Space Engineers- Drift Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Seeing the Stars

  Chapter 1: Drift

  Chapter 2: Rationed Breaths

  Chapter 3: Neptune's Deep

  Chapter 4: Gravity

  Chapter 5: Impact

  Chapter 6: Oxygen

  Chapter 7: Energy

  Chapter 8: Sleeping Giant

  Chapter 9: Orbital Vector

  Chapter 10: Broadsided

  Chapter 11: Stowaway

  Chapter 12: Maverick

  Chapter 13: Icecap Work

  Chapter 14: Salvage Op

  Chapter 15: Hydrogen

  Chapter 16: Consequences

  Chapter 17: Greeny

  Chapter 18: Hazard Pay

  Chapter 19: Danger Close

  Chapter 20: Sabotage

  Chapter 21: The Brig

  Chapter 22: Mutiny

  Chapter 23: Combat Engineers

  Chapter 24: Rogue Phoenix

  Space Engineers

  Drift

  The official book based on the best-selling game.

  H. W. Dante

  Space Engineers: Drift is an original work of fiction.

  Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Space Engineers ® is a registered trademark of Keen SWH LTD. © 2013-2019.

  All characters, names, places, and other aspects of the game described herein are trademarked and owned by their respective owners.

  All rights reserved.

  Space Engineers: Drift

  Published by Kindle Direct Publishing

  https://kdp.amazon.com/

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  © 2019 H. W. Dante

  Cover Design © 2019 by Palette Concepts

  Cover Artwork © Palette Concepts | http://www.paletteconcepts.com/

  First Edition

  For my son and family, who constantly support and inspire me.

  For the dedicated crew at Keen Software House; without your permission and support, this book never would have seen the stars.

  Welcome aboard the Phoenix.

  “I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.”

  -Vincent Van Gogh

  Chapter 1: Drift

  Space.

  Its scale is daunting. Its discoveries?

  Endless.

  One thing often left out is how dark it is. It’s not a moonless night kind of dark, no; it's much different than that. The darkness of space is overwhelming, crushing, even hopeless at times.

  When Marek signed up for the engineering branch of the Space Engineers and Exploration Corporation, he thought he knew what he was getting into. Space, even with all of humanity’s advancements, wasn’t as tameable as the wild west in those ancient tales.

  It was endlessly more relentless, unforgiving, primal.

  Marek always thought those stories of people becoming untethered from their ship or drifting through space were just there to scare you out of becoming a liability for the SEEC.

  “Oxygen low. Fuel low.”

  Marek’s suit whispered its artificial female voice calmly into his ear.

  Even now, as he drifted through the wreckage of his ship, the engineer didn’t realize the severity of the situation. A thick haze clouded Marek’s mind as he tried to remember what had happened.

  An asteroid?

  No.

  An impact, but what?

  Trying to spin his suit around without using any fuel, he looked over the hectic field of debris suspended in zero-g around him. His body hung limply in the lack of gravity as a warm trickle of blood ran down the side of his head.

  Great.

  A head injury to top things off.

  There was no way he could mend the wound in his suit without the proper tools; he would have to hope his body did its job and clotted itself up.

  One thing he could remember in spite of his confusion was the color of his ship, and it definitely wasn’t blue.

  Large chunks of metal from a blue ship hung gracefully through the space around him. Some of the fragments spun slowly, other spun sporadically with no air friction or outside forces to slow them down.

  A collision with another ship.

  That was it.

  Marek groaned beneath his thick Extravehicular Activity space suit, or EVA suit, as the engineers often referred to them as.

  Only him.

  A collision like this could only happen to him!

  What are the odds of something like this even happening in space?! A million to one didn’t quite say it.

  Anytime someone looks at that Hubble Deep Field picture of a supposedly empty section of space, the long exposure times suddenly reveal a sky crowded with stars and galaxies. What those images don’t tell you, is those stars and galaxies are light years away from each other. The odds of a collision like this are astronomical in the vastness of space; even if that ship was probably going for the same mineral-rich asteroid that he was.

  “Oxygen low. Fuel low.”

  Marek’s suit insistently reminded him of his impending death.

  He glanced around the carnage once more in the hopes of finding something, anything that could help him.

  There were no beacons, no markers; nothing.

  His suit’s Heads Up Display, which engineers abbreviated as HUD, was completely blank.

  Whatever crew was in that blue ship was probably dead now, and it was absurd that Marek survived an impact as devastating as this in the first place. Two ships moving towards each other at hundreds of kilometers per second hardly played nicely together. Metal practically behaves like wet paper at those kinds of speeds.

  Marek glanced at his suit’s fuel readout. He had enough fuel left over in his suit’s boosters to maybe allow for one trajectory adjustment. If he missed his target or ran out of fuel before he could reach it, there would be an even bigger problem; drift.

