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Mandate Cartographic Authority · Survey Vol. 7, Appendix C

A TRAVELLER'S GUIDE TO THE TENZIG SECTOR

Being the Partially-Recovered Contents of Mandate Cartographic Authority Survey Volume 7, Appendix C: Practical Travel Information for Commercial and Civilian Vessel Operators, Annotated and Substantially Updated by the Crew of a Vessel We Are Not Currently Naming for Operational Reasons

A NOTE ON DATA INTEGRITY

The following guide was compiled from pre-Scream survey data, post-Scream field reports, and the kind of hard-won personal experience that comes from having been shot at, swindled, quarantined, and briefly impounded across seven systems in the Tenzig Sector. We have done our best.

The Mandate has been dead for six hundred years. Its survey data covers the stars, the atmospheres, the orbital mechanics — things that don't change much over six centuries. Everything else — the politics, the institutions, the people, the prices — is ours. The Mandate never knew about the Aquilanes Union, or the Great Archive, or the Shadowmen. None of those things existed yet when the Mandate was writing. Reading a pre-Scream travel guide for the current Reach would be like navigating a city using a map of the farmland it was built on: the rivers are in the right places, and almost nothing else is.

Where Mandate survey data is included, it is labeled. Everything else is crew observation, reader submission, or things we heard and could not verify. Trust the crew notes. Treat the Mandate data as archaeology. Treat the reader submissions as what they are: strangers on the internet.

Where data has been corrupted beyond recovery, we have left the corruption in. This is not an aesthetic choice.

HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

This guide is organized by system. Each entry leads with current conditions. Where pre-Scream survey data exists and is relevant, it is included with appropriate caveats about its age.

Reliability key:

PART ONE: GETTING THERE

On the Art of Interstellar Travel

Before the Scream, getting around the Reach was a matter of booking passage on a reliable liner service, filing a flight plan with the Mandate Transit Authority, and sitting back with a complimentary beverage while a choir of synchronized elite teleporters hurled the spacecraft hundreds of light years in the blink of an eye. Terminals ran on time. Arrivals were predictable. Insurance was affordable.

This is no longer the case.

Modern travel in the Tenzig Sector involves a spike drive, a lot of hope, and a navigator who either knows what they're doing or claims to. The in-system transit time depends on your drive rating and how much you trust the math. The in-drill experience involves roughly a week in a pocket of hyperdimensional space while your crew does increasingly creative things to stay entertained. Standard advice: bring books. Bring food you actually want to eat. Do not, under any circumstances, run out of either.

READER SUBMISSION — handle: CorvusMagnoliaFlight Bring something to fix. I once spent a six-day spike jump rewiring our secondary coolant manifold for no reason except that it gave me something to do. When we arrived I had successfully rewired it in the wrong order and it took three more days to fix the original problem. But those were three busy days at dock and I emerged from the experience a better person and a marginally better engineer.

CUSTOMS AND DOCUMENTATION

The Aquilanes Union — the governing body for most of this sector, founded in the early post-Scream period and still going despite the odds — maintains customs inspection at major ports throughout its jurisdiction. Customs officials vary enormously by system. Tabet inspectors are thorough and professionally indifferent. Campera inspectors have a reputation for being thorough in proportion to what you appear to be carrying. Rado inspectors are understaffed and will tell you so at length if you ask, and at some length if you don't.

What counts as contraband varies. Weapons are mostly fine. Unregistered weapons are mostly fine if you look like you can handle them without shooting yourself or the inspector. Maltech is absolutely not fine. The Perimeter Agency - Cerberus Corps takes this seriously in a way that most organizations do not, and "I didn't know" is not a defense they have been observed to accept.

Psionics are legal in Aquilanes space. Psionics that have been obtained through coercive means are not. The distinction between these two categories is a matter of active legal debate on several worlds, which is a polite way of saying that some things are technically legal that are morally indefensible and that the legal framework is catching up more slowly than the people with something to hide would prefer.

