Opening his eyes made no difference as he drifted, weightless and sightless. So I'm dead? Kinda disappointing...
An angry voice echoed around him from the void. “John! I swear, if you do not wake up, I come out there to kick ketsu all the way to chikyū!”
Light flared around him, then quickly dimmed and resolved into recognizable patterns. He was strapped to a pilot's chair in zero-g, looking at two articulated mechanical arms through a spherical viewport. Disorientation gave way to clarity as he absorbed information from his helmet's Integrated Flight System Heads-Up-Display. “Control... Status?” He was covered in sweat and still a little shaky, but at least his mind was working.
“Finally! You were unresponsive for fifteen minute, baka!”
Only fifteen minutes? “Control, I was just meditating, you know, getting into the zone.” He stretched a little in the confined space, working his stiff shoulders and wrists.
“Your zone is gomi! Maybe ask your zone to cut wreckage apart for us?”
John was holding station just inside the debris field with his ship set to standby mode.
When had he set the Salvage Tug to standby? Switching the ship to active, he maneuvered it towards the hulking shape suspended before him. Glancing at a map of the immediate area, he saw that the derelict station was situated near the densest part of the asteroid field.
“Control? Any suggestions on where to start?”
“Yes, start removing bulkhead at top of central dome. Remove enough to expose reactor.” She sounded somewhat more calm than before. “Might be lucky and is intact.”
John's HUD updated with new information, showing a dashed circle superimposed over the aforementioned dome. It matched the curving surface perfectly, giving him the impression that the dome was itself painted with a large dashed bulls-eye.
“Roger that control.” He moved the salvage tug in close enough to grab the dome’s imperceptibly curved surface with his ship's articulated ventral anchor. Flipping a switch on his control panel, he activated the tug’s external articulated arms. Two feedback control sleeves folded out towards him from the walls on either side of the small spherical flight deck. He slid his own arms into the control sleeves, then directed the external arms to grasp the outer surface of the dome. The external arms mimicked his own motions and even allowed him to feel the surface of the hull through the control sleeves as they delivered sensory feedback to his hands.
Working with the tug’s external arms, he removed any loose segments of bulkhead that could easily be torn free. This section of hull was largely intact, so he soon switched to a cutting torch. After several minutes of torch work, he had scored enough hull to start removing larger sections.
"Control, do you have telemetry from my Gopher drones?”
“One Minute... Yes, coming in now. Look good, very small signal loss.”
He kept cutting, boring through several layers of bulkhead and decking, until he reached the reactor housing. During the whole process, Gopher drones ferried the scrap he was removing back to the Last Chance (a modified Dynamik Industries light freighter).
“Control, are you getting any readings from the reactor?”
“Nothing. Maybe it meditating?” She wasn't even trying to hide the sarcasm in her voice.
“Then I hope it's really relaxed. Could you project the size of this reactor on my HUD? I'm going to start cutting it out.”
A new overlay showed up as dashed lines defining the hidden reactor on John’s HUD. It was perfectly synced with his relative orientation, creating the illusion of being able to see through the station’s metal skin. Being careful not to damage the valuable salvage, he used his visual overlay to start cutting the dormant reactor free.
After several hours of work, the reactor was nearly free of its metal prison. All that was left to cut were a couple support beams and the primary cable array.
“Control, how's it looking so far?”
“Reactor still dormant.”
“Control, transfer control of one of those gophers to me. I want to visually inspect the reactor.”
“What? You don't believe me?”
“I'm just being thorough.”
He anchored his ship to the derelict's hull with his external arms, then switched his HUD to view the video feed from Gopher G17-A. He carefully navigated G17-A down through the chasm he had so laboriously created, trying to get a better look at the reactor.
“I've already died once today, I'm not in the mood to try it again,” he muttered as he continued his inspection flight.
His dream, or delusion, still played vibrantly through his mind’s eye. He could smell the cool morning air and still see all the electricity in Juno's eyes as she spoke about exploration. Unlike any dream he’d experienced before, he could recall every detail with brilliant clarity. Most dreams were murky things, given to fade within moments of waking, but this one was making him question his current assumed state of wakefulness. Maybe he was dreaming still, and this supposed dream was actually the real waking world?
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Steering G17-A deeper into the wreck, he caught a flicker just on the edge of his screen. He halted the gopher and waited for several seconds, studying the visual feed intently.
There it is again! This time, he clearly saw a brief flare of light as electricity arced from one bulkhead to another.
“Control? Are you watching the visual feed?”
“Yes, what did you see?”
“Control, play back the last twenty seconds.”
“Kuso... Maybe I should meditate too.” Her voice was more subdued than it had been before.
“Control I’m going to step outside for a minute.”
“If I have to look for chunk of you all-over wreckage, I will miss my coffee break.”
“Aww control, I didn’t know you cared.”
“I care about coffee... Baka.”
“Control, if that reactor isn't powered down, when I try to pull it out, it might destabilize and detonate, and I don’t want to lose my bonus for salvaging a working reactor.”
“When you expanding cloud of gas, what will you buy with bonus?”
