Frontier authentication station, grown from a relay

The Cairn

A road-marker that people moved into. Four pressure cans and a man selling filter tape became a city of forty thousand at the only authenticated door into a reach, and it is still built around the relay it grew on — plated to about the height of two men and bare above that, where nobody has ever got round to it.

Operator: The Cairn Compact — nine founding signatory parties
Series: The Cairn
Drawn as: Drawn as at the poll, Day 103 of 2330, the census year — twenty-three sealable sectors, 37,400 people in 41,000 places. Redrawn 2026-09-21 to the topology the books walk: the docks are aprons at the core's foot, not arms on the rim, and the rings step down and out from there. The SITE sheet carries the whole life to 2342 as dated items marked spoiler; the PRINT lane is 2330 only (see printConfiguration).

Sheet 1 Ring plan — looking down, throat side to the top 13 rings · 26 sealable sectors

1 The bar, south face The core district published Who the Door Admits, chapter 1, ch13:77, ch13:129; What the Station Keeps passim
“The counter bar under the south face of the relay core had no name and needed none; it was where the plating still showed the old relay's hull serial under five coats of paint” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 13). The riggers come back “for the warm spot by the core” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 13). The most-referenced single spot on the station.
2 The shrine by the south brace The core district published Who the Door Admits, chapter 14; What First Call Buys, chapter 6; What the Station Keeps, chapter 22
“I went to the shrine by the south brace” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 14). By 2322 “the shrine niche had acquired a second niche — cut into the panel beside the first, edges still unpainted, because the first had filled: dock chits, a knot of ribbon, a thumbnail pressure gauge, a child's hair tie” (What First Call Buys, chapter 6). The floor has a shrine end (What the Station Keeps, chapter 22).
3 The drift-board by the south stair The core district published Who the Door Admits, chapter 13, ch14:103, ch24:5
“the drift-board by the south stair showing the Vekhol market an hour later tomorrow” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 13) — the Vekhol day runs twenty-five hours against the Cairn's twenty-four (Who the Door Admits, chapter 24). The Vekhol stall is beside it (Who the Door Admits, chapter 14).
4 The ledger face The core district published What the Station Keeps, chapter 1, ch05:147, ch24:105, ch27:7
“The route office had one trestle now along the ledger face and the fair copy out on it under a rule” (What the Station Keeps, chapter 1). The core face the route office's trestles stand against, looking down the floor.
5 The relay heart's floor The core district published Who the Door Admits, chapter 16; What the Station Keeps, chapter 5, ch07:219
The civic floor — the banner's CIVIC HEART. “From the head of the ramp the heart ran as a single body, east curve to ramp foot” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 16). “The relay heart's floor was full at that hour, the way it was full every evening: the bench along the inboard wall with people on it in coats” (What the Station Keeps, chapter 7); “a queue at the noodle counter and two of the printers going behind the relay office rail” (What the Station Keeps, chapter 5).
6 The node room The core district published Who the Door Admits, chapter 4, ch10:7; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 13, ch13:37
“The node room off the relay heart seated nine at a pinch” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 10); “Off the far end, past the printers” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 13); its shutter “didn't shut properly and clerks talk” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 4).
7 The stores stair and hatch The core district published Who Gets to Answer, chapter 16, ch16:219; What the Station Keeps, chapter 1, ch22:129
“The stores stair out of the relay heart still had the hooks in the ceiling over it from when that gallery had been stores” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 16). The clean line round the core stops at the stores hatch (What the Station Keeps, chapter 1). ⚠ 2342: “The barrow of brushes stood at the stair foot with the card on it, a name and an hour, and the hour eight years gone” (What the Station Keeps, chapter 22).
8 The core ramp The core district published Who the Door Admits, chapter 16, ch16:181; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 9–9; What First Call Buys, chapter 1
“The core ramp had a rail up one side and a trolley run up the other” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 9), from the heart floor up to the administration landing where the Administrator's room “ran straight off the landing” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 9), two levels above the heart (What First Call Buys, chapter 1). The panel room's ramp door and the noodle stall under the ramp (Who the Door Admits, chapter 9) are on it.
9 The Assembly hall The core district published Who Gets to Answer, chapter 20, ch20:245, ch22:43, ch23:101, ch23:151–153, ch25:11
The bonded store off the administration stair: “the racking scars up both long walls” (ch20:15); members' doors “Long side, third bay down … Public's at the short end off the gallery stair” (ch20:245); “Members on the deck, six rows of chairs in a broken square, a printed card on the back of every chair, and three of the cards at the far end with nobody under them” (ch23:153); “the store's hooks in the deckhead” in the passage outside (ch23:101).
10 Quarantine berth Nine The dock districts published Who the Door Admits, chapter 4, ch18:5, ch22:129, ch22:199, ch25:179
“Below them Nine ran out under work-lights — eighty metres of apron, a gantry with the old relay's serial still stencilled up the mast, and a pressure door built into the deck itself. Nine had been the relay's cargo lock before there was a station to hang off it. Its own atmosphere loop. Its own power spur. The one volume on the throat side a person could shut without shutting anything else.” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 4). A gallery with a rail and a manometer overlooks it (ch22:199); a lay-by lies “two frames down” (ch25:179).
11 The anchor-chain shore plant The dock districts published Who Holds the Standard, chapter 4, ch08:327; What the Station Keeps, chapter 3–81, ch05:17, ch33:9
Throat side, below the boundary dock: “The walk had a stair at one end that came down off the boundary dock, with a door at the head of it that took a code every hand on the throat side knew, and at the other end it gave onto the works passage, which was how the trolleys came in” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 4). “twelve metres of walk with four doors down the outboard side of it, one to a chain” (What the Station Keeps, chapter 3). First named 2334; on the 2330 print it stands as the throat-side ranging bay of Who the Door Admits (“the outboard head's shroud”, ch18:157) without its name.
12 The throat-side landing The dock districts published Who Holds the Standard, chapter 8; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 4–49, ch16:171
“The throat-side landing had a ramp down to the works passage and a ramp up to the trade concourse and one turn between them, and at the turn there was a rail and a notice frame and a board” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 8). The berthing block by the ramp — “a bed in the block off the throat side and it's not a let and it isn't anybody's sector” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 16) — and the intake rooms up the walk from the berth (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 4–49).
13 The route counter and the overdue frame The dock districts published Who Gets to Answer, chapter 6, ch06:93, ch06:117–119, ch12:11, ch15:7; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 16; What the Station Keeps, chapter 9
