The Frozen Northern Reach

The Frozen Northern Reach. Snow has fallen on this ice field for over a thousand years, settling, freezing, pressed deeper by the snow above it, until the ice down there has become another substance altogether, half transparent, blue going into green, light needing a whole winter to work its way back out.

It lies in the northern stretch of the Frozen Continent, separated from Saint Dora by the Ice-Shadow Trench. It is 70 kilometres south by air from Saint Tranya, close enough that it hardly reads as forbidden ground—but the treaty made the whole Frozen Continent a restricted zone, no legal route goes in, and the Bureau is permitted to operate only within the Deep-Cold Zone, which is to say the edge of the Frozen Continent, the southern rim of the Ice-Shadow Trench, plus the observation range on the Dawn Continent's side facing it. Travelling that special corridor means catching one of 6 scheduled windows a year.

In air at 46 below, the wind scours fine grooves into the snow. Signal Marker S-17-R sits on this ice field. Spectra's sensor cloud layer hangs 32 floating nodes above the Frozen Continent, which under normal conditions cover this coordinate completely, and the scan schedule runs automatically every 6 months—yet for 80 years the data returned has always been one grey block of low-resolution pixels.

At the edge of S-17-R stands Listening Post T-17, a relay station on the snow, designed to receive only and never transmit, with outbound communication privileges never even enabled. Its human station chief died on site 80 years ago, and an offline AI has held the watch by itself ever since. In Spectra's records, the last time a living person was present here was 80 years, 4 months and 11 days ago, and the number in that field climbs by one on its own every day.

In the city this ice field is a place name for idle conversation; in the Bureau's files it is the "presumed origin point of aberration"; in the songs of the three races it is the place everyone agreed not to go back to once the war was over. All 3 accounts stand on their own, and none of them reconcile.

Further south, deeper into the ice, lies what every government considers rich Source-Stone ground. Every survey team sent in over the past 10 years has failed; the ones that came back empty-handed count as lucky, and more of them never came back at all.

Officially the place is marked a "no-data zone." Nobody has ever asked why an ice field would need to be marked as having no data.