Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Maxient (section)

==Physical Areas Aboard==
There is little commonality to the many modules of Port Maxient.  Outside those regions where the function of the station is exclusively civilian, nothing is constant.  Onboard light and gravity levels, security presence, availability of places to rest, and even crime are in constant change.  A passenger or merchant on the station might experience four or even five different air pressures, just while walking from one end of the Promenade to the other.


===The Commercial Halls===
Far outside the tightly-controlled martial portions of the station, Thrones rule lives.  Like many stations under the influence of Rogue Traders, there is little in Port Maxient that cannot be swayed into one’s pocket for the right sums of cash.  However, unlike similar Imperial border stations like Port Wander, or Port Seidenham, Port Maxient remains a military posting at heart.  The vast Commercial Hall is a place where Rogue Traders and Captains can escape from the scrutiny of the Naval Provosts and do business.  While slavery is illegal on Port Maxien, very little else is short of outright robbery and murder.  Even xenotech finds its way into the collections of unscrupulous spacers here.

The Commercial Halls consist of two of the six enormous storage modules of the original Xerxes III station, with their bulkhead-directed artificial gravity replaced with conventional mono-directional systems to make trade easier.  Bay One holds a massive bazaar, with well over six hundred thousand merchants, traders, hawkers, buskers, hiring agents, purchasers, runners, and dealers working here day in, day out.  The chamber is packed to the brim with mercantile goods and people selling it all, from wild animals to awe or battle, to indentured servants trained in the widest variety of obedience, to exotic construction materials.

Bay Two is the living goods area.  Unlike Bay One, Bay Two is far emptier, with substantially more space between the ad hoc decks added after the gravity systems were overhauled.  This is to facilitate the venting of metabolic gasses from the thousands of animals and people bought and sold here as gladiators, riding mounts, target practice, experimental subjects, companions for a day or eternity, or any other purpose.  Technically, the edict against the buying of slaves remains in place here, but the border between ‘indentured servant’ and ‘slave’ in the Imperium is fuzzy at the best of times.  Conveniently, there is a massive fighting pit on the lowest portion of Bay Two, where new purchases can be tried out against wild animals bought in Bay One, although the Adeptus Arbites rarely allow such engagements to proceed to the death.  There are other living goods for sale here, however, beyond animals and people’s contracts.  There are also greenhouses in climate-controlled subdecks, where rare plants and fungi from across the worlds of Cloudburst and beyond can be bought and sold, with extensive documentation – or not – about proper care and cultivation.

===The Hovelry===

Generally, the Imperial Navy stays out of the direct administration and control of the station, but Bay Three is a rare exception.  This huge quartering area is connected directly to the primary docking bays of the station, wherever those happen to be this millennium.  Motorized corridors of triple width with catwalks overhead connect the docking bays to Bay Three, allowing discerning or expeditious travelers to simply bypass the squabbling sailors and Tech-Adepts.  After an interminable visit, with advertisements for every service the station provides plastered on every visible millimeter of the corridor walls and ceiling, the motorized corridors dump arrivals out in Bay Three, where every possible quartering options awaits the weary traveler.  Nothing less than a massive hotel and resort, this Bay has been given over entirely to the rest, recreation, and unwinding of its residents.  The Navy intercedes regularly here, to prevent the name from sticking, but despite the grandeur and opulence of the wealthier living spaces, the name has stuck.  The Navy also intercedes to prevent assassinations of guests by other guests, and generally succeeds, although the wealthiest visitors generally stay on their own ships rather than buy a room here.  The smaller rooms are essentially just racking of bunk beds with paid-by-the-hour footlockers.  Opulence and grandeur increases exponentially from there, ranging from rooms that would be fitting as sleeping holds on large starships to full-service spa rooms for the health-conscious Rogue Trader.  Security is provided by roving squads of Naval Provosts and Arbites in featureless black masks and helms, quite incongruous with the relaxing décor.