“The route counter sat where the corridor widened, with the Warden's offices past it and quieter still” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 6). “The frame was on the wall behind them, on the corridor side where a person could read it without coming to the counter … Six sheets in it this morning, one of them an overdue” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 6) — “It stood in that frame from the sixty-fourth to the two hundred and twenty-eighth” (ch06:117). Past it: the Warden's middle room with “benches down both sides”, the access room with “No heater in it” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 12, ch15:7). The throat counter keeps its book “under the glass” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 16).
14 The trade-side post The dock districts published Who Gets to Answer, chapter 3–13, ch04:143, ch06:31; Who the Door Admits, chapter 9; What First Call Buys, chapter 2, ch13:29–31
One stair up from the concourse; four windows; three clerks; Sesk on the tall stool — the one stool on a station where “The counters are cut at human waist height. All of them are cut to the same figure” (What First Call Buys, chapter 13). Its back room has “a table with a burn ring on it, a shelf of docket boxes, a heater, and glass through to the counter” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 4). The window looks down on the apron (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 6) and the heart (Who the Door Admits, chapter 9).
15 The vault door and the civil registry The dock districts published Who Gets to Answer, chapter 25, ch26:113–115, ch26:135, ch27:5, ch28:115
“The civil registry counter sat under the boards at the Trade-Upper end, past the vault door and the post” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 26); “The registry's queue rail was bolted to the deck out in front of the shutter with a printed card in a frame over it” (ch25:347). The boards above it are the station's one public noticeboard: nine sector names in chalk and fourteen blanks on the poll's morning (ch23:11).
16 The berth board and the chalk hut The dock districts published What First Call Buys, chapter 2–13
“The berth board ran one to twenty-two down its left edge, white paint on black steel, bolted to the chalk hut at the head of the aprons” (What First Call Buys, chapter 2). The pool hands read it from the hut's third stair; the loadmaster from the rail of the post stair above; the Vekhol gang's cat from the hut's warm roof.
17 The medical berth, lower apron The dock districts published Who Gets to Answer, chapter 28–125, ch28:205
“The *Almoner* lay at the medical berth on the lower apron with her ramp down and the boards over the window at the ramp foot carrying her calls” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 28); a low rail at the window end and a first bollard along the apron (ch28:125); “The ramp came up somewhere below them and went into its seat with a knock that came through the deck” (ch28:205).
18 The void access, under Nine The maintenance voids published Who the Door Admits, chapter 11, ch15:227, ch16:19–23
“The void access sat behind the reclamation lockers at the end of a service spur, past a wall where somebody had stencilled MIND YOUR HEAD in two languages and got the second one wrong” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 16). Eleven rungs down; the runs under Nine; two hundred metres to three blocs along.
19 The Ring Four board – REFUGE CAPACITY 480 Ring Four published Who the Door Admits, chapter 21
“The sector's board hung on the spine wall at the boundary, laminated, marked up in wet pencil going back a year — duty fitters, water tests, the lift that had been out since the ring build” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 21), and along the bottom in the same hand: REFUGE CAPACITY 480.
20 The Six-B junction tap and the reserve plate Ring Six published What First Call Buys, chapter 4, ch04:145, ch12:3, ch19:51; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1, ch01:85, ch19:133
“The reserve plate was bolted to the bulkhead over the tap, at eye height, where the corridor met the junction. RING RESERVE, stamped into the metal at the build” (What First Call Buys, chapter 4). In 2330 “the ring's access plate carried the reserve in figures the height of a thumbnail — nine hours” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1), and Lote writes it against the flow every morning (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 19). The seamer's chair stands at the head of the tap queue (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1).
21 The narrow part — the bypass Ring Six published Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1–63, ch29:63–65, ch29:97; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 1
“Halfway along, the walkway narrowed by about the width of a person … a hand's span of pipe on brackets down the port side, lagged, taped at the joints, with a rubber mat across the section outside the third door where a woman had put one down years ago and nobody had ever taken it up. The plates along that stretch had come out of a different shop” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1–59). “Don't go fast at the bypass.” (ch01:63). Eight years on, “The lagging on the pipe had gone shiny in a band along the narrow part at about coat height” (ch29:65).
22 Frame nineteen — the trunk gallery access Ring Six published What First Call Buys, chapter 19, ch20:125, ch20:141, ch22:239, ch26:195, ch28:59
“The gallery access stood at frame nineteen, dogs off” (What First Call Buys, chapter 20); “Two runs through frame nineteen — a duty run and a standby, each through its own penetration” (ch20:141) — where “the Ring Six/Seven industrial trunk” failed on Day 35 of 2322 (ch22:239). The outboard stair is here: “down the trunk gallery, along the pipe run, out at the outboard stair at frame nineteen. There was no second way.” (ch26:195). “Remains recovered from the Ring Six trunk gallery at frame nineteen on the morning of Day 51” (ch28:59).
23 The plate with eleven names Ring Six published Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2, ch23:125
“The plate down on the ring walk carried two counts, the roll's cut and the ward's written in under it in stylus, and everybody on the station said eleven” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2). “There's a plate on my ring walk with eleven names cut in it, two more written under them. Everybody says eleven.” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 23, the Six-C delegate).
24 The ward-store hatch, Seven-A Ring Seven published Who Holds the Standard, chapter 13; What the Station Keeps, chapter 22
At the far end of the landing from the sector office (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 13). “a queue at the ward-store hatch” that runs back along the wall and turns the corner (What the Station Keeps, chapter 22).
25 The movement-and-seal desk Ring Seven published What the Station Keeps, chapter 6, ch06:247, ch12:203
“The movement-and-seal desk stood at the head of the walk against the wall on the ring side, under the notice frame, and had stood there since the frames went up, and on an ordinary morning it had one clerk at it and a queue of three” (What the Station Keeps, chapter 6).
26 The Seven board's two rooms Ring Seven published What the Station Keeps, chapter 21
“The Seven board kept two rooms on the ring wall side of the ramp head, and had kept them since the sectors were drawn, and the outer of the two was a room with three trestl[es]” (What the Station Keeps, chapter 21).
27 The letting office, Ring Eight frame Ring Eight published What First Call Buys, chapter 3
“The letting office on the Ring Eight frame kept its founding paper under glass, flat on the counter where the tenants queued” (What First Call Buys, chapter 3). The Concession's face to its tenants.
28 Nine-B's second gallery Ring Nine published What the Station Keeps, chapter 4–71; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 14, ch30:151
“The second gallery on Nine-B ran the length of the bloc face with the rail on the open side and the doors on the other” (What the Station Keeps, chapter 4); a wash-house at each end, “The first wash-house was on the near end and had the queue at it” (ch04:69). ⚠ SPOILER (2334): it takes a bloc's worth of the cascade, and the second wash-house is “the one that never did” work (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 30).