FIELD NOTE We have been asked about our VI crew member exactly twice at customs. The first time the inspector wanted to know his drive cert. The second time she wanted to know if he had an opinion about the import tariff situation on Campera. He did. She wrote it down. We were waved through. Your mileage may vary.

PART TWO: THE SYSTEMS

THE PEROPE SYSTEM

MANDATE Perope primary: Class K subgiant with anomalously elevated novium output. Navigational hazard classification: SEVERE. Do not transit within 2.4 AU of the primary without Class-III radiation shielding or equivalent. Unshielded approach within 1.8 AU: lethal exposure within 6 standard hours. Unshielded approach within 1.2 AU: lethal within 40 minutes. No exceptions. This is not a conservative estimate.

MANDATE The Perope system contains two rocky bodies within the habitable band, designated Perope-III and Perope-IV. Perope-III: breathable atmosphere, variable climate, human-miscible biosphere, population approximately 12 million. Perope-IV: thin inert atmosphere, uninhabited.

FIELD NOTE The Mandate's stellar hazard classification holds perfectly. Six hundred years has not mellowed Perope's temperament. "Lethal within 40 minutes" was accurate then and is accurate now and we can confirm this personally, in the sense that we have the hull scans to prove it.

Perope-III is now called Tabet and has billions of people on it. The population figure in the Mandate survey is off by a factor of roughly a hundred, which tells you something about what six hundred years of post-Scream recovery can accomplish given decent conditions and motivated survivors.

The Perope system contains two inhabited bodies of note: Avire (a refueling station built in the shadow transit corridor, post-Scream) and Tabet (the planet, further in, more interesting, harder to get to).

AVIRE REFUELING STATION

Avire is a post-Scream installation — there was nothing at this orbital position when the Mandate surveyed the system. It was built specifically to service the corridor traffic once the Shadowmen established that the transit was possible and people started attempting it.

It provides refined and unrefined fuel, basic hull repair, and short-term berthing for vessels in transit. Capacity: more than it was built for, less than current demand requires. Average turnaround: however long it takes.

FIELD NOTE Avire is where you meet the Shadowmen. This is unavoidable. If you want to go to Tabet, you need an escort, and the Perope Escort and Salvage Cooperative provides the only licensed escorts in the system. Their tugs run with liquid-hydrogen inflatable shields that they deploy around your vessel like a weird, expensive, genuinely life-saving balloon. Without them you will die. With them you will be fine and also out a substantial sum of credits.

THE SHADOWMEN — A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO NOT ANNOYING THEM

The Perope Escort and Salvage Cooperative is a post-Scream institution, started by the families who first figured out the transit geometry and built the first shielded tugs. It has been called the Shadowmen since approximately the second generation of their existence. They do not call themselves this officially. They use the name among themselves with the unselfconscious comfort of people who have owned a nickname for so long they've forgotten it started as someone else's joke.

They are working-class, technically expert, constitutionally blunt, and collectively in possession of more operational knowledge about this system than any other living organization in the sector. Do not pretend to know more than them. Do not ask whether the escort is "really necessary." Do not suggest that a faster route might exist. One does not exist. Several people have discovered this permanently.

Things the Shadowmen will do:

Things the Shadowmen will not do:

READER SUBMISSION — handle: transit_jockey_seven Asked one of the old escort pilots about the big dark cylinder in the shadow. He looked at me for a while. Then he said, "What cylinder?" and walked away. I could see the cylinder from where we were standing. There is something going on with that ship and the Shadowmen know what it is and they are not telling.

FIELD NOTE They are not not-telling because they're hiding anything. They are not-telling because what they know lives in old pilots' logbooks and margin notes and things their parents said that they didn't take seriously at the time, and putting it into words would require acknowledging that some of those things are true. Marek Solva has been flying this system for forty years. Ask him about the derelict if you want to watch a careful man choose his words very carefully.

