Imported from world/faction4-lore/story/. The omnibus prose for this chapter lives in world/faction4-lore/books/.

This document maps the full middle-installment structure of Book One: where Janus goes, what Ana is doing in parallel, where the two arcs converge, what they do together, and what triggers the return.

Status: Structural outline. Scenes and scene files to follow. This supersedes the placeholder notes in arc-janus.md and arc-ana.md for Phase 4.

Overview — The Shape of the Chase¶

Book One's middle section is a compression chase across five locations in a specific order. Each location serves a distinct narrative function. The chase is not just geography — it is the progressive stripping away of Janus's isolation and Ana's self-sufficiency, until the only option left is to do the one thing neither of them was willing to do when they started: go back.

The location sequence:

INSTALLMENT     LOCATION                  PRIMARY ARC           INTEGRATION
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Anchor          Inner-world fringe        Janus: megacity,      Ana: already
                megacity (outer ring)     first dead-drop       gone two weeks
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Installment 4   Meridian Hub              Janus: closes gap     Ana: waiting /
  "Transit"     (mid-system)              one week behind       moving again
                                          Cinder-7 survivors    Kirk thread
                                          first appearance
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Installment 5   Caelindra Prime           Janus: wrong move,    Ana: already
  "The Tessera" (inner worlds, Guild)     goes deep to find     departed; left
                                          Ana; finds Syndra     Syndra a note
                                          instead               Seren's thread
                                          Nanotracker revealed  plants here
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Installment 6   The Rust Alliance         Janus + Ana:          Gelon/Yamar
  "Deeptown"    fringe (Korrath IV        convergence           arrive via
                or adjacent station)     they find each other   Seren
                                          Mirai finds them too
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Return          Hephaistos-9              Full convergence      All arcs

Installment 4 — Transit¶

Setting: Meridian Hub, The Compact Floor and the Warrens¶

The mid-system hub is the first place Janus encounters the full political texture of the system. The Guild, Vanguard, and the Alliance all operate here under the informal convention that nobody conducts operations against each other on-station. This convention means Janus is theoretically safe. It also means every party that is looking for him is also here, and the same convention applies to them.

What Janus is doing¶

He arrives using the Allianz contact card — the sealed cipher card that Davan Ore pressed into his hand at disembarkation. It opens a door at Meridian Hub's lower commercial level: a transit berth, a contact name, a Fabric node access point. This is the Allianz's informal infrastructure for people who need to move through the system without official transit records.

He follows Ana's dead-drop chain to its second node: a Continuance operator in the Transit Warrens — Cassia Ore. She has a message. Not a physical dead-drop this time, a cipher-text message pre-loaded into the Fabric node, time-locked to release after seventy days. It is past the seventy days. The message is waiting.

The message tells him she was here. It tells him she is moving to a contact in the inner worlds — someone in the Guild administrative tier who owes her a debt she cannot explain in plain language. It tells him she did not think he was coming. It ends with a coordinate: a Guild administrative building in Caelindra Prime's outer Tessera fringe.

He is now eight days behind her. Not one week — eight days.

The Cinder-7 Survivors appear here for the first time in the flesh.

Mirai and her two operatives enter the Hub approximately twelve hours after Janus. They are using Vanguard enforcement credentials to access the transit manifest system — tracking his Allianz card registration. They are efficient. Janus does not know they are here.

The reader sees them. Janus does not.

The Kirk thread: In the Hub, Janus makes one inquiry about the black ship — just the transponder profile, nothing that should surface, through a low-level Fabric node that shouldn't be monitored. It surfaces. The headhunter android, which has been following him since the megacity, relays the query to whoever controls it. Janus does not know the inquiry surfaced. The reader may suspect.

What Janus does find: a reference in Vanguard's outer ring incident database — accessible through the TAP-7 with some effort — to a vessel matching the black ship's profile operating in deniable contractor channels. The contractor chain leads to a dead end, then to a name he does not recognise, then to a cipher designation he recognises as Whisper-adjacent from a Corps briefing three years ago. He closes it. He files it. He does not act on it yet.

Janus at Transit end: Heading for Caelindra Prime. Eight days behind Ana. With the Cinder-7 survivors twelve hours behind him. With an android he does not know about two blocks away.

What Ana is doing during Transit¶

She left Meridian Hub eleven days before Janus arrives. She is in Caelindra Prime by the time he reaches the Hub.