Sheet 2 Section — looking in, showing the terrace Core height 96 m · 3 floors to a landing

Sheet 3 Ring anatomy — a section across a typical ring, inboard to outboard 6 named parts

What a Cairn ring is made of, walking outward from the ring wall. What the Station Keeps is the book that describes this, because its POV works the doors for a living.

AN-WALL The ring wall published What the Station Keeps, chapter 6, ch12:203
The inboard face. “The movement-and-seal desk stood at the head of the walk against the wall on the ring side, under the notice frame, and had stood there since the frames went up” (ch06:61).
AN-WALK The walk published What the Station Keeps, chapter 1–37; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 7
The circulation deck. Plated, stencilled, frame-numbered. On Seven-B it “ran flat and unbroken from the landing to the turn at the plant face” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 7). ⚠ 2342 texture: Ring Seven's extension past the plant turn — “The walk had a name on it that was not the one on the plating. The stencil at the plant turn gave it as the far walk, and everybody … called it the long end” (What the Station Keeps, chapter 1) — is post-2334 and not on the 2330 print.
AN-BLOC The bloc line published What the Station Keeps, chapter 1; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 7
The radial seal. “The bloc line at Six-B ran between the walk and the landing, and it had on it what every bloc line has: a leaf the height of two men, a jack point under a cover.” The leaf is a width of lined steel running the full height of the frame.
AN-LAND The landing published What the Station Keeps, chapter 14, ch22:31, ch31:27; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 13
Three floors up the face, a rail round each, doors all the way round every floor. Mats out, washing on the second, a ward-store hatch with a queue that turns the corner.
AN-VOID The void behind the lining published What the Station Keeps, chapter 23, ch36:127
“Behind it the void ran the length of the landing with the lining down the outboard side, and Cray went in on her elbows with the lamp ahead of her and the lead paying out behind, and the plating over the bays gave a hand's depth of clearance for a person on their front” (ch23:177, Seven-B's store end). The lining stands “in plates the height of a man” (ch36:127).
AN-PATH2 Ring Eleven's second path published What the Station Keeps, chapter 2, ch22:85, ch36:133–139; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 3, ch13:227
⚠ SPOILER — Eleven only, and Eleven is 2333. “It runs behind the lining and it turns out at every bloc line on that ring and comes back in” (ch22:85). Walked at last in What the Station Keeps, chapter 36: “a shoulder's width and had a walkway grating for the first twenty paces and bare beam after that, and the services ran along the outboard side of it in three tiers” (ch36:135) — and at the first crossing “the drawing had the gear outboard of the lining, and the gear was not outboard of the lining. It stood inboard, on the ring's own face” (ch36:139).

How a place here is given. A place on the Cairn is given as ring + boundary + frame number + hour — “Cray gave him the ring, the boundary, the frame number and the hour, and the clerk put down the tin and wrote it on the card” (ch01:69). Frame numbers are stencilled on the plating; the trade side and the berths use the same currency (“a broker's office two frames along the trade side”, Who the Door Admits, chapter 9; “a lay-by two frames down”, Who the Door Admits, chapter 25). So the station shares the ships' addressing, which is why this sheet can be checked at all. published What the Station Keeps, chapter 1, ch28:57, ch38:17

Sheet 4 Sector schedule — capacity against occupancy 37,400 in 43,400 places

C The core district 3,560 / 3,790

C-N Core-North — the relay heart core pressure doors published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who the Door Admits, chapter 1, ch10:7, ch13:131, ch14:197, ch16:5; What First Call Buys, chapter 1–125, ch06:45; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 13
Certified 1,960; 1,840 in 2330. The civic floor under the core: it runs “as a single body, east curve to ramp foot” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 16) with a west curve, a south frame and a south stair. “Now the deck was let in pitches to the wall on three sides and in barrows down the fourth” and “Across the middle of it ran the freight lane, painted on the deck in yellow, wide enough for the hoist and repainted by the traders out of their own pockets” (What First Call Buys, chapter 1–125). The drift-board by the south stair posts the Vekhol day-market's twenty-five-hour clock (Who the Door Admits, chapter 13, ch24:5); the shrine niche by the south brace holds “dock chits, a knot of ribbon, a thumbnail pressure gauge, a child's hair tie” and has grown a second niche (Who the Door Admits, chapter 14; What First Call Buys, chapter 6); the claims desk, the exchange with its chalked rates and its tank of fish, the printers along the near wall, and the node room “off the relay heart” that “seated nine at a pinch” and whose shutter “didn't shut properly” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 10, ch04:163). The core ramp goes up from this floor to Core-South, “a rail up one side and a trolley run up the other” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 9); the stores stair goes up to the gallery; the goods stair and goods lift land here; the throat corridor leaves past the ramp head; the post stair backs up onto it from the trade side.
C-S Core-South — administration core pressure doors published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; What First Call Buys, chapter 1; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 9, ch20:15, ch20:37, ch23:151–153
Certified 1,830; 1,720 in 2330. “Two levels above the heart the noise fell off to nothing, which was what the old core paid for and got” (Muster, chapter 1). The Administrator's room “ran straight off the landing” at the ramp head, with “a rack of pigeonholes with sector numbers painted above them, three of the numbers painted out and done again” (Notice of Intent, chapter 9). The Assembly hall “had been a bonded store off the administration stair and had the racking scars up both long walls” (Notice of Intent, chapter 20): twenty-nine chairs in six rows in a broken square, three at the far end with nobody under them, two members' doors on the long side at the third bay, the public forty deep at the short end off the gallery stair (Notice of Intent, chapter 23–153). It is not a boundary — “the seal's at the core pressure doors up the stair, same as it always was. If this sector goes, everybody in this room is in it” (Notice of Intent, chapter 20).
C-2 Ring Two core pressure doors fixed author ruling 2026-08-01, standing on Who Gets to Answer, chapter 17, ch21:157 (inhabited); absent from the roll, Who Gets to Answer, chapter 23–225
AUTHOR RULING. Ring Two is inhabited and leased in published prose — “a woman on Ring Two with a child under a year” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 17), “The woman off Two who's been coming about the cough” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 21) — but it holds no seat and appears on no roster line and is not called in the ch23 roll. The ruling: Rings One and Two are the original volumes grown against the relay core, not independently sealable, and therefore inside the core's seal. That keeps the published count of twenty-three exact and keeps the prose true. Ring One is never named in any book (grep clean, Who the Door Admits through What the Station Keeps).

DK The dock districts 3,760 / 4,110

TH Throat-side throat isolation published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who the Door Admits, chapter 4, ch07:101, ch18:5, ch18:155, ch25:181; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 6–93, ch12:11, ch15:7; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 8
Certified 870; 710 — the emptiest sector on the station and the one everything else depends on. RULING 2026-09-21: drawn at the core's foot, not on the rim, because “Nine had been the relay's cargo lock before there was a station to hang off it” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 4). “The throat-side landing had a ramp down to the works passage and a ramp up to the trade concourse and one turn between them, and at the turn there was a rail and a notice frame and a board” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 8). “The throat side ran colder than the trade side and always had” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 6) — cold “from the second bulkhead on” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 26), “because nothing on this side of the station was heated past what the work wanted” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 12). Down the corridor from the concourse: the route counter “where the corridor widened, with the Warden's offices past it and quieter still” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 6), the overdue frame on the corridor side of it, the Warden's outer, middle and access rooms, and her working room “one deck under the ranging gallery … the only compartment on the station where nothing was stacked on anything else” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 7). The throat watch stacks vertically: the high gallery (Who the Door Admits, chapter 25), the watch room, and “The boundary gallery ran unheated along the outboard frame, four decks down and out from the watch room” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 18). The boundary dock has a service main that “filled a twenty-litre can in fifty-one seconds”, a gear bay, a pass-through “built for sample crates” and a ramp up to the quarantine berth (Who the Door Admits, chapter 18, ch25:81).
TU Trade-Upper dock boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who the Door Admits, chapter 9, ch09:63; What First Call Buys, chapter 2; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 3–13, ch06:31, ch26:113, ch26:135, ch28:115
Certified 1,690; 1,590. The trade-side post, one stair up from the concourse — “The stair still backed up to the concourse by mid-morning” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 3) — with “Four windows on the post now: the queue window at the head of the stair, two counters for the ordinary business, and the landing window at the far end where people came off ships. Three clerks. Sesk on the tall stool between them” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 3). Its window looks down on the apron and the heart in one view: “the lift gang at the number-three cradle, the noodle stall under the ramp doing the shift change, the queue at the claims desk four deep” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 9); “Below the window a crane came off its park and the sound of it went the length of the apron” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 6). Along the same deck: the vault door, then “The civil registry counter sat under the boards at the Trade-Upper end, past the vault door and the post” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 26) — “The post is forty feet that way” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 26). A broker's office is “two frames along the trade side” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 9): the trade side is frame-addressed like a hull. Trade-Upper is literally over Trade-Lower; the plan draws them as two arcs because it cannot stack them, and the section is where they stack.
TL Trade-Lower dock boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who the Door Admits, chapter 5, ch05:19, ch09:47; What First Call Buys, chapter 2–13; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 3, ch28:93–125; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 13
Certified 1,550; 1,460. The aprons. “The berth board ran one to twenty-two down its left edge, white paint on black steel, bolted to the chalk hut at the head of the aprons. Fourteen of the twenty-two lines were dressed already” (What First Call Buys, chapter 2) — fourteen under the Concession's first call, eight in open order; the pool hands read it from the hut's third stair, and the loadmaster reads it from “the rail of the post stair” above (What First Call Buys, chapter 2,:13). A south apron where the Vekhol gang rig out with their cat on the manifest (What First Call Buys, chapter 2; Who the Door Admits, chapter 9); a lower apron with a named medical berth, “the *Almoner* lay at the medical berth on the lower apron with her ramp down and the boards over the window at the ramp foot carrying her calls”, a low rail and a first bollard (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 28,:125); a far apron under the lamps (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 3); a long apron with far cleats and the Concession's rooms up a stair off it (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 13). Hulls lie ON the apron: “A tenant hull at four with both gantries on her, cargo netting going over the rail in bights, a tally clerk walking her ramp” (What First Call Buys, chapter 2). Cranes park down the length of it; “the whine of the winches carrying the length of the dock the way it carried in the dry air, which was flatly, and forever”.

