Image from Steve Bowers and Chuft Captain

The Rungworld; Jke's Ladder

By 9966 there were extensive Mystery Cult enclaves on the outermost shell of the Kepleria megastructure, in a number of Banks Orbitals near To'ul'h, and in a circumstellar rungworld near Medius. This rungworld, Jke's Ladder, was a series of rotating cylinders orthogonal to the central star; each cylinder was two thousand kilometres in diameter and twenty thousand kilometres long. Normally such an arrangement would need constant adjustment, as a long cylinder of this description would start to precess fairly soon and change its orientation. But the rungs of the ladder were joined together at top and bottom by a circumstellar dynamically stabilised loop, forming a continuous structure (the Ladder) with three hundred and sixty inhabited rungs. The Mystery Cult occupied forty of those rungs, and these cylindrical habitats began to take on the characteristics of other Oracle Machine Thrall worlds, becoming static and changeless utopias.

Most of the other rungs of Jke's Ladder formed an alliance against the Thrall cylinders, and open warfare broke out along the ladder.

Many cylinders were evacuated, some were destroyed, in a war which lasted forty revolutions. At the end of this war the Cultists were still entrenched now occupying half of a badly damaged megastructure; several Oracle Machines were also present, building support structures for themselves among the rubble.

• Dyson Ring Swarm
• Oracle War, The