Storage Bay
Overview
Storage Bay 7 is a decommissioned ore storage chamber located in the abandoned ore sector of an unnamed Terran Resource Consortium mining platform in the Asteroid Belt. Informally referred to by rig workers as part of “The Bone Yard,” the bay was originally designed to hold and queue magnetite tailings and unprocessed ore for transport to Vesta Processing facilities. After being struck from active manifests and stripped of maintenance coverage, it fell into corporate disuse, its heating, lighting, and life support left to decay.
The bay has since been quietly repurposed as a clandestine signal-intercept operation by Tobias Kone, a low-ranking communications tech. Its forgotten status, remote location, and absence from patrol routes make it an ideal hidden workspace, far removed from station oversight. It serves as both sanctuary and surveillance hub, where sensitive data can be gathered without detection.
Description
Storage Bay 7 is a long, rectangular cavern cut deep into the station’s ore sector, measuring roughly sixty meters from its warped pressure door to the rear bulkhead. The layout favors depth over width, with rows of empty, rusting ore drums stacked along the walls and collapsed conveyor segments frozen mid-collapse near the back. The deck plating is worn into shallow depressions filled with fine metallic dust that holds footprints for hours, and the air is stagnant and bitingly cold — the heating ducts have been dead for years, and breath plumes visibly with every exhale.
The bay is illuminated solely by a failing emergency phosphor circuit that pulses a sickly orange glow, its degraded strips flickering slowly at the edge of perception. At the far end, shielded from view by distance, the work nest glows with the harsh blue-white light of salvaged terminal screens and the focused warmth of overworked power converters. The smell is unmistakable: a dry metallic tang of rust and ore dust, cut by acrid notes of hot insulation and faint, rancid lubricant. Sound behaves oddly here; the hard surfaces create long echoes that amplify small noises while swallowing louder ones, making whispers a practical necessity.
Society
The bay is Tobias Kone’s domain, claimed through months of quiet occupation rather than any official authorization. He alone inhabits it, having smuggled in equipment piece by piece and built the nest himself. Only two other individuals are known to have accessed the space: foreman Cade Brennan, who has visited physically, and Dana Reyes, who communicates exclusively via tightbeam from an undisclosed location. Inside the bay, the usual station hierarchy dissolves; Tobias’s expertise and intimate knowledge of the environment grant him a quiet authority that supersedes rank.
Access is controlled not by locks but by secrecy. The surrounding storage bays are equally abandoned, creating a buffer of dead space that discourages accidental discovery. Corporate patrols never sweep this sector, and the bay’s sheer inhospitability — the cold, the darkness, the metallic air — ensures that any unexpected visitor would have little reason to linger. The primary threat comes not from routine enforcement but from the possibility that the data trails Tobias follows might eventually alert someone to his activities.
Notable Features
The bay’s most distinctive element is Tobias’s jury-rigged signal-intercept nest. Arranged near the rear bulkhead for residual heat reflection, it consists of a semicircle of salvaged terminal screens, stolen TRC network splicers, a gutted prospector pod navigation relay mounted overhead on a gantry arm, and a stripped-down mechanical keyboard missing half its keycaps. Cables radiate outward across the deck, secured by strips of old cargo netting, while overworked power converters hum constantly at the center.
Other features include the warped pressure door seal that hisses as it closes, the collapsed conveyor belts hanging in rigid loops like shed snakeskin, and the stacks of ore drums that groan and creak as ambient temperature shifts. The phosphor lighting, with its sickly orange flicker, renders color poorly and flattens depth perception, while the bay’s acoustics transform every sound into a resonant, echoing presence that enforces whispered conversation and careful movement.