Chapter Ninety-Three - Ferromagnetic

“Can you move that drone around, I want a better angle on the entrance,” Candle said.

“Got it,” Day replies as she sent the command over to one of her repair drones.

Candle had a few larger drones pushing a fabrication unit into the opened side of the Aphrodites upper decks. The station’s main reactor was still functional, and once they moved the surplus fuel from its secondary reactor up they were able to power the station up.

Basically, it was now somewhat operational, though it couldn’t do much for them until they fixed it a lot more. So that’s what they were working on.

Three dozen repair drones were moving along the station, fixing wires and cabling, tack-welding plates back together, and marking areas that would need more intensive repairs.

The rings around the station were no longer necessary, but Day planned on keeping one of them intact. Its rotating system meant that if they placed a large gun on it, they could rotate it around to face whichever direction a threat was in. The gun would only need some azimuth adjustments to be able to fire at nearly anything.

It was going to be tricky to get a full-sized railgun all the way to mars--it wasn’t something they could easily build locally--but it wouldn’t be impossible.

Day helped Candle fit the fabrication unit within an emptied section of the station, then they started to make room for refineries and assemblers. At the rate they were going at, the station would be able to manufacture small parts and simpler drones all on its own within a month. Pretty good time. And once it started to build itself up that way, the rate of construction would increase exponentially.

“Right, that’s fit into place,” Day said. “Do you want to continue working here? I’ll go get some of the nearest wrecks and bring them closer.”

“You’re going to leave me all alone?” Candle asked.

“I’ll be within sight. Which is good, because I’ll be able to see if you mess things up,” Day said.

Candle sent her a hard sensor ping and Day laughed as she detached herself from the side of Aphrodites station. The station was quite large, but it was still relatively light. Candle herself was about half the weight even though she was much smaller. That was mostly because of the sheer difference in density between a station meant to house people and a ship that didn’t have a crew and so could be filled to the brim with equipment.

Twilight had moved around Mars’ orbit so she was a little ways away, but she had at least marked out every decently large wreck in the area, including pretty deep scans. None of the local ships seemed to have surviving AI cores, but that didn’t exclude them from being useful.

She aimed towards a nearby ERF wreck. A corvette not too dissimilar to the ship that Day had once been herself.

It would be a nice source of armoured plating, and if the reactor still worked, then that would just be a bonus. It might even have some still-functional torpedoes. She would have to set those aside and either create small torpedo-launching mines or incorporate the launchers into the station.

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Day slowed to a stop next to the wreck, then latched onto it, her drones spreading some netting over the carcass to hold it all in place. “Heading back now,” she said. Then she directed a message towards Twilight. “Thanks for the scans. Have you found anything good on your end?”

Twilight took a surprisingly long time to answer. And when she did, of course, it wasn’t from her actual location. “Nothing great so far. Couple of cores that might be salvageable. I’ll bring those back to the station if there’s room for them.”

Day did the digital equivalent of squinting. She’d seen something, this time. A small... not a signal, exactly, but Twilight had done something that changed her signature for a moment.

Day reviewed everything she had, and then spotted it properly. Twilight was extending a long magnetic wave from her bow. That... wasn’t too hard to do. It would just require a few tweaks to her comms system. But that wouldn’t ever be enough to twist a signal.

So the magnetic wave had to be used for something else.

Day pondered it as she returned towards Aprodites station.

Twilight was probably pushing something out of her hull before sending those redirected signals. It wasn’t anything too large, however. Not a mirror or a drone. Day would have noticed that. A very small mirror could, in theory, work, but it felt unlikely.

The magnetic wave was... relatively small. It had to be or else it would be too easy to notice. That didn’t mean that it couldn’t have a decent range.

Day’s first theory was some sort of very small mirror array, maybe controlled by that magnetism. It would be difficult to move a ferromagnetic item at range with nothing but a magnetic field, but it wasn’t impossible. Having the field be weak would actually make small manipulations easier.

But again, there was nothing there.

Except for some random gases.

“No way,” Day said.

She fired a drone out and launched it towards the spot the last signal had come from. It deployed, flew through the spot, then looped around and returned to her, the round trip taking several hours.

But it gave her something. The drone had a small speckling of dust on its front, and it didn’t take much examination to see that the dust included ferromagnetic particulates.

Day ran some quick simulations, creating clouds of this dust and... was entirely unable to create a mirror out of it.

So there was more to it, but this was the start, and possible what Twilight used to control whatever system she’d come up with.

“You okay?” Candle asked as a frustrated Day docked up with the station.

“I’m fine, just frustrated with my creative little sister,” Day grumbled.

She’d figure it out. She was almost there.

***