=Corse= 
Corse is a fresh gate discovery, still kept out of the media feeds. It is believed to be the farthest gate from Earth so far discovered, by an order of magnitude (the vast majority of remote gates have been within Orion’s Arm). Recent events here are of particular interest to Firewall, given a high likelihood of TITAN or alien activity.
||>   ||= **Corse** ||
||> **Type** ||= Tidally-Locked Rocky Jovian Moon ||
||> **Satelite of** ||= Himmelsk ||
||> **Primary Star** ||= A2V (White Main Sequence Dwarf) ||
||> **Gravity** ||= 0.01 g ||
||> **Diameter** ||= 520 km ||
||> **Atmospheric Pressure** ||= Negligible ||
||> **Atmospheric Composition** ||= Trace Water Vapor and Nitrogen ||
||> **Surface Temperature (Mean)** ||= 50 K ||
||> **Day Length** ||= 13 days ||
||> **Orbital Period** ||= 13 days ||
||> **Satellites** ||= None ||
||> **Gate Access** ||= [[Pandora Gate]] ||
==Mission Journal== 
**[Begin Recording]** This is the personal log of [erased]. In two hours, I step through to a new exoplanet. Based on prelim reports, this one looks fascinating. Let’s hope nothing goes horribly awry this time. I have enough gaps in my memory.
===Day 1=== 
I step through the gate, the new gravity tugs until I adjust, and then I look up—and stop. The pictures didn’t do this justice. That’s the galactic lens out there—the Milky Way galaxy, far as we can tell, but the astronomers are still plotting quasars to be sure. An ocean of stars lies before me.
We’re on the edge here, where stars thin out to total blackness. This is going to be interesting, even if this world doesn’t look much to write home about at first. Just a big icy rock, part of a thin, open ring system around a gas giant that happens to rise dramatically over the horizon a few minutes after I arrive. All well within the parameters of the accepted models. I’m here to manage some automated manufacturing facilities, which we can use to bootstrap an industrial base, and run up some robot probes and instruments to analyze the system.
Time to start work.
===Day 4=== 
The planetary survey team has come up with something. Something bad, almost certainly.
Turns out this place isn’t as bare as all that; they’ve found a bunch of structures about thirteen kilometers from the gate. Just local rock, cut and shaped to form some kind of structural complex, but obviously signiﬁcant. There’s also evidence of high-temperature effects in the vicinity of the structures. Even an amateur like me, looking at the survey drone images, can recognize the scars of a spaceship take-off or two when I see them.
First assessments of this stuff are very tentative, obviously; we’re an academic team, so we don’t leap to wild conclusions ahead of the evidence. But someone said that everything points to all this stuff being recent—within the last few years. (Makes sense. Things would obviously have blurred and ablated over longer periods.) In other words, these aren’t relics of an ancient space-faring race; they’re junk left behind by someone else who came through the gate just prior to us, presumably from our own solar system. In everyone’s minds, of course, this means TITANs.
Suddenly, this place looks deeply bloody scary, not just interesting. Now we’re all walking on eggshells. However, the astronomy team says that there’s no sign of activity that they can detect in local space. So maybe whomever (or whatever) it was have gone on to wherever they want to be, and we’re alone here. We can hope so, and nobody wants to scream and run for the gate until we have proof to the contrary—we’re all far too interested in the science. So we’re making snap evacuation plans but carrying on as before, for now.
===Day 7=== 
Interesting chat with Hans today about this whole system location. I commented over lunch that sitting at the edge of the galaxy makes for a wonderful view, but doesn’t really represent prime real estate in a civilization’s grand scheme of things. Star systems and worlds are sparse and spread thin, for a start. Not much in the way of heavy metals or resources.
“Maybe not,” he said, “but if you can make full use of things, it could be a useful sort of environment.” I asked him to explain.
“It’s thermodynamics,” he said. “Don’t think about how much crude energy you have in a system—think about the entropy. What really matters is information processing, isn’t it? Large computational structures running fast and reliably. We can still assume that, if you have enough processing power and some ability to inﬂuence the physical universe, you can work out how to get whatever you want, in material terms, by nudging things into place just right.”
“So you think that an advanced civilization would mostly just be a big mass of, what, the fabled computronium?” I asked.
“Who knows?” Hans smiled. “But I do think it would want big, powerful computers, using the smallest possible components. Computronium, yeah, if you insist. And for that sort of thing, heat is just noise. It’s a nuisance; it makes processing less reliable. Out here would be a great place to site your planetsized computers, away from the sort of starlight that’d warm you up too much. Away from gamma ray bursts and supernovas, too, for that matter. They mostly show up in the spiral arms, and presumably they’re trouble, even for an advanced civilization.” I asked if an “advanced civilization” wouldn’t put a stop to things like GRBs and supernovas, but Hans just said something about not getting into ﬁghts if you can walk away. And I pointed out the shortage of material resources in this area of the galaxy, but he just shrugged. “There’s some,” he said, “and in any case, you can always use gates, can’t you?”