===The Slots===

Games, entertainment, and the pleasures of the flesh await the visitor to the Slots.  This casino fills the entirety of Bay Four and beyond.  It has metastasized, like Port Maxient itself, out into adjacent compartments and decks, as the Navy and Mechanicus have abandoned them in favor of compartments closer to the hull.  The creeping expanse of brothels, gaming halls, concert theaters, combat sport arenas with variable gravity and light levels, and grand showcases holds a bewildering array of entertainments.  Any carnal desire, any thrill of the wager, and any theatrical delight may be found here for the right price.  The centerpiece of the massive three-dimensional casino complex, the source of most of the station’s income, is a gigantic card game chamber.  Here, Adeptus Mechanicus randomization engines create playing cards and dice to atomic precision, distribute them to dealers and pit bosses, and collect them again for rendering and reprocessing into fresh, undamaged materials.  It vexes the Imperial Navy to no end that the Adeptus Mechanicus, the least human of all Adepta, have managed to create the entertainment that pays for the station.  The huge machine that creates the cards and dice is a public spectacle, and any who wish may buy a pack of dice or cards to keep as souvenirs.

===The Chapel of the Emperor of Starfarers===

Technically, this huge temple of the Emperor was built after the one to the Omnissiah in Bay Six, but this bay was still in use as recently as a thousand years ago.  Originally, the void travelers who wished to worship the Emperor had to make do with one of over two hundred chapels of the Emperor scattered around the station, in lieu of a centralized chamber.  After the Adeptus Mechanicus took control of Bay Six to make the House of the Motive Force, however, the Navy immediately brought in the Adeptus Ministorum to refurbish this chamber into something of greater effort and spectacle.  To the surprise of the Navy, however, the Adeptus Ministorum Cloudburst, in all its addiction to spectacle and effort, hesitated to simply turn the miles-wide bay into a single, giant church.  The amount of construction and architecture that would require was so vast, so expensive, that it didn’t seem worthwhile.  To come up with an innovative solution, the Ecclesiarchy turned to its history, to the early days of its existence, when it was still a prosecuted thing, furtively worshipping the Emperor when His Imperial Truth still held sway over most of the Imperium.  These worship sessions took place in basements, closets, family homes, and other small places, away from the law.  Taking inspiration from this, the Ecclesiarchy rebuilt Bay Five as a great maze of several thousand individual rooms, from the floor of the bay all the way to the ceiling.  Each contains pews, kneelers, or chairs, as well as a single projection screen and a lectern at the front.  Each lectern contains a small cogitator with one of over fifteen thousand pre-approved sermons on the Emperor and His teachings that can be played for a single Throne’s cost, which then appear on the screen.  For those who want a larger congregation or a live sermon to watch, the wider rooms contain more traditional religious accoutrements.

===The House of the Motive Force===

Bay Six is the only one of the original six Xerxes III storage modules to retain the original omni-directional gravity system.  Originally, that system existed to expedite the storage and retrieval of cargo.  Now, it allows for each of the six facings of the chamber to perform independent experiments.  It is also the center of worship for the Adeptus Mechanicus on the station, as well as the personal laboratory of the Magos who presides over the Mechanicus contingent.  This bay is inaccessible to non-Mechanicus personnel, which has led superstitious and greedy Rogue Traders to mutter that the Techpriests must be storing something incredibly valuable there.

===The Core===

The heart of the station’s mechanisms.  This series of central decks are all that remains of the original Xerxes III core machinery besides the Astropathic Temple Spire.  It sits at the middle of the six numbered bays added during primary construction.  Here, a gigantic thermo-plasmic reactor chugs, feeding power into the ever-expanding station.  It has been replaced again and again with more potent reactors over time as the draw has grown.  Eventually, a secondary reactor was added specifically for weapon systems, as there was simply no more way to grow the primary reactor without it being too large to maintain safely.

Elsewhere in the Core, the station’s chronically overtaxed life support systems cling to functionality.  While there is no immediate risk of their failure, the patchwork, hasty approach of the station’s growth has rendered the ventilation and sewage collection equipment grossly under-capacity for the task.  People in the poorer parts of the civilian-operated reaches of the stations have grown used to being unable to flush the toilets or drink clear water for days at a time while frantic Techpriests scramble to make repairs.  There is serious discussion among the less prestige-obsessed members of the Adeptus Mechanicus and Imperial Navy officer corps of sending requests for emergency aid to a non-Cloudburst authority for intervention before Magos Alexia and Admiral Caravel accidentally choke the station dead.

===Command Post Maxient===

Something of a misnomer, since whatever compartment the presiding officer of the station is in is the command post, this huge control zone still serves as the principal dispatch and coordination hub of the entire station.  At one point, the highest deck had an armored bubble that allowed exterior views, but it has long since been swallowed up by the growing station.  Now, it is deep inside its armored bulk.  Here, there are many dozens of control terminals, each manned by Navy officers, which report the status of the many expansions and blocks of the Port.  In times of war, defense command protocols take over, and the Admiral commands all Naval weapons and counter-boarders from there.  In the case of the imminent loss of the station, the presiding officer can, theoretically, assume command of Mechanicus assets too, although no Admiral, technical leader of the station or not, has yet had the nerve.

