John maneuvered his SMV (Space Mining Vehicle) toward the asteroid. It was a big one and it sent strange signals that indicated it had every single element in the whole periodic table, even those it shouldn't have because they exist only for one picosecond before decaying. The interior of the mech suit smelled like sweat, grease, and moldy bagels. John didn't eat bagels, he couldn't digest gluten.
But there was it. The dream payday of every rogue asteroid hijacker ever dreamed of. If half of the readings his spectrographic sensors told him were real, he'd see the next sunrise a rich man. For the last time, he checked his vectors. The approach was the worst part of the docking. If you didn't match the rotation and speed of your target, you'd crash. Crashing at a few thousand kilometers per hour was bad. So bad nobody survived to tell how bad.
He lowered his helmet visor and found a grease stain on his HUD. Telling his brain to ignore it, he aimed the docking harpoons and fired. The titanium-steel hooks accelerated toward the asteroid, trailing the cable that spun wildly from the reels.
Contact!
He braced himself and the whole SMV shook and rattled, spilling a few tools and debris that now floated in the cockpit. John quickly checked the air pressure gauge. No leaks. A perfect success. He flipped the switch to reel in the cable, dragging his vehicle toward the asteroid.
He pulled on the gyro and floored the pedals. Plasma hissed out of the mech legs' exhaust ports, tilting the SMV so it would contact the asteroid upright. John braced himself and shut the blinds over the plexiglass windows. No need to chance some stray rock breaking his mech's windows. He liked being alive very much.
The shock from the landing went all the way from the mech's foot through his stabilized chair and up to his tailbone, into his spine, and rattled his jaw. Fucking third-grade space vehicle. Why couldn't his father steal something with artificial gravity compensators? He recovered his harpoons and reset them in the launchers.
John sighed. as he remembered his old father, killed by a rival gang of space pirates. No time for reminiscence. The telemetry back in Daedalus station would soon find out the slight shift in the asteroid's trajectory, and the Federation goons would swarm over here thinking someone was stealing their precious asteroid. They would be completely right and justified. Someone was stealing the asteroid. John.
"Teabag this motherfuckaaaaar!"
John shouted as he activated the mining drill. For some reason, the drill was located underneath the mech and it punctured the asteroid by squatting its legs. Some joker of a designer got too much leeway a century ago when this piece of junk was a brand-new model. There was a proper term for "deploying the drill", but nobody even remembered what it was. Everyone said, "teabag the asteroid".
John switched his visual feed to the probe camera and watched as the whole machine shook and vibrated. All the Federation watchers in Daedalus would see through the external cameras mounted on the steering engines they attached to the asteroid a few years ago a robot humping a space rock.
The drill would send the samples directly through the spectrometer before sorting it into ore and debris, ejecting the latter. This one had a hundred times more precision than the wide-area scanner he used before, and he hoped there was something good in the asteroid.
"Cobalt, iron, tungsten, traces of platinum, aluminum, damn," He cursed. Nothing worth his time so far. He kept drilling. The probe hit a pocket of ice, which he greedily directed to the SMV's storage. Water in space was more valuable than any of the common metals he found so far.
He switched the probe to autonomous mode, trusting the mining A.I. to not screw up. Back to his instruments, he decided to risk and do an active scan. That would alert everyone within 12 AU that he was there mining where he shouldn't but the interested parties already knew. It was just a matter of time for them to arrive. And John needed something to cash in NOW.
The scan returned a ping of the weird frequency on the other side of the asteroid. 'Because fuck my luck', John thought. He also pinged from the probe tip, and the ultrasonic seismic readings came out empty. This asteroid was worth crap.
Resigned and running against the clock, John decided to go there. If he delayed it here, he'd find a Federation destroyer warping in next to him. An awfully huge waste of taxpayer money, because the value of this asteroid and John's SMV barely paid for a tenth of the fuel necessary to jump from Daedalus to where he was. But a destroyer gotta destroy, and it would vaporize John and his father's machine out of spite. A fate he wished to avoid very much.
"Reverse thrusters. Let's walk," He said to himself as he retracted the probe and shifted the plasma thrusters on the legs and torso to fire upward, pushing the SMV down and allowing him to walk on the asteroid even without a sufficient large gravity field. The rock was only a kilometer wide.
The lumbering machine walked around the asteroid, space shifting around John's as everything turned upside down. After a few minutes, he reached the source of the signal. It was... a metal plate? That was part of a ship's armored bulkhead. Did something crash in this asteroid?
