Wednesday, 3 September 2025

Mapping Mezagorm

The remote scanners are pointing us towards one of the side-structures of Mezagorm. The whole station is designed as a fractal of ever smaller outer circles surrounding inner circles. In order to close in on the exact location of the old Order of Tetrimon camp, we need to move one of the scanners more towards the outside.

This is difficult since there are no maps of Mezagorm - at least not publicly available, even for scholarly research. So, we do not know how to navigate this cursed city.

I did bring 3D tunnel-mapping drones to help us with that. These are really neat, tiny flying devices with advanced gyroscopes that continuously map their surroundings and keep track of their position and orientation. You let them loose and they will map out large areas of tunnels. 

They are often used in speleology but work fine on abandoned stations too. They can create detailed maps of even the most intricate three-dimensional labyrinths. It just takes them a lot of time, since they have to visit every tunnel.

One of these mapper drones entered a surprisingly large space - the outer walls were too far off for its rangefinder. It did start going around the edge of that space, when suddenly its signal got cut off. 

As this is also roughly in the direction where we would like to reposition the scanner, I am taking a team out to go see this space and get our drone back.

Monday, 1 September 2025

Setting up the expedition

Today the Sansha squad was not present in Shastal, at least not in the neighborhood of Mezagorm. 

The Indagatrix descended into the immense and abandoned Grand Hall of the megalopolis-station. It is always a sight to behold, especially without the light-enhancement of a neocom. First one's eyes have to get used to the darkness, as Shastal star's light only illuminates the top part near the entrance to the vast enclosure. As the shades start to take form in the gloomy darkness, the sense of cursedness of this place grows.

There was no luxury yacht at the landing pad of Galactic Tours. I do not know their schedule this summer  and perhaps there is still one cruise on the way. So I chose a different site to land, one closer to the part where my previous investigations seemed to point to. 

With the crew I spent most of the day setting up a base camp, using some of the power generators that we brought along. We rebooted life support in one of the smaller buildings at the edge of the Grand Hall, a place that seems to be on an intersection of roads inside the station. Tomorrow, we will start up the remote radio-isotope fingerprinting scanners and start triangulation.

During our work, Mr. Firth was suddenly called back to Mehatoor by his superiors for some sort of Sedevacantist emergency. I had to interrupt work to drop him off at the 24th Imperial Crusade station in neighboring Dihra. It is quite uncharacteristic of my political officer to leave me and the crew to do exploration alone. He seemed more than a little cross when he left and did not speak to me during our trip. It is understandable, as he will miss all the archaeological surveying fun!