The can was upside down. Because, of course, it was, in any 50% shot, Ash will 100% of the time get the worst outcome. That's a statistical fact. Half the time, it worked, never the time!

Before Ash got down to serious business, he spent almost a good fifteen minutes just frolicking around in the Lunar gravity. If he had thought about it, he would have fabbed a golf club and a basket of balls. He wanted to try hitting a ball into orbit!

The regolith actually was a pain in the ass, it was as fine as baby powder and seemed to be positively charged, so it stuck to his pressure suit something awful. He picked this landing site specifically for the fluffy regolith to cushion the can's landing, but it was highly unpleasant in other ways.

There was an area nearby that was exposed bedrock which he would build on, and the first sites where his automated regolith mining rovers would clear would definitely be around here unless the underlying bedrock was incredibly deep. Ash stomped his foot on the Lunar soil, testing it, which he realized was utterly useless.

Ash glanced upwards as an alert was forwarded to him from the Mistress of Space. The final phase had begun. Forty thousand kilometres away, bots would start trying to cut holes in the space station and use the very sophisticated solution of just tossing the bombs out into space. However, Ash felt it had a better than even chance of working and was willing to take those odds.

It would work, or it wouldn't; he already was well ahead of where he could have ended up. So he would be cautiously optimistic but wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

He turned to face the can, which looked so much like a soup can stuck in the dirt and energized his spacesuit's powerful transmitters. He was a bot-siren; look at them all swarm out of that thing. He was the pied piper of bots!

He ordered them all to assemble near the tug. Some of them dragged equipment behind them, which turned out to be generic bot charging stations. Although the energy density of modern power cells was ridiculous, even exceeding the energy density of TNT, these bots had been working for some time without being recharged.

He couldn't do much for the plasma cutter bots, which utilized external cartridges for the cutters, but he could top everyone off before he had them try to roll the can right side up.

Ash whistled as he worked. The tugs were equipped with standard power cables to provide power for salvaging operations or for situations just like this where a worksite lacked its own reliable power source. The tug mainly was a fusion reactor, after all. It needed to be oversized in order to be useful in its role. While only a fraction of that power is actually able to be extracted as electricity, it was still ridiculously high.

He wasn't able to plug in all of the charging bays that the bots had brought out, but he got most of them, and they'd have to take turns anyway.

Ash continued to frolic, or rather explore the Lunar surface while bots queued up to get charged. There wasn't much light here on the far side of the Moon, so he was navigating mainly with the synthetic aperture radar and LIDAR systems built into his pressure suit, which was quite sufficient for his purposes.

Ash got quite adept at running around and all sorts of low gravity manoeuvres. He finally ended his frolic with a quadruple turn pirouette in mid-air to land gracefully like a cat on one foot, next to the tug.

Ash coughed, realizing that he might have been going a bit too far. Oh well, there is no one there to see him, so he could do whatever he wanted! Plus, he was just getting used to the lunar gravity, anyway. Nothing weird about it!

He briefly entered a high-speed mode to craft a command queue for all the bots before sending an execute command and then sat back to watch them work. Thankfully, it didn't take them too long to get the can right side up. Ash was worried he would have to pull it with the tug's repulsor fields like the tug was a Toyota Hilux removing a tree stump out of the ground.

The bots then swarmed inside and pulled out most of the things Ash intended to take back with him, along with a bunch of graphene netting. He would just have to pile everything in the net and haul it back that way.

Well, Ash was getting bored now. So he entered the can and navigated until he found the reactor area again. He plugged the fission battery back into the output power line, and after a moment, lights started to come online again.

He glanced down at the thing that was still irradiating him. He never did bother to rebuild the shielding. What a piece of shit. He'd drop it in a hole forthwith or recycle it for feedstock. Just the tiny fusion reactor on the tug could already supply more than 3 orders of magnitude more power than this thing.

Only about ¾ of the lights came on compared to the last time; apparently, some of the cutting to free this thing wasn't entirely without consequence, even though he mapped out the bots rather carefully. Oh well.

Another quick stop at the computer room again, and he turned the network back on, which, much to his surprise, actually worked. Then, with the local datanet available, Ash queued a simple motorized and articulating directional antenna from one of the working small fabricators.

It would take quite a while for the fab to heat up the feedstocks again and start construction, and honestly, he did not want to wait for it. Ash was done with his Lunar adventure. He'd leave a bot down here that could install the directional antenna outside and wire it into the network so that he could maintain contact with his somewhat rough Lunar outstation from space.

