Station
The Cairn (Cairn Relay)
Canonical name: the Cairn (crew shorthand). B1 technical designation: Cairn Relay. The name survives after B3 even though it is no longer merely a relay. Provenance: a surveyor's word for the last authenticated waymark at the edge of the charted road — the final marker before the dark. Identity decision-locked 23 Jul 2026 (author-approved), pre-prose — recorded under Canon-lock block as RESOLVED.
Type
station
Within
sable-reach
Founded
2312
Position
Canon has not established a position
Description
Sits on the stable-space lip of the Span mouth, at the Sable throat — "the single door out of the Sable Reach": outside the reach geographically, controlling the single authenticated door into and out of it. The one fixed chokepoint every hull must pass. 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. B1/B2/B3 establish it as the reach's gateway. The road the Dawnward opens through the reach (S12) wounds the reach's sky across the following years, so that by S13 the reach beyond the throat has gone wound-riddled and the Cairn is the last stable junction before the wound complex — the launch…
Classification
Frontier junction station at the Sable throat — the last stable junction before a wound-
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.