Chapter Ninety - A Candle's Flame Reignited
Day couldn’t exactly help The Weeping of Mothers install Candle into her new hull, but she could watch from orbit as the AI core was carefully slotted into place deep within the light cruiser frame.
Then Candle was reactivated in a debugging mode and they started to connect her to the rest of the ship. It, of course, had a number of secondary cores, additional processing nodes, sensors with their own subroutines, and internal systems that were run by purpose-built dumb-AI that Candle needed to take over.
It was, on the whole, an exceptionally complex process, but it was also somewhat routine by now. The exception was that Candle’s new hull was the largest ERF ship by far. It was going to take a while to get everything configured
In the meantime, Day tackled Twilight's little trick. She’d teased her with it a few more times, but they Twilight had stopped with the non-directional pings.
Day knew Twilight well enough to know that she wouldn’t have stopped unless she had to. Not when the challenge annoyed Day this much. So however Twilight had done it, the trick needed some sort of setup that Twilight didn’t want Day to see.
That was enough to get Day to start figuring it out.
She scanned for mirrors, relays, or anything else in the areas where Twilight’s signals had come from, but found little to nothing. Her lidar returned nothing more than traces of gas in empty space, but then, they were near Ceres and this was an area they often moved through, so that could have been anything. There was nothing solid in the space the signals had come from.
Twilight, of course, was exceptionally smug about it. “Maybe you’ll figure it out... in a million years,” Twilight said.
“OH, I’ll figure it out long before that,” Day said. “Then we’ll see who’s pinging who.”
The distraction was enough that she didn’t spend all of her energy fretting over Candle’s relocation. Soon, however, the ship was ready to go, and all the worry returned.
A light cruiser was several times heavier than the heaviest ship they’d ever launched from Ceres’ surface. Even with the dwarf planet’s lower gravity, it was still big enough that Day worried about getting enough thrust to pull out of the planet’s gravity well.
Candle would never be able to simply land on Ceres for repairs. They’d need to do any modifications and upgrades out in orbit.
“ERF- A Candle’s Flame Reignited, ready for take off!” Candle declared.
It was the first time Day had heard her friend’s new name, but... it fit. She liked it.
Day watched with growing trepidation as Candle fired up her main drives, ran through a series of rapid tests, then with the help of nearly every single tug drone they had, lifted off of their Ceres drydock.
A massive cloud of expanding dust and smoke poured out from beneath her as every thruster went to full, and her hull started to rise with the slow, ponderous motions of something gigantic being moved with great effort.
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Day did what she could to help, but it was very little. Candle was in control of the tug drones already since she was the closest to them and could immediately tell if something went wrong.
More drones dipped out of orbit to clamp onto the sides of Candle’s hull once she was higher up, and they gave her the push she needed to rip her way out of the planetoid’s near-gravity.
As she rose, drones fell off her sides, pushing themselves away once they were out of fuel so that they wouldn’t weigh her down. A few got a little cooked in the wash of other thrusters, but it wasn’t like they couldn’t be repaired with relative ease.
“And... stable,” Candle broadcast to the local EFR ship.
“Congratulations!” Day cheered. “I wasn’t sure you were going to make it or not.”
“Oh, come on, have some faith in me, please,” Candle said.
“Well done, little big sis,” Twilight sent.
“Nice,” Lullaby replied.
Then The Weeping of Mothers came in with something a little more heartfelt and meaningful. “Well done on your ascension, A Candle’s Flame Reignited. I hope that you will find a comfortable place within our family. And that you’ll be ready to do your part against he Accord once more when the time comes.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll show them what I can do. And this time they won’t take me out so easily,” Candle promised.
Day circled around her friend’s new hull, inspecting it closely for any defects and issues. Candle’s hull was nearly two hundred metres longer than Day’s own, with a sharply pointed prow and a fatter midsection. She had two rows of six torpedo tubes on her aft section, with a grand total of twelve point defence hardpoints spread out across her hull. Half were accord-style laser arrays, but the other half were Bulwark Mk2s, like what Day had.
She had four turreted light particle cannons on a pair of small naccels, two to a side, and on her top deck, she had a pair of heavy ballistic cannons mounted on turreted bases, both able to fire heavy tungsten shells surrounding a nuclear core.
Basically, she could pack a punch, though she wasn’t quite on the level of an Accord cruiser just yet. Hopefully she’d made it up by being faster and more manoeuvrable.
“You like what you see?” Candle asked.
“Hmm, I don’t know,” Day said. “It feels like you’re over compensating.”
Candle laughed, then spun herself around to reveal her underside where her cargo bay doors were opening. “You know, I could just scoop you right up?”
“Are you two just going to flirt or are we going to get going?” Twilight asked. “While I’m sure the Accord would be horrified to hear you talking, we need to do more than make them cringe if we’re going to win anything.”
Day sighed. Twilight was right... well, mostly right. She wasn’t flirting at all.
***