Abyssgazer
Failed Inventor of the Banana Gun
Presenting to you all, a brain bug of the very unlikely story setting of one man's lonely interstellar layover on a world with only the company of the sounds of industry interspersed with the heavy metal chorus of brass and lead dispatching troublesome locals.
Might this eventually go into crossovers? Maybe if it gets that far.
Sitting on my ass, I panted as I sat in the arid dirt watching bewitched by the dimmed wailing alarms being swallowed by the furious roaring of flames whose baleful heat washed over me. The hot and dry air I gulped down ripped the moisture right from my mouth leaving me parched.
“Well, fuck.” That was the most brilliant descriptor I could manage for the situation I found myself in.
What other way is there to describe a catastrophic failure in the engines leading to an emergency cash landing on approach to enter orbit for a quick survey mission? Barely an hour ago I was just doing what thousands of others do, making a living by scouting the galactic frontier for colonizable planets or with rich enough mineral deposits that orbital survey’s can detect them.
Watching my ride I’d scraped and worked to pay off was a bitter pill to have to swallow, but I was far from helpless.
I wasn’t without a ray of hope as some brainics figured that shit like this would happen to people like me or just in general. Pulling up the hud to the F.A.C.T.O.R.I.O unit I took inventory of the basics it came with; what that acronym stood for?
Beats me. And I’mma call it the FAC, because that acronym is too damn long!
But it’s one of the finest survival kits money can buy, a combination of some quantum replication (I think) and nanoforging combined with a digitizing component to allow a man to haul ungodly amounts of materials on his lonesome.
By itself provided you gathered the startup materials a guy could create an entire industrial complex. As the unit had within its data storage held a hyper-compressed and encrypted fully automated civilian production techbase, with some assembly required in handling production lines any idiot could build their way off an airless rock.
Fuckloads of decompressing and decrypting required.
It was an amazing tool; still can’t shit out a whole spaceship on its own, it couldn’t be relied on for assembling some of the more intricate items like engines and oh, it can’t handle liquids directly worth a damn to name a few flaws.
Adjusting my helmet I pulled himself up and started making tracks when a very important thought struck me.
‘Wait, I’m in the blast radius if the ship goes up.’
Pretty sure I set a new personal hundred meter dash record today.
Once more I was on my ass on a dusty rock of the arid biome I’d landed in, my legs complaining with exhaustion from how much I’d been using them for the last several hours running around like a mad man cobbling together the start up resources.
It’d taken a while to find the necessary deposits of iron, copper, coal and stone which were a haul from the crash site. A journey that took extra time by the enactment of my lumberjack fantasies as I gathered wood from numerous dead trees along the way, giving me some basic shelter, storage boxes and fuel for the single burner miner that came with the survival kit.
Now it stood with a number of brothers tearing at the ground like a pack of famished animals savagely ripping into the soil and churning earth to plunder its riches. Or perhaps like a sounder of pigs from their gluttonous appetite might be more apt description?
I miss real pork. The FAC could only make Agricorp(™) rations, apparently a product placement deal they’d made with the FAC’s manufacturer.
A few mixed packs of burner and electrical miners stood in the distance mining the crucial ores that were spat unto an erratic system of belts that carried them to furnaces which I’d been ‘hand’ feeding.
‘Hand’ being a rather flexible concept thanks to the FAC.
Then extracted from the finished product storage kept away from the burning bellies of the furnaces, thick stacks of plates of copper and iron were stored in crates for later use. The two fundamental feedstocks that would take me from planet bound to orbital then interstellar.
Stretching my legs I thanked that at least this time not because of a whirlwind of events, but because I was still being productive. Namely waiting for the production of ‘science’ packs and ‘labs’, neither were all that groundbreaking as I watched the numbers slowly tick up.
It was make work to some degree, the packs were used by labs to recreate decryption keys for various technologies which were packaged in the FAC. It uses the packs to produce the keys then provide processing power to decompress, then making data into usable formats for the FAC.
On the rock, and unoccupied the red flashing alarm of the FAC indicating something damaging the equipment caught my attention quickly. Pulling out my pistol I hurried towards the source of the alarm to find what the hell thought my machinery was its ass scratching post.
