Star Emperor

This made no sense, he was surrounded by trillions of tons of materials but during the last three days, he barely managed to gather around 250 kilograms of iron and around a hundred kilos of other materials such as Nickel and copper.

The other ones were in too small quantities to process into bars so they were waiting in the buffer til there was enough of them.

During this time he spent almost all of his time mapping out the surroundings of his station and right now he had mapped out a little over two thousand kilometers in every direction.

The rest of his time was spent either eating, sleeping, or exercising.

Right now he had a problem as he needed a lot of materials, and it would be great if he found a bunch of the better ones instead of just the basic ones.

He had no idea about the prices but the rarer the material the more it was worth and as of right now the rarest he had found was platinum of which he had around 200 grams.

If this continued he would not be able to get anything useful.

There was a higher chance of getting better materials from the bigger asteroids and he was able to get them byt the problem in that was the smaller ones in its way as they would most likely be knocked in his direction and impact his shiels.

The shield was now at 100% but if there were enough impacts it would be depleted and the recharge cycle would take too long for it to reactivate before the rest of the rocks hit the station.

When Andrew was thinking about taking the risk and trying his luck, there was a sudden ping from the console and the tone was not something he recognized.

He checked it out and it turned out to be a notification from the local group.

Looking at the monitor he saw a lot of chatter in the channel, not like he could read any of it since the text was in alien letters, but one thing got his attention and that was the number of stations in this system, it diminished.

The first day he took a look, there were 18 of them all together and noe aside from him there were thirteen left.

In other words, four of them had died, while he was busy mapping the area and gathering resources.

He checked the messages logs and saw many of them dating back to the first day they were sent here and it was also the day, the first of them went offline.

The scenarios ran through his head like a tsunami, many possibilities could explain their deaths and the leading one was the same that almost took him out.

An asteroid impact, he was lucky that time but the others might have had less luck.

As if on cue, he received a notification from one of the drones.

The sensors detected another station a bit more than two thousand kilometers away from his position.

Andrew immediately took control of the drone and directed it to the installation while trying to get the readings from its sensors.

According to the readout, there was no power in that station and also no atmosphere of any kind, which explained the lack of life signs.

It took a while but soon he could see the station through the camera.

A gaping hole in the side of the beginning module explained the lack of power, atmosphere, and everything else.

Once the drone got closer, he could see that there were five other modules attached to the station but only three of them were intact as whatever hit the station went straight through the main module, and the two that were placed right behind the impact area.

-Whoever this was, he had no chance, and most likely didn't even know what hit them.

Paul whispered to himself.

He moved the drone to inspect the rest of the station.

The design was alien but the airlocks looked compatible with his own, the destroyed modules were the solar energy and life support ones, at least as far as he could guess from the alien design.

There was also an intact drone module and two other modules that he had no idea what they could be, but whatever they were, they could prove to be useful.

Andrew had no idea if the alien components were compatible with his own, but at worst he would turn them into materials and at best he could get some new modules to add to his station.

He immediately marked the station as a target for all the drones.

Waiting for the station to be brought back was unnerving, especially since he felt like a grave robber right now.

But the truth was that if he didn't take it, someone else would.

Was it immoral? Yes.

Was it Necessary? Yes.

Did He regret it? No.

In his situation, he had to use any chance he got to get ahead and survive.

He thought a lot about his time in the game and it would not be enough to just be a gatherer this time.

As to who he would become, only time would tell.

While he was waiting for the station to be dragged back by the drones he looked into the procedure of separating the modules and hoped that the alien station was working the same way or at least similarly.

It took the drones more than six hours to drag the wreck back to his station and by that time they were below 20% on energy so they would have to be recharged.

In the meantime, Andrew put on his space suit and decided to inspect the damage to the station.

Right now it was parked around ten meters away from his own so he had more than enough safety line to jump there and if something went wrong he could just pull himself back.

The jump went exactly as planned, which didn't make it any less nerve-wracking.

Once he was at the other station he strapped the safety line between the two stations and went inside to explore.

There was no power but he didn't need to use an airlock, the hole in the main module was big enough for him to get in without any problems as half of the wall was just missing.

Once inside, he took a look around and found only some blood stains or at least it looked that way to him, along with some pieces of flesh and something that looked like a piece of shell.

It looked like the previous owner was hit by whatever made this hole and taken through the next two modules to finally get spaced after the object exited on the other side of the station.

Andrew swallowed hard when he imagined the scene and he was sure that he would have nightmares about it for a long time to come.

Pushing this thought aside he continued to look around and found that the console was missing but the chest was still in its place, mostly because it was boiled down to the floor just like his own.

Inside he found eighteen packets that looked similar to his own six containers that looked like jars made of some kind of metal and a space suit that had the shape of a humanoid being but smaller in size than a human and with seven fingers on each hand.

The helmet looked like it was made for a being with a triangular head.

He decided to take everything back with him and check it later.

Using the space suit as a bag he transferred his findings to his station, before returning and taking a look at the clamps holding the modules of the alien station together.

They turned out not only similar but almost identical to the ones in the manuals and his airlocks so disconnecting the modules was an easy task which he did immediately to conserve time and the air in his suit.

Then he returned to his station and waited for the drones to recharge.

It took a few hours before the drones read fully charged again and once they were he piloted one of them to reposition the drone charging station to one of his air locks and then connected it to his station.

Once the connection was made he ran a diagnostic system to see if the new module was airtight and if it was safe to open the airlocks.

The diagnostic found it at 95 % structural integrity and air-tight so he filled it with air and went to see if he could even use it.

His biggest worry was the alien language but it turned out that the modules adapted to the station they were connected to so the console displayed the information in Polish.

Seeing this he immediately transferred the control to his console and went back to reposition another module.

It took him two hours to reposition the other two modules and connect them.

One turned out to be a storage area able to store over twenty tonnes of materials while the other one was a material processing module, similar to his own with identical storage space.

All together he now could store 26 000 kilograms of materials which was a lot.

Andrew decided that the beginning module of the alien station would be turned into materials and the same fate awaited the life support module as they were both useless with big gaping holes in them and their equipment destroyed.

He had a dilemma about the solar energy module.

Its energy storage was destroyed but its panels and converters were in one piece, so it would be a good idea to use them if it was possible to connect them to his power storage.

Not to mention that he could use the power since he now had another drone charging station and the material processing module.

While the other two modules were being processed into materials and the drones were sent to get a few small asteroids that were nearby, he got to the console and started looking at the blueprints and using the search engine to try and figure it out.

It turned out to be doable but the modules had to be connected and the damaged module would have to be set as a secondary power source.

That last part was a bit complicated but it was doable and the best part was that he could use a drone to do the work remotely.

Before the day ended he was exhausted, but also happy with his gains.

The modules that were being processed took much longer than small asteroids so while both processors were running he decided to get some shuteye, leaving the packets from the alien station to be checked the next morning as he was too sleepy to do that right now.