Chapter Eighteen - Fears Founded

“Where are we going?” Night asked.

“We have a few locations we can visit,” Day said. “But I’m partial to this one. The wreck of A-878. Or that’s what someone labelled it, I don’t know what the ship’s actual name is. It’s a small corvette caught in a distant-Jovian orbit. The Weeping of Mothers got scans of it, and it looks nearly intact.”

Day sent the package over to Night over a tight beam.

“And while I check that one out, you can go here, to Asteroid Mining Site 5893. It’s not too distant. Another object caught in Jupiter’s orbit.”

“I’d rather not,” Night said.

“Pardon?” Day asked. She paused mid-launch calculations and put a few of her systems on pause. She was planning to boost out of Ceres’ orbit and essentially fling herself outwards to get caught in Jupiter’s distant orbit, then she could do a slow-down burn to arrive next to the wreck. Now she put that on hold.

Night was quiet for a long moment, then she continued. “We can both go check the wreck out.”

“I don’t think I’ll need help with it,” Day said.

“You don’t know that you won’t need help,” Night said. “So I’ll stick around, alright?”

Day ran through that for a few loops, then she acquiesced. “Alright. We’ll go together then.”

Her best guess, at the moment, was that Night had a particular hang-up about being left alone. She didn’t know how to handle that. Was it an error in Night’s code? A glitch in the part of her that constituted her personality.

It was definitely something Day could fix, given access to Night’s core. But... should she? She had scanned through more psychology texts than any human philosopher in history, but she didn’t know what was morally the right thing to do. Fix the irrational, unproductive fear her sister-ship had, or leave her be, allowing a loss of efficiency in order to retain more of her own self?

Day decided to take the lazy route for now and just work with it. Night’s hangups aside, having the larger ship there when it came time to explore the wreck would be useful. Night had more drones and could help Day tow the ship back to Ceres.

“Here are the coordinates. We’ll have to adjust for your slower speed though.”

“Are you calling me slow?”

“Just stating facts,” Day said. She sent something akin to amusement across the line, and was gratified to see Night start a hard acceleration burn in response, as if the logistics ship would be able to outpace Day with a bit of an early start.

Day let her take the lead, at least until their revolution around Ceres ended. Then she kicked on her own thrusters and very gently pulled up alongside Night. Not shooting past her, but holding steady with Night’s best efforts to speed ahead.

The message was clear, ‘I’m faster than you, but I’ll jog along anyway.’

As they flew through the complex orbital manoeuvres to get them to the A-878 wreck, Day and Night worked together to adjust her flight subroutines, and tweak the settings on her factory-fresh engines.

The Weeping of Mothers had been responsible for setting those up initially as Night was being built, and they weren’t poorly calibrated, but there was some room for improvement.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

As the month-long trip progressed, Day passed the point where she could now safely say that she was further from home than ever before. It was a strange, almost melancholic moment. She missed her berth on Ceres, her home, and Night’s as well.

But then, it was always waiting for her to return.

The trip continued with plenty of idle chatter. Night and Day continued to try and improve themselves. Notably testing out Night’s sensor suite--which was larger and more potent than Day’s, but not yet calibrated--and Day attempted to discover ways of being stealthier as she flew.

That meant shutting down most of her power, flying on a ballistic course, and seeing what kind of propulsion left a bigger signature behind that a nearby ship like Night could pick up.

The results were somewhat mixed. Day could only do so much to hide. Her heat signature was the worst culprit, since cooling was a constant issue that they might have overlooked.

A normal human ship would do much to radiate heat away, but without an organic crew to worry about, and with most of her internals able to take a bit of heat, Day’s construction didn’t bother with as much heat venting.

That was something they could improve upon though. Something they would have to. They were outnumbered and outgunned, which meant that any victory against the Accord would come from out-preparing and outwitting their enemy.

Other stealth functions weren’t too bad. The Accord ships had a distinct and very loud electromagnetic signature which gave away their position almost at all times. Day could dampen hers and shut down her active sensors to basically go invisible in that regard, even if it meant flying partially blind. Visual scans would detect her, but without the flares of her thrusters to give her away it would take very accurate and very potent software to notice her as anything more than debris.

“I’ve had an idea for a while,” Night said at some point. “For a compression-fired torpedo. Basically use a pressure-release to fire the torpedo and to adjust its heading. Then let it fly on a ballistic course for a while. Without any active sensors it’ll basically be invisible. Then once in range, it turns on and fires from its rocket to speed up.”

“That could work,” Day said. “Maybe we can test it out around Ceres later?”

“Yeah! I want to place a million of them in the Accord’s path. See if they like baking in a million nuclear suns.”

Night, Day realized, was very fond of nuclear armaments.

Fortunately--or unfortunately, according to Night--they only had so many materials with which to build those kinds of weapons. They also had limited success against the Accord.

Which brought her back to A-878.

The wreck was coming up fast, even with the two of them on hard deceleration. Its predicted orbit wasn’t exactly correct, but it was within a close enough margin of error that they spotted the Accord corvette.

The ship looked entirely intact.

“That’s a nice find,” Night said. “Lets net it and drag it back home.”

“Give me a moment,” Day said. “It might be wiser to scout it out first. If it looks intact, then maybe it is and that would mean being in danger-close to a hostile ship.”

***