Understrata: you were not the first

Last time, the surface crew got faces and started to sound worried. This is what they have been worried about.

The Charter came down here certain they were the first to ever find this world. They filed the claim, called the rock newly theirs, and started digging. Then the deep started answering back.

You were not the first

The further you dig, the more you turn up that no one on your crew made. A rock face cut in dead straight tool-lines. Rail laid into the basalt to run ore out by the ton. A boring-crown of a make none of your drillers can name. The claim stake you drove yourself, come back up out of ground that was already worked. And far down in the glass, a hatch, sealed on purpose from the far side.

Each one is a real find you dig up and haul home, and each one gets a reaction on the radio the moment you recover it. Idris, who buys everything you bring up, cannot put a price on a cut she has no name for:

Tool-lines, dead straight in mantle glass. The Charter drilled nothing here, so who did? I cannot price a cut like this, but whoever made it once could.

The Museum keeps the theory

Everything you find banks into a Codex in the town Museum, and Archivist Wen, who keeps the records, has started assembling it into a case file. Not answers. Questions, in order, getting heavier as the collection grows. He opens the file the day the crew’s certainty breaks:

We filed this world as newly ours, the first ever to find it; I signed that claim myself. Then the deep answered back, in work older than our claim. I do not conclude; I assemble.

By the time you have dug that same stake back up, he has stopped hedging:

We did not find this world; we found it again. I only filed us first.

The save is the story here. The deeper you chart, the fuller the file gets, and the file only ever asks a larger question. It never closes.

Three voices became seven

The crew that talks you through all of this has grown. The three from last time are still on the radio, and there are four more now: Fuelwright Harlan, who fuels your descents and only ever wants the old power cells you find; Signaller Pell, the youngest on the roster, who works the radio topside and knows the deep only as a voice through the static, the same as you do; Prospector Calder, a pilot on another world entirely, who you only hear once you have built the relay; and the Common Band itself, the open channel, carrying overheard scraps from charters you will never meet.

Pell’s relay is a building you raise in stages, from a shack to a full mast, as you run the contracts that pay for it.

The deep got deeper

The descent runs further than it did. Two new bands open up below the mantle, the Underworks and the Approaches, each one darker and nastier than the last, with a new deepest ore, cindrite, waiting at the bottom of the column.

And the deeper you go, the more the deep argues that it was headed somewhere. Down in the Approaches you start crossing carved way markers, all alike, all facing down, and not one of them faces a sealed hatch. The hatches are not the argument. The road is, and it runs down.

What is next

More of it. More of the deep, more of the crew, more of whatever they are all circling down there. Still no dates, that part does not change. But the file is open, and it is not going to close.

— Vosk