Also Known As:
The Swift Memorial Museum of Deimos Culture, History, and Gravel; Asaph Hall
Zone:
Mars
Location:
In Martian orbit near the “For Deimos” Bluesky
Details:
Voltaire Station trails endlessly behind the “For Deimos” BlueSky, as if stalking a past some 200 years out of its reach. The station was named for Voltaire Crater, one of Deimos’s few landmarks, and among its other eccentricities, Voltaire Station has one of the only collections of Deimos memorabilia in Sol—Bits of space debris, looping news vids of the moon’s destruction, and what the curator claims are photos from a community that once colonized the little moon’s surface.
The station’s obsessed owner—or perhaps prisoner—is a conspiracy-seeking hairless dog by the name of Corbeau Varga. Once an inmate of the infamous Kafka 6 penal colony, Varga escaped, and began devoting his not-insubstantial wealth of Terran lore to exposing cover-ups and dark machinations in the corporate world. He broadcasts his rants on the “Radio Free Deimos” pirate transmission. Journalists who dig too deeply into Sol’s corporate shadows often simply vanish, but Varga mostly makes rumors up, mixing the occasional buried gem with a hodge-podge of newsfeeds from Solnet, off-topic factoids, and actual fiction…he studied 20th century literature in a former life.
Other regulars around the station are Abasi FeHy, a male hyena on indefinite loan from the matriarchy of Izwe Station, and Ashtaar Arytel, a fox occasionally on contract with Pulse who regularly stops by to make sure the station’s inmates haven’t drifted too far into creeping insanity.
Besides Voltaire Station’s notoriety in conspiracy circles, the station has one draw that brings in a steady trickle of visitors: its cramped rooms house dozens of students of Terran lore, other refugees from the Kafka-6 prison. Very few of them have deep insights into Hydra or hidden Terran bunkers or military secrets; most of Voltaire’s inhabitants are experts in the third planet’s art, culture, literature, and popular entertainment. Rarely useful, but who knows—from such rich fertilizer strange flowers can grow.
While you’re at Voltaire Station, you may want to visit:
♃ Asaph Hall, the recording studio for Varga’s pirate radio broadcasts
♃ The Swift Memorial Museum of Deimos Culture, History, and Gravel
♃ The station’s Starbarks coffee shop. The coffee’s nothing special and the lines are long, but the epic fights on Open Mic Night are worth the journey on their own.
Need to Know (before you go)
An interesting place to stop for a deep dive into human culture. Longer visits not recommended as the IRPF associates frequent visitors to Voltaire Station with the owners’ crusade for hidden truth.
GM Notes
While most of Voltaire Station’s scholars are of the “self-appointed expert” mode, the station actually has a deep base of knowledge in the culture of Terra. Current Terran research focuses on the final war, the strange alien races now inhabiting Terra, the factors leading to the creation of Vectors, and other useful information. However, the former Kafka-6 scholars studied Terran life and literature, government and society—the things that arguably made humans “human,” mostly thrown into the wastebasket of Sol’s history.
Plot Seeds
♃ Transmitting Now: While their equipment is weak and their audience is just barely in triple digits, Voltaire Station does have a broadcasting system and a platform, easily available to anyone whose ideas are crazy enough. Whether NPCs are using this to spread disinformation or the player characters are desperately trying to spread “the truth,” the station’s transmitter can be an information lifeline. IRPF keeps an ear on it, though, so be careful what you say.
♃ Faded Photos: The destruction of Deimos is one of the hot-button issues on the station (even if it was 200 years ago). The Deimos Museum has as much fiction and misinformation as the rest of the station, but what Varga insists is photographic evidence of a modest little neighborhood on supposedly barren Deimos turns out to be something else entirely. Evidence of a pre-MarsCo corptown? Fake footage streamed to Terra before the final war? Maybe just some stills from a Japanese monster film? Who knows, but the photos are old and smell of cover-ups.