Blueprints & Schematics

The Reach · The Guttering Light

Four reconstructed Anchorage patchwork hulls set side by side to prove the obvious: there is no Anchorage class. No registry, no shared plan, no two alike — a fleet cut from other people's ships, that reads as a fleet only because someone chose to fly them together. One of them is blamed for the station sabotage.

Spent Light · Dead Reckoning

An ISCA-TI intelligence reconstruction of an Anchorage clandestine-fleet vessel, built from fragments — no class, no registry, no two alike. A hull cut from donor ships and welded into a biography of the ships it was scavenged from.

Spent Light · The Wrong Side

A sensor reconstruction of the enemy: rail penetrators, pattern-round magazines, wake-mapping doctrine. Approximated, unconfirmed, and out-gunning everything the Endurance has left.

Wide Sky · Wide Sky

A reconstruction of the colony ship lost into the reach around 2192 and grounded on Ostry — the keels her people cut away and lived in, and the node-emitter mast they kept running for years afterward, transmitting into a sky that was not listening.

Closed Sky · Nhál passage vessel. ⚠ Builder, class, age and propulsion are open canon and are NOT supplied here.

A working Nhál hull with a human crew living inside somebody else's ergonomics. Nothing about her is hostile and nothing about her was designed for the people now aboard: the handholds are set above where a human hand goes, the deck of the main passage steps up twice on the way aft, four mounts are the wrong pattern and have been since before the engineer was born, the ship's lighting does not reach where a person working needs light, and the warmest room aboard is warm because one man has been running the environmental exchanger through it for nine years in a way the ship was never drawn to allow. She is plated the colour of weak tea, she has one working head and it is aft, and she is the coexistence theme rendered as a general arrangement.

Closed Sky · Cruiser replacement — wartime new-build carrying a boundary instrument, a specialist and about eighty people. The books never name a class.

A new Earth hull, four thousand tonnes of steel set going in June 2350 because a cruiser was gone and the fleet was short one — while Sarah Bishop was on a farm on the wrong side of everything with two hands that would not close. She was built to carry a measuring instrument, a specialist and about eighty people, and the eighty people were the point. Her arrangement is known through the second deck: a galley flat warm because the plant runs under it, a reference bank the size of a door, an after grid space with a standing instruction on it, two blank flanges either side of a wall, and a hand-sized plate riveted to a twisted frame that says when she was authorised.

Spent Light · Dead Reckoning

Meridian-class deep explorer, EX-01. Modular hull mated at structural collars. The collars that make her quick to refit are the ones an act of sabotage will exploit.

The Reach · The Wrong Number

Captain Cross's armed explorer: a lifting-body hull that makes planetfall whole, kinetic mounts precise enough to act as a moving catcher, and the fold array of a true explorer. What a fleet built to discover looks like when it has to learn to fight.

Closed Sky · Heavy cruiser — principal boundary cruiser of the 2350 expedition, adapted for topology measurement ('the chief engineer of a heavy cruiser', Keller's Field, chapter 18)

A heavy cruiser, competently run, carrying a ship-scale Seam draw weapon because the expedition expected anchor machinery — not because the weapon was safe. 'Two hundred and eighty-six people go where I put them,' her Captain says in February; in May twelve are authenticated alive. Her arrangement is known through the ring that wraps the ship's middle, the bridge two decks above it, the module two decks down and forward, and the island aft — auxiliary control, thirty feet of flat, the after instrument space, and a man a hundred feet forward under a screw shore.

Closed Sky · Escort warship — 'a ship that mostly did escort work' (The Firing Order, chapter 13); the books never name a class

The professional naval lane of the expedition, and the ship that keeps moving when Sarah Bishop is absent. Her arrangement is known through the path a round takes — up out of a ready magazine into the cradle and up the second stage, through a handling room that calls each one out loud, to a mount whose shot comes back down through the deckhead as a flat knock you take in the knees — and through the plant four decks down, the loudest and hottest part of the ship, where an engineer sells readiness at an exchange rate.

