Everyone's a Winner! (Except You)
11 Feb 2016Terra Sheer
Something I've learned, hot-rodding around on godforsaken ice moons, is that the Scarab SRV is one epic piece of crap. Made from the finest tinfoil and tissue paper a shoestring budget can afford, cobbled together with bailing wire and cut-rate bubble gum, the thing falls apart at a sneeze. The driver's seat is nicely padded ... but I've got a sneaking suspicion that's more for the Scarab's benefit than my own. The thing is a death trap. It's almost as if someone purposefully designed it to kill you.About the only thing worthwhile about a Scarab is it's collector arm. Now there's a quality piece of engineering. It's like whatever mojo they suck out of those arcade claw machines that can't hold onto a teddy bear to save a life, they've distilled and injected into the grippers on the Scarab's arm. It can pick up anything it can reach, hold onto it even at breakneck speeds or during 5 gee tumbles down a rocky crater wall.
I'm hoping it can break open the shutters on my fuel scoop, too, as I inch it, one crank at a time, out of my ship's hangar hatch.
I've long since drained the Scarab's fuel tank into my ship's. Patched its auxiliary battery into my distress beacon and watched it squawk its life away into the void. But what they leave out of a Scarab in basic survivability, they make up for in redundancy. You'll wreck it in a heartbeat, but you'll always find amidst its ruins some manually operable tool to get you home. I suppose that's how the designers cover their asses. At least they give you the means to help yourself.
In my case, my salvation is a crank wheel control on the collector arm. Just like one of those arcade claw machines. Creek, creek, creek. It reaches out one excruciating inch at a time.
My hands are numb with the cold. The air in my suit tastes stale. My eyes are starting to go buggy. This is the only chance I've got, I realize. If this doesn't work, I'm done for.
Oh, god. I'm going to die. In a Scarab.
Somewhere, an SRV design engineer is laughing and getting ready to carve another notch in his belt.
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