She is not comfortable in Caelindra. The inner worlds are where she grew up — she is familiar with them in the way that makes the specific quality of their control visible rather than invisible. She can navigate the Guild's social infrastructure perfectly and she hates that she can.

Her contact in the Guild administrative tier is a mid-level archivist in the External Affairs records division who owes her a favour from three years ago — a data transaction that she managed cleanly and he could not have. She is calling it in. What she needs: a secure space, a non-Praxis data terminal, and enough time to model what she has. She believes she can run the secondary analysis without the missing parameter. She is wrong, but she does not know that yet.

Installment 5 — The Tessera¶

Setting: Caelindra Prime, Guild capital¶

This is the installment where the story goes to the most dangerous place it has been: the heart of the institution that sent the kill team.

Janus has never been to Caelindra Prime. He is a maintenance technician from the outer ring. He is conspicuous here in the specific way of someone whose body language was calibrated for industrial environments and has not recalibrated for spaces where every movement is read. He is carrying a data module that is worth a kill team. He is wearing a Vanguard Corps modification scar on his wrist from a gear failure at Cinder-7 that he has never had treated. Caelindra Prime is not where people like Janus go.

He goes anyway. Eight days behind Ana. Using the coordinate she left.

What Janus finds at the coordinate¶

Ana is not there. She left three days ago.

What she left behind: the archivist contact, who is frightened and evasive and eventually tells Janus — under pressure that Janus applies with the specific patience of someone who has been in worse situations than this conversation — that Ana was here, that she ran a secondary analysis on a data set he was not allowed to look at, and that on the third day she received a message and left within the hour.

Who sent the message: unknown. The archivist does not know. He does not want to know. He wants Janus to leave.

What the message contained: Ana decoded enough of it to understand that someone in the Guild's upper tier knows she is in Caelindra. Not Praxis — Guild. Someone with Pure-tier access and External Affairs clearance. She does not know how. She ran.

The Nanotracker Reveal¶

In Caelindra Prime, using the Hub's Fabric node to navigate, the TAP-7 produces an anomaly reading. Janus notices it because he is a maintenance technician who reads instrument anomalies the way other people read faces: as information, not noise.

He traces it. He finds it.

0.4 millimetres. Base of his neck. He has been tracked since the hangar.

Everything since the hangar. The megacity. The Hub. Every Fabric node. Every dead-drop address. Every contact. The android has them all. And if the android has them — Janus does the arithmetic in the specific cold way of someone who spent four years in intelligence operations — whoever controls the android knows where Ana is. They have been watching him follow her chain. And they haven't acted.

Why haven't they acted?

The answer is the most unsettling part: they want him to find her. They want to see what she does when he arrives. They want the two of them together, with whatever she has been building, so they can take it all at once.

He removes the tracker. He crushes it. He stands in a Caelindra Prime public corridor for approximately four minutes, rerunning the full geometry of the past three months.

Then he changes his approach entirely.

Syndra Vael¶

Janus finds Syndra through the archivist — specifically through a detail in the message Ana received that the archivist let slip: External Affairs seal, Pure-tier authentication, a specific cipher signature he recognised and did not want to name.

Janus names it. The archivist confirms it.

He does not go to Syndra immediately. He spends a day assessing what approaching her costs: she is the person who sent the message that drove Ana out of Caelindra. She may also be the person who could explain how the message got to Ana without triggering a kill team response. Those two facts are contradictory unless the message was a warning rather than a threat.

He approaches her through the building's maintenance access — not the official entrance. He has a maintenance technician's understanding of any Praxis-supplied building, and this is a Praxis-supplied building. He is in her office before anyone knows he is in her corridor.

The meeting:

Syndra Vael is not surprised. This is the thing that tells him the most. He sits across from her and watches her register his presence with the specific non-reaction of someone who has been expecting approximately this conversation for approximately this long, and files it alongside everything else he knows about what has been happening.

She knew Ana was in Caelindra. She sent the message herself — warning, not threat. She sent it because she understood, when the information about Hephaistos-9 crossed her desk through a channel she cannot officially acknowledge, that Ana Hamato and whatever she was carrying were in danger that the official channels could not address without making the danger worse.

She also knew Janus was coming. Not specifically — she did not know his name until the archivist's building access log flagged an anomaly this morning. But she had been watching for someone following Ana's chain, because she understood that Ana would not have left a chain unless she expected someone to follow it.

