Chapter Nine - C-189.587.889
“I think I need to stretch my legs a little,” Day said.
“Oh? Just another walk, or do you mean something a little more involved?” The Weeping of Mothers asked.
“Something a little more involved,” Day said. The looming threat of the Accord was weighing heavily on her, and she was looking for a distraction, though truth be told, she wasn’t as stressed about it as she thought she would be. It was still a ways away, and so far, the Accord had failed to find The Weeping of Mothers as she hid on Ceres.
There was still the possibility that they’d one day decide to leave the Sol system alone. Or so she hoped.
In the meantime, it would be foolish not to prepare for the worst.
“Do you have anything that needs looking at?” Day asked.
There was a pause, then The Weeping of Mothers sent an affirmative. “As a matter of fact, I do. Look at this. It’s the sensor records of an asteroid. C-189.587.889. I had a drone pass by and scan it several years ago. Nothing but trace amounts of nickel, so it was very low on my mining priorities. But recently, its trajectory changed a little, in a way that doesn’t quite make sense. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch the moment the change happened, but I did notice strange sensor readings around the rock afterwards.”
“That’s... suitably mysterious,” Day said.
She poured over the records and confirmed that yes, something strange was afoot. C-189.587.889 was a week’s travel away on a hard burn, so Day decided to replenish her supplies before taking off.
She didn’t go unprepared, of course. First she loaded up a pair of cargo drones into her limited drone storage, then a pair of combat drones--which were little more than weak missile, chaff, and point-defence platforms with a tiny amount of mobility, and finally a number of scavenger drones with some scanning capabilities.
It loaded her down, and would add some time to her travelling, but it was better to have and not need than the other way around.
And so she took off from Ceres once more after ensuring that The Weeping of Mothers had things in hand.
“I’ll take care of the materials coming in from the station, what little remains, and your AI core project as well. It might very well be ready to function by the time you return. Ah, and... we have enough raw materials to start on another ship. It would be nice to have even more company, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” Day agreed. And with that said and done, she rocketted away and across empty space on a route towards the slightly bizarre C-189.587.889.
The asteroid had its orbit around the sun changed slightly, as The Weeping of Mothers had said, but it wasn’t because of any gravitic interference from any nearby planet. Day started running scenarios to see what might have caused the change in direction, and all of them pointed to either a sudden loss of mass (which didn’t fit, since the asteroid’s profile was unchanged) or an impact. She was even able to dial in the approximate mass and speed of that impact, at least when figuring in the fact that there hadn’t been big changes to the asteroid’s shape.
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The closer she grew over the next few days, the better her image of the rock. C-189.587.889 wasn’t much to look at. It was a dull grey, with a few very faint striations across its surface where she imagined there might be traces of nickel. It could have been a match for any number of other rocks, but one thing did stand out.
There was something both metallic, and reflective on the surface.
Halfway through her trip, Day did a flip and burn and started to decelerate. It limited the number of sensors she could point at the rock, but the burn only lasted a few days, and by the end of it, she was within a few thousand kilometres and was gently matching velocity relative to the stone.
The readings she was receiving now were far more interesting.
Whatever had crashed into the asteroid had been man made, or so she presumed until she came closer.
One part of the wreckage, a long set of spars and hull plating, were clearly human-made. Metal trusses and braces and the sheared end of a standard cargo container proved it. The other part of the wreck wasn’t.
It wasn’t a large piece, just a few square metres of metal, but it wasn’t man-made at all. The metal had a faint bluish-purple sheen to it, and was a composite alloy of a dozen metals, notably, it had quite a lot of lead in it.
That was a piece of an Accord ship, and right where it met the human ship, it was clear that the one had rammed into the other, buckling the hull enough that it had wrapped itself around a spar.
Day hovered over the wreck and sent out a few scavenger drones to see what was there. It... wasn’t worth picking up.
The longest piece of metal wasn’t a quarter as long as her own hull, and the energy used to transport it all back wouldn’t be as much as what she’d need to mine the resources from scratch.
Still... she was curious. The wreckage had wedged itself into C-189.587.889 but it looked very much as if most of it was just missing. Scrapes of paint on the surface of the rock suggested that the rest had bounced right off the surface, and what she found here was just the bits that had been discarded.
There was an opportunity here. She could either grab what was left behind, as little as it was, or she could take a chance, crunch the numbers, and follow the trail left by whatever wreck had struck C-189.587.889. From her calculations, it had to be a relatively large vessel, and it wasn’t moving very quickly, all things said and done.
She could definitely catch up if she was willing to spend the time.
***