TABET

(Perope system — Perope-III)

MANDATE Perope-III: breathable atmosphere, variable climate, human-miscible biosphere, estimated population 12 million, TL3. Primary settlement: coastal lowland concentrated around natural harbor formations. No significant pretech installations. Export: agricultural products, raw materials. Mandate classification: frontier habitation zone.

FIELD NOTE The Mandate surveyed Tabet when it had twelve million people and called it a frontier habitation zone. It now has billions of people and is one of the significant cultural centers in the sector. This is either a remarkable story of post-Scream recovery or proof that the Mandate's survey teams needed to look harder, and probably both.

Tabet is a genuinely good place to stop. It has food, culture, doctors, and — if you know where to look — a surprisingly functional black market. The radiation from Perope makes some things technically illegal that are practically necessary, and the locals have developed an efficient ecosystem for managing this tension.

WHAT TO DO ON TABET

The cultural offerings are real. This is not a planet pretending to have culture while actually having strip-malls. Tabet produced Quintus the Younger (philosopher), Lucia Calidius (composer and hyper-cellist — if you have the opportunity to attend a performance, attend the performance), and Dr. Mettius, the essayist and social critic whose collected works run to seventeen volumes and whose opinions on the Aquilanes Union's trade policy are characteristically wrong about the specifics and characteristically right about the underlying problem.

Appius Faust deserves a separate mention. He is a performance artist and provocateur whose work has become, in recent years, increasingly dangerous in ways that are partly intentional and partly the result of him genuinely not knowing when to stop. His installation Boundary Conditions was shut down by Aquilanes authorities after three days. His follow-up piece Boundary Conditions (Unlicensed) ran for a month in an abandoned warehouse district before the authorities found it. His current project is classified, or at least he's calling it that.

If you see him at a bar, buy him a drink. He knows everyone and he owes favors in every direction and he is surprisingly useful in a crisis if you can tolerate that he will definitely write a piece about it afterward.

ON THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY

Professor Ulfric Lucinius, Distinguished Order of Celestariums, has spent thirty years studying Perope's novium output and has recently published a paper suggesting that novium radiation, properly harnessed, may be applicable to the manufacture of new psi-tech. His institution has received approximately fourteen death threats since publication, which he considers a sign he is onto something.

READER SUBMISSION — handle: academicwanderer I attended one of Lucinius's lectures. He is the kind of academic who shows you twelve slides of data before telling you what point he is making. The point, when it arrived, was genuinely interesting. The twelve slides were genuinely not. Both things are true.

A NOTE ON THE KASIMIROS SOCIETY

The Kasimiros Society — a post-Scream organization, no Mandate record — has a base of operations on Tabet. They distribute suppressed records: historical, political, scientific, anything that power structures have attempted to bury. They do this methodically, without drama, and at personal risk, and they have been doing it long enough that the authorities who have tried to suppress them have twice been replaced by new authorities who were installed partly because of what the Kasimiros Society published about the old ones.

The Cerberus Corps keeps an eye on them, officially because of concerns about destabilizing sensitive information, and unofficially because some of what they've published in the past has given certain sector powers serious institutional heartburn.

FIELD NOTE They are not dramatic about being heroic. This is, in our experience, what actual heroism looks like. If you have information that should not be buried, they are worth knowing.

THE META-STOICS

Tabetian philosophy is dominated currently by the meta-Stoic school, which has modified classical Stoicism in ways that classical Stoics would find either a natural evolution or a complete betrayal, depending on which classical Stoic you ask. The core proposition is that the Scream was not a tragedy to be mourned but a condition to be accepted as the baseline from which new philosophy must build. This is either admirable or bleak and most Tabetians think it is both and consider that appropriate.

Do not start a meta-Stoic argument at a bar if you have somewhere to be. You will not have somewhere to be for a while.

THE DERELICT: A SUBJECT WE ARE TREATING WITH APPROPRIATE CAUTION

MANDATE Survey note, Perope-III shadow: colony ship PCA-Horizon-7, co-axial cylinder design, approximately 900m length, in established elliptical orbit using planetary shadow for stellar radiation protection. Status at survey: operational. Population aboard: [CORRUPTED]. Classification: active colonial installation. Do not approach without authorization from Mandate Colonial Authority.