Leaving the can, Ash watched the bots gather everything, including themselves in several large nets. Not precisely sophisticated, but it would work. He skips back over to the tug and reels the power connectors back in before using the tiny one-person airlock to get back inside.

Ash already had a flight plan built and did not even wait until he was sitting down before engaging the first part. Then, using the tug's powerful repulsor fields, it hovered into the air a couple of meters, floating over to the large nets full of goodies and dead bodies.

Bots help attach the load to the tug in such a way so as to ensure it won't be melted by the plasma drive before retreating back into their cowlings.

Taking his helmet off, Ash cursed the regolith. He should have brought a vacuum. Ideally, a vacuum-rated vacuum, which is to say, a device that exerts a small pulling force using tractor fields. Oh well. He will bring one the next time he comes to the Moon. This stuff got everywhere!

Getting belted in, he executed the flight plan without any more preamble. No fancy orbits to conserve reaction mass, he was doing constant thrust on a straight-line path out of the gravity well and direct to Mistress of Space. So, of course, it wouldn't take him as long to get back, neither.

Ash was quite pleased with his outing and thought he deserved a bath and perhaps some downtime. The bottleneck in his current plans was the speed at which the fabricators aboard the Mistress of Space operated, so he had a day to kill before they completed their queue on the first project, the recycling facility, and then it still had to be packaged up. Putting it together on the Lunar surface should work like legos, it wasn't quite pre-fab, but it was close.

The mobile mining rover factory would take the better part of a week to fully fab, as well. That was to be followed by the ultra-large heavy-duty industrial fabricator. Building a fabricator using a fabricator is the most complicated process it can do. The precision requirements are insane, and the failure rate is incredible, so as a result, it is hands down the slowest possible thing a fabricator can make. It would take two whole weeks, and if he wasn't lucky, it could be six. Still, additional manufacturing capacity worked the same way as compounding interest -- it was essential to invest in it early.

Still, he was delighted with his progress.

His pleasure only lasted about halfway back to the Mistress of Space. He was plugged in to all of the Tug's sensors, and he noticed a tiny flash on the optical sensors along with an electromagnetic pulse spike on his radar and radio transceivers. According to his subconscious, the probability of a nuclear explosion was 100%.

Ash scowled; it was nowhere near the time for the Mistress of Space to eliminate the hazards to navigation with one of its lasers. Something had gone wrong.

He could connect directly to the Mistress of Space's datanet and figure out the answer himself, but he already knew the answer, more or less, so he got on the radio instead, "Mistress of Space, Tug 1, sitrep, please. Was the space station just vaporized?"

The boy/starship replied, "Tug 1, Mistress of Space IV, unclear. The bots all reported that all packages were tossed clear successfully. Reviewing radar returns prior to detonation. Sensors are washed out; stand by while the EMP attenuates."

Ash waited about thirty seconds before the ship got back to him, "Tug 1, Mistress of Space IV, Reporting: one of the demolition charges, number eight in your plan, collided with a piece of free-floating debris after floating approximately one decimal two kilometres clear of the main body of the station.

The resulting explosion has incinerated approximately two-fifths of the remaining mass of the station and has imparted significant delta-V to the surviving wreckage. The new orbital parameters are still unstable, but the current orbit will not intersect with Luna within at least the next five standard T-years."

Ash sighed. It could have been worse. Everything couldn't go his way. But he took heart that his very sophisticated plan on throwing the nuclear bombs out of holes in the side of the space station actually would have worked if not for a chance collision with free-floating debris.

Ash got back on the radio, "Mistress of Space, Tug 1, Roger. I'm going to drop off this load at the flight deck and then proceed out again immediately; I'll move the two derelicts into a parking orbit over Luna. I'd like you to reposition to a similar orbit well clear of the derelicts, and I'll meet you there once I'm finished. Send me the orbital parameters you choose over the net when you are underway."

"Tug 1, Mistress of Space IV, Wilco. The flight deck is clear," came the reply.

Ash spent the next twenty minutes or so decelerating and watched as the autopilot entered the flight deck using manoeuvring thrusters. Then, finally, he dropped the half dozen nets and proceeded back out again.

One part of his mind was communicating with the maintenance system aboard the freighter and indicating that Tug 2 should be repaired with all haste, while another part of his mind was using one of the included design tools to randomize the personality of two specialist class 1 AIs, pilots.

Ash wouldn't admit that he was bored of flying at all, though.