Njord

Njord - The Hidden Gem

Earth never saw Njord. Ran's flare activity drowns the delicate signals that betray a small world, and for two centuries every survey that looked at this system saw a gas giant, a lot of dust, and nothing else worth arguing about. The fleet that dropped out of the Gloom in 2169 was carrying orbital habitat frames and a four-hundred-year dome schedule. What it found instead was a temperate rock in the warm band with a workable atmosphere and no oceans at all.

The Hegemony has spent every year since filling them.

Njord's seas were hauled in. Tanker-class Shift Ships run the long circuit out to the cold belt at seventy AU, cut ice older than the star, and drop it inward, the same trick that drowned Mars, run for two and a half centuries instead of ten years. The oceans are roughly forty percent of the surface now and still rising by a measurable fraction each decade, which means every coastal city on Njord has been rebuilt uphill at least twice, and every property deed on the planet contains a clause about it.

What keeps the atmosphere on is not natural. A magnetospheric array holds station at the sunward Lagrange point and shelters the planet from Ran's wind. Colonists call it the Lid. It is owned, maintained and metered by Monolith Heavy Industries, and the levy appears on every household account on the world as a line item marked ATMOSPHERIC CONTINUITY. There has never been a general strike on Njord. People have run the numbers.

Unassisted breathing was certified planet-wide in 2301, a date still marked as the Second Breath, mostly by people who were not there. The world is green in the way a thing is green when it has been argued into it. There are forests on Njord that were planted by committee, in rows, by number.

Old Earth gave the name Njord to a god of the sea, of wind, of safe voyages and of wealth. He was also a hostage, handed over by his own people as surety in a truce, and kept.