FIELD NOTE The Mandate surveyed this ship when it was a functioning colony vessel with, presumably, a functioning population. The Mandate Colonial Authority it told people to contact has not existed for six hundred years. The ship is still there. "Operational" is no longer the right word. The current situation is — complicated, and we are not going to uncomplicat it here.

What we will say is this: the Shadowmen's unease around this ship has been accumulating for six generations and is not nothing. And the Mandate's survey, which found it fully staffed, raises questions about what happened to those people that the intervening six centuries have not entirely answered.

UNVERIFIED An Eurymem expedition, eight years ago, went to that ship. They have not been heard from since. Eurymem denies having sent an expedition. The Shadowmen escort logs from that period have a gap.

LYCOS / THE GREAT ARCHIVE

(Rado System, coords 0303)

MANDATE Rado system, primary body designated Rado-II (local name: Lycos): breathable atmosphere, temperate climate, human-miscible biosphere, population approximately 80 million (pre-Scream survey), TL4. Significant Mandate administrative presence. Secondary installations throughout system.

FIELD NOTE What the Mandate survey records is a mid-tier administrative planet with a Mandate presence that no longer exists. What Lycos actually is now, six hundred years later, is the site of the Great Archive — the most significant surviving repository of pre-Scream knowledge in the sector, and probably one of the most significant in the accessible galaxy. It was founded in the immediate post-Scream period by a coalition of scholars who had the presence of mind to consolidate surviving records before they could be lost or destroyed. The Mandate didn't build it. The Mandate's collapse is what made it necessary.

Walking into the reading rooms for the first time produces a feeling that is difficult to describe without reaching for words like "weight" and "responsibility" — you are in the presence of six centuries of people choosing to remember things that would otherwise be forgotten, and it shows. The building has been expanded seven times and looks it: a history of architectural emergencies rendered in stone and steel, each addition built by people who needed more room and couldn't wait for a plan.

THE NANOFABBERS

The Archive houses and maintains a set of Nanofabbers — pre-Scream fabrication technology capable of producing a remarkable range of goods at a fraction of the cost and time of conventional manufacturing. They are operational. They have been kept operational, against the odds, through six centuries of component scavenging, creative engineering, and the meticulous documentation protocols of the Stewards of the Grails, a quasi-monastic order devoted to keeping these machines running.

MANDATE Note to survey teams: Nanofabbers are TL5 pretech assets of exceptional strategic value. Any facility discovered to be housing operational Nanofabbers must be reported immediately to the Mandate Preservation Authority, Registry Branch. Unauthorized operation of recovered Nanofabbers is prohibited under Mandate Code 7712.

FIELD NOTE The Mandate Preservation Authority and its Registry Branch are no longer accepting reports. The Stewards of the Grails are doing the preservation work in their absence and are doing it better than the Registry Branch ever did, based on the Registry Branch's track record in other areas. The Nanofabbers are in good hands. The Mandate would have found this reassuring if it still existed to be reassured.

The Nanofabbers are not unlimited. What they can produce depends on what fabrication instructions they have loaded, and many of those instructions were lost in the Scream or survive only in encrypted and corrupted Archive indices. Scholars believe that a decryption key may exist in the ruins of the 908 Porth asteroid belt. Whether this is true, and whether the key has survived six centuries of asteroid-belt conditions, is a subject of ongoing debate and occasional expedition.

READER SUBMISSION — handle: archivistguildwatch The Archive maintains a policy of open access. In practice "open access" means "access that has been processed through a request system maintained by people who are very enthusiastic about process." I submitted a request for a specific pre-Scream engineering document. I was told my request was being reviewed. That was eleven months ago. I am told this is fast.

