80 m – 180 m · human

Varangurd Anchorage

A human habitat cluster anchored to the outer shelf, the busiest waystation between surface and saturation depths.

Most of the entries in this chapter are, in some indirect sense, about Varangurd. I have lived in its upper-rib modules for the better part of three rotations and I am still not certain whether I would describe it as a place. The entry below is the description it would give of itself if it were the kind of place that gave descriptions.

Varangurd is the largest of the so-called outer-shelf anchorages: a chain of pressurised habitat modules tethered along the continental drop between roughly eighty and one hundred eighty metres. Most arrivals from the surface pass through it. Most never go deeper.

Layout

The anchorage is not a city in any sense the surface would recognise. It is a graph of cylinders strung along a structural cable, joined by short pressurised umbilicals, with no streets and no horizon. The shallowest modules — the upper rib, eighty to one hundred ten metres — are ordinary technical-diving depth, and a fit visitor on trimix can pass between them without saturation. Below that, transit is by lift or by short ADS sortie.

Why it sits at this depth

Because that is what is engineerable. The water column between fifty and two hundred metres is the band where pressurised human habitation has been routine since the early decades of the migration: deep enough to be below the storm layer, shallow enough that resupply is cheap and rescue is plausible.

Notable

The Conservancy keeps its principal saturation chamber here.
Visiting Pelagine envoys from the Tyrian Court ascend no further than the lower rib, and stay only briefly.

A graph of cylinders strung along a structural cable, joined by short pressurised umbilicals. Reading this back, that is the most accurate thing the encyclopedic register can do — an architecture without a horizon. The horizons are the journal entries.