The Rivas Corridor
The Sundgren Combine’s sling-and-catch transport region — the theatre of The Wrong Number. Mass-driver “slings” fling supply pods across the system on a flat ballistic line, and a chain of decelerator rings catches them at Tornel, gentle as freight. Crewed ships don’t run supplies here; they escort. Schematic, not celestial: positions are narrative.
Spoiler note: this chart shows the shape of The Reach, Book One.
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The Track
Who Holds What
Locations
The Sling
An electromagnetic mass-driver at the corridor’s launch end — it flings cargo and supply pods across a third of a system on a flat ballistic line. A golden-age advancement; bulk haulage automated and fast, enabled by two decades of Nhál-assisted power and materials.
Sennen
A half-terraformed moon built around an obsolete sling complex — partial open sky under unfinished atmospheric engineering, excavated launch trenches, old catcher hardware turned to housing, human-and-Nhál workers. The catch-rider town.
The Catcher Chain
A lattice of decelerator rings strung along the Rivas line — each ring reaches out with fields no eye can see, takes a falling mountain by the shoulders, sheds a sliver of its murder, and hands it gentler to the next, down the chain. The ‘mitt’.
Tornel
Station control and the catcher-chain docks. Where a pod that crossed the system as a weapon arrives as freight — grain, coil-stock, printer-feed — the ordinary substance of a dozen colonies that will eat this winter because of it.
The Drifting Junction
The corridor’s anchor junction. After every human fault is fixed — the cover-up exposed, the clocks corrected — it is still drifting. Slightly. Not enough to have caused the accident; enough to prove the accident exposed something rather than created it. Shown, never named.
This is a schematic, not an astronomical chart. The far pocket shares no coordinates with the home network — positions here are narrative, showing the Endurance's dead-reckoning track, not real-sky positions. See the other charts, or the celestial home-network map.