Rigger

[Aardvark]

Little rocks, floating in space. What can you do? Here I was, in the middle of the void, trying to hammer a heat panel back into place with a rock. Not the same rock, a different rock, but a rock none the less. Space rocks.

I'd been flying along by myself, just enjoying a nice cruise through the system when it happened. Normally, all manner of scanners and sensors are constantly looking out for bits of debris flying around the place. Most things that are too small for those systems are too small to damage the hull of your average space ship. But not all. If the rock happens to be just the right size and just the right density, a one in twenty billion million trillion gazillion chance of ever happening, they can slip by the sensors and damage a ship. When you're going relativistic speeds, this is even worse.

The structural containment field had absorbed the majority of the blast, siphoning off the energy of two high velocity objects smacking into each other, and the ship's frame had distributed most of the shock from the impact evenly across the whole vessel, but there was still the impact site. Which happened to be right where the main life support modules were. Oxygen recycling, water purification, waste processing, even one of the emergency water tanks were fried. The hull was warped and buckled over the impact site and the atmosphere in the ship was leaking out fast. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem. A few well placed insta weld patches and you're right as rain. Unfortunately, I was fresh out of those. Always on my list of things I'll get next time in port, but would always forget.

So here I was, light hours from any planetary body, armed with a rock I'd found floating around in the void, bashing pieces of metal together to get them back in roughly the shape of the hull. Once they were close enough together, the emergency welder would take care of the rest. Unfortunately, in this world of the future, nobody had thought to put a hammer in the spaceship toolbox. Everything was a fine, precision instrument for some inscrutable purpose. Hell, the only reason a welder had been there was because the previous owner had put a few custom decals on himself and I'd needed to burn them off. Hideous things.

Hammering something in the middle of space is a lot more difficult than you'd think. No gravity means that you're supplying all the force behind each blow. It also means that when you hit your target, you then have to contend with whatever force is reflected back into you. On a planet, if you lost a grip on your tool, it wouldn't matter. The thing would fly away, maybe hit someone, but you could just walk over and retrieve it. If I lost it here, I'd have to be quick or I might lose it forever. I was beyond lucky to find this one just floating nearby. I might never find another,. So I had to be real careful when beating this thing.

The welder made hammering easier. I could heat the metal up to soften it. But as this was super secret space alloy I was trying to fix, it had weird properties when you heated it up. First.ly, the melting point was extremely high.. Heat being a major source of danger in space. But it also conducted heat really well. Any heat source would be conducted to the nearest heatsinks that were built into the hull. Which meant that progress was slow going, as I only had time for two or three hits before the metal had cooled down too much for me to work with.

This presented me with another problem. Each time I reheated the metal, I was warping it. This stuff dealt with warping better than a lot of other materials, but there would only be so many times I could reheat this stuff before it would have to be replaced. I only needed it to last until I could jump out of here and to a station. It was just my luck that I picked an uninhabited system to go for my cruise.

This was hot, hard work. My suit clung to my skin tightly, and was surprisingly good at keeping my body cool, but my muscles ached. I wasn't built for this sort of manual labour. I wasn't some planetside dirt farmer, or shipwright, genetically gifted with the kind fo muscles that wouldn't appear out of place on, say, a bear. I was fast, perceptive and, normally, lucky enough to survive piloting state of the art spacecraft at reckless velocities.

Well, state-of-the-art might be a bit of a stretch. This one was decades out of date and wasn't even top of the line when it was made. Though it was cheap and customisable and had seen a lot of owners like me who just wanted to fly as fast and as far as possible, for the least amount of cash they could get away with.

Cash. That's why he was out here. Another quick space run. In space. Take a shipment of... something questionable, and deliver tit to someone just as questionable. Then get paid by someone else, who seemed to be on the up and up, but was probably just as questionable as the package and recipient combined. He'd even suggested this system to fly through. Well, maybe she. Or they. Or it. I honestly had no idea what gender, species, genus or even kingdom my employer came from. For all I know, I could be delivering a nacent A.I. from some rogue machine collective to infect a poor, defenceless human world.

Not that I really cared. There were millions of inhabited planets, moons, asteroids, stations and floating bits of junk in this galaxy. And, if stories were to be believed, this isn't the only galaxy in which mankind has set up shop. We've been around for so long and spread so far that nobody really knows exactly how many of us there are. The number shifts wildly every day, but always getting bigger.

So what's one more planet falling to the wrath of the machines? Did machines even want to kill humans? Maybe they wanted to enslave them. Or maybe they were just sick of backwards human savages working ion inferior technology, and were planning on performing some unnecessary and unrequested upgrades. All scenarios that had happened before.

Pondering and musing to myself took my mind off the hard work and the fact that I did have a finite supply of oxygen. There were several more tanks of the stuff, what with oxygen still being so important to human survival that we wouldn't totally trust a machine to keep our air clean and plentiful for us. But even with those thoughts, I managed to finish my work. Now the hull didn't quite look like something had blown a hole in it. It instead looked like someone had rent great gouges through it in a star pattern. Not exactly what you'd call spaceworthy, but it would do in a pinch.

