Vessel Registry & Schematics

CommandAaron Vance → Maya Sloane → Julian Mercer

First of the Meridian class, built at the Houston-orbital yards. Sabotaged on her maiden voyage and flung past the edge of the charted network — her aft third sheared away at the collars. She never fully recovers: patchwork plating, cannibalised systems, dead reckoning the whole way home. Sister ships: Resolute III, Endeavour, Fortitude, Tenacity.

CommandMarcus Cole

First of class. Built at Houston Interstellar Yards. 312-metre needle built around a forward 84-metre harmonic array, with four secondary arrays at the hull quarter-points for four-vantage topology. Sits deep — half her mass below the waterline. Designed for 2–4 year continuous deep-frontier deployment.

CommandMarcus Cole

Rebuilt at Junction-23 from the original Resolute's wreckage fused into an Architect-residual derelict. The only canonically energy-armed vessel in the fleet. The hull is the derelict's — angular, rectilinear, taller in the corridor — and the salvaged human bridge sits two degrees off level, the ship's signature.

CommandSigrid Halland (FN)

The line-vessel of the ISNA institutional fleet — the canonical institutional shape against which the SNG commercial ships are measured. Two-stack array; observation deck retained from the 2127 design. Svalbard Shipyard build.

CommandIdris Fasola (FN)

The Erika Magnusdóttir's four-stack successor — a run ship, not a diplomatic vessel, sent on the first deliberate first-contact mission because her First Navigator knows how not to break it. Crew-named after a 0.012% error no one could explain.

CommandBjørg Sandberg (FN)

Standard SNG commercial-route vessel. Regular stops include Junction 14-B, Junction 19, Junction 8-C, and Junction Q-3.

CommandAidan Locke

Built at the Mercer Yards on Mars and named toward the dawn. A civilian survey ship with no business in a war: a mobile laboratory, diplomatic habitat and — the part that matters — a provenance authority, able to seed nodes and make the first authenticated observations in a reach that is dark on the ledger. She opens the Sable Reach in 2312 and spends the rest of the trilogy being pushed a long way past what she was built for.

CommandNot recorded

Lost into the Sable Reach in a seam accident and grounded on Ostry, where her people have lived for five generations as the Ferren. Her node-emitter was kept running for years after landfall, transmitting two generations of message into a sky nobody was listening to — first a plea, then a warning. Her node-logs are the rare authenticated baseline the trilogy's proof rests on: a stranded ship's paperwork, and the most important document of the era.

CommandDaniel Cross

Captain Cross's command, and what a fleet built to discover looks like when it has to learn to fight. A lifting-body hull that can make planetfall in one piece, the fold array of a true explorer, and kinetic mounts accurate enough to catch a falling cargo pod — which is the job she was actually designed for.

CommandMaster Cray → acting Master Efe

A forty-one-year-old hauler that went out with ten and came back with fourteen. Her hand log says three hundred and thirty-one days on passage; her master clock says two hundred and forty-one; her second engineer's says two hundred and sixty. Nobody has ever reconciled them, and the ship is the argument: her master died on the way, Efe brought her in as acting master, and admitting her — people, cargo and all — is the decision the Cairn's whole first book turns on.

CommandCaptain Vandran

Fleet grey with escort manners, standing off the throat lane with her lamps up — she did not move a metre in three days, and the trade side priced that. Up close her captain is smaller than his ship suggests and considerably more exact: he arrives with scrubber substrate for a hull twice the Tallow's size, fitters to pass it through her sleeve, and a demand that nobody comes down that ramp until the Warden has characterised what is in the hold. He is not being unreasonable. That is the problem.

CommandMaster Sabel

Survey stock of the old vintage. Master Sabel came in through the throat behind the Tallow, read her wake displaced from her hull, logged the lot properly and brought the Cairn the raw. He lends his two boats and their crews free of charter, keeps the only honestly-chalked route ledger between the station and the yards in his good opinion, and distils grain mash off the Longsight's hydro loop against a charter clause he is too senior to be caught by.