THE SPIRIT LIBERATION FRONT

The Spirit Liberation Front — post-Scream, no Mandate record — opposes reliance on the Nanofabbers. Their position is that humanity's dependence on pretech it cannot replace or understand is a spiritual and practical weakness that the Scream has already exposed once. They advocate, at minimum, for developing independent production capacity before the fabbers fail and, at maximum, for destroying the fabbers now to force the issue.

The second position is a minority view within the organization and is treated by the majority as something between an internal embarrassment and a genuine ideological risk.

FIELD NOTE They have a point about dependency. Their proposed solution is a matter of vigorous ongoing debate. We do not have a position. We do note that "destroy the thing you need" and "develop alternatives to the thing you need" are both responses to the same problem and only one of them leaves you with the thing you need while you develop the alternative.

THE ARCHIVISTS

Individual Archivists — the Scholar-Adepts who have devoted their careers to the Great Archive — are among the most useful people you can meet in the sector, and also among the most complicated. They differ enormously on the question of how knowledge should be distributed: some believe the Archive exists to share knowledge as broadly as possible; others believe certain records should be restricted; a small faction believes some knowledge should be guarded indefinitely.

Danesh Ashari is the Archivist most likely to be useful to travelers. He is a field scholar who believes strongly in sharing what the Archive knows and goes to considerable lengths to extend that knowledge practically rather than theoretically. He is also, depending on who you ask, either a heroic democratizer of knowledge or dangerously naive about what he's handing to whom.

UNVERIFIED Whether Ashari can be trusted is something we have thought about and not resolved. We are leaving this note in because the question is worth asking.

CAMPERA / EURYMEM

(coords 0206)

MANDATE Campera system, primary body designated Campera-II: breathable atmosphere, arid climate, human-miscible biosphere, population approximately 4 million (pre-Scream survey), TL3. Mandate classification: resource extraction colony. Notable: extensive mineral deposits in the primary planet's crust and in the Campera belt. Pre-Scream industrial survey recommends evaluation for large-scale manufacturing development.

FIELD NOTE The Mandate's survey correctly identified Campera-II's potential and then the Scream happened and the Mandate didn't get to do anything about it. What did get done about it, over the six centuries since, is the Shipyards of Eurymem — the sector's preeminent capital ship construction facility, built from the ground up by post-Scream survivors who had the industrial raw materials the Mandate had flagged and the desperation to use them. The Mandate would probably be pleased. They would also want to regulate it, which is no longer possible, which is possibly why it works.

The Shipyards of Eurymem dominate the Campera system economically and politically. They are the sector's largest capital ship manufacturer and they know it and they act accordingly.

FIELD NOTE We have spent time in Eurymem. The Shipyards are impressive in person. The institutional culture is — professional. Very professional. The kind of professional that has been professionally managed for a very long time by people who are very invested in professionalism. The administrative codes go back a long way. We noticed this.

EURYMEM AND HYPSILA — THE RIVALRY

Hypsila (Diveso system, 0406) is a rising industrial power with ambitions that are in direct competition with Eurymem's established position. Both are post-Scream institutions; the rivalry is their own, not inherited. Both parties engage in what diplomats call "active intelligence operations" and what everyone else calls spying. Both parties deny this with equal conviction and equal inaccuracy.

From a traveler's perspective: if you are doing business with one, be careful about being seen to do business with the other. The sector is large enough that word usually travels slowly, and "usually" is doing work in that sentence.

READER SUBMISSION — handle: shipwright_delta I tried to get hull plating from Eurymem and supply contracts from Hypsila in the same quarter. I want to make it clear that I did not understand the depth of the feeling involved. I understand it now. I have hull plating from neither.

CANTHO

(Savris system, coords 0402)

MANDATE Savris system, primary body designated Savris-IV (local name: Cantho): inert atmosphere, temperate climate, human-miscible biosphere, population approximately 800,000 (pre-Scream survey), TL3. Mandate classification: developing colony, primary resource: agricultural. Notable moon: Telyx-7, habitation potential under evaluation.

