Editing Stars Without Number: Back in Black (section)

=== Ulysses Upsilon ===

You find that Ulysses Upsilon has several rocky and icy planets, and one close-in asteroid belt less than an AU from the star. There are no gas giants. There is also one relatively terrestrial planet; you think that the atmosphere may have once been breathable. However, it's far out from its darkened star, and is now completely frozen. Drifts of crystallized oxygen now sit crusted over its surface.

Unusually... you can detect some activity in the system. There are at least a few radio beacons weakly pinging from here and there in the asteroid belt, and another one from the moon of that frozen terrestrial world. There's no indication they're Chittik. You can be almost certain it's human, since they're transmitting short repeating patterns in a 9-bit format that was standard in the Mandate era and still is in the State. You just can't make sense of the information. A bunch of seemingly random alphanumeric characters. They could be place designators, or they could be garbled, crappy data from systems that are about to fail from not having maintenance in a thousand years or so.

You are able to identify the sources of the radio signals as being ancient installations of some kind. The two asteroid bases were probably mining operations. The signal from the moon was almost certainly an orbital space station that has since crashed onto the surface, and somehow one of the beacons survived. You also identify some signs from the frozen world that there were habitats there, although since you aren't detecting any heat or energy, they are almost certainly long-dead. There's no way people could survive that kind of cold without a solid and sustainable technological base. You can be fairly certain you're the only living humans in this system.