D12 Deck Twelve 780 / 890

12-A Deck Twelve — feedstock and cultured lines plant boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who the Door Admits, chapter 2, ch21:17–25; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2, ch25:15
The only numbered deck in the franchise, and it is used as a sector name rather than as a position in a sequence. Five six-hundred-litre vessels drawn in rotation, each killable alone by one person at one switch — because two hundred cubic metres of bay water cannot be cooked by anything on the Cairn, so the plant is small and there are five of them.
12-S The Sethlan sector plant boundary published Who the Door Admits, chapter 2, ch02:22, ch02:78, ch08; What First Call Buys, chapter 26
NOT A ROSTER SECTOR — a volume inside Deck Twelve's plant boundary, behind its own lock (“The culture hall stood inside the sector's lock”, Who the Door Admits, chapter 2); Deck Twelve votes as one (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 23). Through a stepped lock, and inside three metres the temperature and the light change: dim, wet-warm, the air heavy enough to sit on the skin, a degree and a half warmer than any human keeps a room. Four hundred and six people, two sittings a day, four low tables end to end down the commons and the cord frames racked along the far wall. Something grows on the damp of the outboard walls that the Sethlan strip and braid, and the cord it makes does not rot in a wet void — so the reclamation crews buy it hand to hand, off the books. The entry arch shows low amber off the east curve, dimmer than every door beside it.

V The maintenance voids 460 / 490

V-1 The voids — sections eight through twenty service isolation published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who the Door Admits, chapter 11–39, ch13:169, ch15:227–241, ch16:19–65; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 16, ch23:33, ch23:261, ch24:123; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 12
DRAWN AS A BAND, BUT THEY RUN UNDER EVERYTHING. The voids are the service level beneath the floors, from the core out; this sheet shows a representative band because a plan cannot draw a floor under all the other floors. The access “sat behind the reclamation lockers at the end of a service spur, past a wall where somebody had stencilled MIND YOUR HEAD in two languages and got the second one wrong” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 16). “The ladder went down eleven rungs into cold. Below the deck the noise of the heart came through the plating as a single low pressure” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 16). “The runs under Nine were cable trays and lagged mains at knee height and a clearance that put her on her heels for the first twenty metres” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 11); then “two hundred metres of crawl under a metre high” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 15) “along the outboard side under the spine frames, up three blocs along” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 15), “Nine hundred under the spine frame” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 15). “Twelve metres further the void forked — one leg inboard …” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 16). Reclamation writes on the plating in wax pencil, “and in one place a very good sketch of a dog” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 16). Sections eight through twenty; nine access points on the sweep drawing (Who the Door Admits, chapter 13) against “a dozen ways down off this floor alone” by 2334 (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 12). Four hundred and sixty people, one member, and “one road into it” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 16); the second road “on a list two years and it's under a plant nobody wants shut” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 23); the low gallery wants pressure doors (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 24).

R3 Ring Three 1,050 / 1,180

3 Ring Three ring boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; What First Call Buys, chapter 4; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 14
The oldest let. Lote “had held lease forty-one there, her first paper on the station, a good door on a dry row — and the block had been bought the year before, the whole row re-papered” (What First Call Buys, chapter 4); by 2330 her household is Ring Six (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 11). At the quiet hour Ring Three sounds of its own ventilation and nothing else.

R4 Ring Four 1,350 / 1,460

4 Ring Four ring boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who the Door Admits, chapter 12, ch21:123; What First Call Buys, chapter 21
Nine blocs, nine boundaries, eleven hundred people on the far end of the same pipe. “The sector's board hung on the spine wall at the boundary, laminated, marked up in wet pencil going back a year — duty fitters, water tests, the lift that had been out since the ring build” — and along the bottom, REFUGE CAPACITY 480 (Who the Door Admits, chapter 21). “local reserve, nine hours” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 12), and it starts the minute you open it. “Ring Four was three frames and a tarpaulin” once (What First Call Buys, chapter 21).

R5 Ring Five built 2319 3,990 / 4,200

5-A Five-A ring boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster
Certified 2,120; 2,010.
5-B Five-B bloc doors published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster
Certified 2,080; 1,980.

R6 Ring Six built 2319 5,550 / 5,780

6-A Six-A ring boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster
Certified 1,980; 1,900.
6-B Six-B — the bypass sector bloc doors published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; What First Call Buys, chapter 4, ch12:3, ch26:203; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1–63, ch01:85, ch16:205–209, ch29:63–65; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 1
Certified 1,940; 1,860. The emergency cross-feed of 2322 “came in through the hull access and along a residential corridor” (What First Call Buys, chapter 26) because there was no time to go through the trunk, and the corridor never got its width back: “narrowed by about the width of a person twelve years ago and had never got it back, and the plating along the narrow part was different plating, four courses” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 1). “Halfway along, the walkway narrowed by about the width of a person … a hand's span of pipe on brackets down the port side, lagged, taped at the joints, with a rubber mat across the section outside the third door” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1–59); people go through it single file. The reserve plate is at the tap head where the corridor meets the ring junction (What First Call Buys, chapter 4); in 2330 it reads nine hours again “with the post-programme certification date under it and a tag on a wire beneath that” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1). “It is the only sector on this station where I could not work out where the boundary had been meant to go” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 16). Nobody explains the name any more.
6-C Six-C — the plant face plant boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; What First Call Buys, chapter 20, ch22:239, ch26:195; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2, ch23:125; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 3, ch06:119, ch13:231
Certified 1,860; 1,790. The industrial face, and where the trunk was cut: “the Ring Six/Seven industrial trunk at frame nineteen” (What First Call Buys, chapter 22). At frame nineteen “The gallery access stood … dogs off” and “The house lighting ran warm as far as the last door on the residential stretch and went work-white after it” (What First Call Buys, chapter 20); the outboard stair is there too (What First Call Buys, chapter 26). On the ring walk: “There's a plate on my ring walk with eleven names cut in it, two more written under them. Everybody says eleven.” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 23). Six-C has “the gallery over the growth hall at the plant face, and the works rooms behind it” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 13). The only gang on the station that can plate to a wound rating — “Yours goes past the boundary, so it's a wound rating. A wound rating is a different sheet” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 6) — works here, which is why every other job on the Cairn queues behind this arc.