Lower compartments of the huge deck contain the Defense Monitor coordination hub, which collects targeting telemetry from the ships that protect the station and relays it to targeting systems elsewhere on the station and in the fleet.  In other places, the semi-automated homing mines and torpedo target computers track objects not cleared by the patrol ships.  On lower decks yet, the flight bosses coordinate the launch and retrievals of fighters and bombers.  Firefighting and damage control efforts belong to the Adeptus Mechanicus, who rarely allow the Navy any insight into their protocols.

===The Refuge===

At one point, this part of Port Maxient was a large rack of savior pods.  Long since engulfed by the growth of the station, the divots in the walls remain, stripped of pods.  Now, the honeycomb of empty space has turned into a triage.  Several dozen Adeptus Ministorum and Adeptus Sororitas alms-minders with basic medical training attend to the people who live here, seeing to their needs, and incinerating them if their basic treatment is not enough.

===The Underguts===

If ever a visual reminder were needed of the decay of the station as it grew, the Underguts would be more than enough.  Some of the corridors, cabins, and compartments in the Underguts were luxury quarters for the wealthiest guests and merchants.  Traces of their old grandeur are still visible if one knows where to look, under centuries of rust and grime.  Flickering or absent lights throw deep shadows on embossed skulls and cracked statuary.  Some of the rooms in the Underguts still see some visitors from the Mechanicus, there to pursue personal projects or maintain indispensable equipment, but the most regular visitors are the hundreds of thousands of indigent spacers, vagrants, and escaped indentured servants from the upper decks.  While the station rarely builds up such a populace of lifelong residents in the Underguts as the Dropouts on Thunderhead do, that is not because it is easier to leave.  Roving gangs of unscrupulous merchants and flesh-dealers sometimes descend into the Underguts to kidnap hundreds of people to be sold as cheap gladiators.  The Adeptus Arbites officially do not know this, but unofficially tolerate the practice, as it reduces strain on the life support systems.

===The Croplands===

While all of the permanent parts of the station except the Astropathic Temple Spire are likely to be swallowed up eventually, there would no doubt be mass riots if this wing of the station were engulfed.  This interconnected chain of massive greenhouses, hydroponic gardens, and livestock pens make up the vast majority of the station’s fresh food supply.  The facility is controlled jointly by the Adeptus Mechanicus and House Carvan, which is the only Noble House with a substantial presence on the station.  The Croplands are protected by their own, dedicated formation of elite Skitarii and Servitors, collectively named the Logistic Guard.

===Lockdown===

There is no place the spacers of Port Maxient fear more than Lockdown.  This massive internal fortress is a Precinct of the Adeptus Arbites, one many times larger than those of a common Imperial city.  The fortress has its own fighter bay and docking spur, as well as a huge brig for those prisoners the Navy lacks the capacity to house.  The Adeptus Astra Telepathica temple spur extends from the center of Lockdown, since the Arbites are the only faction that the Astropaths trust not to let the Ecclesiarchs lynch them.

===The Observatory===

This is all that remains of the once-massive telescope and mapping hub around which much of the original construction of the station centered.  The Adeptus Mechanicus has transplanted the detectors and sensors away from their original sites on the station many times, unwilling as they are to replace equipment that expensive without urgent need.  On occasion, the Techpriests even see cause to use the telescopes to perform actual mapping, when the rotation of the station turns them towards the Oldlight Exo-zone.

===The Martyr-hall===

Vast statues of somber Imperial Saints and Heroes of the Imperium line this profoundly depressing passage.  Co-designed by the Adeptus Ministorum and the Imperial Navy, it stretches on for over a kilometer.  Forty meters wide and sixty meters tall, the hall has the names of every military officer and Chaplain to have perished on a mission that staged from or was fought near Port Maxient.  What the enlisted men and women think of all this is rarely on the mind of the merchants and Rogue Traders who come to witness it.

===The Promenade of Mankind===

The exact opposite of the Martyr-Hall, the Promenade is a boastful place.  Here, great portraits of oil and canvas show the surfaces of worlds that Cloudburst and Naxos Sector-based Rogue Traders have discovered, conquered, or opened trade with.  Music plays constantly from concealed speakers, which echoes down the kilometer-length viewing hall-cum-art gallery.