Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Grand Anchor (section)

====The Cube====

The core of the yard is a massive metal frame made of building materials, mostly I-beams and cast metal, in the shape of a rough cube.  Within the cube, held in place by thousands of tiny void shield relays that project a one-way screen between the segments of the frame, are millions of pieces of metal.  They range from intact ship components to random alloy ingots, from obsolete cogitator parts to decommissioned land mines; anything too small or delicate to be left to drift in the outer shell.  When a customer orders a part, the Grand Anchor staff dispatch a tiny servitor drone to collect the part, which is usually done within minutes.  The items inside the cube aren’t free-drifting from the zero-gravity void, but are instead clamped in place on a wireframe of tiny iron bars, which spread out from the massive frame like a fractal.  So far, the tiny spindles of containment bars only fill one tenth of the available space, but the Grand Anchor chiefs are nothing if not ambitious.  More bars go in daily, ready to be filled with every metallic component mankind has ever built.  The command structure of the entire Grand Anchor juts from one corner of the cube, in a space platform made of dozens of hollow asteroids linked together with impermeable tubes of plasteel.  These are the original asteroids from which the scrapyard grew, abandoned by the Mechanicus thousands of years before.  The tubes and asteroids form a tiny echo of the world-shrouding maze of asteroids and trains that surround Fabique.  Some asteroids have sleeping chambers, others have controls for the retrieval drones, and others are mess halls and galleys for the crews.