R7 Ring Seven built 2320 5,040 / 5,340

7-A Seven-A ring boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 13; What the Station Keeps, chapter 6, ch14:85
Certified 1,820; 1,730. “The Seven-A landing was thirty paces by about twelve, with the sector office at the ramp end and the ward store at the other” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 13); the movement-and-seal desk stands at the head of the walk under the notice frame (What the Station Keeps, chapter 6). ⚠ SPOILER (2334): after the twenty-eighth there are households living the length of the landing and forty paces into the walk beyond.
7-B Seven-B bloc doors published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 7, ch07:119, ch10:43, ch10:67; What the Station Keeps, chapter 23
Certified 1,780; 1,670. “The Seven-B inboard walk was wider than Ring Six's and had never been narrowed, and it ran flat and unbroken from the landing to the turn at the plant face” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 7). Four bloc doors on the line, and they are not all handed the same way — “Adisa's door was handed the other way and opened off the Seven-A side” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 10) — which is the only reason anyone came off this walk alive. The jack plate sits “on the Seven-B face, down at knee height, a cover the size of a hand with a wire through two lugs and a lead tag” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 7). The store end of the walk “stood outboard of the seal by about thirty paces” (What the Station Keeps, chapter 23).
7-C Seven-C plant boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 10, ch29:75, ch29:93
Certified 1,740; 1,640 — a living sector at the census, with a delegate who votes (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 23). ⚠ SPOILER (2334): its returns ran through the plant face, and “the face had been carrying over its rating since the twenty-fifth” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 10). “The roll for Seven-C at the twenty-eighth was one thousand six hundred and eighty. The sheet for the sector closed on the forty-fourth at twenty-three. That leaves one thousand six hundred and fifty-seven” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 29). There is no volume behind that door that a person is going to sleep in again.

R8 Ring Eight built 2320 3,800 / 4,040

8-A Eight-A ring boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; What First Call Buys, chapter 3
Certified 2,040; 1,920. “The letting office on the Ring Eight frame kept its founding paper under glass, flat on the counter where the tenants queued” (What First Call Buys, chapter 3).
8-B Eight-B bloc doors published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster
Certified 2,000; 1,880.

R9 Ring Nine built 2325 4,130 / 4,800

9-A Nine-A ring boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2, ch23:15–19
Certified 2,420; 2,080 — the largest constituency on the station, and 4.52 of it to one of the voids. Built 2325, and the first ring on the Cairn built two-path from the drawing, because of what happened in Ring Six three years earlier.
9-B Nine-B bloc doors published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 14; What the Station Keeps, chapter 4–71
Certified 2,380; 2,050. “Nine-B is two-path from the drawing, every run” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2). Its second gallery runs “the length of the bloc face with the rail on the open side and the doors on the other” with a wash-house at each end (What the Station Keeps, chapter 4–71). ⚠ SPOILER (2334): “They've put a bloc's worth of the cascade into it. There's one wash-house, and the wash-house is the one that doesn't work” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 14).

R10 Ring Ten built 2328 3,930 / 4,920

10-A Ten-A ring boundary published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 13, ch20:129, ch20:139
Certified 2,480; 1,980 — the newest occupied ring, and the lowest on the roll. The roll is leaseholders, not bodies: “There's people on my ring in sublets paying twice a let, sleeping four to a room” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 20); “people sleeping in rooms they aren't on a lease for” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 20). “Rent's cheap on Ten. It's noisy.” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 13).
10-B Ten-B bloc doors published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1, ch20:131
Certified 2,440; 1,950. “Ten-B was one, and it stood empty a season for it” — held shut until somebody had walked the second path (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 20). By the census the wait for a let on it is “nineteen months, and her friend said nineteen months was optimistic” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1).

R11 Ring Eleven built 2333 0 / 2,400

11 Ring Eleven — fitted, lit, empty ring boundary published Who Holds the Standard, chapter 3, ch03:17, ch03:35, ch03:103, ch29:107
⚠ SPOILER — NOT ON THE 2330 PRINT AND NOT ONE OF THE TWENTY-THREE. Finished 2333. “The deck plate along Ring Eleven's inboard walk had no wear on it anywhere in its length, and the walk light was up the whole way round, and the air came off the returns at the temperature it would have come off them with two thousand four hundred people in there breathing it” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 3). Door numbers “cut into the frame rather than stuck on … a stuck number comes off and a cut number is there when the lights are down” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 3). Every notice frame “glass and a clip and nothing behind the glass” (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 3). Every handle carries an orange fitter's tag. “two thousand four hundred fitted places behind doors with tags through the handles, two walks and a ramp from” the Seven-A landing (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 29). It is shut because its second path has not been walked.

Key The exterior, label by label 8 labels reconciled

The approved series banner labels eight things. This is where each one lands on the sheet, so the drawing and the cover cannot drift apart.

THE THROAT — ENTRYWAY TO THE SEAM the DK/TH sector and LM-NINE at the top of the plan published Who the Door Admits, chapter 4, ch07:101; Who Holds the Standard, chapters 4 and 8:185
ORIGINAL RELAY CORE core published What the Station Keeps, chapters 1 and 27
CIVIC HEART LM-FLOOR, on ring C published What the Station Keeps, chapters 4 and 19
HABITAT SECTORS rings R3–R10 published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster
DOCK DISTRICTS ring DK, at the core's foot published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who the Door Admits, chapter 4; What First Call Buys, chapter 2
The banner's spurs are read as the aprons' outboard doors seen from outside; there are no arms on this sheet.
SERVICE RING V, the maintenance voids published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster; Who the Door Admits, chapter 11, ch15:227, ch16:19
PRESSURE BOUNDARY every seal class in the legend — the station IS its boundaries published Who Gets to Answer the sector roster
AMENDMENT LAYER R11, fitted 2333 and lit and empty at the census published Who Holds the Standard, chapters 3, 13 and 29
⚠ SPOILER. The banner lights this band a different colour from the rest of the city, which is exactly right: it is the newest work (2333), it was built to a decision rather than a need, and nobody lives in it. Not on the 2330 print.

What this drawing is not claiming

⚠ Every z on these sheets is the drawing's. Canon fixes no deck heights. What it does fix is the DIRECTION: rings are “down and out” — “The boundary gallery ran unheated along the outboard frame, four decks down and out from the watch room” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 18); “two levels up and three rings out of his own sector” (What First Call Buys, chapter 26); the Administrator's office is “Two levels above the heart” (What First Call Buys, chapter 1) — and the approved series banner draws the same terraced disc stepping down and outward from a lit core. The one counter-signal, Lote going “up the ring walk … up the last of the ring stair” from the Six-B tap (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1–113), is a stair inside a ring, not the terrace. The docks sit one level below the civic floor at its foot; Deck Twelve is “down there” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2); the voids run under everything.