The next phase of my repairs was the hardest. Before starting, I'd gone through my ship, pulling apart all my stuff, ripping off panels, stripping down weapons, even pulling out the toilet. Anything with metal was fair game. I had to fill those rents. Or at least cover them up. So I got to work. Melting down pens, handles, frames from electronics, pieces of my precious rail rifle, and finally carving the john up into smaller chunks that I could patch in place. Long, hard work. It almost brought tears to my eyes. Some of these things I'd had most of my life. But then, if I'd wanted, I could have stayed out here and held them close for the rest of my life.

Welding bits of metal to the hull was dangerous. The welder I had was designed for the material the hull was made from. Using it on bits of iron and aluminium was tricky. Even turning it down, I had to be careful, lest I slag things. A floating bubble of metal in space doesn't just cool down and hold still until you grab it. You need to cool it yourself if you want it done quickly. Then you have to go catch the thing before it floats off and you have to hope that it's cold enough for your suit to handle. As I found out three times.

But with enough perseverance, I finally prevailed. My hull was patched. It looked ugly as sin. It was still glowing slightly and was a little soft. I'd have to wait for it to cool completely. I still had one more step before I was as good to go as I'd ever be.

I slipped back into my ship and hooked my suit to an oxy tank. There was no point restoring atmosphere to the ship just yet. As uncomfortable as this suit was, it was designed to keep a human alive when everything else in the universe wanted that human dead. And I wasn't quite sure that the ship was airtight just yet. Fortunately, the pumps were still operational after impact and I was able to save a good deal of the stuff. Enough to give myself maybe an extra hour or two.

This hadn't been the first time I'd run into something unexpected out here. Space hazards were almost a daily hazard of my line of work. Bits of debris were normally on the lower end of the spectrum, but then you had sudden solar expulsions, asteroid collisions, interplanetary terrorism or even plain old space piracy. Enough to keep someone like me on my toes, metaphorically speaking. Though it had been a while since any intelligent being had sought to end me, space was still a dangerous place. But I was still here. Skilled, resilient, or just too dumb to know when to quit, the universe wouldn't be free of me just yet.

An alarm chimed. Well, not so much an alarm. A little message in my head that routed to my aural nerves. As much machinery as humans had packed into their meaty form, there were some things that we couldn't quite improve on. Though we could build better ears and neurons, we still couldn't quite figure out a better way for a machine to get our attention than through our old fashioned senses. Though we were advanced enough that we didn't need to make external noises, we still needed to generate the right nerve impulses. We still needed to hear the voice in our head, reminding us to wake up, feed the dog, buy space milk or go and do the last bit of sealing on that patchwork mess you call hull repair, you space chimp.

I floated out of the ship once more. Little jets of energy propelled me along through the void. Under my arm, something I never really could explain. I knew what it was. Just not why it was. Nor why I even had the thing.

It was one of those decals. Huge, gaudy, but made of plastic paints, metal frame and a super advanced bonding agent. All I had to do was pull off the backing, put the thing into place and the bonding agent would do the rest, pulling the thing taut over the hull and expanding to fill any gaps between it and the hull. In my case, conveniently seeking out and filling any gaps in my patchwork welding.

Space worthy again, but at what cost. I had no idea where or why the previous owner bought these things, nor what possessed him to plaster an otherwise fine ship with them. But now I was thankful to him. And to me, for being careless and lazy enough to leave this thing in one of the storage cabinets. But now I was ready to fly again. Fly through space. To a safe harbour, where I could fix my ship properly, drop off this package and get paid. Hopefully before anybody saw what was on the side of my ship.

A giant cartoon mouse.

Edited September 9, 2015 by Aardvark

[TLDunn213]

Which story are you wanting to tell ?

Or which one first ?

I see bits that could grow into 2 or 3 storys here.

They can interlock but one needs to be the main thread.

 

Patching the ship before running out of air could be a good dramatic short

But you would need to trim away the other stuff to focus on that.

 

If you want the ship patching as a sub thread story element

Then trim it down and focus on the package or the guy.

 

If you pick the package it's a cloak and dagger thriller for the main thread with the guy's personal growth as sub plot.

 

If you pick the guy then he's main plot and the package is sub plot.

 

And I'd open at the moment of impact or back at the point where he first picks up the package.

 

I think I'd go with the impact.

There's just something about a hull rending KaBang!!!

That drags a reader in wanting to know what happened and what next.

 

Or maybe that's just me.

 

Anyway that's my thoughts on how to get this one unstuck and flowing again.

The best/only? Cure for writers block is to keep writing not matter how crappy it is coming out. Just let the drivel sit and come back later.

It'll still be drivel but a few good bits will float to the top

And you might be able to refine and polish them into real gems.

 

Hope some of this proves helpful.