The Long Watch · Shakedown

Exploration-class vessel. First of class. Houston Interstellar Yards. A 312-metre needle built around a forward 84-metre harmonic array, four secondary arrays at the quarter-points.

The Long Watch · The Ruins

Rebuilt from Resolute wreckage + Architect-residual derelict. Energy lance. Topology-modification shield. Asymmetric hull.

Spent Light · Dead Reckoning

The three craft an explorer reaches a surface by, drawn to one scale: the DS-7C dropship (the work truck), the LN-5B lander (science, and the finite surface fleet), and the YT-4A yard-tender (salvage and tow). A Meridian never lands herself — these do.

The Cairn · Civilian bulk hauler

A hauler whose articles are forty-one years old, that went out with ten and came back with fourteen. Her acting Master's hand log says three hundred and thirty-one days on passage. Her master clock says two hundred and forty-one. Her second engineer's says two hundred and sixty. Nobody has ever reconciled them, and the ship is the argument. What the Cairn found inside her was order: the walking line worn to bright metal on the mess deck, every locker labelled twice, a cloth on the table, and three hundred and thirty-one strokes cut into the paint beside the galley hatch.

The Outer Run · SNG commercial cargo – T-class derivative, Bergen build cycle

A commercial cargo hull that stopped being a ship without ever ceasing to be one. An auxiliary-stack failure on 28 April put her cabin power onto emergency inside six hours; her crew assessed the situation and decided to stay aboard, and were still there six weeks later with the galley panel up and the lead engineer's gloves clean enough to clip back on. She is drawn here as the sister hull she is.

Wide Sky · Wide Sky

The Mercer-class survey ship drawn as what she actually is: a mobile laboratory, a diplomatic habitat, a node-seeder, and — the part that decides the trilogy — a provenance authority. Lightly armed on purpose, because a gun at the mouth of somebody else's sky reads as conquest.

The Drift · First Run

Side-elevation technical schematic. T-class traverse vessel. ISNA Registry 2129-T-047. Drawing sheet 1 of 12.

The Far Roads · Survey hull, converted — expeditionary response

An existing survey hull taken up and rapidly converted in forty-six days, because a fixed station had just proved it could not reach the pockets. She is not a purpose-built ship and the books never let you forget it: a card taped to a door where a plate should be, a bay whose lighting went in the same package as everything else that did not arrive, a run of cable behind a connector that nobody cut a gap wide enough for. Everything about her arrangement is organised by one welded-in bulkhead her crew simply call the frame. ⭐ She comes back. In The Chosen Dark she is the hull that carries Sarah Bishop's replacement crystals and instruments from the Cairn wall to Hart on a leg she was making anyway — the same people, five years older, minus two berths, with the after-radiator spares Halloway will not cut for anybody and a raw-state emergence record from a rescue that turns out to be the anchor for everything Sarah proves three years later.

The Drift · The Long Light

Contact-class vessel. First hull. Triple phase-locked harmonic array. Bridge configured for observation.

The Chosen Dark · Expeditionary-response heavy hull, colony-assigned — the second hull; 'a flight plant with a shell round it'. The one that stayed.

Two heavy hulls in the service bays at Launch Spine, one bay each, with a wall between. Response One is the rescue shuttle with a cargo door: she flew Cold Run in April and she flies the crossing. Response Two is the other one — mid-turnaround when the sky went, her cabin access panel against the wall, her propellant faces under yellow plugs, her coolant loop broken at the exchanger and her assemblies tagged on a bench, wanting a gasket set and two face seals the colony could not make in February either. Choi wrote her off flying in March and Choi was right. What she had was a flight plant, the only one of its class on the ground apart from the one in the other hull, and a thing bolted in that couples a ship to a road. In June they tried to bolt the two hulls together and called it off. In July the plant came out of her aft end into a rig at the north end of the bay, her skin went to the sort floor in lengths one person could lift, and at ten o'clock on the night of 23 July the rig burned the plant on the ground, at ambient, in a shed, to make the road the other hull took. Navarro spent the best plant the colony owned on a bet. This is the hull the bet was made on, and this sheet draws her where she stood, because she never stood anywhere else.

