Driftmark Station

Driftmark Station spread across the forward canopy until it swallowed the stars.

It was a brutal monument to industrial endurance. 

The core was an ancient nickel-iron asteroid four kilometers from tip to flank, its pitted black surface scarred by centuries of laser excavation, strip-mining trenches and thermal boring tunnels. 

Welded around its bulging equator was a vast pressurized ring of matte-grey habitat cylinders, interlocking transit tubes and fat smelting chimneys that exhaled thick billowing plumes of condensing steam into the void.

Dozens of docking arms, mooring gantries and open berths lined the outside of the ring, and all of them hummed with the steady pulse of deep-space trade. 

Ore barges with rusted hulls heaped with crushed pyrite drifted into holding lanes like floating iron hills.