FIELD NOTE The Mandate surveyed Cantho as an agricultural colony of eight hundred thousand people with a breathable moon they were thinking about. What Cantho is now — several million people, TL4+, and the most suspiciously efficient economy in the sector — is entirely a post-Scream development. The Mandate would not recognize the place. Honestly, looking at it, we're not entirely sure we recognize it either, and we've been there.

The Central Planning Commission of Cantho is, by any measurable standard, extraordinarily efficient. Its resource allocation, production scheduling, and distribution logistics operate with a precision that conventional economic modeling suggests should not be possible. The question of how it achieves this is a matter of active speculation throughout the sector.

The three leading theories are: an unbraked AI at the core of the planning infrastructure; precognitive psions embedded in the analytical division; or an alien hive-mind that the Commission is either cultivating or being cultivated by. Each of these theories is supported by some evidence. None has been confirmed, because the Commission does not permit the kind of external audit that would confirm or deny them.

The second theory gains support from Cantho's celebrated Psionic Reverence cultural tradition, which holds psionically gifted citizens in high social regard, creates extensive public programs for their education and support, and — according to critics — has been specifically designed to attract gifted individuals to Cantho, after which they tend to remain.

READER SUBMISSION — handle: anon_transit_7 I have a cousin who moved to Cantho for the Psionic Reverence programs. She is doing very well. She seems happy. She has mentioned several times that she is happy. She has not answered some questions that I would normally expect her to answer. She says she is busy. She is probably just busy.

READER SUBMISSION — handle: covert_watch_r Do not send your psion friends to Cantho. I cannot provide details. Trust me on this one.

UNVERIFIED The worship is the lure. This rumor has been circulating for long enough that it's almost certainly true, somewhat true, or started by Cantho's political enemies. We include it because you should know that it exists.

YAKIYAH

(Daphne system, coords 0605)

MANDATE Daphne system, primary body designated Daphne-II (local name: Yakiyah): thin breathable atmosphere, arid climate, human-miscible biosphere, population approximately 200,000 (pre-Scream survey), TL2. Mandate classification: resource extraction outpost. No significant cultural or industrial development at time of survey.

FIELD NOTE The Mandate surveyed Yakiyah as a two-hundred-thousand-person resource outpost at TL2. The Scream happened, six centuries passed, and Yakiyah is now the headquarters of the New Dawn League — a major industrial and military manufacturing concern whose leader holds the title Primarch-Exactor, which tells you almost everything you need to know about how the NDL structures itself internally. It is organized along quasi-theocratic lines: ranks, titles, a fierce institutional mission that the leadership has explicitly framed in terms that sound like religious conviction. This is effective as a management tool. It is also, for an observer, somewhat unnerving.

The NDL maintains facilities throughout the sector and has active commercial relationships with many of the major powers. They sell military equipment. They are good at it. The research side of their operations is — according to rumor — somewhat broader than the commercial portfolio suggests.

UNVERIFIED There are rumors about Yakiyah that we are not publishing at this time. If the Cerberus Corps is reading this, which they probably are: you should look harder at Yakiyah. That's all we're saying.

PART THREE: THE POWERS THAT BE

The Mandate knew none of these organizations. They were all born in the aftermath of the Scream. We are not implying this is the Scream's fault, but we are noting it.

THE AQUILANES UNION

The Aquilanes Union is the governing body for most of the Tenzig Sector — a democratic parliamentary structure with significant representation for industrial and commercial interests, headquartered on Campera, covering principal worlds including Perope, Rado, and Campera. It was founded in the post-Scream period and has been running, with varying degrees of success, ever since.

It is a democracy in the way that most large democracies are democracies: the formal mechanisms are real, the outcomes are significantly shaped by who has money, and the gap between those two facts is where most of the sector's politics lives.

FIELD NOTE As governments go, it is not the worst. It enforces contracts, maintains shipping lanes, and has a functional legal system in which outcomes are not guaranteed but are at least predictable. This is more than many governing bodies manage. The best thing we can say about it is that it has not collapsed, and in the post-Scream sector that is genuine praise.

