Corwin II Subterranean Landing Bay
Overview
The place the Alien Navigation Device actually took them — not the known Pratrock Dynamics Research Facility 42, which sits on the far side of the same world, but a concealed site on the dark side of Corwin II, reached by flying down a narrow fissure in a crater wall with inches of hull clearance on either side.
At the bottom, a metallic landing pad. Mechanical clamps take the landing gear, and the entire platform lowers into the ground. The hangar seals overhead and repressurises. Dim yellow emergency lights come up in the dark.
It presented as abandoned and was not.
Points of Interest
- The landing bay — lift platform, landing clamps, mirrored security windows, automated refuelling and resupply hookups. Heavy overhead doors, sealed remotely with the power cut to trap the crew, and cut open from the outside by Six with the vibro-axe.
- The corridor — a small electric flatbed transport parked outside the bay, a staircase up to the operations centre, and a four-way junction that became the firefight. Now littered with destroyed robots and tangler polymer.
- The operations centre — overlooking the bay through mirrored glass. Two terminals under a Pratrock Dynamics login banner, filing cabinets, a wall map of the facility, a phone, and the detritus of a long posting: knickknacks, an apple core gone to dust, and a Pratrock employee handbook issued to Gary Johnson. The password was Benji, from a dog tag in a drawer. One terminal runs launch and recovery; the other reaches the external network.
Session 6
Breached, fought through, and escaped. See The Corwin II Facility Raid.
Shackleton Magellan bridged his own system to the isolated terminal with a network adapter and still holds that access.
Relationships
- Part of Corwin II — Buried beneath a crater on the dark side of the planet.