Is To Live Through Heaven - 02

 Sorry about the long absence, I have no excuse.

-----------------------

“Does it look friendly?”

I take a good long hard stare at the hull, then it took a pot shot at the hanger. Way off the security room, “Nope.” I pop the ‘P’ at the end of that, I could hear a sigh at the end of that and I retrieved the pistol from my survival kit. “Get away from the RTG, they’ll probably use it for their sensors.” That’s what I would do if I were a super futuristic raider hell bent on killing survivors, I try and think of a plan to get out of this alive.

I take a longer look around my surroundings, this pistol will definitely not cut it. I grab a hold of the metal that I picked and decidedly to use it as shield to hide behind for now. Their ship slowly comes in and drops off some guys before circling the station waiting to be called again. I can’t really see them but they appear to have high power flashlights on their weapons, combat EVA suits. Most likely bulletproof. Their visors glow a menacing red while they move as a team to track us down and kill us. They don’t seem to be floating but using some sort of magnetic boots, I want to steal their shoes. I throw myself as quickly as I can into the security wing, they spot me and a hail of gunfire comes my way.

Surely they would have some sort of weapons locker here, and I see it hidden behind locked bars that I have no particular access to at this moment of time. I see the engineer is still in the room, he hadn’t had much of a chance to escape since the Security Wing overlooks the hanger. Then I get a wild idea.

“Give me your gun!” I shout, there wasn’t much of a need to but I do it anyway. He scrambles to hand it to me and I attach it to my harness while I pass him the nuke casing. “Put the casing back together, I have a plan.”

“You’ll kill us!”

Is To Live Through Heaven - 01

Previous Chapter

“Hehehehe…” I giggled to myself, It’s not everyday you can say you disarmed a nuke, anyway what the hell is up with the torque? Can it unbolt anything? Fuck the Gerber and knives, everyone needs a torque gun.

“You… Uh okay there?”

“Perfectly.”

There’s a long silence over the net before he talks again, I take to trying to open the RTG to place the uranium in it and yes, I have just been hauling that around with me. It’s a bit awkward but I don’t believe we’re going to move it much now from the security room. It takes more awkward fumbling than a horny twelve year old but I work my around the generator.

“Things okay in here?” The Engineer asks again now that he’s waited the ‘soak’ period.

“Yeah, it’s giving out some amount of power we just need to connect it all up.” I do my best to shrug but it doesn’t really work. Especially since I’m upside down, or am I?

“I’ll work that out, I can hook it up to my welder kit. Just find me some scraps so we can make this room airtight.” I nod and float away past him, that roughly took an hour to complete. It’s a pretty big station. I drift my way over to some ripped open bulkheads to start to collect the biggest and flattest metal I can and that’s when I spot some more “good news”.

“Engy, we have a ship comin’ in.”

To Be Alive Is To... - 08

Previous Chapter

I don’t pull out his battery, instead I use the ports in the side, the terminal on his pod glows green and I press ‘open’. It takes a couple of moments then his eyes flash awake. He struggles to find himself as he tries to remember how he got there, I wave from the outside in.

“Comms, comms, comms!” I test, broadcasting it out to him, also noticing that feeds on my suit power.

“I hear ya’, what happened? The last thing I remember is the door shutting and that’s it.” He scowls, I shrug.

“I can’t remember anything.” I pause at that always seems to be the case. “What I’ve worked out is that the spire from Aegis station, broke off and got spaced. I’m trying to get power and air back on but I have no fucking clue what I’m doing.”

“Shit… What do we have?”

“A RTG from a probe, the fuel in it has diminished to practically nothing right now.”

“Yeah those were supposed to be decommed in a few weeks, so we don’t have any other fuel source for them unless we can generate heat, how’d you get that anyway. They’re supposed to be bolted into place.” I raise my left wrist in reply so he can see I’ve scrapped my interface terminal. “Fuckin’ loon.” I could hear him smirk, his door now slides open and he floats out. He also remembers to grab his survival kit and pistol, he glances at the RTG and sighs.

“I believe a good place to set up a base of operation would be the security or the med room. And we need to leave the battery in the pods to rest while we can.” I state and he nods.

“I’ll need to grab my tools, I left them in the maintenance tunnel under the hanger, the power tools are all dead but I could probably do something like you did if we need to.”

“Alright, I’ll drag this to the security room. Send a message if you need help.” We drift apart heading different ways, he crawls into an access port that I never noticed before while I take directions to the security wing. I’ve also noticed a distinct lack of bodies but plenty of bullet holes and plasma burns. I see shell casings but they don’t do me any good.

I finally reach the security room, the window has shattered and the glass is everywhere, I drift through the broken window slowly to avoid making any rips in the suit and that was until I see it.

As long as my wrist to my forearm, torpedo like but fat at the tip, numerous fins and a thruster at the back. It looked like a small WMD, it must have failed to detonate at close range because it couldn’t pick up enough speed when it shattered through the glass.

“Holy shit.” I accidentally broadcast out.

“What?!” A worried tone barely a millisecond after.

“T-they fired what looks like a fuckin’ nuke in the security office and it didn’t detonate.”

“Oh shit!”

I pull myself around the destructive weapon making sure not to touch it at all or disturb it. It was probably fired by a ship strafing across the hanger, they were very fortunate for it not to detonate.

“I don’t suppose you know how to disarm a nuke?” I asked hopefully.

“Fuck off!” In my observation it looked like I’ll need the torque again, but there is no saying how damaged this weapon is and if it could explode in my face.

