Dates are given in Earth calendar years. Asterion station time is used for events at the rim. Events inside the shaft are dated by the time the report arrived, which is not always the time it happened. See time skew.
# Discovery and survey
A geophysical survey led by Dr. Tomás Reyes finds a vertical shaft beneath the Khepri Basin. Probe K-1 descends 1.4 kilometres and transmits a signal timestamped eleven minutes before launch. See Discovery.
The basin is declared an exclusion zone. Three national survey teams compete for access to the rim.
The first fixed relay fails at interval 6. Its recovered casing is warm, though it was designed to run cold. A crystalline fragment in the casing becomes the first catalogued Rift Shard. See The warm relay.
Tether platforms reach interval 9 but cannot find the same route back. Two are lost; one returns with impact scars from unknown machines.
Construction of Asterion Station begins around the rim. Civilian access to the basin ends.
# The lift program
Ilyan Venn joins the rim engineering staff and begins work on a return-capable lift.
Autonomous platform P-3 reaches the first stable industrial galleries and maps three sectors before losing contact. Its sample canister returns on the tether carrying a strip of Rift alloy that stays magnetised without power.
Ilyan Venn demonstrates the first phase coupler, which holds a test sled to a single stable route for forty minutes.
Dr. Reyes retires as Asterion’s science director. His final report proposes the term phase interval.
The Asterion Accord founds the Continuity Directorate with a mandate to study the anomaly and prevent uncontrolled descent.
The Meridian Extraction Consortium joins the Directorate as its largest industrial member.
# Loss and return
First return test of the crew-rated lift. The lift returns empty, its core holding a shard absent from the launch inventory. During the follow-up calibration, Ilyan Venn disappears. See The 2214 return test.
The Directorate suspends crewed descent. Yara Demir begins rebuilding Ilyan’s coupler on the original survey frame: the future C-9.
Supply caches are found at intervals no crew has reached. The Directorate denies placing them. See The caches.
At 03:17 station time, all eleven lower relays go dark. The last packet carries Ilyan Venn’s voice. Pilot Marek Venn launches the C-9 against orders. See The Asterion blackout and The descent.
The archive will add entries as reports from the C-9 arrive. Some may arrive out of order.
Related articles
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.
ARCHIVE RECORDThe lift programHow a one-way tether platform became a return-capable carrier: the phase coupler, the magnetised strip and the price paid to build the C-9.
ARCHIVE RECORDThe Asterion blackout (2217)At 03:17 station time all eleven lower relays go dark. The last packet carries six words in the voice of a man missing for three years.
ARCHIVE RECORDThe descent (2217–)The solo descent of the C-9: what the archive knows of Marek Venn’s route so far, sector by sector.