Kyot didn’t look it, didn’t even feel it or remember most of it, but he knew that he was an old man. According to public records, He had lived as a dependent citizen in Galilea for thirty-five years before becoming a space contractor, and he couldn’t remember how long he’d been doing the job. At least a few decades. The Little Star Hopper was a Coalition ship after all, and they liked to hire experienced crews, not that it mattered. Any contractor worth their mass knew that the value of experience tapered off after a few decades. New tech replaced old tech. Antisocial habits set in. Bitterness. Loneliness. Stubbornness. And that’s when cosmic ray damage, gene-mod side effects, and normal wear and tear either remade or unmade the contractor.

Thank the stars I was lucky enough to be remade.

“Whatcha thinking about?” Agi asked through the commlink. Kyot then realized he was standing completely still in his EVA suit near the edge of the Cab’s roof, staring at the enormous dark blue sky. The headlights of his suit beamed straight into the abyss. He’d been inspecting the structural hard points that held the shielding to the outer shell when faded memories from his past snuck into his head. None of them formed a coherent life story.

“I barely remember who I was.”

“Before storage?”

“No. Before I became a contractor.”

“Is that new?”

“Nah. I’m just thinking about the sky. I feel like I’ve seen the sky before. On Earth.”

“But you know it was probably just a SIM-room, and that inconsistency is bothering you.”

“Yeah.”

Agi grunted his acknowledgement of the dilemma.

“All things fade, Kyot. Everything from people to the planets. Even machinery like me. That's just the way it goes.”

Kyot returned his attention to the raised section of Cab shielding behind him. It was about two meters thick, box-shaped and rust-colored, and so densely packed-in that one could easily mistake it for solid rock. One of Agi’s beefier bots carried it on forklifts, allowing Kyot to step down underneath the section of shielding and inspect the outer frame of the Cab. Agi’s bots had already done a maintenance inspection, but the spaceman needed more accurate scans for the defensive array that he planned to install.

“There’s so little damage,” Kyot said aloud. “It still blows my mind that everything lasted this long. I’m not seeing any degradation to the outer frame of the Cab or the shielding. It’s practically new.”

“Crew Cabins are built to last.”

“A few years, yeah, but not five thousand. You’d think radiation damage or the reactants inside the payment pile would have worn things down.”

“The shields stop everything. Interlocking sections block all radiation while internally stored sealant seeps out of the seams and forms a thick crust in atmosphere, keeping out everything else. A bunch of my bots cleaned it up when you were busy blowing up the payment pile.”

Kyot ran a gloved hand over one side of the dense shielding above him. It was solid to the touch. Thousands of layers of reddish-orange synthetic material. Strong enough to withstand hypervelocity impacts, lightweight enough to carry with a forklift, self-healing, and self-inflating when struck with enough energy. However, like so many other tools and supplies Kyot depended on for his continued existence, it was now a limited resource.

“How is the Cab gonna hold up without the bottom shields?” Kyot asked.

Agi grunted.

“Unless you plan to blow us up again, the Cab should be fine. There’s enough shielding left to crust over and protect it from this frozen environment, and with this new atmosphere above us, radiation ain’t much of an issue anymore. Our problem isn’t the Cab though. It’s everything else. Everything we don’t have.”

“Mhmm.”

That meant more shielding and m-pods for an ascent vehicle, more nuclear fuel to get their operation running, and more Stellarite coils for a new Jump Drive, without which they’d be effectively trapped in the gravity well of Big Red.

Annoyingly, Kyot actually had most of what he needed beneath his feet. The raw material resources needed to build thousands of new Cabs and spaceships could be found in the payment pile, but none of it was yet useful because Kyot’s entire manufacturing network was gone. And, even if the Cab’s onboard fabricators worked at maximum capacity for weeks, the best they could do was build a small facility to process a few metric tons of the payment pile at a time. That just wasn't nearly enough.

But again, the real problem was in the material that Kyot couldn't replace.

Shielding, for example, required the unique manufacturing conditions of orbital space, which was currently beyond Kyot’s reach. Stargod tech like m-pods and Stellarite required station-sized Nova reactors, and those would probably never be within Kyot’s reach. Nuclear sludge was a little more accessible because he had some left over, but getting more would require large-scale surveying and mining, on top of complex refinement and processing facilities, and all that just to get a few kilograms from a single batch. Even still, that was only if Uranium ore could be found on BR-4.

