Beyond Tobias
Overview
Beyond Tobias is an informal designation for a remote stretch of the deep belt, far past the Klondike Spur and beyond the reach of any established shipping lane or authority. The name originates from independent operators who once used the Kinnas family’s ancestral claim as a navigational reference—everything past that last working rig was simply “beyond Tobias,” a shorthand for a region where claims go to die and few who venture in return.
The area encompasses a scatter of exhausted mineral claims that petered out generations ago, centered on the derelict Kinnas homestead. It sits so far from civilisation that the nearest supply depot is a six-month flight at maximum burn. No corporation operates here, no Ceres Control patrol monitors it, and the Terran Government’s legal framework exists only in theory. In practice, Beyond Tobias belongs to whoever can reach it and survive—a desolate frontier where the only law is physics and the only currency is breathable air.
Description
The Kinnas claim itself is anchored to a midsized carbonaceous asteroid—an irregular, potato-shaped body roughly twelve kilometres on its long axis—that the family worked for three generations before the ore became too lean to justify extraction. Its infrastructure is a cluster of Gansu Industrials Model 4 deep-space habitation modules bolted directly to the rock, connected by flexible pressurised tubes that have grown brittle and cracked over years of neglect. Radiation discolouration has turned the once-off-white exteriors a sickly, mottled amber, and the surrounding regolith is pocked with collapsed boreholes and the oxidized stains of final extraction runs.
Inside the sealed sections, the atmosphere is thin, stale, and carries a faint trace of ammonia from failing scrubbers. Most compartments have vented to vacuum, preserving their contents in a cold, desiccated stillness: cups still cling to magnetic strips in the galley, a child’s bunk bears a faded pressure-suit patch, finger smears of rock dust mark a viewport no one has wiped clean in years. The wider region is a graveyard of failed enterprise. Derelict claims, shattered solar panels, empty fuel canisters, and even the half-buried wreck of an ore hauler drift in a loose debris field that provides both navigational hazard and cover. Sunlight is thin and ancient—the sun is merely a bright star—casting razor-sharp shadows with no atmospheric diffusion. Stand on the surface in a suit, kill your comms, and the only sound is your own breathing and the faint hum of life support, an oppressive silence that wears down even the hardiest independent prospector.
Society
No one lives in Beyond Tobias. The last permanent resident, Tobias Kinnas, left the claim at seventeen, and his family departed in slow stages before him. The claim still sits on the Ceres registry under the Kinnas family’s low-digit registration code—a relic of the first wave of belt prospecting—kept alive by an automated system that never checks for signs of life. This grants Tobias a theoretical legal standing he cannot practically exercise; he owns a dead claim on a dead rock.
The region’s social order is stark: if you can take it, it’s yours, and anyone else you meet out here is likely just as desperate and unaccountable. Scavengers passed through years ago, stripping the external storage of anything saleable and leaving the habs untouched without so much as a note. Independent operators on the near side of the Klondike Spur speak of Beyond Tobias with a mix of contempt and superstition—it is where you go when no other option remains, a destination synonymous with exile and abandonment. The grudging respect some old-timers hold for the Kinnas name is less about admiration than recognition of the sheer stubbornness it took to work dead rock for three generations.
Notable Features
The Kinnas Homestead: The central claim’s hab modules are a time capsule of a family’s slow exodus. The galley, crew quarters, and control room remain as they were when the last occupant left, preserved by vacuum and cold. A persistent amber status light still blinks on a comms panel that will never receive a signal.
The Debris Field: A half-day’s burn from the claim, scattered wreckage—broken solar arrays, slag chunks, spent fuel canisters—creates a cluttered, sensor-defeating environment. Among the refuse, the remains of a bulk ore hauler protrude from an asteroid where a misjudged approach ended in catastrophe.
Registration Anomaly: The Kinnas family registration code is one of the oldest still active in the belt’s automatic database, a ghost entry maintained long after mining rights lapsed. It is an artifact of a time when individuals, not corporations, mapped the frontier, and it remains the only mark of human presence in a region otherwise abandoned to physics and time.