Miren
My name is Kaleb Simeon. I am a tracker. I am not from your world: I come from Miren, an oxygen planet smaller than yours, far beyond your solar system but in the same galaxy.
Fewer in number and less divided than you, we went further in science. But the universe is all balance: by exploiting our world, we unsettled our own sky.
Milos Barzin
A little over a hundred of your years ago, our high council entrusted this plague to the greatest mind of his time, Milos Barzin, chemist and physicist. Since the death of his wife, Arqualea, people said he was mad. But no one doubted his genius.
In two years, Barzin designed a belt of ten particle cannons that keeps our atmosphere in balance. The climate calmed down, and the council gave the shield the name Barzin asked for: Arqualea.
Then Barzin demanded more: a seat for life on the high council, and the final word on all its decisions. The council refused and ordered his arrest. Barzin fled. His ship headed for your planet, a journey of nearly ninety years in cryogenic sleep. The shield worked: they let him go.
The trap
A few years ago, our engineers saw the shield weaken. Barzin had hidden a slow-wear mechanism inside it, set to start after his departure. He wanted to be remembered, and for Miren to understand, too late, what it owed him.
The Order of Trackers sent me to find him. On Earth, I discovered one of his laboratories. Barzin was not there, but he had left his notebooks: thousands of coded riddles, some of them leading to the keys of the ten cannons.
Your part
These riddles speak of your world: your artists, your places, your history. I do not know it well enough. Barzin encrypted everything with his image table, where each letter becomes a digit: the right answer is always a code.
The Order allows me to train apprentices. Those who solve the riddles rise in rank: Apprentice, Scout, Tracker, then Master Tracker. There is nothing to win but the esteem of the Order, and the satisfaction of beating Barzin at his own game.
Beware of his accomplices too: some still lurk in our games. You will recognise them, they are always labelled.
Friends of Earth, every day the solar fire draws closer to Miren. Join the Order, and put your mind at our service.
Your friend, Kaleb Simeon