However, Kyot was now his own boss. He didn’t need to follow project specifications or industry regulations. There was no one to satisfy besides himself. Kyot just needed to get the job done.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

And the job is now survival.

“We’ll make do with what we have,” Kyot told his cobot companion. “We can get by on batteries and portable reactors until I get the PFR set up. There’s still plenty of nuke sludge to keep us going for a year or two. Plus, the cargo jumpers are still out there. And the whole damn payment pile!”

“We can’t manufacture ultra superheavy elements,” Agi reminded. “That makes the PFR and m-pods a finite resource. Unless we break down the Cab, take the LV into orbit, and go further into deep space while we can. Scavenge whatever we can find. The Little Star Hopper might still be out there. Or other starships.”

“You’d risk that with a bug swarm in the system?”

“Better than staying put and getting swarmed down here. Bug swarms are more massive than mobile. Once they jump, they can’t deviate from a chosen flight path, and they always travel in force. It wouldn’t be hard to outmaneuver them with a little extra delta-v.”

“True. But I’m not leaving a single gram of my payment behind. Either we take it all with us, or we don’t leave. Otherwise, what was the point of coming out here?”

“You’re the boss, boss.”

Kyot had Agi’s bot reattach the box-shaped piece of Cab shielding as he returned to the workpad mounted on the arm of his suit. Several windows were open, and it took him a few moments to remember what he was even working on.

One window displayed the defensive array that Kyot planned to attach to the top of the Cab. For the moment, everything looked fine, so he moved it to the side to focus on other projects. A few windows had the weapons that he was currently fabricating and planned to attach to the array. Another showed the search pattern for the bots that were digging through the payment pile for the cargo jumpers. One window presented Agi’s notes about the still-disabled central computer cluster. But the window that got most of the spaceman's attention displayed a control terminal for the Mjolnir Reactor, which listed hundreds of critical failures and warnings.

It turned out that molten salt reactors can’t run for years and years without destroying themselves. Who would have thought? Still, that didn’t mean the reactor was useless. Most of the fissile fuel sludge was stored inside shielded tanks from when the reactor initiated an automatic shutdown. Other disposable decay products were safely stored in their own waste pods. The reactor itself, although flooded with a messy neutron moderator fluid and severely damaged from its extended use, still held components that could be used in Kyot’s new power supply.

Whatever that's going to be.

Kyot looked up from his workpad as Agi’s bots took the disassembled sections of the Mjolnir Reactor out of the Cab cargo bays for inspection. The once giant and upside-down, hammer-shaped structure didn’t look nearly as impressive in pieces, yet it was still a critical part of Kyot’s plans. Down below the payment pile, the Cab had been powered by exothermal generators. But those were now beyond reach. Since breaching the surface of BR-4 Kyot had relied on stored up battery power and a few small, portable reactors that used the same Thorium fuel sludge as the Mjolnir. With power rationing they were enough to maintain life support, Agi’s bots, and small-scale manufacturing.

Not much more than the essentials, Kyot thought to himself with a frown.

The spaceman needed a better power source, both in terms of overall capacity and stability. More portable reactors could be fabricated but they required regular maintenance. Kyot only had three to worry about and already they were taking a lot of his and Agi's time. Besides, they could only pump out a couple hundred megawatts each. Kyot needed many gigawatts if he wanted to produce anything worthwhile.

What the spaceman really needed was the PFR, but that monster needed a full maintenance inspection before Kyot would risk activating, and potentially destroying, his only fusion reactor. Unfortunately, the damn thing was an assembly of more than a million components, each of which required his attention.

Let’s just take a moment, Kyot thought to himself.

I have nuke sludge. I have the breeder reactor. Damaged but still technically functional. I have the Mjolnir too, although it’s too busted to risk running at even half power. Still, I have the basic piping. I have all the components of a nuclear reactor. If only I could rig it together into… something. But how could I turn that into power? Without the Mjolnir, what transfers all that heat into gigawatts of electricity? What does the work?

A gust of frozen wind forced Kyot to steady his footing and focus on the activity around him. Agi had hundreds of worker bots scurrying around the crater and the Cab. Inflatable shelters housed the few fabricators already in use, producing the crude firearms that the spaceman planned to defend himself with. It was all that could be manufactured on short notice. However, after taking a moment to think as he watched the busy scene, Kyot was forced to consider a terrifying thought.

This isn’t enough.

