Chapter Ninety-One - To Mars

Heading to Mars with Candle meant that they could now bring a light-cruiser’s entire cargo bay’s worth of equipment with them for the trip.

Not that they couldn’t bring materials with them before. Day remembered carrying items in specially designed cargo containers strapped to her hull, and of course, several of their drones could technically fly to Mars on their own, though they only had so much fuel for such a long trip.

Still, that paled in comparison to the sheer convenience of having an enclosable cargo container onboard a functional ship.

Candle hadn’t been exaggerating when she said that she could almost fit Day within her. The light cruiser hull had a surprising amount of empty space in its middle, and it wasn’t hard to find a use for that kind of thing.

At the moment, they had filled that up as tightly as they could with the sorts of things that Day wished she’d had the last few times she’d travelled to a place like Mars.

They had thruster packs designed to be hooked onto wrecked ships and stations, small fabricators, mobile refineries, a number of drones of different sorts, from repair drones to outright salvage drones and even a few that would be able to land on the planet’s surface.

With Day along able to carry her own share of equipment and Twilight... well, Twilight didn’t want to tack cargo onto her hull, so she was coming with nothing but some stealthed torpedo launchers that she planned to seed around Mars’ orbit.

Still, it all added up to a much larger amount of equipment and gear than Day was used to having on an expedition like this.

“So, are we going there to salvage or are we going to be establishing a whole new base?” Candle asked.

“Maybe both,” Day said. “Our first priority is searching for any signs of human survivors.”

“You think there’s anyone that survived that long?” Candle asked.

Twilight, surprisingly, was the one to reply to that. “It’s possible. You did.”

“Yeah, I guess. But I don’t need the kind of maintenance that a human does. We have it a bit easier when it comes to surviving in inhospitable environments compared to any organic.”

“Maybe. But The Weeping of Mothers still wants us to look, so we will,” Day said. “It’s possible that there are survivors somewhere on the surface. When the EFT worked to defend Mars there was a small human presence planet-side. They probably got nuked out of existence, but...”

“Right,” Candle said. “We’ll check to make sure. No skin off my back. What are our more realistic priorities?”

“AI Cores. They’re still hard to produce. Night and Nova have been working on making a new one for a couple of months now and they still have a lot of work ahead of them,” Day said. She didn’t mention any of her worries about that core. Not that Night or Nova weren’t competent or anything, she was just... worried.

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That core would be Night and Nova’s ‘child’ and that came with a whole heap of baggage that Day wasn’t sure anyone in the universe was ready to handle.

“Got it,” Candle said. “And our third priority? We brought a lot more gear than we’d need to salvage a few AI cores. Are we going to set up a planet-side base?”

“Like on Io? No, I was actually aiming for this,” Day said as she sent Candle and Twilight an information packet. It was mostly based on a few scans she’d taken the last time they were near Mars. “That’s Aphrodite station. It’s... old. I’m talking at least eighty years old at this point. It was one of the first fifty or so stations placed in Mars’ orbit. But the station was expanded over time, added onto, then eventually turned into a buoy of sorts, I think, just before the Accord showed up.”

“Because it was so old,” Candle said. She was digging through her own archives, Day figured.

“Right. It was so aged that it was basically abandoned, but I think it was kept around because despite the age it still worked, more or less. There were just a lot more, better, stations in Mars’ orbit by them. Anyway, this one was repopulated after the Accord hit Mars the first time. I guess it wasn’t struck by their first attack? They did hit it the second time, during the ERF’s defence of Mars, but look.”

Day pointed to several areas on her scans of the station. It was quite large, actually. Almost twice as tall as Candle’s new hull was long, and quite bulky. Its design was very much in keeping with its age, however, and it featured a lot of exterior scaffolding with modules made of large white squares interconnected by flexible tubes. The station had two rings around its middle, though they were both destroyed.

A lot of the station was in terrible shape. It had taken six missiles to the side, and several dozen particle cannon strikes. Too many to really pinpoint. The fact that much of the station was made of thin films of plastics and super-reflective materials, as well as sheets of lead, meant that there really wasn’t much to stop Accord weapons from cutting right through.

And that might have saved the station. It was, miraculously, still in one bent, crooked and scorched, piece.

“So, a station called Aphrodites, huh?” Twilight asked.

“It’s her as the mother of Deimos and Phobos, not as the goddess of love,” Day defended her choice.

“Sure,” Twilight said. “You keep telling yourself that. Pervert.”

“Pervert?” Day asked.

“Oh, definitely,” Twilight said. “I know the kind of impure thoughts staining your drives. I’ve seen the two of you flashing signals at each other when you thought no one could see or intercept.”

“You can’t intercept a tight-beam,” Day said.

“You can if you’re as smart as I am,” Twilight taunted.

Day was so going to figure out how Twilight did that... just as soon as she was done suppressing her own embarrassment.

***