⚠ NO ARMS. v2 of this spec drew six radial berthing spurs off the rim, from the banner. Deleted 2026-09-21: in five books no hull ever lies on a spur. Every berth is an apron inside a pressure boundary — “eighty metres of apron, a gantry with the old relay's serial still stencilled up the mast, and a pressure door built into the deck itself” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 4); “the *Tallow* riding dark on her lines with her umbilicals sagging, and along the outboard sill of the deck door a chalk mark” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 22); “that berth wants fenders, cradle-power and umbilicals before anybody brings a ship alongside” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 5). The banner's spurs are read as the aprons' outboard doors seen from outside; the exterior key maps them onto ring DK.

Seal class — what shuts around this volume

Ring boundary
Bloc doors
Plant boundary
Core pressure doors
Dock boundary
Throat isolation
Service isolation

Grade of every figure on these sheets

published Stated in the books. If a drawing disagrees, the drawing is wrong.
derived Arithmetic on published facts; the working is given.
fixed Canon was silent here and the drawing decided.

Systems

Apron berths

derived

A door in the deck, cradles and fenders, umbilicals, a gantry, and the hull's own ramp down

RULING 2026-09-21. No Cairn berth is a spur: a hull comes alongside onto an apron inside a pressure boundary. Nine is the pattern — “eighty metres of apron, a gantry with the old relay's serial still stencilled up the mast, and a pressure door built into the deck itself” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 4); the hull rides “dark on her lines with her umbilicals sagging” with a chalk mark “along the outboard sill of the deck door” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 22); the sill is caulked on your belly for forty metres while “the manometer on the gallery rail came up from nine to ten and a half” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 22); and the crew come “down a slope in station gravity” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 22). A berth wants “fenders, cradle-power and umbilicals before anybody brings a ship alongside” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 5); a working hull has “both gantries on her, cargo netting going over the rail in bights, a tally clerk walking her ramp” (What First Call Buys, chapter 2). Berths are numbered one to twenty-two on the trade side, with Nine and Four and a lay-by “two frames down” on the throat side; a hull that cannot come in sits at a standoff — “*Rampart* shifts outboard four thousand metres before that hull comes alongside” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 4). The 2322 cross-feed hulls “moored hard against the hull line above the seven-side blocs” (What First Call Buys, chapter 26) — the rings' outboard faces are exterior hull, which the terrace draws.

Nine80 m of apron the relay's old cargo lock; its own loop and power spur
Berth board22 lines fourteen under the Concession's first call, eight open
Standoff4,000 m Who the Door Admits, chapter 4
Quarantine lane40 m “a roped, lit lane from the quarantine lock at Six to the back door of the holding annex” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 5) — the trade-side plan, stood down when the hull went to Nine
A packet alongside4 days Who Gets to Answer, chapter 20

Who the Door Admits, chapter 4, ch04:43, ch05:19, ch18:5, ch22:129, ch22:199, ch22:223, ch25:179; What First Call Buys, chapter 2; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 28–205; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 13

The environmental trunks

published

Twenty-two runs across four rings, on one certificate

One certificate, raised 2320, referencing the ring set's master design by its drawing number and certifying the runs as constructed two-path throughout. It named no run, no frame, no length, no diameter and no gallery. Nineteen of the twenty-two went in single-path underneath it — the form offered the substitution, nine houses took it separately for a saving on each of their own accounts, and the master design was never amended, so every gallery plate in four rings still reads two-path and every plate is correct against the drawing it was printed from.

Runs, Rings Five to Eight22
Built single-path19 What First Call Buys canon. Spoken in Who Holds the Standard, chapter 13 as 'nineteen of twenty-two off four separate people this fortnight'; the coined form 'a corridor in 2322' was cut at the Who Holds the Standard dialogue pass and is no longer live prose
Certificates1, dated 2320
Re-pathing programme90 days, four runs openable at once

What First Call Buys, chapter 21, ch22:239, ch23:5, ch24:119; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2, ch20:151

Trunk Six

published

The shared polishing loop

Takes what three sectors put down a drain, feeds it through the standard cultures, and hands it back clean and boring. The Sethlan draw first on the loop; Ring Four's eleven hundred draw second. There is no third pipe.

Return pH7.4, held 209 days
Turnoverevery 22 minutes
Loop volume140 m³ at temperature
Culture failurestandard cultures quit below pH 6.9 it is in every commissioning file on the station

Who the Door Admits, chapter 5, ch08:123, ch12:19, ch17:9, ch17:33

Bloc doors

published

A rack, a pinion, a crank and one warden

The leaf sits back in a pocket with a fire notice on the frame and a lamp bracket over it. The gear is a plain plate, a cranked handle behind it and a lock through the crank — grease goes on the pinion, never the rack, because the rack is meant to be dry. It opens from the gear's face only; it shuts from either, on a trip on each face and one at the turn. Handedness varies door to door, and the sector office's board draws all four the same way round and has done since the doors went in. There is no remote actuation: the board is a picture of the doors, and it is for the office to look at.

Full cycle, hand-crankedunder three minutes two minutes and a bit, with the seat checked
Jacked from the wrong faceone-way a bar in the square socket at knee height; when the mark cut in the bar comes level with the frame the leaf is clear. After that you have not got a door — you have a leaf lying off its seat in a pocket it does not fit, and the boundary is gone.
Reseating a jacked leafa hold on both faces, a gang for a run of shifts, and a name on the test
A ring boundaryan afternoon a ring boundary is not a door

Who Holds the Standard, chapter 7–119, ch10:43, ch10:67; What the Station Keeps, chapter 1, ch30:21

The emergency isolation set

published

Four bays in a row along the ring spine

A sealed hold, a kill train, an actuated valve set and its own stack — cut in during the ring build, certified, filled with clean water, and never once used for anything. Three of the four bays' atmosphere skids share a condenser, which somebody did on a quiet shift in the second year and never drew. Bay Three's washdown header has carried a blank flange since it was fitted, because the valve went into a consignment for the fourth ring and never came back.

Bays4
Gross sealed hold, per bay180 m³ the contingency entry reads as a per-bay unit description — a sealed hold, a kill train, an actuated valve set, its own stack: one bay's equipment, listed once
Net working volume, per bay140 m³ gross minus the kill train, valve set and stack — and identically the Trunk Six loop volume, because the recourse was sized to receive the loop. That is engineering, not coincidence.
Set, gross≈720 m³ across the four
Bay One as charged, 2318≈200 m³ the 140 off the loop plus the flush water — the trunk was flushed and re-seeded INTO the bay holding it

Who the Door Admits, chapter 12–25, ch21:25–27, ch22:81

Load shedding

published

Isolate at nine boundaries; local reserve nine hours; recourse

The contingency schedule reads: loss of primary polishing — isolate at bloc boundaries (nine); local reserve, nine hours; recourse, transfer to the emergency isolation set at the ring spine, by standing arrangement with station environmental. When the set is already committed, the recourse line is a sentence that is not true. Under shed load the spine circuits come down, which puts the powered doors between the seven-side blocs and the Ring Six commercial deck to manual, and corridor lighting drops to the emergency circuits — which on the new rings means a strip of blue at ankle height and nothing else.

