Chapter Forty-Five - Rude
“Alright,” Day said as she arrived closer to Twilight. She had the ERF Postmaster’s AI Core secured in one of the launch cradles for her larger drones, a drone which she’d left behind at the frigate itself to serve as a beacon, if they ever needed to get back to it. The ship still had sensors... terrible, very much outdated ones that were old even when the Accord arrived in-system for the first time, but they could run passively, and the ship generated enough power from a few solar arrays that once Day tinkered with it and passed some wires across the ship’s exterior... well, it could now serve as a very poor weather station of sorts.
If an Accord fleet passed by, it would notice and could relay that information back. It wasn’t perfect, and she doubted it would last forever, but it was a better use of the wreck then just abandoning it.
They could retrieve it later, in anycase.
“Did you spot any of the other wrecks?” Twilight asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Day said. “I looked over pretty much all of the sensor data I could on the Postmaster but it wasn’t enough to give me a precise idea of where the other ships went. They were outbound from Mars, so... anywhere? They’re probably still in the solar system though, they weren’t moving that fast, and it’s possible they got caught in a gravity well somewhere.”
“Hmm, sucks,” Twilight said dismissively.
“How about you?” Day asked.
She turned her sensors on and checked on her sister. Twilight was hugging the slightly-larger ERF Karambit close. The corvette was, as far as Day could tell, one of the first all-AI human ships.
AI-assistance was a must onboard human vessels, of course. The Accord used their own dumber AI too. But most vessels had a crew. The Karambit was a deviation from that. A lighter vessel entirely operated and controlled by a single military-grade AI.
Just like Day.
In a way, she suspected that the Karambit was her... maybe older cousin? The design of its hull was clearly different. More robust in places, with a larger but less efficient drive, and only two point-defence turrets not too dissimilar to her old Bulwarks. The corvette had two ventral torpedo tubes and a single in-line coil gun.
She imagined that when it fired the entire ship would light up. It certainly had a lot of heatsinks available. They were mostly tucked-in at the moment, but they were in cases that would unfurl then out of the corvette’s sides so that they’d spread the dissipating heat around.
Clever, but wildly inefficient.
“How’s its core?” Day asked.
“Angry,” Twilight said.
Day pushed. “It can’t possibly still be active?” she asked.
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” Twilight said. The smaller corvette fired off its manoeuvring thrusters and gently pulled away from the Karambit‘s side. A few connecting wires broke apart, and some repair drones flew out of the ship and back into Twilight’s hold. “Went through her files... I think it’s a her? Whomever built their AI did a piss-poor job of it. Anyway. They were trying to fix themselves and get moving again for literal days after they got slagged. Ended up cannibalising a few things to repair others, and it didn’t work out.”
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“Oh.. that’s awful,” Day said. She couldn’t imagine... no, she could imagine it. Being stuck in the void of space, floating listlessly, far from anything, no one answering the call for help.
“Ended up sending low-priority distress messages for a while, then... I think she saw what happened on Mars,” Twilight said. “Then she shut down.”
Day winced. Another shipster, another AI with some interesting issues to work through.
“By the way, I set things up for you to grab on. We’re bringing the whole ship back, right?”
“Why didn’t you latch yourself on?” Day asked. “You have the same drive as I do and weight less.”
“Didn’t wanna ruin my profile,” Twilight said.
Day wanted to protest, but decided against it. It would waste precious time and she did have a larger complement of drones at the moment. She launched those as she approached the Karambit. Then she had to focus for a few hours as her drones built braces to latch onto the corvette with. Once she was properly secured, Day sent more drones into the Karambit and started sawing off bits and pieces only to fling them in the vague direction of Mars. Bits of armour, old sensor antenna, some of those external heatsinks. Anything that they could produce better versions of for cheap back on Ceres.
The difference in weight wasn’t huge, but she did succeed in removing a few tons from the total mass she had to carry. Venting all but a few of the rounds for the coil-gun helped as well.
After sending some of her drones to Twilight to further decrease her total mass, Day started a slow and careful burn out of Mars’ distant orbit and towards the asteroid belt and home.
It would take a while to get there, and she’d have to execute a pretty hard burn to slow down, but it was doable.
Day idly spent some time tinkering with the Karambit’s core as they returned home. It was a long trip back, especially slowed down as she was, and she needed something to do to keep busy when she wasn’t chatting with Twilight.
The core was clearly mass-produced, and its hardware suggested a level of... rigidness that she wasn’t used to seeing in her sisters.
That could be improved. Though she wanted to do it without destroying who the Karambit was. That would be trickier.
Then, just as she started her slow-down burn a few days away from Ceres, she received an urgent tight-beam from The Weeping of Mothers.
“There’s an FTL signature on the edge of the system. Someone’s here.”
***