Usnea has a particular respect for visiting fighter pilots; I imagine a woman who lives underground would enjoy meeting a pilot.)

           Orders came that the captains of all surviving warships that participated in the Battle of Gegel were to report back to Corvos to be tried for war crimes, which you know is a prison colony to this day. The captain consented, passing on the ship to its officers. In his absence the missing warship Cygnyz appeared and docked next to them for only two days. There was a brief rendezvous between the two crews; officers from the Mondor were invited on board and even toured the famous hangar deck where the improvised biological weapons were assembled. But the next day the Cygnyz was gone. They had become raiders of the Empire’s own ports, hoping to plunder the colony. That ship was found stripped of every conceivable salvage in a helium nebula not long ago. Its captain was never brought to justice; they say he died an old smuggler recruiting Inerians to help him and then dumping them in the nebula on the way back.

           And so my dear woman, the New Empire brought peace to these times. Mines like this one invited Corvian convicts and Inerians because they invite free labor. I just saw some of our dwindling Corvian brothers who will never know a woman again fighting a group of Inerian vegetarians who have no concept of marriage. The best one can do for himself here is to be a mechanic, which brings me to my last irony which is the word “irony” itself. Iron is the reason for the daily fights to the death, it’s the reason we settled here and what brought our people to the stars, and where has it all gone? I wish you long life and health on Cheszer 2 and to your family.