  Drift is something else people tend to forget about in space. All those eager rookie engineers can’t fill out their paperwork fast enough to get up here, but what happens when you can’t stop? There’s nothing to stop you. No air friction, no passing ships, no gravity. Those rookies don’t think about that as they’re picking out what luxury ship they should get with their hefty paychecks.

  For how packed those long exposure Deep Field images looked, you could easily drift millions of lifetimes through the blackness of space just in the hopes of slipping close enough to some planet or moon’s gravity field.

  With the hardy backgrounds of some of these engineers, you’d think they fear nothing out here, but even they fear the unforgiving punishment of being condemned to drift. A concept as weak as stranded doesn’t even begin to describe a situation as lonely, desolate, and ultimate as that.

  Marek could drift with an infinite supply of oxygen, but what would happen if he actually got to a nearby planet? He wouldn’t burn up in the atmosphere, no; these modern EVA space suits are far past those primitive first steps across Earth’s lonely moon. Gravity would be the thing that kills him; or, more specifically, the landing. If he had an ample supply of fuel for his suit’s thrusters, this wouldn’t be as big a problem; reach terminal velocity, activate the suit’s reverse thrusters at full power just before impact, don’t black out.

  Simple.

  Without the fuel, it’s much simpler; enter the planet’s atmosphere, reach whatever its terminal veloci
ty is, splatter across the unforgiving surface in spectacular fashion. It wasn’t pretty, but it was the reality of the situation. His best bet at the moment would be to find a larger piece of debris to cling to and go from there.

  As Marek began to pick out the biggest piece of motionless debris that he could land on, he made a startling realization; nothing in this debris field was actually stationary.

  He tapped the cold blue glow of the velocity readout on his left arm.

  225.7 m/s.

  That can’t be right.

  Could this entire debris field and himself really be moving together at over two hundred meters per second?! With no stationary points of reference to go off of, it seemed likely that his suit’s readout was correct.

  Marek let out a defeated sigh that fogged up the bottom part of his helmet’s visor. Even momentum was trying to kill him out here.

  After the collision with the other ship, a large portion of both ships must’ve gotten ejected outward at a fraction of the speed they were traveling at. With nothing to slow it down, the entire field of wreckage was moving at a constant speed across the void. Even the pieces of debris that weren’t visibly rotating were actually flying in a straight line at two hundred and twenty-five point seven meters per second.

  This revelation made the use of his dwindling fuel supply even more of a challenge. Now he not only needed to change his direction, but he had to compensate for his already blistering velocity as well.

  Still, his best bet remained with the bigger chunk of twisted metal that moved in tandem nearby. It was about thirty meters out and still had some flaked red paint on the exterior; at least he knew it was part of his ship. The piece is easily twenty or so meters long and about half as tall. Zero-g spherical flames billowed out of a hydrogen thruster on the rear of the wreckage as sparks burst out sporadically on the other end. The quick flashes of electricity quickly died out as they succumbed to the frigidness of space. What was left of the wreckage resembled an open corner of a room, although part of the area was obscured by the twisted structure; it must be what’s left of his ship’s stern end.

  “Oxygen low. Fuel low.”

  The suit’s persistence pressured him into making his decision now; the engine wreckage would have to do.

  Marek barely tapped the button for his yaw thrusters.

  “Fuel critical.”

  The suit’s artificial voice immediately scolded him. He ignored it and tapped to reverse the thrusters even more gently to counteract the turn.

  “Fuel critical.”

  He was now facing the sizable piece of wreckage as directly as he could be. A direct shot meant his suit’s main forward thruster could be used; the same thruster that chews through fuel like a ravenous animal.

  A one-second burn at full throttle should get him where he needed to go.

  Any hesitation in Marek’s mind blurred together with the pain, fear, and dread that possessed him. He focused on the wreckage and leaned his feet forward to ignite the main thruster.

  With a blast of ion energy, the adaptive thruster on his suit rocketed him forward with a spectacular burst of speed. Marek wasn’t a computer, but the burn should have been more or less one second long. The wreckage approached quickly; a little too quickly. He arched his feet backward to use whatever fuel he had left for a reverse burn.

  “No fuel.”

  He tried it again.

  “No fuel.”

  A cold sense of dread washed over him. The engineer had overestimated how much speed he needed and now was on a collision course towards the debris with no way of stopping.

  Marek began flailing his arms and legs while twisting his body around in a desperate attempt to slow himself down. He even flipped his suit’s inertial dampeners on and off multiple times as a last-ditch effort. In his mind, he knew it was pointless, but at least he could think he tried.

  A smaller piece of debris skated by above his head. He reached out in an attempt to grab it and succeeded; succeeded in causing the piece to spin away forever in the opposite direction.

  His fate now sealed, Marek tensed up as he sped in a controlled, unstoppable path towards the massive wreckage.

  Chapter 2: Rationed Breaths

  His fate appeared sealed, but even the smartest of engineers would panic in a situation a dire as this.

