I’d seen the storm through Miki and the humans’ cameras in the corridor on the way to the bio pod, but seeing it with my own eyes, no interface to interpret it, was different. The clouds were like a constantly moving structure, colors not so much swirling as in slow, ponderous motion. It was immense, and wrong, and terrible and beautiful all at the same time. I stood there for what I later clocked as twenty-two seconds, just staring. (Rogue Protocol)
Milu is a planet outside the Corporation Rim where GrayCris once mined for alien remnants under the cover of terraforming. There is a transit station nearby and a terraforming platform in orbit.
The planet's atmosphere is covered in perpetual storms, and the surface is masked from view as a result.
Transit Station[]
They stood outside an office center with three levels of bubble windows looking out over what should be the station mall. It was an open plaza area with a couple of tube transports arcing overhead, and a big globular display that was currently on standby hovering in the air. It was surrounded by multi-levels of dark shadowy occupation blocks and empty fronts for places that should be cafés, hotels, cargo brokers, transit offices, tech shops, and so on. Much of it looked unfinished, like no one had ever moved in, and the rest had closed, nothing left behind but a few stray floating display surfaces.(Rogue Protocol)
The Transit Station is small (smaller than RaviHyral's) and triangle shaped. It's managed by an independent company, and in the process of being shut down permanently now that the facility it services has been declared abandoned. Its feed is silent due to the low traffic and floating population, which is under one hundred in quantity.
Despite the unusual shape, the station has the same places of interest that most stations have: a transit hub and a mall.
Terraforming Station[]
This station was built by GrayCris to supposedly terraform Milu, but was actually built to mine the planet for alien remnants. After the station is marked for abandonment, GoodNightLander Independent (GI) puts up an automated tractor array to keep it in orbit. It sits in the planet's upper atmosphere, low enough to be covered by the planet's layer of storms.
The facility is larger than the nearby station (and indeed than a full-sized transit ring). This size is needed to accomodate the (extremely large) engines needed for a terraforming process.
The station's locations include:
- Docks (with nearby decontam rooms)
- Central Node
- Bio Pods
- Geo Pods (contains a main geological hub, which includes a large semicircular space and a section of ceiling left clear to view the planet's storms)
- Engineering Pod (which also has a curving, transparent roof)
- Production Pod
- Atmospheric Pod
- Atmosphere Dispersal Bulbs
- Lifts
The geo systems have 'Diggers', which are similar to bots but are really extensions of the geo system itself. The overall facility also includes three Combat Bots, which are not typical of terraforming facilities but are less unusual for an illegal mining facility.
The facility is affected by storm-caused radio interference, though this was exacerbated during the GI's assessment due to the Combat Bots disguising their feed activity as more interference.