The Colonnade

SURVEY The Colonnade

GG-D2 was the first destination surveyed that did not try to kill the survey team, and it remains the calmest place the programme has been. It opens onto a sunlit ruin: a long standing colonnade of fluted stone running to a flat horizon under a sky a half-shade too gold, with no inhabitants found — unpopulated, or long since vacated. Nothing there is hostile. Nothing there is anything; the wind moves, the light falls, and that is all.

The stone is weathered on its weather side by a sun our instruments cannot place. A single fallen section was recovered and is held, on loan, by the external partner as the Colonnade Fragment (see Research Sharing). GG-D2 is now the programme's reference destination — the dial we run to confirm the gate and the crew are sound, and to remind ourselves that not everything through the ring is a war.