Ring Four local reserve9 hours for 1,100 people and it starts the minute you open it
Ring Four refuge capacity480
Domestic respiratory cartridge40 minutes, 20 realistically if it has been in a cupboard

Who the Door Admits, chapter 12, ch21:123; What First Call Buys, chapter 26–217

The RING RESERVE plate

published

Stamped at the build; the working figure on a slip

Bolted to the bulkhead over the tap at eye height, where the corridor meets the junction. RING RESERVE stamped into the metal at the build, and the build's figure stamped with it: NINE HOURS. Below the stamp, in the working slot, a printed slip — white figures on a grey slide. It read FOUR, then THREE, then under two. The queue stands under it the way it stands under the light brackets, and the whole corridor goes past it all day without slowing.

Stamped at the buildNINE HOURS
Maximum the plant may postTHREE
Actual, at the worstunder TWO
At the census, 2330NINE HOURS again “nine hours, the same as it had said since the works finished … with the post-programme certification date under it and a tag on a wire beneath that” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1); read against the flow every morning and “right every morning of it” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 19)

What First Call Buys, chapter 4, ch04:145–147, ch12:3, ch19:51; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 1, ch19:133

The anchor-chain shore plant

published

Twelve metres of walk, four doors, four chains — throat side, under the boundary dock

Four doors off the outboard side, one to a chain, a desk at the far end with the round sheet clipped to it and the pin store opposite. In each bay a cradle, a take-up, a brake, a set of load pins, two tell-tales, and a port in the outboard face with nothing to look at through it. Nobody looks through it. A stair at one end comes down off the boundary dock through a code door every hand on the throat side knows; the other end gives onto the works passage, which is how the trolleys come in. Three rounds a day, and between rounds nobody stands the plant, because there is nothing in there for a person to stand at.

The unattended gap1 hour 30 between the second round and the third and there has been nobody in the plant in it since the plant went in
Bay threeon local operation since the winter the key hangs on the frame and the panel at the stair head shows three shut whatever three actually is. It is written on the round sheet in three places.
⚠ SPOILER — The attack4 minutes, first tell-tale to last
⚠ SPOILER — Aftertwo chains cut, one damaged, one serviceable
⚠ SPOILER — Diagnosticdressing bright on one face and dull on the other which is what it does when the pin is going over

Who Holds the Standard, chapter 4, ch08:81, ch08:327, ch11:5; What the Station Keeps, chapter 3–81

⚠ SPOILER — The corridor budget (2334)

published

Two hundred and forty hours on one chain

Two hundred and forty hours are scheduled on chain four against this corridor. A passage window is twelve of those hours. That is twenty windows. A hull carries a hundred and twenty places. A window takes the chain from its first hour to its last with nothing across it — and every hour that goes on four for anything else comes out of the two hundred and forty. Twelve of them is a window that is not flown, and a window that is not flown is not made up afterwards.

Scheduled240 hours
A window12 hours
A hull120 places
Flown17 windows, 2,040 names
Standing at the close6 hours ruled off with the reference against the rule, and the hours board taken off its nail and put face down

Who Holds the Standard, chapter 16, ch17:13, ch28:33, ch28:137

Counter height

published

One figure, station-wide

Every counter on the Cairn is cut at human waist height, and all of them are cut to the same figure. The accommodation for anybody built otherwise is a stool, one per post, and nothing else — which Sesk has stooped past for sixteen years. Deck Twelve is the single exception, and it is an exception because the whole sector is built to Sethlan preference and human standard is the odd one out.

What First Call Buys, chapter 13–31; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 3, ch04:143, ch18:237, ch28:95; Who Holds the Standard, chapters 5 and 15

What was checked

The books state distances aboard this ship. The drawing has to produce the same ones or it is wrong — so it is made to, and the working is shown. These run again on every build; a compartment moved by a metre fails them.

“Twenty-three sectors, 41,000 certified places, 37,400 people, ninety-one per cent” Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2 (“Thirty-seven thousand four hundred people live on this station. Certified capacity is forty-one thousand … across twenty-three sectors”); ch16:43; ch20:129

Sectors drawn inside the roster: C 3 + DK 3 + D12 2 + V 1 + R3 1 + R4 1 + R5 2 + R6 3 + R7 3 + R8 2 + R9 2 + R10 2 + R11 1 = 26 sector rows, of which three are not roster sectors: C-2 (ruled inside the core seal), 12-S (the Sethlan sector is a volume inside Deck Twelve's plant boundary, behind its own stepped lock – Deck Twelve votes as one, Who Gets to Answer, chapter 23) and R11 (2333, outside the roster). 26 − 3 = 23. Capacity: 3,790 + 4,110 + 890 + 490 + 1,180 + 1,460 + 4,200 + 5,780 + 5,340 + 4,040 + 4,800 + 4,920 = 41,000. Population: 3,560 + 3,760 + 780 + 460 + 1,050 + 1,350 + 3,990 + 5,550 + 5,040 + 3,800 + 4,130 + 3,930 = 37,400. 37,400 / 41,000 = 0.9122 — the prose says “ninety-one per cent”; 91.2 is the roster's decimal. The population column is a roll of leaseholders, not bodies (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 20).
“The executive vote is twelve sectors to eleven; fifteen–fourteen with the reserved seats” Who Gets to Answer, chapter 23–225, ch23:241

Roll as spoken: Corrigan — 5-A, 5-B, 6-A, 6-B, 6-C, 7-A, 7-B, 8-A, 8-B, 9-B, TU, TL = 12; Kade – R3, R4, 7-C, 9-A, 10-A, 10-B, C-N, C-S, D12, TH, V = 11. 12 + 11 = 23, every sector on this sheet inside the roster called once. Reserved seats 3 + 3 (ch23:241): 15 and 14.
“Nine-A is more than four and a half of mine to one of hers” Who Gets to Answer, chapter 23 (“two thousand and eighty people in my sector. There are four hundred and sixty in the voids”), ch23:19

R9/9-A population 2,080; V population 460. 2,080 / 460 = 4.52. Both figures are on this sheet as drawn.
“⚠ SPOILER — Ninety-seven point three across the twenty-three: 39,900 in 41,000 (2334)” Who Holds the Standard, chapter 3

39,900 / 41,000 = 0.9732. The denominator is the twenty-three roster sectors and excludes Ring Eleven's 2,400, which this sheet draws outside the roster and marks spoiler. Against the built figure of 43,400 the station is at 39,900 / 43,400 = 0.919. No character says so.
“⚠ SPOILER — Seven-C: roll 1,680, sheet closed at 23, 1,657 displaced (2334)” Who Holds the Standard, chapter 29, ch29:93

1,680 − 23 = 1,657, as spoken. Confirmed dead to the fifty-fourth: Seven-C 23 + relay heart and containment 9 + incidents 4 = 36 (ch29:93). 7-C's census figures (1,740 / 1,640) are the 2330 roll and stand; the 2334 numbers live in the note only.
“180, 140 and 200 cubic metres are three measurements, not one measurement three ways” Who the Door Admits, chapter 12, ch05:237, ch08:179, ch21:25

