Orb Dannika
Kind: Planet — empire mining world, and in a previous life the site of a buried imperial massacre. Location: Unstated. Controlled by: Galactic Human Empire. Officially settled “some five hundred years previously” as of Ch. 05 — A Dictionary — but covertly colonised three centuries earlier than that.
Summary
A mining planet home to “some of the galaxy’s finest archaeologists” alongside the miners. The archaeologists are seeded to soften the rough-camp culture of the miners; the two groups routinely intermarry. The planet holds the empire’s largest deposits of Delphium, “that strange matter used for powering starships,” which gives Orb Dannika significant industrial leverage.
The buried first settlement
Dannika is the chapter’s worked example of how the empire handles its own embarrassments. Construction work on another continent turns up thousands of human skeletons in the soil, pre-dating the “official” 500-year-old settlement. Empire voidships seal the site and confiscate the remains. The archaeologists strike; the miners strike with them. A planet-wide work stoppage chokes delphium extraction. The cover-up finally breaks when a journalist on some minor orb digs up an ancient newsfeed article referring to a world in Dannika’s exact coordinates, under a different name, eight hundred years ago — three centuries before the official founding.
The empire confesses: Dannika was colonised earlier by a rough crew of miners from Aerth, Luna, and Mars, whose late-night card-table murders got bad enough that the Marquis deployed Marquis Guards from Fort Ridiny with orders to execute anyone even mentioning violence. Within a year an uprising slaughtered hundreds of guards; a second wave of guards, including battle-elites and three war-class voidships, was slaughtered in turn. The voidships responded by washing the entire planet’s surface in a nerve agent. The name was changed, the bodies buried, and the planet repopulated with “new, willing miners” plus archaeologists as cultural counterweights.
The Ertian Surgeon — himself a Dannika-born trauma resident during his early career — cites the massacre as the template for how the empire will handle the Vasily Incident: “The empire would cover the Vasily incident up, cover their intentions, cover their asses as always.”
Appearances
- Ch. 05 — A Dictionary: Narrator’s origin orb; framing example for the empire’s cover-up habits (see Dannika Massacre).
Related
- Delphium — the resource that gave the strike its leverage.
- Dannika Massacre
- Galactic Human Empire
- The Ertian Surgeon
Open questions
- What was the original name of the orb before the rebrand to Dannika?
- Is Dannika stable politically after the cover-up is forced into the open, or does the revelation of the massacre destabilise it again?
- Are the “finest archaeologists in the galaxy” here by choice, or has the empire been quietly steering them here for social-engineering reasons since the rename?