A salvage history of the generation ships still drifting in the outer system and the few arks that escaped to Gogi-One.
The Cradle Drift is not one wreck. It is a long graveyard orbit holding most of a generation-ship convoy. The arks reached the Cantor's system after the society that launched them had changed beyond recognition. Their arrival plans no longer matched the worlds, governments, and routes they found. Most of the ships were left in the ring and never moved again.
The hulls do not share one condition. Some still hold spin and provide weight in their outer corridors. Others have stopped turning. Heat, air, power, and internal doors may change between decks on the same ship. Salvage crews mark every tested route and do not trust a mark simply because it was correct on the last visit.
The ships were built to count. They counted air, water, meals, births, deaths, medicine, occupied berths, empty cradles, and the time remaining before arrival. Caretaker systems continue many of those duties. A machine may reject a salvage crew because its manifest has no place for them, then spend the next hour preparing a nursery meal for passengers who are no longer present. The machine is following the work it was given. It was never told when that work should end.
Several arks escaped the ring over a period of decades or centuries. They did not leave together. Each reached Gogi-One alone, and each surviving ship record treats its own landing as the first. At least six separate caretaker schedules can be found in the planet's planters and wreck sites. No complete record explains how each hull broke orbit or why all of them came down on the same unplanned world.
Gogi-One had native weather and animals but no humanoid people. The ark passengers who landed there are long dead. Their shipboard trees, livestock, herbs, and fungi escaped into the local ecology. Caretaker automata still recapture useful plants, place them in labelled planters, and tend them according to the schedules of their own ships. The machines work around one another, but they do not share authority or combine their records.
The Orison Ark was one of the ships that escaped. It had sailed for Asterhome, a prepared colony elsewhere in the system, but it never reached that destination. Orison came down on Gogi-One and broke open. Its nursery transmitter continues to broadcast a lullaby. Machines from other arks answer the signal because their maintenance rules classify an unanswered transmission as a fault.
Orison's departure left a visible gap in the old row of ships. Salvage crews count that gap whenever they cross the Drift. The habit began as a navigation check and continued because the ships still run tallies even though no office or crew receives them. This is the source of the salvage saying: somebody is still counting, and it is not us.
