Continued from The
Phosphorus Era
The Decision
The frame of mind of the leaders of Syoom during the
last few thousand days of era 15 can be summed up as the growing
consciousness that "it's now or never".
They knew that humanity on Ooranye was at the acme of
its power. They knew that no more plundering of other dimensions
like Chelth could ever be risked again. If ever the decision was
to be taken to conquer the world for mankind, it must be taken some time
relatively soon, before Fyayman powers resurged. No future time
would be as good as the present. And if nothings was done, would
not future generations blame those who might have acted but chose
instead to consider their own immediate comfort?
A considerable stock of the power looted from Chelth
still lay in the vaults of the major cities of Syoom, but at current
rates of use it would only last a few more lifetimes. After that,
patrols would have to be cut drastically, and who knew how the powers of
Fyaym would react to this sign of weakness in Syoom?
At this point some fainter voices were raised for the
last time - voices that had unsuccessfully tried to get a hearing at
various times during this long Phosphorus Era. These critics
argued that it was not too late to redeem the honour of Ooranye to some
extent, by making an effort to find a way to return what was left of the
plunder to Chelth. If even a fraction of the ill-gotten energy was
given back, perhaps the present generation would earn forgiveness for
their world and obtain pardon for themselves and their
descendants, from the wronged Other Dimension.
Belatedly, the minority who took this view organized
themselves into a group which could not even agree on a name for
themselves, and were derisively nicknamed the Justies. They
accepted this appellation, and went around trying to get support for
their idea among the Noads.
The "Justies" got nowhere. But
who knows - if any transdimensional power can listen in on our universe,
perhaps the mere fact that these dissenting voices were raised, did
something to make restitution.
The gamble which Syoom as a whole then undertook
can be compared, faintly, with decisions taken at forking paths in
Earth's history. In the 1840s, in Victorian Britain, the decision
was made not to protect agriculture from foreign competition but to
allow the import of cheap food, to allow free trade that was bound
eventually to let loose forces that would drive people off the land and
into the cities, relying for their bread on a powerful Navy policing the
oceans.... in short, a gamble to allow an economic wrenching,
a distortion, for the sake of greatness. Whether the decision was
seen in those terms in the 1840s is doubtful, for a whole generation was
still to go by before the pinch was felt by British farms, but in the
case of the Uranian Phosphorus Era the analogous decision was
consciously made, to abandon, not agriculture, but the unwritten
stability pact with the silent, watchful forces of
Fyaym.
The motive, the aim, was to win mastery of the
world. A Sunnoad was elected, the young and ambitious Noad of
Vyanth who now became Sunnoad Fiarr Fosn 723, and who was known to
favour the plan to build a great, unified Navy of Syoom, to go
forth and conquer the starlit hemisphere of Ooranye.
With the failure of the "Justies", only one voice of opposition
remained. The Bank of Light strongly opposed the plan for the
creation and launching of the armada. The Bank's whole ethos
favoured peace, retrenchment, and letting the future look after
itself. When it became plain that their opposition, like that of
the Justies, was useless, the leadership of the Bank became divided
as to what they should do. Should they try to force the issue by
releasing their accumulated store of calm at once, wastefully and
possibly prematurely? Or should they wait and see what happened to
the expedition, meanwhile keeping their contemplative power in
reserve? After all, the expedition might succeed, in
which case the Store of Light ought to be saved for some more urgent
future crisis.... In the end the Bank decided to watch and
wait.
Doom of the Fleet
The navy was built. The greatest fleet of airships
ever to take to the skies was launched with Fiarr Fosn in command.
Part of the gamble was that reliance must be placed upon sheer might
rather than on reconnaissance and intelligence, since to send out scouts
would be to alert the Forces which might oppose the Plan. So the
fleet flew outwards from Skyyon in all directions without any firm idea
of what it would find. Fifteen hundred ships formed an
ever-widening circle as its front line expanded, hoping to find and
overwhelm the defences of Fyaym. Radio-silence was abandoned, and
the ships stayed openly in touch with each other, preferring the
advantage of communication to that of surprise.
Somewhere deep in Fyaym, though still far from the
mythic starlit polar land of Arclour, the fleet encountered Nemaean insectoid mounds the size of
mountains. Battle ensued; in most cases the units of the fleet won
the encounters. A hostile mind must have then made a decision to
throw secrecy to the winds and unleash a new order of weaponry against
the armada from Syoom. Hours later, the Syoomean captains,
including the Sunnoad in his flagship the Rezorplint , were
amazed to see ships coming to meet them across the plain - ships which
seemed, and indeed were, replicas of their own. The insectoids
this time were using some mind-mirroring and tissue-melding power to use
millions of their own bodies to form metal hulls. Each Syoomean
ship found itself faced with on average five or six foes of the same
mass and design as itself, eager to ram. And when a Syoomean ship
was hit and thrown down from the sky, its attackers dissolved once more
into swarms - ravenous for metal - swooping down to finish the
destruction of the wreck.
Some Syoomean ships turned tail to fly back the way they
came, trying to escape not out of cowardice but in order to save the
homelands of Syoom from this new force. Few managed to outdistance
the Nemaean rammers. In one famous case a partially disabled ship
managed to reach the ground safely and its marooned survivors, in the
depths of Fyaym, later founded the cities of Deev and Karth (see the
history of the Argon Era). There is a tradition among the
descendants of these survivors, that what kept them going was the need
above all the justify Fiarr Fosn's gamble; the desperate need to believe
that it had not all been for nothing.
And of course this was true. Lessons had been
learned about the capabilities of Fyaym; lessons which were never to be
forgotten.
Nevertheless the disaster was unparalleled in
history. The armada was virtually wiped out. It was the one
and only occasion that Syoom has ever put forth its whole strength
against Fyaym, and surely the attempt will never be repeated. (The
Second Great Fleet, in era 91, succeeded where the first had failed,
because its objective was discovery rather than conquest.)
The Sulphur
Era
Whereas the Phosphorus Era had lasted 14,626,687 days
(595.9 Uranian years; 50,057 Earth years), the succeeding Sulphur Era
lasted 36 minutes.
The enemy which had destroyed Syoom's Grand Fleet
continued its victorious course towards Syoom itself. Insectoid
blizzards swarmed against the Syoomean outposts, overwhelming and
destroying them. Much darkness had fallen on Syoom in days of
yore, in the long-gone Nitrogen Era, but now came the first time in
history that Syoom had been attacked concertedly and simultaneously from
all directions. Millions of people lost their lives to the
Nemaeans, mostly of the victims being settlers and the descendants of
settlers who in recent U-years had been drifting further from central
Syoom. The population increase of the later Phosphorus Era was
more or less wiped out.
The Chlorine
Era