Chapter Fifteen - Research Base Zeta

Day spent a few seconds working through various scenarios for her trajectory, and in the end settled on the one that would waste the least time. It would also save her some fuel, which was nice.

If she was going to visit Hygiea, then she’d do it first. That way she could then boost around the planetoid’s orbit and catapult herself towards the wreck of the Jaunpuri XII. Once there, she’d see what could be salvaged. The wreck was too far for a good sensor reading, but she could tell that it had lost a few pieces after she’d abandoned it, so they were unlikely to gain much from it.

The trip to Hygiea was quiet, but not uneventful. Day started to experiment with drive feathering, switching between ion and hydrogen thrust, and seeing if her drone’s thrusters could add to her total acceleration.

She ran simulations on everything before trying it in the real world, and every time noticed minute discrepancies between simulation and reality.

Reality wasn’t as clean as even her most involved simulation. There was always something off which led to slight errors. Most of these were within her razor-thin margin of error, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t trace them down and squash the errors now. She had the time and computing power to do it, so it was worth doing.

It might, in the distant future, mean a thousandth of a percent increase in thrust or manoeuvrability, especially if they were going to continue to design new ships.

Her new weapons were a good example of not matching simulation to reality. The laser arrays ran one or two degrees hotter than expected after prolonged fire. Likely because the metal in the heatsinks wasn’t as pure as what they had been in her simulations. Those extra few degrees in her hull happened to be close to a few hydraulic lines, which happened to warm up the liquids within a fraction more than expected, which in turn meant that some of her hydraulics had more kick to them than they were supposed to.

Tiny little mistakes in calculation led to larger issues which needed to be rectified.

She was happy to find better ways to prevent that kind of thing in the future, so she called her trip productive and kept at it until Hygiea came so close that even the naked eye would have been able to see the tiny dwarf planet.

Hygiea was the smallest of the dwarf planets in the asteroid belt, if it even was a dwarf planet. Astronomers had been arguing the point for a long time. The planetoid wasn’t quite round, and its structure was mostly made of shifting stones barely held together and liable to break apart at a moment’s notice. All it would take was for Hygiea’s orbit to change enough to send it close to a larger planet and it was likely that the gravitic interference would rip it apart. Fortunately, that was somewhat unlikely, and while its orbit wasn’t exactly stable, it was at least predictable.

Day executed a turn and burn, slowing herself down until she was captured in Hygiea’s minuscule orbit.

Once there, it wasn’t hard to find the Zeta Research Facility. It was the only place on the dwarf planet with huge scorch marks and clear signs of recent bombardment. Day was able to detect high levels of radiation, even though it had been years since the facility had been bombed.

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From the look of it, she judged that a large nuclear device had been detonated above the facility, then, once the blast was cleared, the area had been peppered with a barrage of missiles, mostly targeting any structures outside of the immediate blast radius, but also striking some of the tougher buildings in the centre which might have had sections buried into the rock.

What was left were a few ruins and some ripped apart tents.

Day doubted anyone had survived for long. The lack of atmosphere meant that without oxygen scrubbers and reprocessing plants, any survivor would have been stuck without any way of replenishing their air supplies, let alone food and drink. Then there was the radiation.

Presuming that any survivor had space-capable suits, it was possible that they would survive for a little while after the blast, but a lot of the radiation was on the harder end of the spectrum and Day doubted that the average space suit would protect against it. At least, not for long.

She didn’t even see the point in trying to scavenge anything. The facility hadn’t been too large, and landing, grabbing what few materials survived, then dragging them back to orbit would take as much energy as just mining the same amount of resources and making them from scratch.

It wasn’t until her sensors caught something weird that she paused and took a second, closer look.

Outside of the facility, down and across a set of rolling hills, was a second, smaller base. It had been hit as well, though from the foundations she could tell that there had only been three little buildings, though their purpose eluded her. A single missile strike in their centre had destroyed all three.

But old tracks were left in the sandy ground. A rover had gone from the facility, to a hill overlooking the main Zeta station, then it had rolled on and on, away from the base and Zeta.

She shifted her orbit to track the marks on the ground until they suddenly ended.

The rover was parked at the base of a hill, stopped. Next to it, with their back to the side of the rover, was a body in a space suit. It was hugging onto something.

Day sent a drone down to see what it was from closer up.

What she found was a middle-aged man, helmet open to the space, with clear signs of distress on his visage. He had chosen to go out on his own terms. At a glance, she suspected he had received a more than lethal dose of radiation.

In his arms was a case, the kind designed to carry computers through hostile environments.

Her drone carefully extricated the item away from him and carried it back up to her spot in orbit. Once connected to the device, she discovered partial records of scientific (mostly geological) research on Hygiea, and more interestingly, a Doctor Williams’ record of the Accord-Human war, as witnessed by himself from the quiet Hygiea.

Day made a copy of the files. The Weeping of Mothers might just enjoy these.

With little else to find, she boosted out of the dwarf planet’s orbit and set course for the wreck of the Jaunpuri XII.

***