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