“Hey! I got this. I'll just find a working console and shut it down. They're totally safe to move once you turn them off. As a bonus, I'll have enough to buy us both whatever's on tap at the bar tonight.”
John put the salvage tug in standby, then unhooked his flight harness and pulled himself into the air using rungs mounted at various points along the interior. Spinning himself 180 degrees, he grabbed another rung while moving along the ceiling towards the aft of the ship's small single-pilot flight deck. His Class-4 Iso-Suit was mounted on the far wall with its back open to him, allowing him to slip into it without too much effort. Once inside the heavy utility suit, he powered it on and ran a brief system diagnostic.
“Run Iso-AI.”
“Iso-AI activated,” an emotionless voice replied.
“Iso-AI, check suit seal's.”
“All pressure seals, active. All systems, operational. Linking communications, incoming audio transmission from Last Chance control. Authorize connection?”
"Yes, connection authorized.”
“You know this is crazy?” Her voice sounded slightly hollow because the suit was transmitting directly instead of using the salvage tug’s more powerful transmitter, resulting in a noticeably lower sound quality.
“It's not as crazy as you think. This is a Class-4 Iso-Suit so it's more than capable of keeping me alive for days, and the wreck looks pretty stable, at least structurally.” He ran a second pressure check on the suit. “Are you getting visuals?”
“Yes, not very good ones.”
“Follow me with Gopher G17-A, it has better transmitters than this suit does. Use it to relay comms.”
Everything checked out, so he grabbed a rung, then entered an override code into a wall-mounted control panel. He clipped a safety line to the rung, took a deep breath, then pressed the override button. Air suddenly rushed past him as the portal at his feet irised open. He waited for the small flight deck to completely depressurize before pulling himself through the airlock into open space. Pushing himself away from the salvage tug towards the station, he activated his Mag-Boots before making contact with the outer hull of the derelict. He walked to the edge of the hundred-meter crevasse and peered into its darkness. He'd sliced through several decks and could see them now bisected at intervals along the chasm. Turning back he saw the salvage tug looking like a huge metal bug clinging to the derelict's hull, surrounded by a pool of its own light. He gazed past the small ship and up into the lonely beauty of a sable void stippled with countless points of light.
“Having second thoughts?”
Turning back towards the hole, he saw Gopher G17-A, floating ten meters away, its camera pointed toward him.
“Nope, just admiring the universe.”
“Yeah, yeah, pretty star, let's go Romeo.”
He turned on his suit's lights, then worked his way down into the chasm. Standing on the outer hull, it was easy to think of the hole as “down”, but due to the lack of gravitational reference for down, the transition felt like the world was turning 90 degrees instead of him crawling down a chasm.
Reactors generally had control rooms hardwired to them, so John started looking for rooms or walkways around the reactor itself. He found a bisected hallway that led to a small room. The room was stripped bare of anything valuable except for one terminal that looked newer than everything else. Nudging a spinning chair aside, he lumbered over to it. The screen came to life at his approach, displaying a diagnostic schematic for the reactor. The reactor was still feeding something powerful, from the look of it.
What could possibly be drawing this much power on an abandoned station?
They had detected zero energy output, even with the freighter's much better sensors.
“Control, has there been any sign of life on this station so far? Any reports of squatters living here?” The Gopher angled so its camera could see into the small control room.
“No? Why would anyone live out here?”
After several minutes of searching through menus, he found the power distribution control program. Scanning the list of powered systems, one rather cryptically named item caught his attention. It was something called “Project Dark”. He deactivated the enigmatic Project Dark system.
“Whoa! Sensors just light up like firework! What did you do?”
“I just powered down a weird system called Project Dark, why? What can you see now?”
“Everything, the station is still partly powered, mostly life support and communication systems, no lighting though... And the reactor is still running at peak efficiency!”
John flipped through more menus until he saw one named “Reactor Control”. Selecting that menu, he saw a systems schematic showing the reactor and its ancillary components.
“Control, do you know how to shut this thing down without turning me into space dust?”
“Maybe.”
Over the course of an hour, the comms officer guided John through a safe shutdown process. It wasn't long before the entire reactor was as inert as the bulkheads around it.
He made his way back outside to the salvage tug.
Was my dream a warning? That would mean I could see the future.
He shook his head. No, that's just dumb psychic nonsense. Get a hold of yourself man. You sound like an idiot. Still, there was enough power in that reactor to vaporize nearly half the station. It would have given new meaning to ‘being one with the universe’.
Back inside his salvage tug, John pressurized the tiny flight deck, then climbed out of the heavy utilitarian Iso-Suit. He put his flight helmet back on, then strapped into the pilot's chair.
He flew the small ship a short way back to the chasm and proceeded to cut the last couple of support beams, then he cut the massive cluster of power conduits connecting the reactor with every system on the derelict station, wincing as the powerful plasma torch severed the largest conduit.
Please don’t explode, I’m to young to die.
Nothing happened.
Nothing is good! I’m cashing in today! Reactors never survived the kind of damage this station had experienced, certainly not in perfect condition.