The Last Stand off Dock Seven

In Mid-Autumn 2831 UCSD, a fleet-priority survey in the thin water off Threshold Station's Dock Seven found a fold aperture held open past its transit. The narrowed Interval that the forty seconds had been marking for sixteen years had been located and worked industrially, off that dock, by a licensed commercial concern, the Hyperfold Yield Combine, for four months before any Survey Corps classification caught up with it. Holding an aperture open past its transit is a boundary-integrity violation, whatever it is held open for.

Evacuation from the boundary was completed by shuttle and by contracted courier before the failure point, and every person aboard survived. The vessel was not recovered, and Threshold Station logged Line Captain Tissadelle Shepherd's position at the failure point at the moment of closure. Every material witness recorded what answered the intrusion as dragons. Nothing in the Cascade has ever corrected the impression, and no Ranger present was told anything at all. The record calls the event the Last Stand, and it is the event most people now mean by the Wrath of the Dragons.

The Archive holds three irreconcilable accounts of what did it and adjudicates none of them. Beside the incident file in the Survey Archive's reconciliation binders sit two accounts by other hands: the Farline Courier Guild's loss adjustment, which enters the witnesses' word as proximate cause, and the Institute's material account, which prints at the length of its finding everything it could not explain. What the forty seconds marked is established. What produces them is not.

Canon facts:

• Evacuation from the boundary off Dock Seven was completed by shuttle and by contracted courier before the failure point; every person aboard survived, and the vessel itself was not recovered. Threshold Station logged Line Captain Shepherd's position at the failure point at the moment of closure.
• Every material witness at Dock Seven recorded what answered the intrusion as dragons. Nothing in the Cascade has ever corrected the impression, and no Ranger present was told anything at all.

See: What Came Off the Ship (S05E02C03), and for the accounts filed beside the incident file, Statement of Proximate Cause — Dock Seven and A Material Account of the Dock Seven Event.