Spent Light · Dead Reckoning

A contact-intelligence reconstruction of the silent power that holds the deep field: armoured non-geometric masses, vibration-and-EM speech the translator cannot read, and a single anomaly the assessment will not resolve — the behaviour reads defensive, not territorial.

Wide Sky · The Closing Sky

An intelligence census of the reach's coalition fleet, drawn to one scale. Not a class list — a biography of everything a stranded people could weld, salvage, buy or take, flown together because someone gave them a reason to.

The Chosen Dark · High-orbit traffic, node and climate-lattice control installation with a recoverable inhabited core

The station that kept the colony's sky. Thirty-eight years in high orbit above Fifteen, she ran traffic control, the junction node's orbital equipment and the forty-eight-frame climate lattice — and when terminal black took the lattice from under her, she kept eighteen people alive inside their own air for two months. Then her crew cut her in half on purpose: everything that only worked in orbit was vented and released, and Okonjo flew the pressure core down onto a building site at the edge of a dark town. This sheet draws both shapes, because the book does.

Wide Sky · The Widened Road

The station over Earth: gateway, market, embassy row and the Open Reach Survey's home berth. Where expeditions leave from, where they come back to a hero's welcome, and where a finding goes to be handled properly.

Wide Sky · The Widened Road

How a survey ship comes to be, on a terraformed Mars turned into the system's great spaceport. Two generations of seam-power, a fortress of plenty, and a yard named for a man who never wanted a ship.

Spent Light · Dead Reckoning

How a kilometre-class deep explorer comes to be: a Meridian hull in its orbital assembly cradle, dwarfing the tugs that build her. Section-mated, collar-joined, and never once on a planet. The scale of the Endurance, drawn honestly.

Wide Sky · The Closing Sky

The authentication relay at the Sable throat, commissioned out of Span-control infrastructure and never built for what it ends up carrying. A road-marker at the only door in or out of a reach — and the one place where what is true can still be established rather than asserted.

The Reach · The Guttering Light

The cathedral-scale anchor that holds one great fold open and lit, so a whole frontier region can thread home through a single mouth. Keep it lit and the region lives — and it was never built to carry what it now carries.

The Reach · The Doorstep

The jury-rigged watch-array and lock thrown up over the Doorstep junction, welded from the stripped core of the returned ISV Endurance — one improvised lattice held lit over a door that will open in months.

The Reach · The Wrong Number

The catcher and corridor-control outpost that holds the mouth of the Rivas Corridor — a golden-age momentum-exchange station that throws ships down the lane and catches what comes home, on a schedule a whole region eats and breathes by. Populated, ageing, and carrying more than it was built for.

The Chosen Dark · Geothermal heat and power plant on the far side of a road, and the legacy pressure works under the civic ground that its north loop keeps warm — the refuge

South Thermal was the reason Hart was not already dying. Forty-four years old, ugly, extended three times by people who each had their own ideas about labelling, its heat comes out of the ground and has nothing to do with the sky; it has nine doors and a loading yard, eight people live in it, and it is the only volume on the far side of a road. Three quarters of a kilometre away, under the civic ground on the old alignment, are the old works: the pressure shells the first settlers lived in, not a habitat for a generation, used since for whatever the colony needed a dry warm underground space for that year, with a landing-pattern reactor forgotten underneath them. When the sky went, this is where everyone went. The two halves are one drawing because the books never separate them — the north loop's number three circulator is upstream of every warm room on this sheet, and it turned on a bearing taken out of number four at ten past two on the first morning, with a hand on the casing from the fourth night on. Block six, two hundred metres from that hand, is where the fourteen died.

