Steven stood up, stoically refusing to acknowledge the pain from his aging knees and back as he watched the indicator lights on his gravity machine. Steady green across the board. He nodded, then chinned the toggle inside of his suit’s helmet.

“Anti-gravity materials research, material version 3.5.1.7. Initial power-up shows positive results. Suit systems show .78g. Controller setting is currently .75g. Further calibration, testing and comparison to OEM setups are required. It is my belief that my current tungstanium formula is, if not precisely what Gravitic sells, close enough to produce replicable results. Radiation shielding tests are of the utmost priority once proper calibration is achieved.”

Toggling the recording off, Steven fiddled with the dials on the hunk of engineering in front of him until his suit showed 1.03g. A few minutes of watching gauges and energy readouts, and he was satisfied that nothing would explode. Tapping his way through menus on the smart pad built into the forearm of his suit, Steven heard the space around him began to pressurize, irises over already sealed ports closing for a secondary sealing protection layer in case of leaks. His suit depressurized, and Steven popped his helmet. Station air was still stale, but better than being in his suit. Looking around, Steven knew there was still far too much work to be done.

He had made this asteroid into his home, digging out the interior of the metal rich hunk of rock. More of a moon than an asteroid, Steven’s newest makeshift home sat inside of the interior ring system around an unnamed planet in an unnamed system.The ring system wound around a binary planet made of two nearly identical gas giants which orbited each other. Given the absolute size of the ring-bound body, Steven had hollowed it out until it was just a 50 meter thick shell of rock, giving him the same volume of an exploratory orbital station without any of the radiation shielding concerns.

His powerplant, atmosphere control, and initial lab had been set up quickly. A tethered orbital body was how Steven interacted with the outside world; as a newly explored system, even if it was unnamed, the system still had a small amount of through-traffic, so Steven had little problem acquiring the rarer materials he could not process himself. His ship, She Dances At Night, had the facilities aboard to process raw space rock and spit out not just refined ores, but circuitry, structural components, and, most importantly, the parts needed for more refined processing and fabrication equipment. As a researcher who preferred to reverse engineer large corporations otherwise protected designs, Steven found that being able to leave and re-bootstrap wherever he could get raw resources was an absolutely invaluable bit of flexibility.

Aside from his admittedly over zealously equipped lab, Steven hadn’t spent nearly as much time as he would have liked building up his living space. He had lived in the moon shell he dug himself for over 3 years, and the most he had done for decoration was laying down steel floor paneling so that he didn’t have to bounce off of bare rock. Getting a handle on his tungstanium was, in his mind, the perfect excuse to actually build out this satellite into an actual, usable space station. There was even a possibility that he could sell the place to a mining group once he was finished with it.

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Steven looked down at his suits smartpad. He had autonomous mining delivering practically everything he needed to make gravitic flooring, but the exotic material that allowed tungstanium to work was too rare and delicate to collect with the rude robotics Steven could produce on site. No, the small amounts of this material had to be collected by hand. Refining could be done with the equipment he had brought originally, so there was no real issue there, but mining carefully enough to not disrupt any of what Steven had taken to calling gravitonium meant lots of spacewalks, and hours of observing rock faces before he moved a drill head over by an inch.

He didn’t care. It was worth it just to spit in the face of those uptight Gravitic assholes. All they cares about was following their SOP and maintaining their outdated military traditions. Steven didn’t want to live the rest of his life with a stick up his ass and a spider in his head.

I AM 5T1LL H3RE, STEV3N.

Sixteen years, and all Steven had been able to do was stop that damn implant controlling his nervous system. Doing so had caused an annoying glitch with its text output, but Steven couldn’t bring himself to care enough in order to fix it. He was hopeful that he would be able to adapt his version of tungstanium into a tool that could crush the spider without killing him; he had taken the time to figure out exactly where it sat, after all.

JUST L3T ME HELP Y0U STEV3N. I C4N SP33D TH1S ALONG FOR TH3 BOTH 0F U5.

Again, Steven declined to respond. He knew better than to rise to the bait.

Just he was about to begin preparations to do another mining run, Steven heard a ping, and a red light began to strobe next to his externally connected system. He kept it air-gapped, of course, both to protect his systems from having any information skimmed from them, and also from himself just in case this damnable spider figured out how to circumvent the overrides Steven had put in place and the limited damage he had managed to inflict on the spider, and send a message to Gravitic Solutions giving them information like his suppliers or, even worse, his location.

Steven approached the monitor as he donned a glove he had designed to remove any skin contact to the monitor, just to put an additional barrier between a connection and the spider. Most would call him overly cautious, even paranoid. Steven would call those people gullible fools on a good day.

The monitor had an alert for an old facility which Steven had abandoned roughly a year and a half ago, which meant they were still an entire hiding spot behind. Looking at the list of what he had left behind, Steven was disappointed in himself. The lackluster defenses he’d abandoned were paltry compared to his previous place. The last raid one of his old facilities had gone through hadn’t killed anyone important sadly, just their pilot when some orbiting debris had struck their ship.

This ship clearly wasn’t meant for any kind of combat, unfortunately. It had jumped into the system, then burned to a Lagrange point where it began active scanning. It was the active scanning the Steven’s instrumentation had picked up. Even if it was actually those rat bastards that had been chasing him for years that were operating that scanning craft, they kept tabs on explorers. As soon as whoever was in there reported to their bosses, Gravitic would know, and they would task their people to go in the hopes of catching him, or at least figuring out where he had gone.

Steven prided himself on leaving the barest hints behind, enough that their idiot employees could figure out the puzzle, but not enough to actually get to him before he moved on to a new location. As soon as they figured out where his clue were pointing in a reasonable time frame, he’d stop, but in the meantime it was a fun little puzzle for him to make. After all, if people are going to cal you a villain, might as well lean into the tropes; it made them underestimate him.

He set an alarm for when a craft entered or went inside of a geostationary orbit at the vacated lab. He always enjoyed watching pirates get themselves killed in his traps, no matter if they were free-range or corporate.

He whistled to himself as he sealed his helmet on and climbed into one of his mining vessels. Might as well make the most of his time here, before he had to find greener pastures.