THE PERIMETER AGENCY (CERBERUS CORPS)

MANDATE The Perimeter Agency, operating under Mandate Security Council Authorization 9921-ALPHA, is responsible for identifying and suppressing maltech threats throughout Mandate jurisdiction. Mandate Authorization 9921-ALPHA: the Perimeter Agency's operating forces (Cerberus designation) are authorized to use lethal force against confirmed maltech users without trial. This authorization does not expire.

FIELD NOTE The Mandate Security Council is no longer operational. The Perimeter Agency — now operating under the name Cerberus Corps — still is. At some point in the post-Scream period, six centuries of continuous institutional consensus decided that the job doesn't stop because the authority that created it is gone. Whether this is admirable institutional continuity or an armed organization operating without accountability to any living governing body is a question that the Cerberus Corps considers already answered and that some legal scholars consider not yet answered at all.

What is not in question: maltech is real, maltech is dangerous, and someone needs to deal with it. The Cerberus Corps deals with it. They are currently moving toward Perope. We are noting this without further comment.

THE KASIMIROS SOCIETY

Founded in the post-Scream period on the principle that suppressed knowledge belongs to everyone. Operates primarily through information distribution — historical records, political documents, scientific findings that various powers have tried to bury.

FIELD NOTE They are careful about what they release and when. They are not reckless. They do not publish things simply because they can. They ask whether publishing serves the people the information concerns, and whether it serves the people who will receive it, and they have considered answers to both questions before acting. This makes them more effective and considerably more trusted than organizations that operate on drama alone. If you have information that should not be buried, they are worth knowing.

WINDMILL FARMS

Windmill Farms is a psionic research and development concern operating in the Daphne cluster. Their official materials describe "cultivation, placement, and development programs" for psionically gifted individuals.

FIELD NOTE Windmill Farms runs corporate psychic exploitation. We are using that phrase deliberately. The legal framework for "cultivation" and "placement" is, depending on where you are, somewhere between "deeply compromised" and "an active ongoing scandal." If you know anyone with psionic ability who is considering a Windmill Farms training opportunity: they should not. That is our complete position on Windmill Farms.

READER SUBMISSION — handle: Cohort_5_survivor They gave us numbers instead of names. I still know my number. I won't say it here. That's enough.

PART FOUR: PERSONS OF INTEREST

The following individuals have been vouched for, encountered, or heard about with enough consistency to be worth noting.

Alvorez "Redeye" — Bartender, current location: ask around Tabet dock district.

FIELD NOTE Cybernetic eyes. Dim red glow. Gruff. Will not tell you anything unless you pay for it and sometimes not even then. Knows everything worth knowing in a three-system radius. Worth the price of the bribe. Do not attempt to get information for free. He knows you're trying and he finds it boring.

Capitán Javier Suerte Varrin — Smuggler, gambler, and operator of a vessel that does not officially exist.

FIELD NOTE Runs stolen ship parts, fake transponder codes, and contraband we have elected not to enumerate here. Debts stacked high. Luck somehow holds. Has a southern drawl that nobody we have spoken to can explain and that he himself, when asked, becomes unusually vague about. Useful in a crisis. Expensive in a crisis. Both of these things are related.

"Look, compadre, I ain't fixin' for no trouble. I'm just an honest businessman."

Javier has said this to us twice. Both times it was a prelude to significant trouble.

Padre Esteban "El Predicador" Torres — Information broker, black market fixer, and wearer of a priest's robe that has seen better decades.

FIELD NOTE Sells guns, black-market cyberware, and knowledge that other people have tried to make inaccessible. His manner is theatrical and his information is reliable, which makes him more useful than most people who are theatrical. He loves a dramatic pause. Give him the pause. The information on the other side of it is generally worth waiting for.

Aries — Metapsion, no fixed address.

FIELD NOTE Operates an underground network for psychics trying to get out of situations that have been legally arranged to make getting out impossible. Quiet about it. Effective about it. If you can help: help.