He’s crazy, I reckon. But he’s an entertaining talker.
===Day 8=== 
Stellar Astronomy is getting tetchy. Their observations of the local star ﬁeld ﬁt the standard models less and less well the more that they look at them.
“Excessive entropy in the system,” one of them said. I suggested that they take another look at the theoretical models they use, and they basically threw me out of their ofﬁce.
We’ll have the ﬁrst probe units launched tomorrow. Be interesting to have a view of the ring system from another angle.
===Day 19=== 
Another synthetic anomaly in the neighborhood—and this one looks weirder than that TITAN launch complex or the subtle stuff that some of the departments have been waving around since then. One of the probes was positioned to pull an intercept on an asteroid that is passing through the ring system on what looks like a hyperbolic path; its spectra didn’t look like the dirty ice that makes up most of the rings (and this moon, for that matter), so we assumed that it was a sample local independent rock—maybe even nickel-iron, which should be relatively scarce in these parts—and decided to take a look. The intercept was fast and distant, but we’ve given those probes decent senses, and everybody involved sat around watching the data ﬂow and eventually the images. Those were ﬂagrantly interesting; the thing was somewhat regular, with a very smooth surface in places—not actually symmetrical, but I think that everyone that’s looked at it agrees that it’s probably artiﬁcial. The spectroscopic measurements would seem to support that; most of the exterior was something other than rock. The details are still hazy, but the metallurgy expert systems reckon that it’s some kind of complicated alloy. And there were other parts that we can’t analyze at all conﬁdently from this pass—too dark, not enough reﬂected energy. From the IR imagery, I’d guess that we’re looking at exposed technological systems.
So a lot of us were getting nervous and talking about TITANs again at this point, but Shelly from Xenology said that this didn’t ﬁt the pattern—as if there’s any sort of reliable pattern. Still, that calmed us down while a couple of high-magniﬁcation images came in, and somebody pointed out that the casing looked like it was scarred and dust-pitted, very heavily. Shelly insisted that the thing was old—centuries to millions of years, depending what sort of space environment it’s been passing through. Which makes it very interesting, but hardly likely to be a TITAN artifact. It’s very, very old junk.
Then someone pointed out the obvious thing we’d all forgotten; the lack of IR radiation. The thing is basically at local background temperature. Whatever it is and whoever built it, it must be stone cold dead now. Still, we need to know more. Once we have proper space capability, we’ll have to chase after it.
===Day 21=== 
Stellar Astronomy’s latest grouse is the local dust cloud—a big, dense thing within a parsec of this system. They say it’s much too massive. They reckon there must be some large bodies in there, though this is yet another thing that doesn’t ﬁt standard models. They’re assuming it’s just full of a bunch of rocks, of course—they’re only slightly excited. But I keep remembering something Hans said about screening large, highly advanced computronium systems from thermal interference. I’m beginning to think that the edge of the galaxy may be a cool place to be. Literally. Perhaps the bigger kids know that too.
===Day 32=== 
This is getting serious.
Astronomy’s automated sky-watchers threw up an alert earlier today; they’d picked up a moving IR trace, quite a strong one. We turned a couple of the probes to triangulate, and they conﬁrmed that it’s in this system, though some way off as yet. Just from the visuals, we guessed that we were getting an oblique view of a fusion drive ﬂare; spectroscopy conﬁrmed it. So we plotted the thing’s velocity and position and took some best guesses as to its previous course. Tracking back, we’re guessing that it started from this moon—from the gate—launched itself out towards the edge of the system and then very recently turned around and started heading back this way. It must’ve been running cold for a while, which is why we hadn’t spotted it. Now it’s decided to burn fuel and not care about being seen.
The word is that everyone who wants can evacuate at the ﬁrst opportunity, though there’s a call out for volunteers to stick around and continue observations. The trouble is, access to and through the gate is limited, so the evacuation is proceeding rather slowly. It didn’t help when the people on the other side used one spell of access to haul something through to here from there. A big package. Rumor says it’s a nuke, or maybe an antimatter bomb, which I guess makes sense. Still, no one’s panicking yet.
I tried to find Hans, to ask his opinion on the situation, but apparently he managed to arrange to be one of the ﬁrst people evacuated. He’s smart. There’s an idea I’d love to bounce off him. Every time I look at that fusion flame—that TITAN, let’s not mince words—and the trajectory plot that goes with it, I ﬁnd it harder to believe that it’s an irritated property owner, coming back to clean out the pests in its yard. Does it even know that we’re here, I wonder? Does it care right now?
Because to me, it looks like it’s running away from something. Running for its life.

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