935 Bonder Rivet Gun

The 935 Bonder Rivet Gun was a construction tool manufactured by Schofield Tools and issued to Concordance Extraction Corporation employees on deep space mining operations. Built to panel surfaces and attach bulkhead supports, it drove high velocity rivets by rail gun technology and carried a charged secondary mode for punching through denser materials. When the Aegis VII colony collapsed into madness and Necromorph infestation, the humble riveter became one of the most dependable instruments in the hands of the survivors, sealing doors and barricades against the creatures one rivet at a time.

Design and engineering role#

The 935 Bonder was a riveter, one of the workhorse construction tools of the Concordance Extraction Corporation. Schofield Tools, the same manufacturer whose catalogue included the 211-V Plasma Cutter and the Arc Welder, built it for the endless structural work that deep space mining demanded. Its designed purpose was paneling, the fastening of plate to frame, and the attachment of bulkhead supports, the kind of maintenance that kept colony habitats and mining vessels holding pressure.

What set the 935 Bonder apart from a simple hand riveter was its mechanism. The tool used rail gun technology to accelerate its rivets to high velocity, which meant a crewman did not need to press the head against the join. The gun could nail items to each other from a distance, even a long one, letting a single worker fasten paneling across a gap or pin a support in place well out of reach. For denser materials the tool carried a second firing mode. Held on the trigger, the 935 Bonder built up a charge over a few seconds and then discharged a more powerful rivet, one able to shoot through material that the standard bolt could not seat in. The charge time made the mode a deliberate, planned action rather than a quick one, suited to the measured pace of structural work.

Within the Schofield catalogue the riveter occupied a fallback position. The company's Arc Welder was the preferred instrument for repairing structural damage, and where a weld could be made, crews made it. The Rivet Gun was the tool reached for when an Arc Welder was unavailable, which in practice meant it was everywhere, carried on postings and stocked in stores throughout CEC operations, its rivets among the cheapest and most plentiful consumables a crew kept on hand.

The Second Aegis VII Incident#

The 935 Bonder entered the recorded history of the outbreaks during the Second Aegis VII Incident, when the illegal planet crack at Aegis VII unearthed the Red Marker and the colony below the USG Ishimura fell first to dementia and then to the Necromorphs. Through the fall of the colony and the desperate flight that followed, survivors kept the riveter with them constantly. It was never set aside, because almost every stage of the escape called for it.

Its most valuable service was not killing but carpentry. As the infestation spread, survivors used the 935 Bonder exactly as its makers intended, riveting together barricades to hold doors and corridors against Necromorph attacks. Plating was dragged across entrances and pinned in place with charged rivets, buying minutes that meant the difference between escape and death. At the headquarters of P-Sec, the colony's police force, the tool was used to seal off the main entrance while crazed colonists, driven violent by the Marker's influence, massed against it. The detective Nathan McNeill and the Ishimura security officer Gabe Weller barricaded themselves inside that building during the colony's final hours, and the riveted entrance stood between the survivors and the mob outside.

The same colonists demonstrated the tool's second use. Alongside the P-Sec Pistol and the Plasma Cutter, the Rivet Gun was one of the few instruments available to the survivors when the deranged attacked, and its high velocity bolts served against flesh as readily as against plate.

Against the Necromorphs#

For an improvised weapon, the 935 Bonder proved respectable. A rivet that could seat itself in a bulkhead support did brutal work on reanimated tissue, and a well placed shot could sever a limb outright from the lesser Necromorph forms. The hardier, enhanced variants of those creatures took more punishment, requiring repeated rivets in the same joint before a limb came away, but the tool remained lethal to the common forms throughout the incident. Because its ammunition was cheap and abundant, a survivor carrying the riveter rarely wanted for something to fire.

The tool had its limits. The charged secondary shot, powerful as it was, demanded seconds of charge time that a survivor in a sudden emergency did not have, so in close fighting the standard rapid bolt was the mode that mattered, and the charge was saved for the barricade work it was meant for. Against the heaviest creatures spawned by the outbreak, massive armored forms such as the Brute, the riveter's light bolts accomplished little beyond chipping at limbs, and survivors who faced such things needed heavier equipment.

The 935 Bonder was not the only riveter to see service in the outbreaks. The 711-MarkCL Rivet Gun, a high pressure rivet launcher from the rival manufacturer Timson Tools, was carried by miners and engineers elsewhere in the CEC and turned to the same grim purpose. Between them, the two rivet guns marked out a pattern that ran through the whole history of the Necromorph disasters, in which the tools built to hold human structures together were turned, joint by joint, to taking the dead apart.