Teller Graks — Former navigator, current philosophical position: uncertain.

FIELD NOTE Used to chart jump routes. Has the knowledge. Doesn't have the sobriety. If you can find him in the window when the knowledge is accessible and the sobriety is sufficient, the routes he knows are genuinely useful and may include some that nobody currently licensed has filed.

READER SUBMISSION — handle: transit_jockey_seven I found him. I got the route. I am still not sure it was worth the conversation I had to have to get it. He started talking about the nature of time during a spike jump and he was either having a genuine mystical experience or a very poor reaction to something he'd taken and I don't know which.

Danesh Ashari — Archivist, Great Archive of Lycos. Scholar with opinions.

FIELD NOTE He believes the Archive exists to give people things they can use, not to sit on them. This puts him in productive tension with most of his colleagues. He will help you if the help serves the mission and he is generous in his interpretation of what serves the mission. He also has strong opinions about Eurymem that he does not express publicly and that you can elicit if you buy him dinner and seem trustworthy.

PART FIVE: PRACTICAL MATTERS

ON DRUGS

The Reach sector has developed a pharmaceutical ecosystem commensurate with six centuries of post-Scream coping.

Bruma Azul (Blue Mist) — Hallucinogenic depressant, inhaled. Creates hyper-realistic auditory hallucinations and time-dilation effects. Used by artists, psions, and people with very specific problems they cannot address by conventional means. Synthesized from the venom of a deep-space leviathan that feeds near neutron stars. Street price: 750 credits per inhaler. Long-term use leads to Echo Syndrome, in which past hallucinations begin to bleed into present reality in ways that are poetically interesting and practically terrible.

FIELD NOTE We are not endorsing this. We are providing information. Use your judgment.

The Aquilanes Union legal system applies throughout member worlds. Contract law is functional. Personal liberty protections exist and are enforced with varying consistency depending on which world you are on and whether you have resources to pursue them.

Psionics: legal. See above for nuances.

Maltech: emphatically illegal. The Cerberus Corps does not use a sliding scale. Their mandate — technically six hundred years old and currently answering to no one — authorizes lethal force without trial. They treat this as still operative. Proceed accordingly.

Indenture accords: technically legal in some jurisdictions. The New Dawn League operates under something called Indenture Accord 44-C that is currently being reviewed by the Aquilanes legal council. "Currently being reviewed" is another phrase that is doing significant work.

ON MEDICAL MATTERS

TL4 medicine is available on most inhabited worlds. Good TL4 medicine requires a doctor who knows what they're doing and ideally a facility with proper diagnostic equipment.

REDACTED - CREW EDITORIAL DECISION

ON FOOD

Tabet: excellent. The culinary tradition tracks the philosophical one — elaborate, considered, willing to sit with complexity longer than most food would prefer.

Campera/Eurymem: functional. Industrial. The dockers have discovered what dock workers everywhere discover, which is that the best food is near the ports and costs very little and involves more protein than the upscale restaurants want to acknowledge.

Avire station: we are calling it food in the same way we call a spike drive a ship. It meets the technical definition.

READER SUBMISSION — handle: CorvusMagnoliaFlight I had a meal in Tabet's lower cultural district that I am still thinking about. I cannot explain why. Nothing exceptional happened. A woman played the hyper-cello in the corner. Someone at the next table was crying, but politely, and nobody commented on it. The food was very good. I left a good tip and walked for an hour afterward. I'm including this because I think it's representative of what Tabet actually is.

APPENDIX: THINGS WE HEARD THAT WE CANNOT CONFIRM

The following rumors have been collected from ports, guild halls, bars, and one memorable conversation in a corridor on a station we are not naming. Reliability: variable. We include them because someone should have a record.

This guide is a living document. Additions, corrections, and reader submissions are welcome. The editors reserve the right to hold some things back.

— The crew of a vessel we are not currently naming, Reach Sector, 3201