To Be Alive Is To... - 06

I leave the transport ship for now, it looks shagged. I don’t expect it to work. I don’t want to touch the ice mining ships either, since I do have a limited amount of them and they will be useful once I have someone that know what they’re doing. I stare down the probes, It’s a sphere with jutting spikes, landing gear, cameras and high power antennas.

They don’t look too damaged, maybe because you can’t escape on one. That wouldn’t have stopped me from strapping myself to it and trying. I take a look around it and see no obvious way to get into it’s guts which is starting to piss me off. For a hanger they should be able to do some basic maintenance, maybe there is an angle grinder or something kicking around, maybe a sledge hammer, I pause and think.

Shit neither of those options would work, no power and no gravity would make that pointless and a waste of oxygen. I need to think of this in a smarter manner, investigating closer I notice that it’s a bolted casing, so if I had something to unbolt it then it would work hopefully, which brings me to my power problem again. I scan the workbenches but find nothing that I can use because it’s plugged in.

Hang on, my EVA suit has power. I look at the terminal on my arm that I’ve neglected because it was smashed. I take myself over to the workbench and peel the cover off it carefully.

Removing all the connection ports apart from the power. I grab a torque tool, I carefully shred the power cable and leave the wire bare for connections. I brace myself for an electrical shock that never comes as I connect the wires from my suit to the torque tool. I flick it on and I feel it hum with power.

Warning! Critical power drain!

Woah, it worked. I stare at the tool in disbelief and look at my power level. It’s fairly low now, I don’t have a lot of time. I do another walk around the probe, or a float around. This rope is very useful, and look for areas where I guess the engine could be, luckily there’s a diagram.

Now my first mistake was not tying myself down with the rope, and my second is not knowing exactly what I’m looking for. I found nothing that resembles an engine that was until I wasted enough time looking on the back of some of the casing I removed indicated an RTG. (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator). It was a cylinder in shape with cooling fins. Looked a hell of a lot more expensive than my apartment and looked like it weighed a fair amount of this wasn’t 0G. I pull it out to the best of my ability and my helmet scans it.

Scanning RTG… Power Low… Needs replacement fuel source…

Uhuh, that’s… Great…

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