The Last Legion: Book One of the Last Legion Series
Page 36
“Yeh?”
“He had a poem. Can’t remember much of it, but there were lines that went something like ‘those I fight, I do not hate, those I guard I do not love.’ ”
“Petr’s epitaph?”
“Or ours,” Njangu said.
“What a shitty way to make a living,” he said, after a space.
Garvin grunted agreement, retrieved the bottle.
“Pity it’s the only game in town.”
APPENDIX
The Cumbre system has a medium main sequence sun, about 1.5 million kilometers in diameter.
There are thirteen planets in the system, named, rather unimaginatively, after the letters of the alphabet. A- and B-Cumbre are too close to the sun to be habitable, with limited atmospheres, and have only solar and astronomical observation stations.
Mineral-rich C-Cumbre is the reason for both Man and Musth colonizing the system. Its riches include manganese, tungsten, vanadium, niobium, titanium, godarium, natural gamma iron, and some precious metals.
Mines, worked by both races, stud the arid landscape. It’s uncomfortable for both races, more for the Musth than Man. It has a single moon, Balar.
E-Cumbre is chill, just habitable for Man, comfortable for Musth, who know it as Silitric, and consider it the center of the system.
F-, H- and I-Cumbre are ice giants.
G-Cumbre is a half-destroyed world from an out-of-system asteroid, and moonlets litter its orbit.
J- and K-Cumbre are small planetoids and have small observation stations.
L- and M-Cumbre are little larger than J- and K-, and are almost certainly trapped asteroids, with extremely irregular orbits.
D-Cumbre is — mostly — Man’s world. It has three small moons: Fowey, Bodwin, and Penwith. Only the largest and nearest, Fowey, affects D-Cumbre’s tides.
D-Cumbre is about thirteen thousand kilometers in diameter at the equator, and its axial tilt is fourteen degrees, producing a more even climate than Earth’s. Unlike Earth, there are no continental masses, but many, many islands, mostly in the temperate and tropical belt, although two significant landmasses are at the poles. Some of the islands are large and of volcanic origin. Their peaks have been worn into plateaus with an entirely different climate than the lowlands — still wet, but chill and mist-hung, with the vegetation fernlike, from tiny to enormous. The Musth make their headquarters on the largest of these, the Highlands on Dharma Island.
Man settled at sea-level, mostly in the tropics, with his capital, Leggett, on the northwestern portion of Dharma and three smaller islets. There are two dozen smaller cities, some not more than villages, on other islands in the temperate or tropical zones.
The climate is balmy, and there are few weather hazards, although open seas away from the island masses produce enormous globe-circling waves, and the stormy season can be uncomfortable.
The environment must be considered benign, although there are still-unclassified predators in the jungles and several species of fish, from large sea serpents to marine carnivores to coelenterates that must be considered hazardous to life.
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Text Copyright © 1999 by Chris Bunch
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Published in association with Athans & Associates Creative Consulting
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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-5362-9
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5362-2