The Cairn
The hub. The last authenticated waymark at the edge of the charted road, and the station every far-reach leg leaves from and returns to. Kestrel is chartered from its wall; Sarah Bishop transfers through it.
Detail → The certified boundary
The line past which no dependable schedule runs. Crossing it is a ten-day run in its own right; a hull beyond it is unreachable on any timetable.
Detail → Sabben
A mark station on a rock on the near side of the certified boundary. Two hands, a stores boat every forty days, and a shelf better stocked than anything on Kestrel — "a station that cannot be reached for forty days at a time keeps two of everything or it keeps nothing."
Detail & full record → Threap
The first ground over the boundary — B1's destination, and the one road whose Cairn-to-ground figure the series later rules was a fact about 2334 and not a general leg class.
Detail & full record → Mireth
The reach's society. A road exists here because a route-authority says one does — "her whole authority is the power to say a road exists" — and the book is about what a society does with a road it believes it holds.
Detail & full record → Hember
The ice run: cold-trap screens flown across the jets like sails, wound in on drums when loaded. Water, methane and reaction mass sold to everything outbound — the far reach's outermost watering trade. Where Inside the Window opens, already engaged.
Detail & full record → Lantry
The terminator world. Moonless, thirty thousand kilometres round, turning once in a year around a close K star, so the terminator crawls westward at walking pace. The civilisation walks: caravan houses on graded roadways ride the dawn band. From orbit, a moving line of lights a few hundred kilometres wide.
Detail & full record → Withen's Shoal
An ice giant whose inner moon shattered — a young debris field, still bright, still settling, threaded by a surveyed drift lane marked with drums and strobes. One extended family keeps the lane and the light.
Detail & full record → Ulmot
The last ground on the reach: a Callisto-class ice moon at 0.12 g around a banded giant with a young bright ring system, tidally locked on a twelve-day orbit. A watering camp generations older than the works it now serves. Kestrel comes back to it in The Surveyors.
Detail & full record → Almon
Road Three — the first road reopened, and the clean win. Stalled, not starving: the road took their glass and gallery crop to three grounds until the marks came off it four years ago.
Detail & full record → Wrent
Cache Two — the hard trade. The lane is lit with Threap's marks: four years ago somebody came through selling good gear at a fair price and asking nothing.
Detail & full record → Ledden
Road Two — the road Kestrel herself made unrepairable: Ledden's own marks and drums went into the works at Ulmot and died in her discharge. Four years without a road; eating their capital, not dying.
Detail & full record → Farrant
The last cache's ground. Farrant's road is not held; it is marked — and what Guld put here is what he takes. A dead station's bays, the best-founded ground on the reach for exactly that.
Detail & full record → Kelder
On the road from the Cairn to the Sennet approach. Hulls on the Kelder run have doubled in a few years, "all going the one way." Sarah's consignment loses four days here getting a panel made.
Detail → Sennet One
First of the four-junction Sennet family — forty-one years of traffic, reconciled to eleven places.
Detail & full record → Sennet Two
Second of the family; reconciles to eleven places.
Detail → Sennet Three
Third of the family; reconciles to eleven places.
Detail → Sennet Four
The fourth. The reconciliation closes on the first three and refuses on this one — the thread that takes Sarah Bishop to Fifteen. Both Sennet Four anchors go on continuous read.
Detail → Fifteen (Hart)
The colony. A 0.94 g world under a quiet K-type star, one small moon, a forty-eight-frame climate lattice in orbit. The nearest stable anchor passes some 84,000 km beyond the planet; nine hours on conventional drive from emergence to the ground. The Sennets end here.
Detail & full record →