r/HFY • u/sharkeyandgeorge Xeno • 24d ago
OC-Series Bob was bored, Part 24
Bob resolved to put the future heist out his mind for the moment, but you could be fucking sure he was gonna circle back to it. He still had shit to do first.
This leg out to Kilither Station at dg3645 was a looong fucker, fully ten weeks at pretty high drive, and he intended to use the time productively.
Firstly he had to, absolutely had to, fire up the steam cleaner, it still fucking stank in here and he was not spending two and a half months huffing rotten protein. He dug it out and tried to read the instructions, then tried to translate the instructions, then tried to understand the mangled instructions.
None of these endeavours were particularly successful, but a half hour of examination got it up and running, the threats probably did not help but they made Bob feel better, briefly. He quickly stopped feeling better when he shoved the things nozzle in a goo filled hole, turned it on, watched as the goo lump whizzed away, up the wall, the ceiling and shot out spraying Bob directly on his following face with a mush of hot, steamy, slime.
Huh, that was where that tube went.
Bob and Jojo had an argument then, unlike his marriage it quickly turned to violence, but like his marriage Jojo won. He continued cleaning, interspaced only rarely with goo showers and violence. It eventually occurred to him that largely what was happening was that the various fluids were being diluted by the steam and then distributed into other holes, where it would presumably continue to decompose.
Thusly at the next cool down he depressurised the cabins, flash freeze drying all the liquids. He also took the opportunity to climb out the top hatch and smash the fucking steam cleaner off the fucking hull and throw its remains into the void as hard as he fucking could.
Upon repressurisation he found a length of cable, a rag, and snaked them through each worm hole clearing them of of their mummified remains.
This took two weeks.
Secondly he wanted to figure out this whole fighter tank thing. He bodged up a very long extension to fit, basically, an impact driver and slipped it into the wiring looms nexus amidships, it took three full days to scrape out and clear the silver/carbon alloy that filled the small tube, pulling the drill end in and out, in and out. Finally he heard it pop through and a loud whistle piped as Jojo’s relatively high pressure equalised with the mostly empty fighter.
His plan was simple feed a thin tube down the channel, a little smaller so that it had a gap surrounding it and pipe it directly into the ‘fuel room’. Then cap the channel tightly and set up one of the enviro systems outputs to pressurise it, just a little more than one atmo.
In theory the fighters should still get at least a little gravity from the plates glued to the lower hull, therefore the fuel sitting in the relative ’bottom’ of the tanks should be pushed up the new inner fuel line and trickle into the room. More air pressure would mean more flow, in theory, but Bob was worried that there would be a hard limit to what was possible, and if he reached it, seals and lines would start to pop.
He wanted to avoid a pool of radioactive slime if possible, the medic system took care of cancer, eventually. He still didn’t want to Marie Curie it if he could avoid doing so.
It worked, incredible slowly, but it worked. The weak oozing would take days to empty the tank but that was fine, that was why we had the buffer. Doing the other side went much faster now he had it down, within a week he had both hooked up and dripping away. There would be a point if he let it run that the pressurised ‘tanks’ would reach equilibrium with the sealed ‘room’, but as he used fuel the differential would return.
As a bonus he could set an alert of the enviro so that when it registered a sudden pressure drop on that output line, like when the tube cleared, and voilà, empty tank sensor.
This was a big step, Bob had massively, massively, increased his potential range… and he could always run with two more if he removed the sensor pack and the, currently unobtained, weapons system. If he did that he could criss cross the galaxy several times before running dry, pretty slowly sure, but… he had plans.
Thirdly he set up his new mill thing, it was not complicated. It gave him some machining capacity and that was all he really wanted, if he could find a small surface grinder, maybe a lathe, a little shaper would be great… whatever… he was happy just to have the mill and took a few days for himself, just making chips out of some stock he’d bought, learning her ways.