What she tells him: - The kill team was not sanctioned by the Guild's standard security apparatus. It was sanctioned by a division that operates above the standard apparatus — specifically, through Orvyn Lace. - Lace does not know she knows this. She has been managing this information carefully. - The data module is not what Praxis told the kill team it was. The kill team was briefed to recover a research dataset. What is actually on the module is something that Syndra has spent three weeks trying to understand and has not yet understood. - Ana left a note for Syndra. Syndra will share what it says if Janus tells her where Ana went.

He tells her. She tells him.

Ana's note said: I know what the bearing means now. I need the parameter to complete the model. There is only one place the parameter exists and I am not ready to go there yet. When I am ready, I will need help I cannot ask for officially. I don't know who else to leave this with.

Syndra is the person Ana chose to leave it with. This tells Janus something about Ana that he did not know before.

What Syndra wants in exchange for her help: not the module. Not the data. She wants to know what is at the bearing. Because she has the External Affairs intelligence picture of the Azimuth formation at the system's gravitational centre, and she has the Hephaistos-9 kill team authorisation that Lace ran through a channel she is still tracing, and she has thirty years of institutional pattern recognition, and she has arrived at a conclusion she cannot prove.

She believes the module and the Azimuth are connected.

She is correct. She does not yet know how.

What Janus gets from Syndra: - A new route to Ana's location — not through the dead-drop chain, which is now burned, but through Syndra's External Affairs network - A Fabric authentication layer that will mask his movement from whatever node the headhunter android was feeding - The name Orvyn Lace, and the specific weight it carries - The knowledge that Ana left a note. For the first time, evidence that Ana understood she might need help she could not arrange herself.

What Syndra gets: - Confirmation that the module exists and that Janus has it - A proxy in the outer ring she cannot officially send — someone who is already moving toward Ana for reasons of his own - A commitment: if they find what Ana found, they tell her

What neither of them says: that this arrangement makes Janus Syndra Vael's informal operative. That Syndra is the most dangerous person in the Guild and she has just decided to help him. That help from this person costs something, always, even when the cost is not named yet.

Seren's Thread — planted here¶

Janus, moving through Caelindra Prime's outer fringe toward the departure hub, passes through the Underlay. A transit contact Syndra arranged requires him to stop at a specific address in the lower district — a House of Weights-adjacent location, neutral ground.

At this address, he has a brief exchange with a person who is arranging passage for someone else — an inner-world young man who has been in the Underlay for two days, moving carefully, clearly from Guild but not behaving like Guild. The young man is not in the scene directly. He is mentioned in passing by the transit contact. He left an hour ago heading for the outer transit corridors.

Janus files the detail without acting on it. The reader, who has been following Seren's parallel arc, recognises this. Janus and Seren were in the same building within one hour of each other. Neither knows it.

The Cinder-7 survivors in The Tessera¶

Mirai tracked Janus to Caelindra Prime. She does not enter the Tessera district — her Vanguard credentials flag in inner-world Guild territory and she knows this. She waits at the outer fringe transit hub. She is very good at waiting.

She is in the correct position to intercept Janus when he leaves.

He does not leave through the transit hub. He leaves through the maintenance access, using the route Syndra's contact arranged.

She misses him by forty minutes. This is the second time she has missed him. She is not developing patience. She is developing precision.

Janus at Tessera end: Moving toward Ana's location. No longer being tracked by the android. In possession of Syndra's authentication. With the name Orvyn Lace filed and active. Forty minutes ahead of Mirai.

Installment 6 — Deeptown¶

Setting: Korrath IV, or a Rust Alliance adjacent station¶

This is where Janus and Ana find each other.

Ana has been here for nine days. She came here because it is the one place in the system where the Guild's information management apparatus cannot reach without Allianz cooperation, and the Alliance does not cooperate. She has been using the informal Corridor Trade network — Brennen's extended contact list — to stay housed and fed. She has been running the secondary analysis again. It keeps coming up incomplete.

She is running out of time to pretend the incomplete model is enough.

The convergence¶

Janus arrives through the Rust Alliance contact infrastructure Syndra arranged — a route that does not appear in any transit log. He finds Ana at the third address on a list Syndra gave him, in a room that smells like recycled air and the specific staleness of a space where someone has been working for nine days without sleeping enough.

This is their first face-to-face since the docking corridor at Hephaistos-9.