“If you hear an explosion, it wasn’t me.” I cackle a little of the comms and he doesn’t say anything, I gently grasp in with my entire arm and press my torque tool to it. ‘Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me.’ Eventually after sweating and hugging it out with a nuke it slowly drifts apart, I had dismantled a nuke. That is an achievement.

Awarding Title ‘Risk-taker’.

Yeah fuck you too Jarvis.

To Be Alive Is To... - 07

“Right Dom what do you have for me?”

“Well I’ve set up my laptop to watch you play, fucking immense man. Looked like you were going to lose your shit at that probe though. RTG reactors work on, well... Radiation.” I hear him speak through my helmet, he must have connected his mic to his laptop as well.

“So what? Throw it into space and hope the background radiation powers it?”

“Nah mang, take it apart with your torque and throw some uranium, platinum whatever it inside. Here I’ve got a basic diagram from NASA.”

I stood there in disbelief for a moment before he elaborate.

“Google.” He elaborated, it saves the day again. ‘From what I understand from the wiki page, it runs on the heat and decay of the radioactive materials to create the electricity.’

What else could possibly hold enough radioactive materials for me in one go? How would I attach the RTG to a battery? I’ve reached a dead end and I don’t know how to break through it.

“Is there anything that can hold a lot of radioactive materials?”

“Smoke detectors have Americium or throw a few bananas in there. They don’t all have to be the same material as long as it works for you right?”

I thought about my options some more. I could try and hook up my stasis pod battery to another one to wake up someone, but that would give me under four hours battery life total between us before everything switches off. Currently though, I’m sitting at a nice seven hours in game time.

“I think I have a plan.” As I head in there once more.

“You’re looking for Alpha particles by the way, FYI and all that jazz.”

I almost fly to my pod and scramble around the back of it to remove the battery inside, it’s about the size of my torso, but that doesn’t mean shit in 0G.

I fly along from pod to pod, looking at their jobs and you could use the term ‘cherry picking’ here. That is until I come across a engineer, I have no idea what kind of engineer. Could be a computer software engineer, but he’s fully EVA’d up and that is good enough for me.

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…

⚶

To Be Alive Is To... - 05

It’s a fair amount for myself, but I counted twenty four other pods, six of which are opaque like mine. They’re possibly waiting on me to kick start this game for them or they’ll stay closed because no one else is unlucky enough to spawn here.

Hopefully there will be a working transport ship that I could pressurise and turn into a Ops Room and work from there, then I’d like to work on either the medical bay or the guardroom. They seem to be situated next door to each other so maybe I could cut through a wall or if I’m lucky they’ve already got a door separating them. I can see why people find space confusing, are you on the ceiling? Floor? A wall? But the easiest way to deal with it, is to not give a fuck. Simplify your mind and don’t think about it, you’ll just get a headache.

The hardest part of this entire experience for me is listening to my own breathing, because it’s the only thing I can hear and I am learning to hate the sound of my own wheezing, hopefully I won’t run into any monsters in like some of Dom’s games, I remember him playing one where they were all zombies and in space. That would be pretty fucking creepy right now considering I can’t see a thing, but the armour he main character wore was badass.

I slowly make my way to the hangar, it’s just a small thing. It has one large resupply ship, but looks fucked as bad as the station. A couple of ice mining ships and a few what looks like probes.

Objective Updated…

Create a powersource for a safe zone.

That’s great thank you so much, I would have never have guessed that is what I would have wanted to do, but how! How the fuck am I meant to do this, you’re giving a rubix cube to a neanderthal right now! So thank you very much Jarvis, you fuck.

To Be Alive Is To... - 04

I did my survey and the station is big as I am fucked. In other words… Very. I don’t know what happened to the solar panels but I can see even from here in low level light that they won’t be working… At all. I do suspect there is a hanger somewhere on this. I think half the station was embedded in an asteroid while this half reached off it like a spire and was broken off in an explosion. I pull myself back into the station, solar panels are a no go but if this place was a mining station they should have tool stations and engines, even replacement solar panels. I glanced at my map and seen a lot of it filling up now, it looks like I don’t physically have to walk every corridor for it to map.

I slowly start drifting down the hallway, gently pushing myself from wall to wall zig-zagging my way across. Travelling in 0 Gs is an art form in itself, I’m lucky in the way they seemed to think having protruding lights are cool, makes travelling easier. What doesn’t make it easier is the inky darkness that is everywhere, being in empty space with no direct sunlight or power just makes seeing almost impossible, the light from my helmet light is extremely low level and red. I float slowly through the space, debris and station breaches everywhere. I imagine that I’ll have to create my own airlock where I can get down and really put some work together, these gloves don’t do much for dexterity.

The area I’m in right now looks like the cryogenic sleeper area, not a lot are being used and even less have suits on. Some with suits on appear to be dead as well, I cannot open their capsules yet. Maybe it was a random power surge or one of the solar panels had a spark of life that generated my character waking up. I would like to wake up some of these astronauts but I need power and a supply of air.

After fifteen minutes or so I reach a halfway that denotes other areas of the station and a small map on a wall. Aegis Station. An official borderlands research facility right on the edge of known space. Inside the asteroid anchor was a hydroponics lab, they were investigating alien plant life and how it acts in space. Boring stuff if you’re not a botanist. It looked like it had it’s own water processing plant, it was semi-self sufficient meaning that it grew some of it’s own food, made it’s own water and air but for stuff that were more technical was resupplied. So ignore everything below where my stasis pod is the rooms and resources I do have to work with include.

• Docking and loading bay,
• Medical outpost,
• Guardroom,
• Kitchen and mess hall,
• A few dozen trashed solar panels and antennas,
• Customs,
• Radar post,
• A couple of EVA stations.