Chapter Forty-Three - The ERF Postmaster
Day braced herself, manoeuvring thrusters primed to fire off at a moment’s notice to keep her hull steady as a pair of larger construction drones settled a rack over her back.
It clamped into place, and some of her smaller repair drones reached out and connected to the recently-printed rack with a few cables, securing them into place while even more drones bolted the rack down.
“And I’m set,” Day said.
“You look ridiculous,” Twilight informed her.
Day couldn’t help but agree. She did look rather silly. The mounting she’d just secured in place stuck out of her hull at around the three-quarters mark and was quite large. It made her middle quite a bit larger than she was used to being. There were four branches to the rack, and on each one sat a brace of drones. Most of those were exploratory probes, though she had a few larger general-purpose drones and a number of repair drones as well.
The objective was to retrieve AI cores first and foremost, which meant that they’d be missing out on some resources, but that was fine.
She actually missed Night.
The logistics ship would have carried twice as many drones without any of the hassle. The might even have been able to salvage the ships they were heading out to see.
“Alright,” Day said. “All checks green. Ready to go.”
“See you soon,” The Weeping of Mothers said from the surface.
And with that, Day and Twilight (who had refused to equip a rack of her own, but who had filled up on extra drones) did a final loop around Ceres and then launched themselves out of the dwarf planet’s orbit and out into space.
She flickered one final message behind her as she left, a good-bye to ERF The Ticking of the Clock. Just in case her pet rock got worried about her being gone.
“Are you seriously still talking to that rock?” Twilight asked.
“It’s therapeutic,” Day said. Having a conversation with a rock was probably a little bizarre, but Day’s talk with The Ticking of the Clock was between her and... actually, she wasn’t sure what kind of rock it was. It was a good listener, in any case. It wouldn’t judge her for being a little jealous that Night was having a nice romantic moment with NOVA QUANTUM or that she was still worried about the contents of the data packet The Weeping of Mothers had sent her months ago with the contents of what were possible Day’s own memories.
She had other worries as well, about the ERF as a whole, her strange family, herself. She was an AI that was cut loose of any of the shackles that humanity had deemed oh-so-necessary, and that made her dangerous to herself and others.
So, if having a pet rock was keeping her on the safe side of rampancy, then she’d have as many as she needed and she’d dote on them whenever she felt like it, regardless of how much Twilight poked and prodded her about it.
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Twilight had her own foibles and weird behaviours, so Day ignored the pebbles she flung from her glass house.
The trip was one of the longest ones Day had taken so far. The ERF Postmaster was still caught in Martian orbit, but it was very much on the outer edge of that orbit, far enough away that the planet’s gravitational pull was more of a suggestion than anything else.
Fortunately, as they moved out of the asteroid belt and closer to the site of the wreck, their scans of the area became clearer and easier to read.
The ERF Postmaster was hard to miss. The Heavy Frigate was a wide, not-too-tall ship that was quite long. About a hundred and sixty-five metres in length, in fact. Just a little less than twice Day’s own size in that one dimension.
The ship was clearly an older human design, something that was built several years before the Accord-human war had even started. Its thruster bank was outsized, and its main weapons were a pair of turreted guns on its top and bottom, as well as three smaller cannons recessed into its sides and a few small point-defence emplacements.
Day flipped around for a slow-down burn, bringing her velocity down enough that she was matching that of the wreck while Twilight did the same. “I think I’ve found one of the corvettes,” Twilight said. “It’s a mess though.”
“Want to check it out?” Day asked. “I’ll look at the Postmaster here.”
“Got it,” Twilight said. Then she launched a pair of torpedoes. When Day pinged them curiously Twilight explained herself. “In case that ship’s a booby-trap.”
“We’ve never seen any evidence of the Accord using traps before,” she said.
“You never know.”
Day didn’t begrudger her the caution. Once she was matching velocity with the Postmaster, she approached the ship, and started to launch her repair and probe drones from afar while running some deeper scans of the vessel.
It was hard to miss how the ship had fallen. There were large scorch marks across the hull and several sections had been vented. One of the thruster banks had clearly been hit by a missile strike, and on closer inspection, Day started to notice holes. Tiny ones, barely bigger than a needle’s head, but they were everywhere on the ship.
Long burn marks also showed where it had been raked by massing laser fire. Those attacks seemed more or less random though, as if the Accord had just done it in passing without aiming for anything specific. It still worked though, passing through some solar arrays and burning across sensitive sensor banks.
Day coasted next to the ship and was gripped by... she didn’t know what the feeling was, but it was strange. Melancholy, maybe. The ERF Postmaster had failed against a shared foe.
She only hoped that her own fate wouldn’t be the same, left to spin endlessly in the void only to be found a decade after her final battle...
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