Nathan pushed off from the wall, fighting his instincts about force and speed in order to make it a controlled leap. He spun despite that, flailing a little, and there was a shuddering impact and a distinct lack of sound as he twisted away from the incoming strike and interposed a piece of metal he’d grabbed.

The voidfish went through the metal plate, barely deflecting as it did so—but that was enough for it to miss him. Again.

And then he impacted the wall, shoulder first, and winced at what he knew would be a bruise.

Again.

“Saucer,” he said sharply, and then stopped for lack of anything useful to say. His HUD was quite correct in what the clear priority was—decoding the data band being used by the hatch that he’d just unjammed so that they could close it. And they very much had to close it, because the reason why the hatch had jammed was that untold centuries or millennia ago a voidfish had curled up and died inside the manual overrides and a host of spawn had erupted out of its corpse, fighting each other and eating whatever they could.

There was only one left now. It was the size of his torso, matte black and shaped vaguely like a knitting needle, and every time it came within three inches of him it drained a quarter of a percent of Saucer’s power every second. That was what it cost to maintain suit integrity in the face of that kind of proximity to an apex scavenger of the void.

And there was nothing he could do to so much as scratch it. Saucer’s nanotech capabilities weren’t up to the task, and that was all the weaponry he had available other than plates of metal sliced off of the bulkheads or the leavings of the voidfish’s previous meals. And the fish itself in its seven and a half inches of slender glory was hardly going to be taken down by even his best batter’s swing.

He didn’t know what the outer hull was made of, or why it and the airlock were impenetrable to a creature that was perfectly willing and able to eat the chunks of metal he’d brought to patch whatever needed patching. This was because he had no conception of the materials science involved, or for that matter of the ecology of space in this particular universe; but why would he have any such knowledge? He was not from that universe, and his own universe was strikingly hostile to life by the standards of anywhere that was inhabited or sophonce-bearing. There was neither magic nor functioning inorganic nanotechnology, and what little organic nanotechnology did exist was limited to the basic building blocks of life; nothing that generated radio waves, and barely any computational capacity.

For that matter, he had no background in materials science at all even within the context of his own time and place of birth. He was vaguely aware that carbon was involved in turning iron into steel, and that titanium was a useful metal in creating advanced alloys. But he had read far more science fiction than science, and more of that in fantasy; and he had played nearly as many games as he had read books; and so, to him, the metals of true virtue were the fantastical ones. Iridium, yes, but not the iridium of his home’s truth—and likewise neutronium and osmium, appearing in imagined variants rather than how they appeared in reality. Those were joined by orichalcum and mythril, by truesteel and truegold, by carbonium and unobtanium and a thousand others.

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And so when he thought of the voidfish and what its body was made out of he thought of it as neutronium, and when he thought of the outer hull and the airlock he thought of them as unobtanium—and when he thought of the composition of the prybar he’d found along the way in one of the hamster-maze-like rooms of the facility, he thought of it as mythril.

Conveniently for Nathan, these were far closer to correct than anything from his world’s understanding of material science would have been.

Attempt #3: READY, his HUD blinked at him as he did not reflect upon the metals in play. He swore in relief, then swore again as the voidfish drifted slowly in his direction. He had gotten familiar with its attack pattern, so he knew what was coming next. It started to shoot forward high, high enough that he could squat—and then the moment he was out of the path of its strike, it had always chosen low. A twisting shift got his legs out of the way and it uncommitted and recommitted to a center-of-mass strike, and that was the money shot.

Nathan was off balance from taking evasive action to avoid the first two strikes, and there was no way he was going to be able to generate a miss on the third one. Instead, he lashed out with the prybar, throwing everything he had into the strike.

It was… not precisely one of his few expert skills. He’d trained with true experts in the trade and practice, met men and women who could send a forty-five gram ball a third of a kilometer with routine ease. But he had worked at a fancy golf club at a fancy resort in the Pacific, catering to the idle and busily malevolent rich, and it had simply been expected that he would have at least an adequate golf game. Nothing particularly impressive, nothing that would threaten the social dynamics of the game by virtue of him being better than a wealthy monster in human skin at one of the pastimes of the upper class.

But it had to be better than embarrassing.

Nathan’s swing connected with the voidfish. The mythril held, mostly, only losing a modicum of flakes and developing a mild case of pockmarking on the outside, which was a terrifying prospect for a metal so overwhelmingly something that Saucer had been unable to absorb it or analyze it in more than a perfunctory manner. And Saucer was still sore about that, he suspected, but that didn’t stop it from doing what was necessary.

As the voidfish recoiled, both from the sheer inertia of the blow and from the surprise of having been hit with something that actually hurt it—though it was the equivalent of a scratch, or possibly a light bruise—and Nathan flew backwards from the equal and opposite reaction, Saucer slammed the outer hatch closed.

A split second later, Nathan slammed into the inner hatch, grunting in pain at the impact even through every defensive and buffering measure of his impossibly capable and Saucer-inhabited space suit.

“There had better,” he muttered as he snagged a handhold and swung into stability, “not be another one of those around. Unpleasant.”

Saucer triggered the inner hatch by way of answer, and Nathan waited patiently for it to iris fully open.

It closed gently behind him once he’d passed through it, and he returned to his quest.