Dav’s head currently felt like it spent a good hour in a blender with hammers instead of blades.

Waking up to what he instantly recognized as a new, record breaking sadistic form of hangover, he blinked away detritus from his sleepy eyes. The stench of burnt plastics and metals assaulted his nose, but more frighteningly, a quiet hissing sound was immediately picked up by his ears.

Dav’s hand immediately reached for a canister colored in striking black and orange, labeled “BREACH SEAL – EMERGENCY USE ONLY!” uncapping the top with his thumb as was common practice, and strained his ears through the pounding of his head.

A bit to his left, on the lower part of the canopy, was a small hairline crack that spanned a good 3 centimeters.

Dav immediately smothered the thing with a third of the can – even he knew you don’t mess with hull breaches unless you like the popsicle experience.

The grey goop that foamed out immediately got sucked into the crack and created a rubber-like layer that spread across the clear material of the canopy, forming a space-worthy seal that could last a good month or two.

Thinking about how he bought himself some time, brought him back to reality, the pounding headache, and his situation.

A quick series of gestures saw the holo-interactive control scheme compromised, which forced him to access the emergency manual interface – a classical keyboard made from good old steel alloy, meant to survive the rougher collisions. Typically, pulling this out meant your craft was screwed up enough that you didn’t really need the fast reaction that holo-controls enabled.

Since speed wasn’t of the essence and you were a dead target in orbit or on some dirt patch, and likely burning, you probably didn’t need gesture controls and biometric feedback reading.

A quick diagnostic command brought a preliminary report of the systems of the attack bomber, or what was left of it:

Dav’s craft, which he christened as the Trashcan, was down a wing and its associated pylon weaponry, a main and secondary engine (and he only had partial capability on the remaining set, since the missile that sheared the first set threw fragmentation into the other), dozens of fried electronic systems, and the emergency fab on board was limited to basic part manufacturing and “emergency ration type-13”.

Dav took a minute to let the information soak in, saw that his life support could carry him for about a week before he choked to death, and chose to tuck in for about five more minutes.

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A few hours later, Dav was finishing off the last of the previous pilot’s in-flight meal ration.

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Apparently the guy’s idea of a mid-flight snack consisted of peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, jerky, and orange juice. If Dav had known he could get this kind of special treatment, he would also strap himself to a city-buster delivery truck.

From the corner of his eye, “emergency ration type-13” was sizing him up – or maybe he was imagining it because of the plastic smoke in the cabin of the bomber. The horrid brick in off-white, cream color drudged up nasty memories of long-range recon missions in his fighter, sleeping in a tiny cramped cockpit a third the size of this one, munching on what was essentially dense dirt flavored with an imitation of vanilla which later gave him constipation for three days.

This was also why the fighter jockeys called the type-13 the “excretion retainer”.

And for the next week, he was about to get intimate with it very closely.

The last couple hours, Dav was able to make light repairs, bypass most of the damaged systems and regain most of the control over the craft. Weapons were toast, shields were effectively gone for anything more serious than micrometeorites and space dust, and he barely managed to get the folding toilet unclogged, thank god.

And then there was the engine.

Since the power supply was still good, Dav could get the Trashcan moving, but only after he checked the engine – if he started it up and it was too badly damaged, he’d be dead in the water for the rest of the week, which was also his life.

Problem was, camera feed to the aft was dead, so he’d have to EVA – that is, put on a space suit and go fix things up himself.

Dav packed up his stuff, put anything that wasn’t tied down or bolted in one of the storage compartments, and got to wearing the damn suit – they were always a size too small.

Ten minutes later, Dav gave the computer the command to cycle out the atmosphere into the air-tanks, and grabbed onto the repair toolkit. A series of warning lights came up, and then turned off, something sparked, and the air got sucked up into the vents behind the co-pilot’s seat in about two minutes.

The canopy then popped open, and Dav was in space.

Well, he was always in space, but now they much more intimate with each other.

Slowly and carefully, Dav hooked the emergency harness to one of the hand-holds in the hull and made his way to the aft of the vessel.

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It looked like an angry dog-thing confused the shit for a chew toy – more holes than hull, everything nearly dust and crumpling to the touch. The secondary engine he thought was lost was literally hanging by a thread of shredded fuel-line – which was good news since the other one had the aft-section of a missile lodged into it.

It took another three hours to fix up the propulsion to a state which would give green-ish diagnostics, and another half hour to make sure it wouldn’t blow up or shake the ship apart mid-flight.

Dav then went to the top of the ship to finish with the last part of this EVA session – the deployment of the emergency scanner-communicator array.

From a circular panel popped up a sheet of silvery foil, several rods, and a long arm with an antenna at its end. Dav “dressed up” the antenna with the foil sheet using the hole in the center of the sheet, the slid the rods into the reams of it, and connected them.

Finally, after another 10 minutes of finagling, he had a working, 5-meter antenna protruding from the top of his ship like tits on a super-carrier.

Sliding back into the cockpit, he cycled air in, dropped the damn suit and grabbed a type-13.

Powering on the main computer, Dav had to play wrestling with the control system to make up for loss of half the propulsion and uneven thrust, then the loss of a third of the maneuvering thrusters, shift in center of mass, etcetera.

Finally, he had control of the vessel proper.

Now, he could power on the scanner, and see where the hell did that quantum space rupture dropped him off.