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 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 saw 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 0Gs 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 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 appear to be dead as well, I cannot open their capsules yet. 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 its own food, made it’s own water and air but for stuff that was 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.

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 kickstart this game for them or they’ll randomly surface because no one else is unlucky enough to spawn here. Hopefully, there will be a working transport ship that I could pressurize and turn into an 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 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 power source 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.

“Rate of survival has increased from two percent to ten percent! congratulations!” Survival guide cheered in my ears.

I will destroy this AI before I die.

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 knows 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 its guts which are 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 sledgehammer, 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 scan it.

Scanning RTG… Power Low… Needs replacement fuel source…

Uhuh, that’s… Great…

                                                                                           ⚶

I fly along from pod to pod, looking at their jobs and you could use the term ‘cherry-picking’ here. That is until I came across an 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.

I use the panels on 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?”

“An 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,” 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.

“Chance of survival Decreased!”

“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.

“Chance of survival increased!”

Yeah, fuck you too Jarvis.