I had to thank mankind for relearning the age old lesson once we started exploring other planets. Namely something will try to make a meal out of you, so bring a gun!
Skidding to a stop across the dusty land I found one of the biggest and most pissed off bug I’d ever seen going berserk on a burner miner, its jaws like hydraulic cutter slowly slicing through one of the miners legs and its many legs failing like a drunk clawing deep marks into the metal.
Raising my pistol in a two hand grip and taking a second to aim and squeezed the trigger, the gun barked and purple blood sprayed onto the steel. The bug whipped around skittering with impressive in time for a second shot to puncture its carapace, but it still was kicking.
It barely paused from its injuries, as it began charging me with surprising speed I found giving ground by backpedaling as I reaquired it in my sights the better part of valor. It hissed as it bolted forward mouth slaver and pincers cutting at empty air leaving no clues as to its plans if it caught me.
Brass flew from the pistol as I dumped the damn mag into it as fast as my finger could pull the trigger, my heart went from quick to trying to burst from my chest as shots kicked up dirt, glanced the bug digging a trench in its carapace or borrowing into its body as it’s maddened charge continued.
Sucking in a breath I slowly exhaled to steady my aim as I snapped a shot into its heads, the new hole burst with its blood as its legs instantly gave out sending it smashing to the ground, its momentum carrying it forward forcing me to throw myself to the side to avoid getting body slammed by the corpse.
Laying there raggedly breathing I popped an extra shot off into the still corpse to be sure it was dead.
Staring at the thing, one thought jumped to the front of the line causing my mouth to drool like a leaking faucet.
‘I think I just caught some real meat dinner!’
I regret nothing and everything.
There’s only so long and so much vacuum packed processed argicorp rations that have been made utterly inoffensive(and tasteless) for the mass market a man can survive off of before his mind and palette begins to wander and loosens up its once strict limits.
Now hear me out, crabs are basically bugs and so are lobsters? I’m hearing the siren song of fresh food and as a bug that means that he’d be like a lobster or crab of the land right? Or maybe if that doesn’t catch your culinary fancy think of it like one of those land dwelling crabs.
So, once the analyzer spat out that the bug was suitable for human consumption. Can you fault me for taking a bite of the ugly bastard who tried to take a bite of me? Fair play right?
After some carving of the cadaver for some choice cuts away from the bullet holes, the lead would make for a nasty gristle to bite into and I’d like to savor the first piece of fresh meat I’ve had in months.
Let's talk about cooking.
We’re going simple here, as the expectation with the FAC is that you just eat rations rather than doing real cooking, so most cooking utensils and appliances are missing from the blueprints and I can’t whip up custom designs without building the necessary computers.
We’re going back to basics. My inner caveman is pleased.
Light some wood using the fires from one of the stone furnaces to make a nice campfire.
Then hand sharpen some decent length sticks then slice the meat into thin strips for quick cooking, no real seasonings as any herbs I’d long ago used in transit, spices had gone up in smoke with everything on the ship and I lacked salt, as I’ve yet to find a deposit or any salt water to evaporate for the precious substance and I’m saving what I do have for rations.
Like a shish kebab, do the good ol’ stick it on a stick and begin roasting your meat over the open flame for a good twenty minutes, nothing fancy.
Then like me, you can also spend another ten minutes realizing you’re an idiot and shouldn’t be cooking while the fire is still roaring, and that you should have been cooking over coals. After another few ‘brilliant’ attempts in losing the meat and relearning some basics.
I finally had a cooked strip of meat, which I ravenously took the first bite of fresh food I’d had in months.
It was glorious, the flesh was sweet, succulent and melt in your mouth tender. Which after the first few chews as the juices flooded over and clung to my tongue was when everything went wrong.
The taste is hard to describe, but my gag reflex kicked like a furious mule as something with a taste like putrid soured and chunky milk mixed with something foul creeping up my sinus from my throat.
Chunks, ribbons and pieces flew from my mouth back into the fire as sputtered spraying out my mouth's contents, a second bite was no better.
End verdict of roasted insect flesh, hot garbage. Almost better than no taste at all.
I’m ruling out eating it straight up without seasoning with roasting on an open flame.