The Chosen Dark · Junction-node ground authentication array: a directional head on a shed with its own fuel cell and thermal loop, behind a fence on the rise east of Main Base, on a buried line that shares nothing with the ward grid

A shed on a rise east of Main Base, behind a fence, with its own fuel cell and its own thermal loop, because a node authentication that drops when a settlement transformer trips is a node authentication nobody offworld will ever accept again. On its roof a directional head tracks the high-orbit station across the sky and holds it for as long as the geometry allows; under its floor a buried line runs two kilometres into the command pit under Main Base and shares nothing with the ward grid. When the pit was abandoned at twelve minutes past one on the Monday morning of terminal black the far end of that line went with it, and for three and a half days Hart could not talk to eighteen people in orbit. The answer was not to move the cable, because you cannot move a buried cable. It was to go and sit at the far end of it: fifty minutes for the door, twenty for the terminal set, and then it worked, because it had been designed by people who assumed that one day everything else would be gone. From that Thursday the post cost two people and a vehicle slot every day, and it was the most expensive standing commitment on the ground. This sheet draws the shed. The pulse plant of One Road Out is another building — bay two at Launch Spine — and is not on it.

The Chosen Dark · Industrial hall, the north half of the Foundry ward — annealing bank, cranes, pattern shop and a pattern store under the hearths

Where the colony grew its crystals: one hall, the north half of the Foundry ward, the length of the Civic Spine market with a roof full of vents. This sheet is not about the crystals. It is about the building — a bank of eight annealing furnaces along the north wall with a metre of refractory in every one of them, holding at temperature on the Friday afternoon and giving it back into a dark hall for fifty hours, breathing wet warm air out of the vents until every vent wore a beard of ice a metre long and the whole windward face was white from the gutter down, so that from high orbit it read as a block-sized patch that had not moved and had not cooled in two passes; and the room nobody on the first search knew was under the hearths, behind a steel door with a number and no word, down twenty-two steps and a turn, where five people went at twenty past five on a Friday and two were alive on the eleventh day. The rescue party stood on the floor above and called, and a metre of concrete took the sound.

The Chosen Dark · Lake intake, water treatment and transfer station — the settlement's only source of drinking water

The station on the lake that makes Hart's water: a low building, a crane, three sheds and a walkway out to an intake head the size of a small house. In The Surveyors it is where the visitors' incursion comes ashore — two figures in outer shells working the junction boxes along the water side, operating the pumps through a control bus old enough to be a core sample of forty-five years of the colony's engineering budget. In Terminal Black it is the thing that is still liquid when nothing else is: a four-hundred-cubic-metre header under a metre of earth that would not freeze, and a plant room with the only treatment set, intake switchgear and heat-trace controls on the planet, with a hand-wheel gate at its north end that is the boundary between what is still working and everything else. And it has a gallery. Two hundred and ten metres of dry concrete straight under the spillway gully with the transfer main on brackets along its west wall, a weld at the sixty-metre mark, and eight metres of rigid bracket either side of the weld that somebody put back because rigid ones were what the store had that week.

The Long Watch · The Deep Edge

The seam-coupled relay that gave human space near-real-time communication across the junction network. Device cutaway, the growing mesh, and the two-layer architecture — transport, and the public append-only ledger.

The Reach · The Wrong Number

The Sundgren Combine corridor-logistics system — a mass-driver "sling" that flings cargo across the system, and the chain of decelerator rings that catches it gentle as freight. The catapult, the catch, and the legacy control net the catch-riders walk through.

The Long Watch · First Contact

The node-coupled neural device that turns a calibrated alien signal into real-time speech — noise-suppression, the hive model it learns from, and the three iterations from tethered prototype to portable kit. Drops the concepts with no human shape; returns null for the Nhál.

Wide Sky · Wide Sky

The survey sheet for a star that is failing far too fast: photometry against the model, the residual that will not close, and two mundane explanations struck out in order. The instrument is not broken. The cluster is not old. Something else is happening.

Spent Light · The Wrong Side

A survey chart of a system that has already ended: a guttering terminal primary, airless worlds, and an inner field of ancient hulls entered, stripped and emptied — every one, in the same patient way. Who did it, and when, is not on the chart.