Ash Gap Hazard Survey Station

Ash Gap Hazard Survey Station

You dock into a D-class ring that smells like citrus decon rinse and the hot-metal breath of probe cradles cycling corrosive-atmo samplers because the world below eats seals for breakfast. The berth is narrow, honest about being temporary, and every viewport looks down on pale desert flats wrapped in exotic air the registry codes with letters that mean don't treat this like a walk in the park.

Inboard of the mooring shell sits the upload desk — seal-break, breach-profile checksum, dual-filing queue split between public chart fields and sealed appendix slots Colonial Affairs actually reads. Martin Cole runs it with the unhurried precision of a clerk who's watched one outsider hull paste hazard chemistry to the open board and trigger three jump claims before the decon cycle finished. The station commons opens off the desk: recycled air, bad coffee, open-band terminals where mineral brokers pretend they're just passing through.

It is the strangest efficient dock on a Solaris rim spur. They'll berth a crew that filed straight and mean it — a decon slot, probe cradle time if your writ covers surface sampling, a clerk who walks the dual forms if you ask. And in the same breath Cole will void your whole chain because you sold breach profiles to Thomas Reed in the commons, because on Ash Gap a hazard log on the open board is a claim-jumping invitation, and a scout upload that publishes corrosive chemistry where speculators can read it is worse than no upload at all.