◀ System Registry
Donlan
Molten Silicate · Crystalline Ranges
Landing Prohibited · Beacon Active
// Long-Range Observation — Donlan
ClassificationTerrestrial · molten surface
AffiliationUnaligned
System PositionFirst orbit · innermost world
SurfaceSilicate plains that melt by day and set by night
LandingsNone on record
Installations1 × survey beacon · geosynchronous, night side
Status Landing Prohibited
"The message was two words."
First orbit. Two materials, and they behave differently. The silicate plains melt under the daylight and set again in the dark, so the surface pours, cools, and pours again with every rotation. Between them stand crystalline ranges of something denser, tempered past the point where this much heat means anything. Those do not move. Everything else does.
Nobody has ever set foot on it. The formations sit in temperatures that would take a suit apart before anyone reached them.
The survey beacon was parked instead: a geosynchronous marker holding station over the night side, early-generation hardware, running on power nobody budgeted to replace. It has been transmitting since before most of the Fleet existed.
The message was two words. DO NOT LAND.
The hardware has been failing for a very long time. Somewhere in that decline the transmission lost its edges and started arriving as one word instead of two, and crews on the inner runs got used to hearing it that way. They stopped calling the planet anything else.
The Authority updated the charts, because it was easier than correcting everybody.