Read Cracked Dagger, Book One of Allies and Adversaries Page 5

It is not exactly known when excess became the guiding credo for the Novan people, but most historians attribute its birth to the Great Migration of the Rell. The architects of the time wanted to proclaim their conquest in the boldest possible strokes, to lay down their lines in thick impasto that would outlive the last child of the oldest generation. So they began plans to engineer this new world called ‘Novan.’

  The world called Novan was comprised of three distinct sections. The first, ExterNovan, or ‘Topside’ for short, was a shell created two millennia after the Rell departed the planet in 3750 in what was called the Great Migration. Population growth exploded, and TELREC predicted they would run out of livable space. It was decided that either population control would be instituted, or the need for a second living surface would have to be found. It was decided to create an outer shell that would orbit Novan. Covering about eighty-six percent of the planet’s land mass, it freed up a tremendous amount of room, which the Novans quickly filled. ExterNovan, unlike the planet it encompassed, had equal amounts of night and roa. Topside became the seat of all government, headquarters for all business, and generally the home of the economic elite of the planet. Great efforts had been made to engineer some vegetation into the ecosystem of ExterNovan, for most non-soumanoid life died out on Novan by 5900. A beautiful world, Topside was built slowly and methodically, using only the strongest alloys, the most durable construction methods. What resulted on Topside were spires and buildings that almost reached to the stars.

  The second section, called CoreNovan, or ‘Core’ for short, became densely populated, a landscape with hundreds of levels. A purely artificial landscape, it was home to most of the population that lived in great apartment complexes hundreds of levels high.

  Briefly called ‘Inseef Novan’ or the ‘Womb of Novan,’ ‘Foundation,’ as it became called, was the lowest section of the world called Novan, created after the oceans were drained. On the sea bed they built a massive gridwork that formed the basis for the world to come. They built pillars a mile across and ten til high to support the continuation of the upper mantle of Core. They built roads, beams, and trusses to connect those pillars, and skeleton frameworks in-between, anticipating a necessity for future Novans to settle below ground. The fact that there had never been a tectonic shift of any magnitude, that no collapse had ever occurred of either Topside, Core, or Foundation, was a testament to the creativity and genius that those early Novans possessed. Historians jealously refer to that time as the magnificent millennium; a time in which Novan genius flowered and flourished with the departure of the Rell, to be burned and buried once complacency set in. So much technology born, and then forgotten, so many noble principles started, and then abandoned; relics of a past they would sooner forget. Foundation became the bowels of the Novan pleasure machine. Located up to ten til beneath the surface of Core, it was where all maintenance processes eventually were housed. Millions of maintenance meta from Foundation serviced the provinces, and billions of people ensured their efficient function. Great supply ships from the void descended through the Window of the World in Topside, through hundreds of openings in Core, to land on Foundation. All fuel was created on Foundation, as well as raw materials. Though food was grown on the AG platforms, it was processed and distributed on Foundation. To walk on Topside or Core was to see an effortless world of pleasure, but to venture to Foundation was to see the great mechanisms of the machine.