Tsittak Found at the Exit
2794 UCSD
In 2794 UCSD a Ranger survey vessel on an ordinary deep-space transit comes out of a quiet-zone tunnel nobody had charted, a few hundred kilometres from Tsittak, a Chthonari settlement cut into a lone body of nickel-iron with no star. The settlement hails the vessel through a translating set and asks whether the crew needs anything.
The settlement was not new. How long it had been there, and how its founders came to the tunnel, the record does not hold: Tsittak's own account is kept in the Undersong, cut into the structure of the body, and the record has a description of that account rather than a reading of it.
Canon facts:
- Tsittak had a name, a working dock and a habit of greeting traffic before the Survey Corps knew there was traffic to greet.
- Its people know when a vessel is inside the tunnel, through the metal underfoot, before any instrument aboard it does.
- The Corps filed the body under a catalogue number before it knew the place had a name; the number stands beside the name, and the Corps uses the name.