  Marek never held his intelligence to that high a standard. Just ask his professors from the Engineering Academy who shook their heads as they barely passed him. That was just like him, though, to belittle his accomplishments. It was no simple feat to graduate from the Engineering Academy, let alone actually get a job as a certified space engineer. He barely passed, but it wasn’t because he didn’t know the material. On the contrary, the opposite was the case; he knew most of the material and was merely too lazy to show up for the exams. With everything he went through in the academy, Marek never met a problem he couldn’t solve; and he wasn’t about to give up now.

  “No fuel.”

  Another hiccup of energy sparked out of his EVA suit’s main thruster. Marek may be out of fuel, but that wasn’t his only option.

  He flicked a gloved finger across the blue readout on his left arm and activated his boot’s MAG tech. The Magnetically Assisted Grip tech should be strong enough to allow him to magnetize his boots onto the metal surface of the wreckage; assuming the piece he ends up on is magnetic. And that wasn’t even considering his approach speed that could shatter his legs on impact if it was too high.

  Marek nervously glanced down at his speed readout again.

  225.7 m/s.

  The blue screen glowed with his total speed, but not his velocity. After the burst from his truster, he was still moving forward at that intense speed in tandem with the wreckage, but he wasn’t moving laterally at that speed. It was similar to if he was swimming sideways in a blistering stream of water; the water would continue to pull him in the direction of its flow, even if he had moved sideways. For now, the engineer would have to make his best guess as to how fast he was drifting towards the wreckage. With the length and power of the boost, he figured he was probably drifting towards it at twenty meters a second; hardly a soft landing.

  Attempting a direct landing on the wreckage was a death sentence. An alternative involved angling his boots to align with one of the sloped surfaces of the metal. If he could potentially “skim” across the surface of the wreckage and shed some of his speed, then he’d have a better chance of not causing any permanent damage to his EVA suit or body.

  There was no time left to weigh his options as the wreckage sped towards him. Marek angled his boots and prayed that his ankles wouldn’t snap. For a brief second, the band of LED’s surrounding the soles of his boots glowed yellow to let him know they were within locking range of a magnetic object.

  A deep metallic thud shook the suit as the MAG boots locked to the surface. There’s no sound in the vacuum of space, but it can still travel through vibrations in surfaces and, in turn, pressurized environments like his EVA suit. Along with the heavy thud, a horrid screeching sound filled his pressurized helmet as the MAG tech struggled against the forces working against it. Nails on a chalkboard doesn’t quite justify the scream that metal on metal makes at those speeds. Marek leaned back a bit to try and counterbalance the slide, but that did nothing since he lacked a center of gravity in the weightless environment.

  The edge of the wreckage quickly approached, and there was nothing more he could do at this point besides hope; it was up to physics now if he was allowed to survive or not. The MAG boots jerked to halt just before the edge of the wreckage, but Marek’s body kept moving forward. He nearly doubled over forward from the momentum as he over-extended the muscles in his lower legs. If there were any food or rations left in his body, he probably would have vomited them up into his helmet from the g-forces involved.

  Marek’s eyes were open the whole time, but he still couldn’t believe what had happened.

  He was alive!

  The MAG boots had done
what he had hoped and slowed his approach to a survivable speed!

  Standing at the edge of the wreckage for a moment, he gazed down at the infinite abyss below him. From this vantage point, he might as well be standing on the edge of the universe. One leap would send him hurtling into eternity with no hopes of salvation. Marek took a few cautious steps backward from the ledge, bringing with him an incredible sense of vertigo that only space could give you.

  The EVA suit’s sensors detected the specific movements needed to periodically activate and deactivate the MAG tech in the boots with each step. Decades of scientific testing and research had gone into this tech. The result? Marek could walk across this piece of debris in zero-g that was hurtling at hundreds of meters per second as if he was strolling through the park.

  He couldn’t help but chuckle a bit to himself despite his still grave situation. This suit was figuratively and literally crammed with thrusters, inertial dampeners, and various in-flight sensors and tools. Yet, the sole source of his temporary safety was electromagnetism; what once was a fun trick at a science fair was now a powerful force to be reckoned with in a small package.

  Electromagnets were not new tech; they’ve been studied and known about since the early 1800s. The Second Space Race of 2029 necessitated the need to create more potent electromagnet tech and scale it to fit just about anywhere, from massive landing gears to the MAG boots on the engineer’s feet.

  Marek took in a deep breath to try and ease his mind in the tense situation.

  “Oxygen low.”

  His suit was more than happy to remind him that even his breaths were a precious commodity at the moment. His attempt to relax did nothing more than fuel the burning anxiety within himself.

  If there were a plus side to this situation, it would be that his MAG boots used very little of his suit’s power supply. Thanks to the suit’s kinetic compensators, among other advanced energy savers, his MAG boots only trickled the suit’s energy stores when they were in use. The most significant spike of energy by far was the initial activation of the MAG tech. As he walked, the tech wasn’t turned on and off for each boot as much as it was weakened and strengthened to allow his feet to lift from the surface.