My new plan was pretty simple. I was going to build a solid fuel rocket engine out of some explosives adulterated with some ground up glass and fire retardant, strap that to the eldritch insanity machine, and then nuke the whole package the moment it was far enough away from me that I thought I could survive the blast.
Should be nice and simple.
Assuming I could push through the hallucinations and the feeling like I was having a never ending panic attack.
Yep. Should be fine.
It was not fine.
I blew a hole in the side of my ship.
So, if I’m entirely honest, attempting to make rocket fuel out of high explosives while in an altered state of consciousness may not have been the best idea.
That’s my bad, I’ll own up to that.
But in fairness to me, how was I supposed to know that exposure to maddening whispers would serve the same detrimental effect upon my higher reasoning skills, as say, getting wildly wasted?
Like sure, I knew not to drink and drive, or play with high explosives while on intoxicants, but nobody ever told me not to undertake complex tasks at the same time as I was fighting off demonic possession.
That wasn’t covered by the DARE program in middle school.
Anyway, instead of turning some bombs into rocket propellant, I ended up just making a couple of said bombs into one larger, shittier bomb.
A bomb I set off inside of my ship’s only airlock, evacuating every bit of air from the entire vessel in the process.
So, not great, but it could have been worse.
Nothing had gone nuclear on me, the couple of intentionally anemic fusion reactors I had access to all being inert outside of highly specific circumstances.
And, most importantly, the voices had stopped!
All the hallucinations had, in fact.
I counted that as a pretty thorough win.
I unexaggeratedly cried tears of relief, not quite realizing how nice it would be to finally have some quiet, after a full week of constant noise that had accompanied my slow and gradual loss of sanity.
Then I got my shit together and started actually making sure I was safe.
The lack of any breathable atmosphere wasn’t really a problem, given that I didn’t need to breathe, but that didn’t mean I was in the clear.
The liquid cooling system attached to the computer that housed me, for instance, had completely failed to survive exposure to a vacuum.
All the pipes had burst, the liquid inside of them near instantly coming to a boil with no atmospheric pressure to prevent it from sublimating.
Thankfully, my electronics all survived that just fine. The coolant was, very intentionally, electrically insulative to the extreme, just so that nothing could short if there was a leak.
No, the real problem was that I was now overheating.
Space isn’t actually all that cold, you see. In fact it’s not much of anything, what with the complete lack of stuff in it.
Which meant there wasn’t anything around me to passively conduct heat out of my processors. Well, aside from black body radiation, but that wasn’t going to be nearly enough, long term.
If I didn’t come up with a solution, I would soon be, quite literally, cooked.
Which would kill me, to be clear. If my computer stopped working, I would too.
So I needed to fix that pretty quick.
In the meantime, though, I dialed my clock speed way down. To the point that I was, for the first time in a long while, forced to perceive the world in real time.
I didn’t like it.
Need must, and all that, though.
Next, I took inventory of what tools and materials I had available, and was unimpressed to find that there was a whole lot less of all of it than there used to be.
What hadn’t been nailed down had all been sucked out the side of my ship, and were basically irrecoverable. This included, I’m said to say, both my reconnaissance drone and the multitool snake I’d built.
Germy had stuck around, at least, but replacing the other two would be a pain.
Even of the materials and tools that I did still possess, a number of them hadn’t handled explosive decompression well.
Polymers with trace amounts of water or gases trapped inside tore themselves apart. Numerous containers of chemicals burst open. Any containers of dry goods that weren’t literally vacuum packed popped like balloons. Exposed chemical battery packs puffed up like marshmallows and then melted.
Shit was bad.
Nothing I’d been packed with was meant to survive a vacuum. Intentionally, so, I imagined.
After all, if anything damaged the structural integrity of my vessel before I landed, I was supposed to be dead. The only reason I was in this position at all was because I’d painstakingly disarmed all of the onboard bombs before I did anything dumb.
Only to then blow myself up after panicking over scary rock.
I sighed, from within my simulation.
This was going to be a pain in the ass.
For solving my cooling issue, the easiest way would probably be to re-pressurize my vessel.
I was pretty sure I could do some basic chemistry to make nitrogen gas out of what materials I had available, and that would do just fine in place of normal air.
So I plastered over the hole in the side of my ship with what was basically a fancy tarp, glued the edges shut with some two part resin, and then let it all set while praying that it would prove airtight.
Then it was just a matter of grinding some iced chemicals together into fine powders, mixing them in a ratio that I hoped was roughly correct, and then putting the resulting mixture in a heated metal can with a bunch of fine holes in it.
At which point I settled in to wait, one camera pointed at my rushed patch job.
Once the tarp started to balloon outwards slightly, I let out a completely unnecessary breath.
It was holding, and the atmospheric pressure onboard the ship was rising, albeit incredibly slowly.
By the time my chemical payload had fully expended itself, I was only at around a tenth of a single atmosphere’s worth of pressure, but progress was progress.
Eventually, I’d replace the tarp with some welded sheet metal, but I couldn’t do that until I had a bit more atmospheric pressure.
You see, it turns out that many forms of conventional welding don’t work in a vacuum, or even in a near vacuum. Arc welding, which normally only took electricity, was no exception. For an electrical arc to form, some form of gas has to act as a bridge, after all.
And Arc welders were all I had access to.
Thus the tarp.
I repeated that same initial gaseous reaction a couple of times, my poor little Germy with his coincidentally vacuum-safe glass battery working his scuffed metal ass off to get everything done. He only got a break once the tarp had started to bulge outward so much that I was afraid it’d tear.
I’d had to stop at just over a half a single earthen atmosphere, but it would have to do.
I got some fans running, to keep what I air I had circulating and slow my rate of thermal buildup. Then I got out the arc welder, and spent about twenty minutes figuring out how to get Germaine to use it with only his single opposable claw.
Once I puzzled that process out, I did some test welds on some scrap metal, and then practiced putting sheets of steel together at right angles until I could make a bucket that held oil without leaking.
That was good enough, I figured. I wasn’t going to take the time I needed to make an airtight testing setup. Not with how precarious everything was.
I tore apart a crate for some extra sheet metal, and got to building a new wall in front of the airlock.
I’d done some simulations in advance, so I knew to shape the metal to something as close to a half sphere as possible, but other than that, I was mostly just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.
I wedged the metal into place in it’s cramped little corridor, making sure it was secure enough that thermal expansion wouldn’t fuck me over, and got started welding.
An hour and change later, and it looked like I’d done an alright job.
I hadn’t made anything worse, at any rate.
I just wouldn’t truly know if it would hold unless the tarp behind it failed.
And waiting for that to happen seemed fucking stupid, so I built another wall in front of the first one, just in case.
My welds hadn’t been perfect, I was sure.
I was a fast learner, though, so I was pretty confident I could get it right the second time.
The second go around was much smoother. I still couldn’t be sure it was perfect, but it was smooth enough that I felt confident that I could continue bringing the ship back up to pressure.
After eventually reaching about 80 percent normal pressure, My cooling situation had stabilized enough that I was no longer in any form of immediate danger.
Which meant I was back on schedule, roughly speaking.
Thus why I decided I’d more than earned giving myself the chance to de-stress again.