The Wound
Chain-hours
also: chain hours · the corridor budget
The unit a held corridor is measured, booked and rationed in — and the age's real currency.
In full
Chain-hours measure <em>use of a held corridor</em>: scheduled passage windows, extraction support, and the continuous work of holding somebody outside a wound. They are booked against a plan and spent against a clock. Nothing substitutes for them — not ships, not berths, not gangs, not money, and the minuted position of the man who would know is that money never was the constraint. When a station can hold one corridor on one serviceable chain for a finite and stated number of hours, the arithmetic of who comes out is not a metaphor.
Key facts
- Measures corridor use, not passage alone.
- Booked against a plan; spent against a clock.
- Nothing substitutes for them — ships, berths and money cannot.
- ⚠ The binding scarcity of the age, and the reason its hardest decisions are arithmetic.