The Rings of Salammis

Off Course - Part 1

     Thomas, Timothy and Prup Chull returned to the bridge together, the wizard pushing the moon trog's wheelchair, the cleric strolling along at their side. All three chatting happily as new friends will who discover that they have so much in common despite their widely varying backgrounds. For Thomas, their visit to the ship's outer shell, the zero gravity moon trog area, had been a confirmation of his great liking of the entire moon trog race which he'd formed during his first visit to Kronos back in the war.

     They left him speechless with awe, that such physically frail creatures could achieve so much; could perform the architectural miracles he'd seen on and in the smallest moon, but for Timothy, for whom this was his first real meeting with the frail, thin limbed humanoids, the sense of wonder had been much greater. He could only listen in stunned silence as Prup had described their gigantic farm domes, their vast road tunnels that ran horizontally, vertically and diagonally through the smallest moon, and their habitation chambers; lined with vegetation on walls, floor and ceiling and illuminated by sunlight channeled down from the surface by mirrors and fat bundles of optical fibres.

     When he'd gone on to speak of the projects that had been planned for centuries but which were only now becoming practical because of the help they were receiving from Belthar and the wizards of Lexandria, he did so with such confidence and assurance that the wizard could almost have believed them to be already accomplished. Covering all Kronos with a shell of glass, so that crops could be grown all over the surface of the smallest moon. Constructing arrays of mirrors for miles out into space so that all the interior tunnels and caverns could be illuminated more brightly than ever before. Even the colonisation of the other two moons.

     The elderly moon trog's eyes had glowed with dreamy excitement as he'd described fragile, spidery ships of space bearing vast sails of gossamer thin material to capture the winds of space; the gentle breeze that blew from Tharsol and the raging hurricanes that occasionally swept in from blood red Derro, signaled days in advance by the appearance of dark smudges on the face of the red sun. The deathspots, Prup Chull had explained, were constantly looked out for because they heralded the onset of a mysterious plague that struck down anyone caught up on the surface during its two or three day duration. Everything in the farm domes was killed as well, so that they had to be replanted with fresh seed stocked in the centre of Kronos.

     These sunblights, which fortunately only occurred once every thirty years or so, had traditionally been dreaded and feared, but now, thanks to the space winds that accompanied them, they could become a positive boon, allowing the moon trog race to increase by a thousandfold the territory they occupied. And when all three of the moons were occupied, there were other moons circling Tharia's neighbours in space, and other moons that seemed to circle no planet at all but which orbited the yellow sun directly. Their astronomers had discovered hundreds of them, crowded close in to the yellow sun inside the orbit of the first planet, and that must only be a small fraction of all that must exist. Ultimately, the aged but irrepressible moon trog could see no limit to the expansion of his race.

     "But we require one thing to make it possible," he had then said, some of the light fading from his eyes as the awkward practicalities intruded themselves. "When the spacewind blows from Tharsol it is too weak for us, unless one of our alchemists invents a sail material thinner and lighter than any before. Only when the wind blows from Derro is it strong enough for us to use with what we have now, but when the wind blows from Derro the blight comes as well, killing everything not sheltered by rock. Our ships of space may arrive at their destinations, but with crews of corpses."

     "I suspect that would happen even if you used the light winds that blow from Tharsol," Thomas had replied solemnly. "Our experiments reveal that the skydeath, as we call it, exists at a lethal intensity in deep space all the time. Kronos is protected by something most of the time, but my guess is that when the wind blows from Derro it reaches such an intensity that it's able to overcome that protection. Your ships would require protection from it whenever they set out."