Causeway 3 is a secret Virodyne routing station the crew reached after decoding hidden coordinates from Strake’s outgoing transmission: pulses buried in a carrier wave, mechanical chirps that only Felix recognized. The coordinates led to an unnamed system three jumps out, an eighteen-day transit away (Ep 28).
Exterior: A short cylinder studded with dense antenna arrays on every surface, with a flat docking ring facing inbound traffic. Turret ports are recessed into the outer hatch, only visible up close.
Docking hallway: A zero-G corridor running the station’s length, its walls pitted with hidden slots that deploy optical lens and laser tracking arrays when intruders enter (targeting only, unarmed). The inner end holds a voice-controlled comms panel.
Server room: A tight hexagonal space with terminals ringing every wall and indicator lights throughout. Slots along the floor and ceiling can launch security drone swarms if a hack is detected, with one main interface terminal on the right wall.
When the crew arrived, the station immediately flagged their ship’s ownership module as unauthorized and warned that authorities had been notified. Felix spacewalked to an exterior control panel while Haleyy held his line, hacking the docking clamps open. The crew entered in vac suits as camera arrays tracked them; Thorne successfully bluffed a human security officer monitoring the comms into opening the inner door. Felix then hacked the server terminal and cleared the outer security layer, uncovering transit logs confirming that Strake’s ship, the Acceptable Loss, had delivered Voss to Prometheon Station, the first hard confirmation of her location since her capture. As the hack continued, a security patrol was flagged inbound and drone swarms began deploying from the walls, ending the episode on a cliffhanger (Ep 28).
Picking up mid-hack, three drone swarms pressed Felix from multiple flanks while the rest of the crew held the line against an approaching patrol vessel. Deeper in the system, Felix’s hack turned up a second discovery: historical records showing that the Omnitek data vault (carrying Petey’s digitized consciousness) had also transited through Causeway 3 years earlier, bound for Prometheon Station, and never returned. The drill-path directory also exposed an unlisted, unexplored destination named Generator 01 alongside the Prometheon route. With the drill path to Prometheon Station in hand, the crew fought off the drones, escaped back to their ship, and fled the station under pursuit (Ep 29).
Appears in: Ep 28, Ep 29