SC Escrow

Type	Long-range survey carrier
Length	About 110 m
Built	2306, for Outer World Realty
Crew	Three operators. Company policy: crew never set foot on a surface
Carries	40 SV-class Surveyors, a repair bay, and spare parts for most of them
Drive	Crosses the Reach along the old relay buoys, about three light-years a day
In the Reach since	2309, through the Meridian Gate. First system: Menhir

How a survey works

1. Escrow parks at the edge of a system, never in orbit around a world. Company policy, and an old Quarantine rule nobody has rescinded.
2. One Surveyor launches from the bow hangar: a single large door that glows warm white whenever it opens.
3. The drone crosses the system on its own, which can take days, and settles over the property it's been sent to.
4. It hovers there, silent and still, and records one long, uninterrupted survey. That recording is the listing.
5. It transmits the survey home and returns to its rack. Most of them do.

Some Surveyors stop transmitting partway through. Outer World Realty calls it routine signal loss. A replacement is assembled in the repair bay and given the same number.

The hull

• The bow hangar: one wide door and, behind it, the drone racks: forty Surveyors in rows, each about a metre long, charging in the warm light.
• The repair bay amidships, where damaged drones are rebuilt and lost ones replaced.
• The drive section at the stern: long, heavy and almost entirely automated.
• Antenna masts and folded sensor arrays on the spine: the relay link that carries every survey home.
• The scuffs: two years of dust, micrometeorites and cold have worn the paint down to bare composite in places. Nobody has asked for it to be repainted.