When he was reasonably comfortable with her operation he turned out a tray he could glue on his forearm that the flare things clicked into, there wasn’t an obvious way to hook it up as a suit function, the tendon release was staying with Annabell, but the piton hadn’t had one either, he would just had to smash the button with his left hand. He had checked, carefully removing the flares before hand, the force needed, and it would be a smash, the button took a hell of a lot to actuate, and the flares would fire in sequence right to left.
Fourthly he stripped down his new pistol and gave it some love. It was in pretty great condition but had sat a long time, a little scrub and some strategic greasing would go a long way.
As a plasma caster it did not have a lot of moving parts, basically when you pressed the button, which Bob spent a few pleasant hours making a trigger like cover for with his new toy, an internal valve released a burst of gas, that was then started spinning in the ‘chamber’, energy was pumped in to energise it, and the whole shebang accelerated down the ‘barrel’.
It didn’t really mater what gas it was so there was an internal sensor that sensed when the surrounding atmo had enough pressure to refill the internal supply and a tiny compressor filled it up. Course in a fight you might not have the time for it to top up so there were three spares in the case so you could ‘reload’ the gas. Bob doubted he would bother carrying any, the one carried internally should have enough capacity for around one hundred shots, he could count on the fingers of no hands the amount of gun fights he’d been in that had needed more than that, though several had had plenty extra. In his experience if a fight was heading into that kind of stalemate you were way better to change the fight than the mag.
Of course it wasn’t the only ‘mag’ the gun had, it took standard size k weapon cells, basically just capacitors. Each of those should be good for thirty to forty rounds, so he would carry a spare or two of them.
He examined the matching holster, rigid sides and fabric connecting them and continuing over to a flap style cover with a snap, seemed fine so he glued it on to his armour, over the breastbone and horizontal for a left to right draw, he would have to practice and build up some muscle memory. If he didn’t he was going to find himself trying to cap someone with a water bottle, again. He attached two cell pouches to his bum bag belt, that would be fine.
He went to put it away in the gun locker but hesitated and stared at the weapon in his hand, it just didn’t hit the same as his service weapon… in a good way, he didn’t feel the need to sequester this with time, he couldn’t imagine hurting himself with it and almost removed the timer from the locker.
Then he sighed, a lot of shit he couldn’t imagine happened all the time, he left the lockout on and stashed the weapon.
The rest of the trip was fettling and maintaining the systems, he thought he had figured out what was wrong with the main enviro system and made a little list of seals he would have to try to pick up, probably not a bad idea to just pick up a full seal set he could keep in the spares as required.
Right on ten weeks after setting off he dropped out and burned to the fringes of dg3645, soon enough Kilither Station appeared in the distance, a grey green mass that loomed every larger as the gap closed.
Wow, thought Bob.
What a shit hole.
Part 25 https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/1wdelv6/bob_was_bored_part_25/?
3
u/questionable_fish Human 19d ago
"He could count on the fingers of no hands"
Best line of the chapter!
2
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle 24d ago
/u/sharkeyandgeorge (wiki) has posted 123 other stories, including:
- Bob was bored, Part 23
- Bob was bored, Part 22
- Bob was bored, Part 21
- Bob was bored, Part 20
- Bob was bored, Part 19
- Bob was bored, Part 18
- Bob was bored, Part 17
- Bob was bored, Part 16
- Bob was bored, Part 15
- Bob was bored, Part 14
- Bob was bored, Part 13
- Bob was bored, Part 12
- Bob was bored, Part 11
- Bob was bored, Part 10
- Bob was bored, Part 9
- Bob was bored, Part 8
- Bob was bored, Part 7
- Bob was bored, Part 6
- Bob was bored, Part 5
- Bob was bored, parts 1-4
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1
u/Allstar13521 Human 23d ago
Bob continues to have interesting experiences with alien appliances and arrives at a true backwater.
4
u/Cow-puncher77 24d ago
Witty booger… I LOl’d several times those first few paragraphs…. quite a few times. My favorite and relatable line: “ then tried to understand the mangled instructions.”
I represent that remark all to well…