Junction
the Sable throat
The chokepoint — "the single door out of the Sable Reach."
Type
junction
Within
sable-reach
Position
Canon has not established a position
Description
"Sits on the stable-space lip of the Span mouth… the one fixed chokepoint every hull must pass." Geographically outside the reach, controlling "the single authenticated door into and out of it." "The Cairn does not move; the meaning of what lies beyond it changes" — in B1 the edge of an unproven road, by S13 the boundary before damaged space.
Classification
Contested strategic chokepoint. The Cairn on it is constituted as a civilian authentication relay (a warship base at the throat "would read as conquest"); Earth's B3 militarisation targets it; the B3 resolution (the Cairn Compact) makes it multilateral.
Wound state
By S13 (planned) the reach beyond the throat has gone wound-riddled; the throat is the boundary before damaged space. The Cairn "watches the sky humanity's own road first visibly damaged" (the-cairn.md).
Canon has not fixed this place in space, so the archive does not invent a coordinate for it. It appears in the gazetteer as unplaced rather than on the star map as a guess.
On the record
- ~2312 The Dawnward's escape route ("the single door out of the Sable Reach,"); the Span-control infrastructure at the mouth is commissioned into Cairn Relay (the Cairn).
- ~2313–16 The reach's gateway; the B3 crisis site (trapped mixed transit + emergency bypass both happen here); Adm. Merrick militarises the throat as national survival; "whoever holds it holds the reach." Resolves into the Cairn Compact (Earth losing unilateral authority).
- ~2316+ (S13, planned) The last stable junction before the wound complex; the launch point for the first wound expeditions.