Orb Flain

Kind: Colony world (or station-bearing system) Location: Unstated — within empire space Controlled by: Galactic Human Empire

Summary

The system where an astronomy satellite tracked the second known TZ-exit artifact event, approximately sixty years after the first. The object — perfectly spherical, compositionally identical to the first — changed course by roughly 90° without decelerating (“possibly with a little Higgs trick, we don’t know”), giving the empire its first close-range scan of an artifact exit. This is the event that established the artifacts as genuinely anomalous rather than natural ejecta. Orb Flain is not visited as a setting; it appears only as a reference point in the Vasily Incident’s backstory.

Appearances

• Ch. 05 — A Dictionary: Named as the location of the second TZ-exit event, referenced in the Ertian Surgeon’s archive lecture on the sequence of artifact events leading up to the Vasily Incident.

Related

• TZ Star — the stellar type from which the artifact exited
• Vasily Incident — the third event, the one that yields material evidence
• The Dictionary — what the artifact cargo eventually decoded into
• Orb Ertia — site of the third event

Open questions

• Is “Orb Flain” a colony world, a station, or simply a named star system? The astronomy satellite suggests at least a persistent observational presence there.
• Was the Orb Flain observation classified at the time, or was it publicly known before the Vasily Incident?