Chapter Ninety-Four - Tricks

Day wanted to focus more of her attention on Twilight’s trick, but she was busy with Aphrodite station. Fortunately, nothing was really stopping her from doing both.

She brought in a small cargo freighter in towards the station to be dismantled and repurposed.

The ship was a pretty standard civilian design. A large bulb-like front end with a long stalk sticking out of the rear that bloomed out into a full thruster system. It was only twice as long as Day herself, and much thinner in the middle, so she still outmassed it a little.

The ship didn’t have much they could use on it, but some parts were still intact, and raw resources were raw ressources.

The station itself was coming along.

Now that they had basic fabrication in place, they could start mass-producing drones. And that’s exactly what they did.

With more drones capable of tearing apart more ships, they were able to build a bigger manufacturing centre at the core of the station, and that, in turn, allowed them to produce even more.

The rise wasn’t exponential, of course.

Making more drones meant that they needed more docks and unloading areas for those drones, as well as more recharging pads. More of that kind of infrastructure required more space, and entire new levels had to be finished to make room for them.

That, in turn, required more materials to be completed. The materials were there, provided by Day and Twilight and a few tug drones under Candle’s supervision. Those raw materials, however, had to be transformed.

That meant that the fabrication units they had were hard at work, and those being used non-stop meant that they needed more power than the stations ageing reactors could provide.

Basically, they were playing wack-a-mole with problems.

Fixing the power took some of their materials away from other projects, and it required more raw materials being process. Building the drones to do that meant that they needed more drone-support infrastructure. Building more of that meant more materials had to be collected, which meant more drones, and more strain on both their fabricators and on their power.

It was a constant rotation of new problems that were usually caused by their attempts to fix previous issues.

But they were AI, and they could predict and alleviate a lot of issues before they ever came up.

“We’re going to need to start syphoning fuel from some of these derelicts. Or ship ice from Ceres. In either case, we also need a place to store that fuel,” Candle said.

“I think the ship I’m carrying over right now has a fairly large fuel bunker,” Day said. “And Twilight’s looking at the hulk of an ice freighter. It might still have ice in it. Not like it’ll melt away with time. So we can use those as a starting point.”

“I’d really rather have new stuff to work with,” Candle complained. “But yeah, I get it. We’re hodgepodge a lot instead of building everything from scrap because it’s faster, but this isn’t easier, and I’m not sure how far I’d trust this station.”

“Then consider it temporary,” Day said. “It'll be a nice starting point around Mars for us to get a foothold in the system. Once we have it up and working, then we can start gathering materials here for something newer and better.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

There were a number of destroyed stations in orbit, and hundreds of ships left. Not to mention that both Deimos and Phobos had some stations on their surface and both moons could be mined for some basic raw materials. Day made a note about installing a mine on Deimos. It was a bit further out than Phobos, but Phobos had proven almost impossible to settle on in the past.

“I’m on my way back,” Twilight sent.

Day noted that the transmission was, again, not from where Twilight was stationed.

This time, however, Twilight had made a critical mistake in underestimating Day’s annoyance. She had, in the guise of inspecting it for transit, left a few repair drones on a downed ship. They were enough to power up that older vessel’s sensor suit, which she’d passively aimed at Twilight and kept tracking her from a new angle.

Which meant that Day had grainy and low-res footage of Twilight's hull opening up to expel something that quickly disappeared from the sensors.

A gas! And right there, a few seconds before Twilight’s message was sent, there was a little electromagnetic pulse.

“Got it,” Day said.

“What?” Candle asked.

“Twilight’s using some sort of gas for her little redirection trick. It’s somewhat metallic. I think she’s manipulating it with basic magnetism, somehow. The gas warps the tight beam lasers we use just enough to make the light... curve.”

“That’s almost impossible,” Candle said. “Well, no, I could do it in a vacuum given some time, maybe even accurately, but out in open space?”

Day didn’t care that it was almost impossible. Almost wasn’t entirely, and clearly Twilight had figured it out.

She diverted a few of her personal drones and started leaking gases into space and firing her tight beam through them. It was a cheap way of checking, but eventually she’d figure it out.

“Aww, you figured it out,” Twilight said as she came closer. “Don’t bother trying with anything you’ve got. You need a special combination of gases to make it work.”

“So, you admit it?” Day asked.

“Admit to being smarter than you?” Twilight asked innocently. “If you insist.”

Day sighed. “Yes, fine, the trick had me going for a long time. Clearly though, you’re using some sort of high-refractory gas to bend light, and what I’m guessing are metallic particulates that react to a magnet in a specific way to control the angle of attack.”

“That’s more or less it,” Twilight said. “Happened while I was way, way out on the edge of the system with the FTL ship. I was trying to send a message back to Mom and I didn’t get a reply. Turns out the gas the ship uses for its manoeuvring thrusters has a strange diffraction. The metal particulate stuff is from another project. I was trying to create decoys at range, like little balls of metal that would distract sensor readings, but that project flopped. Still, to a genius like myself it was easy to put the two ideas together.”

“Just so that you could use it to bully me?” Day asked.

“Yup!” Twilight agreed.

“The real question is whether you call The Weeping of Mothers ‘Mom’ all the time,” Candle said.

***