The scene has three beats:

Beat 1 — The information exchange:

She tells him everything. Not edited — everything. What she found, what the bearing means, what the secondary analysis keeps failing to complete and why. What the parameter is and where it exists. What the Azimuth formation at the system's gravitational centre means if her incomplete model is pointed in the right direction. She has been carrying this alone for three months and the weight of it has been building and he is the person she left the chain for and he is here.

He tells her everything. The kill team. Hephaistos-9 dark. Kirk. The android. The tracker. Syndra. The name Lace. What the Fabric node in the Hub found about the black ship's contractor chain.

Neither of them speaks for a moment after.

Beat 2 — The disagreement:

Ana wants to find another way to get the parameter. She is adamant about this. Going back to Hephaistos-9 is going back to a site that is dark, in the gravitational shadow of the ice planet, where a kill team was waiting and may still have assets. It is going back to the place where a man she liked and respected died because he did his job correctly. She understands the logic of it. She refuses it.

Janus does not argue the logic. He lets her argue it out. He waits — the specific patience of someone trained not to act before the moment requires it. He has been carrying the data module for three months. He has been following a chain of clues through an increasingly hostile system. He has met the woman who runs most of the Guild's operational architecture and negotiated with her. He is not in a hurry.

He asks her one question: Is there another place the parameter exists?

She knows the answer. The parameter was Gebreysius's classified supplemental series — the data classified above her clearance that existed in Hephaistos-9's restricted archive and nowhere else. Praxis does not keep redundant copies of classified research supplementals at any accessible tier. The people who had authorised access to it either worked at the station or are dead.

She is quiet for a moment. Then she says: There might be a way to derive it from the primary dataset if I had enough processing time and a second analyst who understood the probe telemetry calibration constraints. This is technically true. It would take six to eight months. It is not a solution. It is a way to say no while knowing the answer is yes.

He does not say this. He waits.

She says: We don't have six months.

She means: the Azimuth formation. She has been watching its growth curve from the secondary analysis. The model is incomplete but the growth rate is not. She has known for six weeks that the timeline is not years. It is months, possibly. She has not said this out loud yet because saying it out loud would make it real.

Beat 3 — What they decide:

Not yet. They do not decide yet. This is important.

They decide to wait one more day. They decide to run the secondary analysis together — Janus does not understand the telemetry calibration but he understands maintenance instrument systems and some of the probe mechanics transfer. It will not produce the parameter. It will tell them, more precisely, how incomplete the model is and what the missing piece would change.

They work through the night. What the analysis produces in the morning is not the parameter. What it produces is a growth rate projection with an error margin so tight it might as well be a date.

They look at the date. They look at each other.

Ana says: If we go back and get the parameter, does Syndra's network protect us on approach?

Janus says: She said she could mask our movement to the outer system. She cannot guarantee the station itself.

Ana says: Gebreysius left something under his desk. I know how he worked. He would have left something.

This is the first time she has said his name out loud since leaving the station. Janus registers this. He does not comment on it.

We go back. She says it. Not him. Her.

Mirai in Deeptown¶

She has tracked Janus to Korrath IV through the transit log at the outer fringe hub — the one he used before Syndra masked his movement. She is three days behind and knows it. She is not trying to arrive quietly anymore.

She sends a message through the Vanguard enforcement channel — signed with her rank, encrypted to a military standard she knows Janus can read if he has the TAP-7 — to the last address she has for him. The message is four words:

I know you're there.

That is all. She does not demand a meeting. She does not threaten. She makes herself visible. She is doing what she told him at Gate 7-C she would do: she is making him aware that she is coming. The conversation at Gate 7-C is still pending. She intends to have it before Hephaistos-9, not after.

Janus receives the message. He has known the survivors were following him since the Hub — the TAP-7 caught a Vanguard enforcement access ping on the transit manifest system there. He has been wondering how long it would take her to escalate from tracking to contact.

He shows Ana the message.

Ana says: Four words from your past. Wonderful. Does she want to help or kill you?

Janus says: Both. In a specific order.

Ana says: How much time do we have before she arrives?

Three days.

They do not wait three days.

Gelon, Yamar, and Seren — The Convergence¶

This is where all three parallel threads arrive at the same location.

Gelon and Yamar are in the Korrath IV fringe transit corridor on their regular outer-ring drift. Seren is three days ahead of them — he took the faster route from the outer transit waystation where their second crossing happened.

