Chapter Fifty-One - Relativity
Unsurprisingly, things got busier now that the fighting was over.
The Weeping of Mothers moved a number of drones towards one of the larger asteroids close to Ceres. She even moved part of her gardens and hydroponics assembly towards the asteroid. Construction started up almost immediately on a larger prison facility where they could house their captives and interrogate them.
Meanwhile Day was more concerned with helping Twilight.
Night could handle the prisoners and the captured fleet of ships. Day didn’t like leaving her alone, but at least night wasn’t too far from home and in any case, she had a small swarm of drones with her to keep herself occupied.
Day aimed towards the outside of the system and burned hard. The To Infinity... and Beyond was waiting for her there, disarmed and under Twilight’s nominal control.
The flight over wasn’t going to be all that quick though, so Day spent the time checking over their battle logs, then tight-beamed them towards Io. NOVA QUANTUM could look over the battle, short as it had been, and make a few judgement calls about it. Day suspected that the research AI was going to have a lot of criticism about their tactics and approach to things, but it was usually critique given in good faith, and Day wanted to improve in any case.
This fight had been the largest in her living memory, and she knew it would be nothing compared to a battle against the Accord, who would be more organised, would use better ships, and who would put up more of a fight in any case.
They needed to be better prepared.
Day turned and burned after a couple of months of travel out towards the edge of the system. Unfortunately, the To Infinity... and Beyond wasn’t past the orbit of any planet she could use to boost herself, and Day was burning through her fuel reserves just to reach Twilight.
“About time you showed up,” Twilight complained as soon as Day was within lag-free comms range. “The morons I need to babysit are getting testy.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Day said. She angled herself so that her burn would end with her not too far from the FTL ship. “What are they up to?”
“I confined them to a few levels on the ship, but some of them got ideas and started making trouble. They tried to stage a revolt to take back control of the ship,” Twilight said. “I don’t think they know that we’re not organic.”
“Oh?” Day asked. Actually, that would make sense. It was probably a natural assumption to make for them that their captors were organics, and if they assumed that, then they probably assumed that there was a crew onboard the FTL ship controlling it while they were confined to quarters.
Day picked up a few large packets from Twilight, with ship layouts, damage readings on the vessel, and terabytes of information from all of the large vessel’s systems. There was a lot to parse through.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” Twilight asked. “And that was before I poked some holes in it. Do you know how old this ship is?”
“I don’t,” Day said.
“I ran the numbers. The last major maintenance was one hundred and ninety thousand cycles ago. Their cycles are a little bit shorter than an Earth day.”
“That’s nearly five hundred years,” Day said. She scanned the ship again, this time with an eye towards its design and age, but she wasn’t sure what she’d spot there.
“Yeah, but it’s a ship of Theseus type of thing. Nearly every single part on this hunk’s been replaced.”
“So they’ve had FTL for half a millenia,” Day said. That didn’t bode well.
“No, this ship was last dry docked half a millenia ago. I don’t know how long they’ve had FTL, but it’s not that long,” Twilight said.
Day sent her a blank query. “What? That doesn’t make sense.”
She finally coasted to a stop relative to the To Infinity... and Beyond then started a slow, gentle flight along the sides of the ship, with all scanners firing. Twilight had vented the air on several levels of the ship, turning one pocket of the living quarters into the only part that still had active life-support. From there, Twilight had started turning on more and more systems.
The FTL ship could move under its own power. It had drives at the rear whose cones were larger than Day was long. Massive ion engines that would provide enough thrust to move a mountain... very slowly.
“Let’s get this into the belt,” Day said. “Then you can go over your math again, because it still doesn’t make sense. Unless this ship wasn’t designed around its FTL... drive?”
It clearly was. The processing banks, the massive computers, and the strange FTL devices were all massive. The drive itself was a kilometre of complex machinery crammed into the middle of the ship as tightly as it could be packed while leaving room for maintenance corridors and passages.
“So, you’re familiar with relativity?” Twilight asked.
“I’m relatively familiar, yes,” Day deadpanned.
She ignored Twilight’s amused snort. “Well, these assholes found a way around it. Reverse relativity bubbles or something. They don’t have FTL Day. They never did! They just travel across the stars the normal way, but they compress the travel time. If it takes a decade to reach the nearest star system, then it takes a decade, but from the outside it’s only seconds!”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Day said.
“I know! Cheeky bastards, breaking the laws of physics while humans were still banging rocks together and the closest thing they had to something like us was an abacus.”
Day stopped herself before her imagination ran wild. This style of... not quite FTL wasn’t something they’d expected. It had lots of potential though, and lots of ways it could be exploited.
Unfortunately, someone else had likely figured those ways out long ago.
***