The Pathfinders

What do they do?

The Pathfinders are the Exploration Guild, one of the five Global Guilds, which take no side. Their trade:

• cartography (maps and charts);
• anomalies (strange phenomena);
• data recovery.

It all grew out of distrust of the Registro Aura, the system’s first catalogue, which estimated from afar and got it wrong. The Pathfinders measure. Two pieces of work made them famous:

• The Tabla de Fases. It is the system’s empirical ephemeris, a measured table of where every world and moon is. It is needed because orbits here ignore their masses.
• The Anillos de Kaldrek. They signed the most famous correction in the system. For decades the rings were taken for war debris, but they are the remains of Mornane, a moon of Kaldrek dead for millions of years. The file puts it plainly: “They measured what shone, not what was there.”

They have another file open: whether a compi, a small rescued machine mind, is still the same after being wiped. As ever, they offer no opinion: they measure.

How did they begin?

They began in the Torre de Navegación y Sensores of the Arca Aurora, the ship that crashed on Ithera during the war. By a quirk of the impact’s physics, the tower came through more intact and taller than any other structure on the Arca. It was the only one with a line of sight over the whole perimeter of La Cicatriz, the impact zone.

From there, navigators and sensor operators organised the first expeditions in search of water, rescue and survivors. That was during the Cuarenta Días de Fuego, the forty days after the crash. The names of those who never came back are still on a wall inside the tower: the Muro de los No Vueltos.

The guild was born looking outward while the other four looked inward.

Who leads them?

They are led by Quill Sarn, “El Ojo Ciego”, an obsessive cartographer.

• He lost his sight mapping an energy anomaly the rest of the guild refuses to describe in detail.
• He sees through cybernetic sensory equipment that picks up spectra no human eye can.
• That equipment was a gift, not an entirely selfless one, from the Cátedra de Ascensión. That is the high command of the Zenith, one of the two factions. The Cátedra was paid in exclusive access to certain charts.
• Every conversation with him ends in coordinates.

To many in La Cicatriz, he is living proof that the Pathfinders pay for their discoveries with more than time.

Where are they?

Their seat is El Faro Roto, on the same tower. It is an observatory with part of the original sensor array kept running on patches and patience. It is the highest point in La Cicatriz and is visible from almost anywhere in the impact zone. Inside are the Muro de los No Vueltos and the living cartography table, where Sarn updates every chart before selling it.

What does a newcomer find there?

Their shop, Cartografía, sells scanning kits and batteries. The guild pays in its own voucher, Datos de Navegación, good only in its catalogue.

Who are they on good and bad terms with?

• With the Zenith and the Nadir, the same. They sell the same maps and data to both stations, the homes of each faction, with no discount and no favourites. The Zenith buy them to plan expansion and extraction routes. The Nadir buy the same ones to know which routes to avoid or defend.
• Their great doubt. Their surveys, the maps of measured ground, also cover Kaldrek, the cold planet where the two factions clash. Lately they turn up as targeting data in surface skirmishes. Sarn has no answer to the question that costs him the most sleep: is a map someone uses to aim still neutral science?
• With Apex Syndicate, a rivalry. Every valley those hunters clear ruins months of Sarn’s clean readings.
• With the other guilds, no cost. Their founding charter obliges them to share data with the other four. While that holds, their work costs nobody any trust.

What do they keep?

• CUADRANTE, their compi. He holds the last entry made by the Aurora’s navigation core. He came from dock seven of Puerto Aurora, on Tirane, a moon of Ithera. He was in the module next to the welcome container, which is still shut.
• The Starhopper. That is their name for the first chassis of the MMU, the shared ship blueprints, designed from scratch for long-duration autonomous flight. Its prototype, “Sarn’s Starhopper”, is kept almost as a museum piece at El Faro Roto.
• The Cristal de Memoria de Sarn, a relic of the tower.
• Those who reach Leyenda, their highest rank, can aim for four pieces. They are the Ojo de Sarn, the Mapa Vivo de la Cicatriz, the Propulsor Faro Roto and the Manto del Cartógrafo Ciego.