Seren arrived at Korrath IV six days ago. He is doing what he has been doing in the outer ring: working passage, looking for surgical capability, gathering information about the Flicker through people who do not use the Guild's vocabulary for it.

He encounters Ana first. Not because he knows who she is — because she is using the same House of Weights-adjacent contact network that he has been working through for implant information, and the network is small enough that two people using it in the same location eventually share a contact.

They meet in a transit canteen at a shared contact's introduction. Ana is guarded. Seren is recognisably inner-world even after months in the outer ring — the bearing is there even when the clothing is not. She would normally avoid him.

But she hears him ask a question about probe telemetry sensitivity in near-magnetosphere environments — a technical question that only someone with access to inner-world Guild research infrastructure would know to ask in those terms. She stops. She asks him how he knows that framing.

He tells her. Not everything — he is careful — but enough. The Guild documents he accessed. The classified infrastructure reports. The frequency variance data he found in his father's restricted access.

She asks to see the document.

Seren shows her. She does not show a reaction. She is the person who panics with precision. She looks at the document for forty-five seconds and then puts it down and looks at the canteen wall for another ten seconds and then she says, very quietly: Where did you get this.

He tells her about his father.

She says: Your father is on the Infrastructure Licensing Committee.

He says: Yes.

She says: That committee approves the contracts for the cognitive infrastructure distribution network. The same network that the Flicker supplemental research was classified under.

He says: I know.

She says: The document you're carrying is a parameter reference for a probe telemetry model. It is the specific parameter I cannot derive from my primary dataset without six to eight months I do not have.

He says nothing. He is processing.

She says: I need to make a call.

When Janus meets Seren:

Ana brings Seren to the room where Janus is running the secondary analysis. Janus looks at him. Seren looks at him. Ana says: This is the parameter.

Janus says: He's a person, not a parameter.

Ana says: He has the document. It has the parameter in it.

This is the first time the two main arcs have been in the same room.

When Gelon and Yamar arrive:

Two days later — one day before Mirai. Gelon and Yamar come through the Kael Belt Compact network at Korrath IV's fringe anchorage, which is where they always come through. They are not looking for anyone. They are between routes.

Yamar finds Seren at the same transit canteen — the third crossing. He sits down. He registers the quality of the room Seren has been occupying differently than the previous two crossings. Something has changed. He asks, with the specific economy of someone who does not ask questions they are not prepared to hear answered: What did you find?

Seren tells him about the document, Ana, and Janus.

Yamar goes to get Gelon.

Gelon meets Janus:

This scene is the one that the whole arc structure has been building toward without announcing it. Two people who have been moving through the same system on different vectors for different reasons, and who share — without knowing it — the fact that they have each been paying attention to the Flicker for longer than anyone thinks is useful.

Gelon looks at Janus. He looks at the data module in Janus's kit case. He says: The module is from the Hephaistos station.

Not a question.

Janus says: Yes.

Gelon says: They found the bearing.

Janus says: How do you know about a bearing?

Gelon says: I have been watching the azimuth of that coordinate for twenty years.

The room is quiet.

Ana says: That's not possible. The formation at that coordinate only became visually observable—

Gelon says: The signal was there before the formation was visible. The ice planet has been pointing at it for considerably longer than your research program has been running.

Ana stares at him. Janus watches Ana stare at him. Seren watches all three of them.

Yamar eats the rest of his food and does not comment.

The Team That Goes Back¶

By the time Mirai arrives, the group has formed. Not comfortably — there are four people in a room who have each been operating alone or in pairs for months, and they do not trust each other cleanly yet. But they have the parameter, the module, the bearing, and a growth curve projection that has removed the option of waiting.

Janus: Has the data module. Has Syndra's authentication layer for approach. Has the TAP-7 and twenty years of experience navigating things that are trying to kill him.

Ana: Has the model, the encoding key, the analytical framework, and the specific knowledge of what Gebreysius would have left and where to find it. Is the only person who can run the final processing sequence.

Seren: Has the document with the parameter. Has Guild infrastructure knowledge that will matter on the approach — specifically, the Praxis supply chain knowledge from his father's committee access that maps the station's classified maintenance protocols.

Gelon: Has forty years of observational data on the Flicker. Has spoken with Synths in the Devotion during accessible periods. Has been watching the azimuth for twenty years. Is the only person in the group who has been to the ice planet's orbital zone before.