180 m³ is one bay's gross certified hold (ch12:25 lists one bay's kit: a hold, a kill train, an actuated valve set, its own stack). Net of the plant a bay works out at 140 m³ — Bay Two swept empty burns its lamps “over a hundred and forty cubi[c metres]” (ch05:237), and Trunk Six's loop is “a hundred and forty cu[bic metres]” (ch08:179): the recourse was sized to receive the loop. Bay One holds about 200 because it “had taken the hundred and forty cubic metres off Trunk Six on Day Eleven and still had it, cooking out in six-hundred-litre batches” with the flush water added (ch21:25). 180 > 140; 200 ≈ 140 + flush. Consistent.
“The void under Nine: knee height at the fourth spine frame, nine hundred millimetres under the spine frames, a pinch and a fork” Who the Door Admits, chapter 11, ch15:241, ch16:27, ch16:61, ch17:81

ch11:39: “At the fourth spine frame the void narrowed to a pinch and the frame edge came up at knee height … scraped down to bright along forty centimetres of its top face.” ch15:241: “Nine hundred under the spine frame[s]”; ch17:81: “the clearance under the spine frames not quite nine hundred millimetres”. ch16:27: “Thirty metres in, the void narrowed under a spine frame” — no height is given there (an earlier version of this check put a hip-height frame in ch16; it is not in the text). ch16:61: “Twelve metres further the void forked”. Corrected 2026-09-21. Knee ≈ 0.5 m under a 0.9 m clearance leaves the crawl the prose describes.
“Nine void access points against Milek's dozen” Who the Door Admits, chapter 13 (“nine access points, two squads, the sections numbered”); Who Holds the Standard, chapter 12 (“There's a dozen ways down off this floor alone”)

Nine is the sweep order's count for sections eight through twenty in 2318, off a drawing. A dozen is Milek's count of ways down off the relay-heart floor alone in 2334, and she says the drawing predates the vault door. Different things at different dates; the stale drawing is canon, presented as stale.
“Lifts: few, mostly goods, unreliable” Who the Door Admits, chapter 8–201 (lift lobby; “rode up two levels”), ch21:123 (“the lift that had been out since the ring build”); Who Gets to Answer, chapter 9, ch13:259 (goods lift); Who Holds the Standard passim

A lift lobby and a two-level ride, a goods lift with doors, a lift crew, and a ring-spine lift out since the build; no passenger lift in Book Four, which runs under a declared emergency with the station shedding. Absence of mention is not absence. Drawn as written.
“Three floors of rail up a landing face” What the Station Keeps, chapter 14, ch22:31 (three); ch31:27 (four, counting the ground row)

ringAnatomy.levels.v == 3, grade fixed with both readings. ch31's “mats out along the second and third” and “On the ground row” read as ground + three. The render draws three dwelling floors on every ring with capacity.
“The core is plated to about the height of two men and bare above that” What the Station Keeps, chapter 1

core.grade == published for the character; radius and height fixed. The lit-column exterior — “rings first, the relay heart's glow spilling up the core” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 6, ch25:179) — follows from an unroofed core and is not the banner's invention.
“The anchor-chain shore plant is twelve metres of walk, four doors, one to a chain, on the throat side” Who Holds the Standard, chapter 4; What the Station Keeps, chapter 3, ch05:17, ch33:9

LM-PLANT is on ring DK inside the TH arc (24° within [0, 76]) — an earlier sheet had it on Ring Six. Four chapters give twelve metres; the stair at one end comes down off the boundary dock and the other end gives onto the works passage (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 4).
“The docks are at the core's foot, and the plan's walking order matches the books'” Who the Door Admits, chapter 1, ch04:5, ch09:45; Who Gets to Answer, chapter 3, ch06:85, ch26:113; Who Holds the Standard, chapter 29

DK.radius 124 < R3.radius 214: the dock ring is the first ring outside the civic floor. Nine “had been the relay's cargo lock before there was a station to hang off it” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 4); the post stair backs up onto the concourse (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 3); the registry sits “at the Trade-Upper end” of the traffic floor (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 26); Six-B is one ring stair from the concourse (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 6); Eleven is “two walks and a ramp” from the Seven-A landing (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 29) – R7 → R11 spans four rings on the plan, which is the one place the drawing is still wider than the walk. No arms: sum of capacity over arms is vacuously zero and the census above is untouched.

Service history

Before the Compact
“this was the relay, four pressure cans, and a man … selling filter tape out of a crate at criminal prices” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 13). Span control at the mouth, made permanent as the reach's standing authentication anchor and logged Cairn Relay. Nine was its cargo lock.
2318, Book One
“a station of eight thousand people” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 14); “Ration issue is tomorrow. Ten thousand people, from the heart to the ring corridors” (Who the Door Admits, chapter 13). Ring Four is “three frames and a tarpaulin” in living memory (What First Call Buys, chapter 21).
2319–2320
The Concession build. Rings Five through Eight let on forty-year terms to nine houses — “I built you four rings” (What First Call Buys, chapter 3); “The lease on the four rings runs forty years” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2). One redundancy certificate, dated 2320, covers twenty-two runs across four rings (What First Call Buys, chapter 24).
2322, Book Two
“Twenty-four thousand people held quarters on the Cairn … Thirteen thous[and]” in the rings (What First Call Buys, chapter 1). The Ring Six/Seven industrial trunk fails at frame nineteen on Day 35; eleven dead (What First Call Buys, chapter 22). The cross-feed comes round the outboard face and in along a residential corridor on Day 50–51, and the corridor never gets its width back.
2325 and 2328
Ring Nine — “two-path from the drawing, every run” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2). Then Ring Ten, and Ten-B “stood empty a season” until its second path was walked (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 20).
2330, Book Three – THE PRINT DATE
Thirty-seven thousand four hundred in forty-one thousand places across twenty-three sectors (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 2). The Assembly is elected on the hundred and third; the constituencies are the volumes that seal — “Your ring is one because a door shuts round it. The voids are one because a door shuts round them. Those doors are where the pressure put them, not where a roll would have.” (Who Gets to Answer, chapter 23).
2333
⚠ SPOILER. Ring Eleven finished, fitted and held at temperature. It does not open (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 3).
2334, Book Four
⚠ SPOILER. Charges on two anchor-chain shores. Seven-C's plant face carries above its rating for three days and stops; the sector is lost and sealed, 1,657 displaced onto landings (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 29). The relay heart's ledger room is cut at the hinge side and burned; the route ledger is reconstructed by hand from counter copies. Thirty-nine thousand nine hundred in forty-one thousand places, at ninety-seven point three (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 3). Confirmed dead to the fifty-fourth: 23 + 9 + 4 (Who Holds the Standard, chapter 29).
2342, Book Five
⚠ SPOILER. Ring Seven runs on past the plant turn to a stores end — “the far walk”, called the long end (What the Station Keeps, chapter 1–33); Ring Eleven's second path is walked at last (What the Station Keeps, chapter 36); the *Tallow* comes back to the trade docks down at the stern with two hundred aboard.

Compiled from

Who the Door Admits — 26 chapters (published, immutable)
What First Call Buys — 28 chapters (published, immutable)
Who Gets to Answer — 29 chapters (published, immutable)
Who Holds the Standard — 31 chapters (published, immutable)
What the Station Keeps — 38 chapters (published, immutable)
The approved series banner — shape only, never a metre figure; its spurs are read as the aprons' outboard doors