Scanning it showed it was some sort of titanium-vanadium-something alloy. He moved the manipulator's arm and lifted it. Several things happened at once. The spectrometer went wild. Somehow the plate was dampening the signal. He also got several warp-signatures in his passive scan. Someone - make that someones - had just warped in the vicinity of his location. Federation? Too small and too many for that.
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"Damn. The Skull Cyborgs."
The worst kind of party crashers. The ones you owed money to.
"Heave ho!" He shouted and pulled the manipulator control all the way forward, causing the mech to shove the plate away. It detached from the asteroid and was sent spinning into outer space.
Underneath, he found a glowing crystal. it was two octagonal pyramids sharing the bases. It was cracked and leaking... something?
"Retrieve the source... carefully." He maneuvered the manipulator arm to pick up the crystal. Whatever it was, it was the mission payload. He would settle his debts and walk a free man.
"Fuck!" He started and jerked the controls. The manipulator's arm squeezed the crystal and it crushed as if made of glass. "Impossible! The damn thing was lodged in stone!"
Something, a gray mist swirled out of the crystal and climbed the arm of his mech.
Holes opened in his cockpit and the mist entered. Panicking, Jack pulled down his visor and sealed the life support of his suit. "Fuck, fuck!" He mumbled. The mist came straight at him.
The mist was eating his spacesuit. He sucked in a huge breath then exhaled everything. The first rule of exposure to the vacuum. Do not hold your breath.
He felt a thousand stings as the mist burrowed into his body and entered his bloodstream. It ate his suit and... made more of it? Fuck, it was a nano swarm!
John watched as one of his harpoons fired at the spinning bulkhead and pierced it, dragging him off the asteroid as the cable reeled in and physics decided the mech and plate should meet at their barycenter. Not that he could do anything, because he freaking nano swarm was eating him alive.
That's how he'd die. Eaten by a freaking alien nano swarm.
Unable to resist, he breathed. The nano swarm entered his lungs and throat. His SMV hit against the gigantic bulkhead and latched to it. The two chunks of metal were being disassembled and merged.
"Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you doing with me?" John mumbled as his face squeezed and twisted in horror. He was being assimilated. Just like that XX century show, he was becoming a 'borg!
"Get away from me. Get out of me!"
"Stay out of my memories!" He tittered.
'A princess? A FUCKING PRINCESS? WHAT THE HELL? FUCK YOU, PRINCESS!' John thought. The last part was both to vent and to see if she was reading his mind.
John's fear vanished as if it never had existed. But he was still pissed.
"Don't fuck with my neurotransmitters. I like them."
So she could read his mind. Fuck.
Same thing.
"At least let some fear. Don't make me a 'borg," He implored with a neutral tone. Which was completely weird.
Yeah. He could feel the adrenaline again. But it stopped short of becoming panic. It was like watching a good horror VR movie.
John watched as his SMV broke apart like a LEGO build crashing from the second floor. He was floating in space. Then the parts of his vehicle broke apart even further and started to reassemble, flying through space and joining as it started to form a sleek chrome... something?
"Fuck, I'm in space!" He exhaled his breath and dreaded the cold of the vacuum.
He looked at his hands. There was a blue-gray membrane covering everything. He touched his hands and while he could feel, it was like wearing latex gloves. He touched his torso and face. Everything was covered up.
"Look, space elf princess. I'm not so sure about this whole body-snatch business. I hope its temporary," He stated.
The chromed spaceship was still being assembled as the metal pieces flew around him. Did it look like... a space fighter?
His attention focused on the Skull Cyborgs. That was her way of pointing things out, John noticed.
The Skull Cyborgs are barely classified as cyborgs. They only had a human brain, the rest of their bodies was entirely artificial. The life support needs were just to sustain their brain, fifty times less than a whole human body, give or take. Their metal faceplates were all skulls, most humans but several of them looked like demons, dragons, or other things.
They didn't need space suits or even a closed vehicle. No, they rode a three-meter long open spacecraft that anyone from the XX century would recognize as a roadster motorbike. Humanity went to space but the biker gangs followed. Without life support, the anecdote was that these space bikes were made of three things. An engine, a weapons system, and a metal girder connecting both.
"Hell, no. They are here to kill us, princess," John replied.
John saw the whole machine close around him and after a blink, he was sitting in the cockpit of a... starfighter? Damn. It was a starfighter!
He looked around and even though it was the first time he was looking at the controls, he knew what each one of them did. There were even two control joysticks he was familiar with on either side of the front panel in a place he could reach.
"What should I do, princess?" He asked already knowing the answer. The Gungnir practically begged to be used. To FIGHT.
The princess scoffed but she was mocking the Skull Cyborgs, not John. Her order was his command for their will was as one.
"Shoot 'em up, John."