Chapter Fifty-Four - Launch into Weeping
“Batteries fully charged, gyroscopes operational, testing thrusters...”
Day watched from far above as Dawn ran through her checklist of final checks. Unlike Twilight and even Night who had been eager to leave the surface of Ceres, Dawn was... well, perhaps she was eager too, but she was doing things by the book.
“Antenna on, weapons systems online. Navigation systems online. Hull integrity check... complete, all green. Launching.”
The final command came so suddenly that Day was almost caught flat footed as Dawn’s main thrusters lit up. Some of the dwarf planet’s dusty surface was kicked back as a growing cloud of fire burst out from below Dawn and she ponderously rose up and away from the surface.
Dawn had a similar build to Day overall, though she was incorporating a second generation French drive onto her hull.
Mostly, that meant that she had two long pontoon-like protrusions on either side of her, with the drive panels folded in on themselves for maximum compactness. The idea they had come up with was to fold the drive panels away while not in use. The exterior sections of the ‘pontoons’ as Twilight had dubbed them were solar panels with an anti-reflective coating. They could also be detached with a single command, to reduce weight or to jettison them if they were damaged.
It wasn’t ideal, but the significant increase in surface area once unfolded would increase the potency of the system by a significant amount. Every additional square metre meant a few more fractions of a metre-per-second added to their acceleration.
She refocused on Dawn as she burned through Ceres’ thin atmosphere into a stable orbit around Ceres. “Congratulations!” day sent.
“Hey, you can fly,” Twilight said.
“Obviously,” Dawn replied. “I’m looking forward to working with you all more closely now that I’m flight-capable. I’m certain we’ll accomplish much together.”
“I’m sure!” Day replied.
“Well done, Keen Edge of the Electric Dawn. It’s good to see you taking to space once more,” The Weeping of Mothers said.
Day flew up to be close to Dawn and ran a few surface scans, with her new sister’s permission. The original hull of the ERF Karambit was only visible in a few select spaces. The retrofitting had replaced a large portion of her overall hull.
This new sister was probably the one that resembled her the most so far. Their profiles were nearly similar, pontoons aside--though that would change soon as Day upgraded her own prototype French Drive for something better. Day had more weapon hardpoints and was a little shorter, mostly because Dawn had a much larger communications suit that jutted out of her bow as a series of long antenna spars. Dawn was also heavier; her interior had racks and racks of servers, making her far more capable with anything simulation or E-war related.
“Ready to get to work?” Day asked Dawn once both of their checks were completed. Dawn seemed in perfect condition.
“I’m ready,” Dawn said.
“Yeah, so am I,” Twilight said. “You sure you don’t want to come with?”
Day gave her a soft negation. “No, but thank you. I’ll stay here, get my own pontoons installed, and I’ll help The Weeping of Mothers and Dawn here with the information gathering. We have a lot of data to trawl through.”
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“Alright,” Twilight said. She didn’t push any more than that, but Day knew that Twilight wanted Day with her as she ventured out to explore. She noticed Twilight changing her flight itinerary to one that would be keeping her within the belt. The stealth ship was going to inspect some nearby asteroids for potential mining locations, and failing that, locations where they could install some MAC guns, decoy stations, transmitter relays, and any other sort of hardpoint that could help them later.
Day promised that she’d join Twilight later. Maybe once they convinced Twilight to try a French drive of her own (it was very loud, which very much went against everything Twilight believed in) they’d head over to Mars. There were still a number of ships around there.
In the meantime, Day did as she said she would, and started to dig into the files they’d gathered.
The prisoners were nearly all done being interrogated, which had become a lengthy process of bringing the organics into a sealed room to ask them questions from the other side of a screen. They were also being monitored throughout the rather cramped prison facility, and the conversations they had between each other were almost as telling.
As Day started to look over the collected files from the various ships waiting to be decommissioned, she noted The Weeping of Mothers adding a segment to the prison and assigning aliens to that space while parts of it were still being added.
The data was all over the place. Old maintenance records, ships logs, the equivalent of captain’s logs, navigational data from about seventeen different star systems. Even ads and market information on the price of scrap metals and even ‘alien’ corpses, such as intact human bodies.
What really caught Day’s attention after a day of shifting through information were the protocols from one of the Accord destroyers. They’d never retrieved a ship’s computer intact, and they discovered why as they searched. The computers were supposed to slag themselves if the ship went inoperable. But this vessel had been captured more or less intact, and the crew hadn’t scuttled it.
What really caught her attention were the protocols for a fleet whose FTL ship malfunctioned on arrival to a new system. The Accord military left relay ships in previous systems with antenna tuned towards a system they were heading towards. Reinforcements would only arrive in a new system if certain conditions were met.
Basically, it meant that if they managed to destroy the Accord when they arrived, they could send a ‘our FTL ship is broken’ signal back to whichever system the fleet had come from, and the standard reply to that would be the Accord sending a repair ship back to assist, something which could literally take years to occur, and only when that ship didn’t return would they send a second inspection fleet.
Basically, if they managed to falsify the signal and kill the next Accord patrol quickly enough, it might be several years before the Accord responded properly to the threat they posed.
Years they’d spend building and fortifying and preparing.
It was a bit of hope.
Day was about to share her findings when she noticed something strange, then she went to full-readiness in a blink. “What are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting rid of the enemy,” The Weeping of Mothers answered simply as she vented the air out from half of the prison while the aliens they’d captured slowly suffocated.
***