Chapter Forty-Eight - Space Truckers

Day lit up her thrusters and started to boost in the same direction as the fleet.

At the same time, Night’s cargo containers opened up.

They were all designed to look like debris, with enough shielding that they wouldn’t give off any heat or EM signatures. Basically, the nearest thing to unnoticeable they could manage. As they opened up though, all four containers revealed a set of tubes within them and a small sensor suite.

This part was tricky.

Night read the relative position of all the scavenger fleets in that moment, their velocity, and their flight paths. Then she relayed that to the containers.

The pressurised guns within the containers fired.

Shells shot out across empty space, racing outwards at just the right speed to match the fleet moving in the opposite direction as the containers.

And with a few tiny adjustments from manoeuvring thrusters, the drones came in for a smooth, careful crash against the sides of the ships they were aiming for.

It was an incredibly delicate procedure, and Day was impressed when Night struck eight of her twelve targets.

Of those eight, six drones stuck the landing.

And now they had small remote-controlled drones riding their opponent’s ships.

Day herself was moving in closer to the fleet as well, her thrusters shut down now that she was out of the asteroid’s shadow, so most of her acceleration was from her compressed air thrusters, leaving nothing but a film of compressed gas behind as a sign that she was there.

Since her trajectory would have her falling in behind the fleet, she was hoping that she’d just look like some random bit of space debris.

Now came the tricky part.

She was between the fleet and their FTL ship. If Twilight succeeded, then the FTL ship wouldn’t be warning the fleet of its capture, or even that it was in distress. If she failed... then Day would get the signal from the FTL ship first, and that meant that she could disrupt the signal.

Unfortunately, with the fleet spread out, the only way to really block a wide-ranging signal was to overwhelm it.

Hence, a lot of nukes.

That part of the plan had been Night’s idea, of course.

Day coasted after the fleet. She was waiting for Twilight’s confirmation that the FTL ship was captured, disabled, or destroyed, the three positive possibilities, in decreasing level of success.

In the meantime, Day listened. The more she took in of the fleet’s communications, the more she was certain of a few things. This was a mixed-species group, and they were scavengers. There didn’t seem to be a clear hierarchy in the group, though the captain of one of the larger freighters was giving direct orders to three other ships, and that group tended to stay closer together.

So perhaps not a single outfit, but several competing or cooperating groups?

Their grasp of the language the Accord used was tenuous at best, but the more they overheard the better it became.

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Then Day received a tight-beam from Night.

“Check this out,” was all Night said.

The communication was a risk, albeit a small one, but once Day started poking at the files she’d received she’d deemed it a worthwhile one.

It was from one of the old, retrofitted Accord destroyers. The drone she’d landed on it had cut through some exterior hull plates and slid into the ship’s chassis. Not into the air-tight parts, but deep enough to gain access to some of the computing parts, and from there, Night had started a very preliminary hack. Mostly to disable the ship’s communications suite, but Night wasn’t specialised in that and was having a hard time. Worse, she had to relay information to the rather dumb drone and back, which was making things tricky.

Still, the drone had gotten into the communication’s system, and even if its programming was alien in every sense, it was still programming, and that was their jam.

One of the first things it found, as if placed specifically to be found, was an Accord First Contact protocol. It had everything.

Languages, modes of communication, images of various species, including many they hadn’t seen yet.

Day was almost shaking with excitement as she took it all in. The package wasn’t comprehensive. The language package was little more than a dictionary, a small teaching program fit for children, and little else. The database about species was almost suspiciously vague, and there was nothing about any technology of note. Even the programming itself felt... sterile. The bare minimum to function and to be easy to adapt to different systems, but absolutely nothing else.

It was the human equivalent of sending someone a link to a website that operated off of basic HTML with no graphics or UI.

They could finally decipher the fleet... or some of what they were saying.

“Apoca Lisp, you’re driftin’ again.”

“Nah I’m not, it’s the rest of ya who are.”

“You still haven’t fixed that wonky thruster, have you?”

“Shut your probes, do ya have any idea how expensive that would be? Maybe if we actually strike blood here we’ll have somethin’ to sell and I’ll fix the thrusters.”

The communication was constant and clearly very much on the informal side. Some of it simply didn’t translate at all, though she started to put pieces together after a while and started to build profiles on the ships and their crews.

It was interesting to note some cultural similarities with humanity, though there were only so many. The fleet seemed to have in-jokes shared between them, and memes of a sort.

Truly, they were cultured in their own unique way.

Then Day received a tight-beam, this time from Twilight.

“Bastards caught on. Get ready, I’m going loud.”

The transmission cut off as Day’s rear-facing sensors caught the very distant explosions of a nuclear bomb more or less where the FTL ship was.

It was time to move. She had seconds to pick a course and stick to it.

***