Chapter Ninety-Two - Aphrodites Station

Aphrodites station wasn’t in any better shape now than it had been when she scanned it several months ago, but it wasn’t much worse either. A small section had flown off near one of the airlock tubes. Either it had been hanging on by a thread already and it just gave out, or something had struck it and tossed it off.

Either was possible. Mars’ orbit was filled with micro debris that was only just starting to be scooped up by the planet of one of its moons. It would take decades, possible centuries, before the worst of it was cleared out. That was, if they didn’t put any effort into clearing things out themselves.

They did have a few blueprints for drones capable of scooping up small debris. One of them was kind of neat. Essentially a drone wrapped around a large drum filled with a non-reactive liquid. It had one end that was semi-open, with a thin film of hydrophobic material over the liquid. The debris would ram through that film and into the liquid, absorbing its kinetic energy and capturing the object. Then it could be moved more easily or disposed of. Nice and simple and if one or two broke apart, it wasn’t a big deal.

She’d consider deploying a few if they really wanted to secure Mars as a third base, but that would be for later.

For now, the station.

Day came to a slow stop next to it, with Candle coming in not too far behind. She was just slower to slow down thanks to her increased bulk. That left Day with more time to deploy her repair drones and run a more in-depth survey of the station.

A few things made it interesting for her. First, it was designed to run off of much, much older tech. Without a primary AI core. That didn’t mean that it wasn’t fully automated, however, just that every system was linked together in a different way. One which would be so much easier to take over than if the station was designed around an AI Core to begin with.

There was more. The station had a working nuclear reactor. An older one, sure, but it was intact, and she suspected it wouldn’t take much to get it working at full capacity once more. There were several small bays for landing craft which could be turned into drone docs, a few jury-rigged turrets that... well, those would need updating. A decent communications and sensor suite. That was handy.

The more she looked, the more she found that was useful, or at the very least not something that would go entirely to waste. The station had even once had a full suite of fabricators and assemblers and refineries, though those had been struck by a missile.

Still, she suspected it could be fixed, and there were plenty of processed ressources floating around in easy reach.

“Oh hey, I can see my corpse,” Candle said.

“That’s morbid,” Day said.

“I mean, it’s true,” Candle replied. “Though... yeah, I guess that is kind of morbid. Hey, Twilight, you’re doing towing today, right? Think you can grab that one first? I give you permission to manhandle my body.”

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“Oh, sure,” Twilight said. “Does Day have permission to manhandle you?”

“She never asked,” Candle said.

Twilight laughed. “Poor Day, still hasn’t reached second base.”

Day rolled her metaphorical eyes, then almost ignored Twilight’s next message.

“Right, heading out now,” Twilight said. She sounded exceptionally cheeky, but it wasn’t too unusual...

Only... the message hadn’t come from Twilight’s position!

Day immediately ran some scans over the area and looked at her recordings of Twilight and... and nothing strange was there. She immediately sent a message to Candle. “I need all of your footage of Twilight stretching back from right now to half an hour ago,” she said.

Candle laughed. “Sure thing. You think you’ll figure it out?”

“If it’s the last thing I do,” Day said.

She poured over the footage and found nothing... nothing except for one of the maintenance doors on Twilight’s aft, where Day couldn’t see her, was open when by all means it shouldn’t have been. Twilight wouldn’t let something like that pass, not when it broke her lines and made her just a little bit easier to detect.

It was a clue. Twilight was probably moving something out of her hull before she did that trick of hers. She was also moving without any of her main thrusters on, just coasting along, which was perfectly fine and reasonable, but she fired them up to manoeuvre again a little later. It would have made more sense to manoeuver earlier.

Day didn’t have the solution down yet, but the clues were piling up.

Still, this wouldn’t be enough to solve it, so she got back to work on the station. A lot of it would have to be stripped off, and they could start with the habitats that weren’t structurally important. With more materials coming in, including warship-grade weapons and armour, she was sure they could turn the station into a formidable fortress with a bit of time and effort.

It would still suffer from being a station and being unable to dodge, but she figured they could work around that too. With enough batteries and power onboard, they could recreate the Accord’s particle cannon deflector shields over the entire station, then they just needed to equip it with so much point-defence that not even an Accord missile frigate’s full missile barrage would touch it.

And of course, the best defence would come in the form of a good offence. There were plenty of old warships laying around with perfectly usable turreted guns on them, and she was sure that they could find a few torpedo launchers.

Yes, she was getting excited about this.

Oh, and she supposed the station could be used for refuelling and for processing ressources too. But that wasn’t as exciting.

***