At one point, far in the past, BR-4 had a substantial defensive network. Kyot built it himself. Thousands of hypervelocity railcoil launchers, tens of thousands of defensive guns, hundreds of missile sites, and a few orbital drone bases. Not that it was needed. The Little Starhopper was a legitimate starship, practically a god in terms of raw destructive power. But it was standard practice to assume a defensive posture in case the bugs hitched a ride or went interstellar. No one ever thought they would though, and neither did Kyot. So, he never bothered to keep weaponry close by.

Because of that mistake, everything he’d built was thousands of kilometers away and no longer responding to radio communications. Most of it was probably buried under several meters of ice and snow, weathered and worn-down beyond use.

The spaceman looked up into the dark blue, almost black sky of BR-4. Only a handful of stars were visible. It looked like an empty abyss. Yet Kyot knew that a bug swarm was out there. A massive one. And, according to Agi scans, it was spread out across the whole system. That meant they probably wouldn’t jump directly from the star when they decided to attack. It was more likely that offensive swarms were already stationed at Big Red’s Lagrange points, since it was the biggest planet in the system. But they could also be in a highly elliptical orbit around Big Red, and Kyot wouldn’t even know because he had no presence in space.

It could only be worse if they were already here, he thought. And, of course, things got worse.

“Kyot, something’s moving toward us.”

The spaceman tripped over himself and nearly fell off the edge of the Cab at Agi's words. The cobot's tone of voice scared him more than anything else. He rarely spoke so affirmatively.

“Scout drones have detected multiple groups coming from different directions. Thousands of heat signatures. I’m launching more scouts”

A few flying drones buzzed off into the frozen night as Kyot considered his options.

He looked down at everything he had in the crater. All of Agi's bots were scrambling as they quickly tried to disassemble and pack everything back into the Cab cargo bays.

Some small part of the spaceman wanted to scream in rage and then quickly rig up a radioactive bomb so that he could end his life and destroy the Cab without letting the bugs take either one.

But another part of himself ignored the urge to indulge in impulsive, panicked behavior, and instead search for a way through the coming assault. Kyot had been put in an impossible situation, being left alone in storage and forgotten for so long. It wasn't fair, he knew that. It also wasn't likely that he'd escape what was coming. The spaceman was going to die. He accepted that too.

Coming out here was always a risk.

But life was unfair and sometimes there was no escape from a shit situation. Still, that didn't mean Kyot was going to quietly accept death and defeat.

"What do we have? he asked Agi through their commlink.

A few of the bots suddenly froze in place as the cobot considered his words.

"You mean the weapons?"

"Yes! Every cannon. Every gun. Anything that can shoot. What all do we have?"

"Twenty breach-loading one-hundred and fifty millimeter cannons, and twenty-nine autoloading fifty-millimeter guns. A thousand high explosive rounds and charges for the cannons and about fifteen hundred self-contained rounds for the guns."

Fuck me. That’s nothing.

There could be millions of bugs in a small swarm. Even if the guns were all used perfectly, Kyot could only hope to kill a few thousand. And that was being very optimistic. Unfortunately, optimism in the face of certain death was all he had.

“Have your bots hoist everything to the top of the Cab and tie the guns to the outer frame with cabling. Then take the ammunition inside.”

“It’s explosive.”

“It’s our only weaponry.”

“Kyot—”

“Trust me Agi! I know the risks. Just get it done. Have the bots follow the layout of the defensive array that we planned. Remove whatever shielding you need to.”

“What about the guns. They have no frames or supporting structures.”

“Then man them all! Use the bots to physically aim them.”

Agi wanted to argue, Kyot knew it. Physically handling newly fabricated and untested cannons with valuable worker bots was beyond desperate. But what other choice did they have? And to the cobot's credit, all the bots in the crater sprang into action within a second of Kyot's command, with those not packing away equipment busily transporting guns to the top of the Cab and storing ammunition inside. For better or worse, Agi would follow Kyot no matter what. Still, that didn't mean he would quietly follow orders.

"How do we use the guns if the ammo is stored inside the Cab?"

Kyot worked his way down as a small army of worker bots swarmed the dome of the Cab's topside. Considering the wide search area that Agi's scouts had been covering over the payment pile, and the harshness of the environment, Kyot assumed that they had about an hour before their location got swarmed. That didn't leave much time for intelligent solutions.

“I have a plan. Just get me some bots with welding tools.”