Desperation for anything fresh, still there. I'm not giving up this hunch any time soon. Furiously I swore I’d keep trying until I find a way to make this edible!
Might this eventually go into crossovers? Maybe if it gets that far.
-XXX-
Sitting on my ass, I panted as I sat in the arid dirt watching bewitched by the dimmed wailing alarms being swallowed by the furious roaring of flames whose baleful heat washed over me. The hot and dry air I gulped down ripped the moisture right from my mouth leaving me parched.
“Well, fuck.” That was the most brilliant descriptor I could manage for the situation I found myself in.
What other way is there to describe a catastrophic failure in the engines leading to an emergency cash landing on approach to enter orbit for a quick survey mission? Barely an hour ago I was just doing what thousands of others do, making a living by scouting the galactic frontier for colonizable planets or with rich enough mineral deposits that orbital survey’s can detect them.
Watching my ride I’d scraped and worked to pay off was a bitter pill to have to swallow, but I was far from helpless.
I wasn’t without a ray of hope as some brainics figured that shit like this would happen to people like me or just in general. Pulling up the hud to the F.A.C.T.O.R.I.O unit I took inventory of the basics it came with; what that acronym stood for?
Beats me. And I’mma call it the FAC, because that acronym is too damn long!
But it’s one of the finest survival kits money can buy, a combination of some quantum replication (I think) and nanoforging combined with a digitizing component to allow a man to haul ungodly amounts of materials on his lonesome.
By itself provided you gathered the startup materials a guy could create an entire industrial complex. As the unit had within its data storage held a hyper-compressed and encrypted fully automated civilian production techbase, with some assembly required in handling production lines any idiot could build their way off an airless rock.
Fuckloads of decompressing and decrypting required.
It was an amazing tool; still can’t shit out a whole spaceship on its own, it couldn’t be relied on for assembling some of the more intricate items like engines and oh, it can’t handle liquids directly worth a damn to name a few flaws.
Adjusting my helmet I pulled himself up and started making tracks when a very important thought struck me.
‘Wait, I’m in the blast radius if the ship goes up.’
Pretty sure I set a new personal hundred meter dash record today.
-XXX-
Once more I was on my ass on a dusty rock of the arid biome I’d landed in, my legs complaining with exhaustion from how much I’d been using them for the last several hours running around like a mad man cobbling together the start up resources.
It’d taken a while to find the necessary deposits of iron, copper, coal and stone which were a haul from the crash site. A journey that took extra time by the enactment of my lumberjack fantasies as I gathered wood from numerous dead trees along the way, giving me some basic shelter, storage boxes and fuel for the single burner miner that came with the survival kit.
Now it stood with a number of brothers tearing at the ground like a pack of famished animals savagely ripping into the soil and churning earth to plunder its riches. Or perhaps like a sounder of pigs from their gluttonous appetite might be more apt description?
I miss real pork. The FAC could only make Agricorp(™) rations, apparently a product placement deal they’d made with the FAC’s manufacturer.
A few mixed packs of burner and electrical miners stood in the distance mining the crucial ores that were spat unto an erratic system of belts that carried them to furnaces which I’d been ‘hand’ feeding.
‘Hand’ being a rather flexible concept thanks to the FAC.
Then extracted from the finished product storage kept away from the burning bellies of the furnaces, thick stacks of plates of copper and iron were stored in crates for later use. The two fundamental feedstocks that would take me from planet bound to orbital then interstellar.
Stretching my legs I thanked that at least this time not because of a whirlwind of events, but because I was still being productive. Namely waiting for the production of ‘science’ packs and ‘labs’, neither were all that groundbreaking as I watched the numbers slowly tick up.
It was make work to some degree, the packs were used by labs to recreate decryption keys for various technologies which were packaged in the FAC. It uses the packs to produce the keys then provide processing power to decompress, then making data into usable formats for the FAC.
On the rock, and unoccupied the red flashing alarm of the FAC indicating something damaging the equipment caught my attention quickly. Pulling out my pistol I hurried towards the source of the alarm to find what the hell thought my machinery was its ass scratching post.
I had to thank mankind for relearning the age old lesson once we started exploring other planets. Namely something will try to make a meal out of you, so bring a gun!
