The terrain east of the third entity's Rift was different from anything in the survey record.
Not the alluvial basin geology of the first leg northeast, or the compressed highland of the third entity's site, or the gorge stratification further west. Something older and more complex—deep basement rock exposed at the surface by ancient uplift, the kind of geology that had been compressed and folded and compressed again over geological time until the formations running through it had no clean horizontal or vertical character. The substrate read here didn't resolve into the directional patterns the previous builds had shown. It ran in all directions simultaneously, the formation layer carrying path-energy through curved and refolded structures with a character more like static than signal.
