Aperture Register

1.0 Confirmed Apertures

Two apertures are confirmed. The register is open: it lists confirmed terrestrial transit points and is expected to grow, not because more are being built but because more are being found.

Aperture census remains OPEN. Any further confirmed terrestrial aperture is inserted here with the next sequential designation. The programme assumes there are more and has not found them.

2.0 The Gate (GG-1)

GG-1 is a standing ring approximately 2.5m across with a console of unlabelled controls. Destination is selected by a bearing-and-lock sequence — "set and seat" — reproducible up to a point. The point is that GG-1 does not resolve destination from the controls alone. It reads the crew: their disposition, composure, honesty, intent. The same lock run by different crews opens on different realms. Command spent eleven months trying to suppress this variable and failed. You cannot order a soldier to be the right kind of person and have the gate believe the order.

3.0 Inbound Pressure — Enemy Crossing Attempts

Since INC-GG-05, GG-1 has been worked from the far side. The Drûl understood from the moment they read our team that the door has a near side; they have spent the interval trying to open it from the Underhold without our cooperation. Logged inbound activity at GG-1:

• Thermal events. GG-1 runs hot off-schedule — outside any dial we initiate — in pulses the watch has learned to read as pressure: something seating a lock against the ring from the other side. Frequency is increasing.
• Uninvited locks. On six occasions the ring has begun to resolve a destination with no operator at the console. The watch's standing counter-procedure is crude and effective: kill the power, and — because the gate reads disposition — put calm, unfrightened people in the room, which makes the ring resolve home rather than open away. The enemy cannot yet beat a settled watch. The fear is they are learning what "settled" costs us.
• The threshold breach. Once, the ring opened inbound before power could be cut. A Drûl forward element of four came partway through. They were killed on the threshold, in the chamber, by the watch, at the cost of two of ours. It is the only time the enemy has stood on Earth at GG-1. It will not be the last attempt.

4.0 Second Aperture — NORTHGATE (GG-2)

GG-1 is not the only door. A second aperture existed, unknown to the programme, in the flooded lower workings of a disused colliery in the north of England — and the Drûl, unable to force GG-1, found it and used it. They did not send a probe. They sent a horde. It poured out of the mine and into the surrounding region before any element of the programme knew GG-2 existed. The incursion was defeated — narrowly, at heavy cost, in the open, in front of a town — and the aperture was located in the workings and designated GG-2 / NORTHGATE.