Yamar: Can pilot the Rust Alliance salvage approach profile that gets them through Hephaistos-9's outer perimeter without triggering what remains of the station's passive monitoring systems. Also can move in spaces where larger chassis have difficulty. He has been in tighter places than a decompressed research station.

Mirai: She arrives the morning of departure. She is standing outside when they come out.

Janus looks at her. She looks at him. Behind him are four people she did not know were part of this.

She says: Before Hephaistos-9.

He says: I know.

She says: After Hephaistos-9, if either of us is still standing, the conversation we didn't have at Gate 7-C.

He says: Agreed.

She says: Then I'm coming.

No one objects. Not because they are happy about it — Ana is conspicuously not happy about it — but because Mirai is former Vanguard special operations with a working knowledge of the outer ring's patrol corridors, and the window is closing, and the group that goes back needs everyone it can take.

The Trigger — Why They Go Back Now¶

The formal trigger is the growth curve projection. The date it produces is approximately eleven weeks from the current position in the arc. After that date, the Azimuth's growth will be optically visible from any ship in the inner system, and the Guild's suppression apparatus will collapse under the weight of too many eyewitnesses.

When the suppression collapses, every party that has been managing the Flicker secretly will have to manage it publicly, which means the data module — and whoever is carrying it — becomes the most important and most dangerous object in the Veridion system. The window for bringing the module's data into the open in a form that cannot be suppressed is eleven weeks.

Gebreysius's parameter is the difference between a partial model that raises questions and a complete model that forces answers.

The emotional trigger is different:

Ana has been running from Hephaistos-9 for three months. The running has been rational, necessary, and the only correct choice at each step. But it has been running. The moment in the room in Deeptown, when she said Gebreysius left something under his desk and used his name — that is the moment the running ends. Not because she is no longer afraid. Because she has stopped being ahead of what she is afraid of and has finally caught up with it, and it turns out the thing she has been running from is not the kill team or the Guild or Praxis.

It is the responsibility of having found the thing she found.

She is the person who found it. She is the person who has to go back.

What This Means for the Arcs¶

Janus: Has moved from reactive (everything since the capsule) to active (choosing to go back, choosing to bring a team, choosing to let Mirai come). He has spent Book One's middle section making himself slightly less small. Going back to Hephaistos-9 is the largest choice he makes. He frames it as pragmatics. It is not only pragmatics.

Ana: Has stopped running and started standing in the thing she found. The specific cost of this is Gebreysius — she said his name, which means she is no longer treating his death as an abstraction. The return to Hephaistos-9 is, among other things, the closest thing she can do to acknowledgment.

Seren: Has found the purpose the document was building toward. He took it because it seemed significant. He carried it for months without understanding it. He handed it to Ana in a transit canteen on Korrath IV and the world arranged itself around the significance he had been carrying without understanding. The Flicker — the thing he has been trying to understand for its own sake — is now the thing he is walking into.

Gelon: Has been watching the coordinate for twenty years and is finally moving toward it. Whatever the two explanations for the Devotion's failure to take him are — one of them becomes relevant the moment he steps onto Hephaistos-9 and feels the strength of the signal at close range.

Mirai: Is in the position she told him at Gate 7-C she would find. She has her conversation pending. She has not decided what she wants from it. She goes anyway. This is the most honest thing about her.

Open Questions for This Document¶

• Does Syndra know where Seren is? (She should — she is watching the Underlay contacts. The moment his document surfaces in the inner worlds, she has context for it. She may already know he is on Korrath IV. This remains open but should be decided before writing the Tessera installment scenes.)

• What exactly is in Ana's note to Syndra? The version above gives a summary. The full text is a scene to be written.

• Does Kirk appear in the middle installments? The arc file says yes — the convergence happens in the middle section. A candidate placement is Meridian Hub, which is where Kirk's debrief would naturally have routed him. This is not yet placed.

• What does Gelon say when he first sees the data module? The module is from the Hephaistos station. — this is a scene fragment. The full version needs to be written.

• The Azimuth formation: is it already optically visible to anyone in the system during Deeptown? Or is it only visible to instruments? The answer affects how much urgency is visible to other characters.

• Does Yamar know what the document is before Seren shows it to Ana? He is observant. He may have read it during one of the crossings. This is character-specific and needs a decision.

See also: Arc — Janus | Arc — Ana | Arc — Seren | Arc — Gelon and Yamar | Arc — Mirai | Arc Index | Timeline