Chapter Nineteen - Accord Corvette A-878

Day lined herself up with the Accord corvette very carefully. Her nose, and therefore her in-line particle cannon, was pointed at the ship’s side and a little towards its rear. If the vehicle so much as twitched, she’d punch a hole into and through two critical systems, two coolant pipes, the fuel reservoir, and a bundle of wiring that ran the length of the ship. It was the single most devastating blow she could land in a single shot and she had all the time in the world to line it up.

In combat, that would be nearly impossible, but when her current adversary looked to be dead in the water... she took the time to get it right.

“Sending in my drones,” Night said from her position a few kilometres to Day’s rear.

Day herself had calculated the maximum effective range of a mid-sized Accord nuclear device, then she parked herself half a kilometre past that range. The Accord, from what they’d seen in their battles around Mars and Earth, were very fond of nuclear devices.

The drones zipped past Day, then slowed down, their little ion engines hard at work to get them close to the Accord corvette without ramming into it. With Night piloting them, they flew quite smoothly and came to a stop right next to the ship.

“Not a twitch,” Day said. The Accord corvette wasn’t moving at all. It was cold, only slightly warmer on its sun-facing side, and the only signs of damage she could see were a few crumpled radiator fins.

One thing jumped out to her though. A small portion of the ship, near what she considered the ‘bottom’ was missing. It wasn’t a bad break, and there was no sign of damage, though there were mild scorch marks around the area.

The most plausible explanation she found was that the ship had the Accord equivalent of an escape pod or ejection seat built into it.

That’s where Night started her exploration.

The Accord fleets, from the data The Weeping of Mothers had collected over a decade, were almost always exactly the same. They were pyramidal, basically. If there was a destroyer, then there would always, without fault, be a single logistics craft and exactly three corvettes. If there was a cruiser, then it would be accompanied by two destroyers... and they in turn by their own compliment of logistics ships and corvettes.

If they knew what the largest ship in a battle group was, then they knew the entire group’s composition.

And that also meant that the Accord had a lot of corvettes. Six for every cruiser. Twelve for every carrier. Corvettes made up the backbone of the Accord’s military forces.

This one was no different from the hundreds of others that had flown through the Sol system already. Night’s drones pushed in through the bottom, and immediately encountered what looked like an emergency airlock. There were symbols on it, Accord glyph-pairs that Day tried to decipher, but couldn’t quite understand. The Accord written and spoken language was still a mystery... at least for now.

They cut into the door, which had a strange six-hinge setup. Day wasn’t sure if they should expect atmosphere within the ship, but on opening the door there didn’t find any change in pressure.

The interior was intact, down to the very alien bodies floating in zero-g.

“Well shit,” Night said.

“Are you okay?” Day asked. This scene might be too much of a reminder for Night of her own too-recent past.

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“I never expected to see these guys with my own million sensors,” Night said. “Not the cutest bunch, huh?”

Day kept her relief to herself. “Yeah, they’re not pretty.”

The first alien they ran into was an Accord A. The name wasn’t very imaginative, so humanity as a whole had started calling them Weebs. Or weedyboys, dandelions, pricklies, and a few other names across a multitude of languages that generally went from imaginative to crass.

Humanity was good at dehumanising, and that became a lot more prevalent when the thing they hated wasn’t human to begin with.

Accord A’s were generally small, but their size could change, and so could their morphology. They were a wooden core, about the size of a modern soccer ball, with rents along the edges that turned the ball into two spherical shells. From those rents came the rest of their bodies.

Sensory organs, usually between two and six. Limbs, usually between four and eight. Many of them had a sort of foliage around their sensory organs, either strange leaves or more prickly, cactus-like blades. Their ‘back’ was usually covered in a growth of fine leaves, but the front of their core was almost always uncovered.

Some had rigging and devices literally screwed into their wood-like cores.

What little data she had indicated that they were able to live off of pure photosynthesis, at least for a while.

The other aliens in the ship were Accord Cs, also known as mosquitoes, or nightmares.

These were thin, almost skeletally so, with large, hunchbacked frames and a pair of long arms over a pair of shorter limbs. They had a long, proboscis on their face, which lent them the nickname. Most wore glass-like halfdomes over their singular eye, and a spacesuit over the huge sac on their backs.

They were truly, disturbingly, alien.

Accord As seemed to do most of the gruntwork abroad Accord craft. Accord Cs were more akin to the average human onboard a ship, doing everything from navigation to piloting.

Those they found were all very much dead.

“Found it,” Night said.

The Accord corvette had several floors. Some were tiny, others, nearer the centre, were more spacious. The bridge was there, as well as the equivalent of the officer’s quarters. The Accord A lived in one of the more cramped areas, apart from the central core of the ship which was mounted on a large set of rotors and which could spin to induce centrifugal gravity.

Day put off searching the ship and focused on what Night had discovered.

The radiation levels in the ship were far in excess of what was normal. The Accord’s frequent use of nuclear weapons suggested a certain susceptibility to the same, and this might prove it.

There was a leak, and as they traced it, they discovered a small missile storage area at the rear of the ship. One of the missiles was partially dismantled. It was bleeding out lethal levels of radiation throughout the room.

“Looks like something broke. And the dust was picked up by that vent there. Spread through the entire ship, probably in a matter of minutes,” MNight said. “Doesn’t even look like sabotage. I bet it was just some badly made dud that slipped past QA. Figures. Even these idiots are mortal, you know? There’s a million things that can go wrong in space and wipe a crew out. They discovered one of them.”

Day had to agree. “Let’s scan the ship for booby traps anyway, then we can bring it back in. This is practically a treasure trove.”

***