Korthaan
Korthaan, "the standing stone." The recovered ancient name; the colonists call it the Monolith.
House: Imperia
One of the six artifacts recovered from the ruins of the ancient civilisation that ended itself ~200,000 years ago.
What it is
The Monolith stands in what the ancients had built as a throne room aboard the Aurokhal. It is heavy and black, and its outer face was etched in a script the colonists could not read for the first decade. The orbital also held a ship factory, and the whole station was offline and in need of repair when the colonists arrived, every live system stripped of its memory.
The site
The exterior carried the visible knowledge, and the interior was a sealed data vault. The rest of the orbital had been wiped clean, every system emptied of memory by the people who left, so that the Monolith stood as the redundancy, the backup held off the grid and out of reach. Whoever built the station feared the day the data would be taken from them, and they were right to fear it. The data was taken. The Monolith remained, and held what the rest of the station had lost.