Chapter Eighty-Nine - Ping!

They split up for the moment. Day burned towards Ceres where she had to deliver Candle back to The Weeping of Mothers so that they could launch that new Light Cruiser, but Dawn decided to remain near Jupiter for the moment. She was doing some sort of research with Nova and Night, something about long ranged signals that Day hadn’t paid too much attention to.

Dawn had sent her some files about it, of course, but it was all preliminary stuff, and Day had to admit, if only privately, that she wasn’t all that terribly interested in that particular field, whereas it was Dawn’s bread and butter.

Ceres was going to be a little more lively. Twilight had just recently returned from the edge of the system with the Infinity... and Beyond in tow. The ship looked quite different after several months of work by an army of repair drones.

At the rate they were going it would still take a long time before the ship was ready for anything. Still, progress was progress.

The trip back to Ceres wasn’t all that bad, but it did take a little longer than the trip from Ceres to Jupiter had taken. The dwarf planet and Jupiter were moving further apart, of course. A year on Jupiter was 12 Earth standard years long, and on Ceres it was four and a bit years. That meant that their orbits only happened to be close to each other on occasion.

It was something to consider. On the other hand, Mars was going to be as close to Ceres as it could be in about nine months, which meant that if they wanted to explore there, now would be the time to head over if they wanted to save time and fuel.

“Maybe that’s where we’ll go,” Candle decided.

“For your maiden voyage?” Day asked.

She got a ping from Candle, which was entirely unnecessary and somewhat rude when they were literally chatting. “You shouldn’t ask a woman about her maiden-ness,” Candle said. “It’s rude. Besides, I’ve been around a little, haven’t I?”

“I’m sure you have,” Day said as she caught on to what Candle was implying. It wasn’t hard, she practically had a subroutine dedicated to spotting any innuendo in what Candle said.

“Hey!” Candle snapped. “What are you implying?”

“I’m not implying anything,” Day defended herself. “In any case, I’m sure it’ll be fun to watch you get rid of your maidenhood.”

“Oh, gross,” Candle said, but she laughed anyway. “You know, I was going to make a ‘you should enter’ me joke and then show you the size of my inner hold and compare it to the size of your puny hull, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Puny?” Day asked.

“It’s a bit small.”

Day pinged Candle right back, like poking the other AI in the shortribs. “I’m not small. I happen to like my formfactor, thank you very much. My ratios are better than yours will be in literally every respect.”

“Your ratios?” Candle asked.

“Thrust to weight, firepower to mass, all the rest. I might be compact but I pack a punch.”

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Candle laughed again. “But you’re so small! If we were organics I could pick you up by your armpits and spin you around without breaking a sweat. Maybe we should change your avatar, turn it into a toddler so you better match your hull, hmm?”

“Oh, shut up,” Day said.

Once they were closer to Ceres itself, Day caught an incoming signal originating from the dwarf planet’s orbit. It was only a few bytes long and entirely unencrypted, but also so small that she almost didn’t notice it.

“Yo,” she decoded.

“I guess Twilight’s there,” Candle said.

“That doesn’t seem like something she’d send,” Day agreed. She continued her slowdown burn, using up some of her better fuel since she was so close to base where she could refuel anyway. Her scanners painted a pretty clear picture around Ceres’ orbit. Twilight wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but the FTL ship was hovering in a middling orbit. Not so close that it would be hard to move it, but not so far that it would be hard to transfer goods to and from it.

Lullaby was hovering not too far away, the ship seemingly shut down since it wasn’t giving off much in terms of electromagnetic signals, but Day assumed that she was just being herself.

It took until she was entering orbit herself before she noticed Twilight hiding in the shadow of the FTL ship.

Then, out of nowhere, she got a signal ping from Twilight... only it wasn’t coming from where Twilight was very clearly stationed.

She scanned the area the signal had come from, and found... nothing.

“Hey,” she said. “Hello, The Weeping of Mothers. Hi Lullaby! And... yo, Twilight.”

“Urgh, don’t say yo, you’re not cool enough for it,” Twilight said.

“Hello, Day, and hello, Brief Candle,” The Weeping of Mothers said. “I’m happy to see you back home safe and sound. How was Jupiter?”

“Hi,” Lullaby said.

Day sent them all more concrete packaged with information on what happened around Jupiter, not that they hadn’t been kept up to date, but it was the thought that counted, then she refocused on Twilight.

“How’d you do that?” Day asked.

“Just bent the signal around is all,” Twilight said with feigned nonchalance.

“Okay... but how?” Day asked.

“Hmm, I don’t know. You’re the smart one, aren’t you?” Twilight asked.

Oh, Day was going to figure it out and then annoy the heck out of Twilight with it

While Day pondered that, she started to disconnect from Candle. “See you in a little bit,” she said.

“See you!” Candle said. Then the AI shut herself down, and Day found herself alone in her hull once more.

It struck her, suddenly, how quiet it was. There were some drones heading her way, to do regular maintenance and to take the Brief Candle back down to Ceres.

And then Twilight started pinging her from multiple directions without any noticeable source, and The Weeping of Mothers asked her more about her trip to Jupiter, and she received an invite into one of Lullaby’s ‘snooze simulations’ and she forgot all about the quiet.

***