The Khepri Basin is a wide, dry depression of salt flats, sandstone ridges and old mining roads. Before 2189 it was known for potash and for very little else. Today it is the most heavily guarded square kilometre on Earth, because the Rift opens in its eastern floor.
# Before the Rift
Mining companies worked the basin for most of the twenty-second century, building small company towns along its edges. Marek and Ilyan Venn grew up in one of them, Saltreach, where their father ran haul trucks. Old maps of the basin show nothing unusual at the site of the Rift. Two independent mineral surveys in the 2170s drilled within eight hundred metres of it and found ordinary sandstone.
# The exclusion zone
After the discovery, the basin was sealed in 2190. The company towns were bought out and emptied. Saltreach is now a Directorate supply depot, its school a warehouse for cache staging. The only permanent inhabitants of the basin are the crew of Asterion Station and the security teams on the perimeter.
# Strange weather
Since 2198 the basin has developed weather of its own. The air above the rim is several degrees warmer than the surrounding flats, and on still nights a faint cyan haze hangs over the station. Compasses within two kilometres of the rim drift slowly clockwise. Directorate scientists attribute all of this to waste heat and electrical equipment. The station crew mostly do not.
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ARCHIVE RECORDThe RiftA perfectly straight alloy-lined shaft found beneath the Khepri Basin in 2189. Its depth changes, its echoes repeat, and its end has never been reached.
ARCHIVE RECORDAsterion StationThe ring-shaped research station built around the Rift rim. It holds the launch cradle, the relay chain and the rim lock.
ARCHIVE RECORDDiscovery of the Rift (2189)A routine geophysical survey of the Khepri Basin finds a shaft where the bedrock should be, and a probe that reports back before it is launched.