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Co-Mars Two was in the same orbit as the planet Mars—that was why it was called Co-Mars—but it trailed Mars by a sixth of a Martian year, in what is called a "Trojan" point. There was another control station just like it at the orbit's other Trojan point, the same sixty degrees away but in the other direction. These two Co-Mars stations commanded the entire sky. The stations in orbit around Mars itself could help if necessary, but that seldom happened. Actually any of the stations could, in a pinch, handle all the comets at once, at least all the ones not blocked by the Sun. The reason they divided the work was for safety's sake. Co-Mars Two was the one that vectored the incoming comets on the final legs of their approach to Mars and thus it was the most important of all . . . or at least its personnel liked to think so.
Co-Mars Two wasn't small. It was about the size of a seagoing cargo vessel of Earth, and it would weigh around fifteen thousand tons if it weighed anything at all. Being in orbit, it didn't. Nothing inside it weighed anything, either, because there was no spin on Co-Mars Two. Therefore there was no centrifugal pseudogravity to hold the objects inside to the shells as there was in, say, the stations in the Oort cloud itself. Co-Mars Two couldn't afford the luxury of spin. Its myriad antennae were all aimed with great precision at particular points in the sky, and they couldn't be allowed to wander.
Nor did the people who manned it experience even the tiny micro-gravity that was found in the transfer stations at the top of a Skyhook. They didn't experience any gravity at all, which caused a lot of queasy stomachs. Co-Mars Two's corridors went in all three of the directions of three-dimensional space, and there was no such thing in it as a stairway. For the convenience of its crew the corridors were colored red, green, and yellow, corresponding, but in no particular order, to left-right, front-back, and up-down.
Once they got used to its little eccentricities, the crews of Co-Mars Two found that it wasn't a bad place to be. There was plenty of power from their Augenstein-powered MHD electricity generators for civilized comforts. They needed a lot of power. The station's sensors, after all, had to reach out past the orbit of Neptune to keep in touch with their quarry.
Those sensors were powerful, and before the supply ship came within ten thousand kilometers of Co-Mars Two whole banks of them had to be turned off, because otherwise the radio energy the sensors emitted would quickly fry everybody aboard.