Skidding to a stop across the dusty land I found one of the biggest and most pissed off bug I’d ever seen going berserk on a burner miner, its jaws like hydraulic cutter slowly slicing through one of the miners legs and its many legs failing like a drunk clawing deep marks into the metal.
Raising my pistol in a two hand grip and taking a second to aim and squeezed the trigger, the gun barked and purple blood sprayed onto the steel. The bug whipped around skittering with impressive in time for a second shot to puncture its carapace, but it still was kicking.
It barely paused from its injuries, as it began charging me with surprising speed I found giving ground by backpedaling as I reaquired it in my sights the better part of valor. It hissed as it bolted forward mouth slaver and pincers cutting at empty air leaving no clues as to its plans if it caught me.
Brass flew from the pistol as I dumped the damn mag into it as fast as my finger could pull the trigger, my heart went from quick to trying to burst from my chest as shots kicked up dirt, glanced the bug digging a trench in its carapace or borrowing into its body as it’s maddened charge continued.
Sucking in a breath I slowly exhaled to steady my aim as I snapped a shot into its heads, the new hole burst with its blood as its legs instantly gave out sending it smashing to the ground, its momentum carrying it forward forcing me to throw myself to the side to avoid getting body slammed by the corpse.
Laying there raggedly breathing I popped an extra shot off into the still corpse to be sure it was dead.
Staring at the thing, one thought jumped to the front of the line causing my mouth to drool like a leaking faucet.
‘I think I just caught some real meat dinner!’
-XXX-
New World Cooking Chapter one.
New World Cooking Chapter one.
I regret nothing and everything.
There’s only so long and so much vacuum packed processed argicorp rations that have been made utterly inoffensive(and tasteless) for the mass market a man can survive off of before his mind and palette begins to wander and loosens up its once strict limits.
Now hear me out, crabs are basically bugs and so are lobsters? I’m hearing the siren song of fresh food and as a bug that means that he’d be like a lobster or crab of the land right? Or maybe if that doesn’t catch your culinary fancy think of it like one of those land dwelling crabs.
So, once the analyzer spat out that the bug was suitable for human consumption. Can you fault me for taking a bite of the ugly bastard who tried to take a bite of me? Fair play right?
After some carving of the cadaver for some choice cuts away from the bullet holes, the lead would make for a nasty gristle to bite into and I’d like to savor the first piece of fresh meat I’ve had in months.
Let's talk about cooking.
We’re going simple here, as the expectation with the FAC is that you just eat rations rather than doing real cooking, so most cooking utensils and appliances are missing from the blueprints and I can’t whip up custom designs without building the necessary computers.
We’re going back to basics. My inner caveman is pleased.
Light some wood using the fires from one of the stone furnaces to make a nice campfire.
Then hand sharpen some decent length sticks then slice the meat into thin strips for quick cooking, no real seasonings as any herbs I’d long ago used in transit, spices had gone up in smoke with everything on the ship and I lacked salt, as I’ve yet to find a deposit or any salt water to evaporate for the precious substance and I’m saving what I do have for rations.
Like a shish kebab, do the good ol’ stick it on a stick and begin roasting your meat over the open flame for a good twenty minutes, nothing fancy.
Then like me, you can also spend another ten minutes realizing you’re an idiot and shouldn’t be cooking while the fire is still roaring, and that you should have been cooking over coals. After another few ‘brilliant’ attempts in losing the meat and relearning some basics.
I finally had a cooked strip of meat, which I ravenously took the first bite of fresh food I’d had in months.
It was glorious, the flesh was sweet, succulent and melt in your mouth tender. Which after the first few chews as the juices flooded over and clung to my tongue was when everything went wrong.
The taste is hard to describe, but my gag reflex kicked like a furious mule as something with a taste like putrid soured and chunky milk mixed with something foul creeping up my sinus from my throat.
Chunks, ribbons and pieces flew from my mouth back into the fire as sputtered spraying out my mouth's contents, a second bite was no better.
End verdict of roasted insect flesh, hot garbage. Almost better than no taste at all.
I’m ruling out eating it straight up without seasoning with roasting on an open flame.
Desperation for anything fresh, still there. I'm not giving up this hunch any time soon. Furiously I swore I’d keep trying until I find a way to make this edible!
