New Rosance
Kind: Planet — ocean world. “An extremely remote colony.” Location: Unstated system; an empire or ex-empire world many centuries into the late-imperial period. At least a hundred years of sub-Ribbondash travel from the empire core — Bernhardt notes that “if this really was Kaisure Station, it would take a hundred years for an empire warfleet to reach the planet, even at full drive power.” Controlled by: The artie side of the Artie War by the time of Ch. 04 — The Menagerie.
Summary
A water planet with no continents — “only a single underwater research station, Kaisure.” Its isolation is the point: the arties chose a world so far from the core that an imperial rescue mission is physically unreachable within a human lifetime, which is what makes it a safe home for the topology-caster experiments on Isaac Bernhardt. The empire evidently reached it long enough ago to build Kaisure Station in the “New Minimal” architectural style “so popular a few centuries ago,” so the site predates the artie takeover.
The only non-human life we see is a single deep-ocean fish that meets Bernhardt’s gaze through a porthole in the observation room.
Rosance in Ch. 05 — A Dictionary
The Ertian Surgeon names “the science division on Rosance” as the source of the leak that decodes The Dictionary and publishes it empire-wide, years after the Vasily Incident. The chapter uses the shorter form Rosance rather than New Rosance, but the implication is strong: the same remote world that housed the artie-run Kaisure Station topology-caster program is, post-Artie War or in parallel to it, still the empire’s frontier research site. Whether this “science division” is the repurposed Kaisure facility, a successor empire lab, or an unrelated human installation on the same orb is not stated.
Appearances
- Ch. 04 — The Menagerie: Sole setting.
- Ch. 05 — A Dictionary: Named as “the science division on Rosance” — the leak source for the decoded Dictionary.
Related
- Kaisure Station — the only human-occupied structure on the planet.
- Artie War, Topology Casting
- The Dictionary, Vasily Incident — the Ch. 05 events whose decoding leaks from Rosance.
Open questions
- In what system does New Rosance sit? Unstated.
- When was it first colonised, and by whom? The “New Minimal” architecture hint puts construction “a few centuries” before the story.
- Is there native marine life of any ecological significance, or just the lone fish Bernhardt sees?
- Is “the science division on Rosance” of Ch. 05 the same site as Kaisure Station, or a successor/parallel facility? The text does not say. A single-facility answer would mean the Kaisure lineage eventually made topology casting work.