=Jaques= 
**Station Type:** [[Aerostats|Aerostat]]
**Allegiance:** Independent ([[Brinkers|Brinker]])
**Primary Languages:** Unknown
**Population:** 5,000
While I was on [[Mushroom]], I talked to several people there who had returned from an even deeper aerostat that’s closely allied with Mushroom. Known as Jacques, after some [[Earth]] undersea explorer or other, it’s down in the deep and completely opaque water ice clouds, where the pressure is around 50 atmospheres. You can’t build a hab that can survive that environment without equalizing the pressure, and in air that sort of pressure is too high for anything but synths, so the hab is ﬁlled with water and inhabited only by aquatic morphs. The residents get to live in a ﬁsh bowl surrounded by a high pressure atmosphere and if anything goes wrong, they swiftly become one with the compressed water and methane ice below them. The one consolation is they’re deep enough that the external temperature is actually habitable, which also means that the station is invisible to all IR scans and deep enough that no other sorts of scans are going to ﬁnd them. You can’t detect Jacques from orbit, and you’d need an insanely tough ship to get close to the station, so these brinkers are very well hidden. The only way to get to Jacques is to egocast from Mushroom. I wasn’t allowed to visit the habitat, it is supposedly only for people who are hardcore brinkers.
I obviously don’t have much intel to work on here, but I overheard something on Mushroom that makes me wonder about Jaques. None of the three people who’d been there were willing to talk about it, but one made a comment to another that made it sound like some of the inhabitants were not there voluntarily or were prevented from leaving. My guess is either that they are either using slave labor or they won’t let anyone who might say anything bad about them leave. In either case, I think there’s something nasty going on down there, and maybe someone should take a look.

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