Chapter One Hundred and Eighteen - New Dawn
It took several Earth-days to get everything organised. Every hour, Day expected things to go horribly wrong, but somehow they managed to keep things together.
The civilian fleet reorganised into something a little neater, with the main station at the centre of their formation. The civilians were trading resources, and had taken some time to link up several ships together.
Dawn was keeping a watch over them, making sure that they didn’t become too rebellious, though there was still a powerful undercurrent of resentment among the Accord.
The repairs on Candle had been completed. She was operational, but none of them wanted to really test the repairs. They’d been done in a hurry, using scrapped and repurposed materials. That wasn’t ideal when it came to making sure that Candle would be able to fight any sort of prolonged battle.
It did help in cowing the Accord civilians.
Dawn had ripped her way into their remaining sensors and communications systems and had overwritten what they were seeing. As far as the Accord could tell, the ERF fleet had three times as many ships as they really did. Dawn had essentially overlaid copies of themselves in slightly different locations.
To someone looking from within the Accord, it looked like there were three Days, three Dawns and Candles and Lullaby’s, and only occasionally, when they were very lucky, three Twilights.
The news had spread through the fleet, and now the civilians were more cowed than ever. Dawn was tagging all of the conspiracy stories she was picking up, and had created a massive spreadsheet of all the false possibilities they had come up with.
It was somewhat enlightening, actually. The Accord apparently had a vast number of slighted enemies that could be responsible for what the ERF had done. It was good data, but not something Day could act on just yet.
The civilian fleet was eventually slowed down, with some delta-v applied so that they’d enter a large orbit around the sun instead of taking a path that would lead them towards Earth. They’d still pass relatively close, but afterwards the fleet would loop around the centre of the solar system, not too distant from the inner part of the asteroid belt where Ceres was tucked away.
It would make it all the easier to transfer the fleet into a higher orbit later to bring them to Ceres for dismantling.
But that was an issue for the future. “How is the new control system coming along?” Day asked.
“It’s coming along,” Dawn said. “A few more hours of debugging and it should work. I’ll still have remote control through it all, so if something changes I’ll be able to correct and repair things from afar. Or so I hope.”
Dawn had taken over the Accord ship’s computers, plugging small drones onto the sides of their ships with repeaters that would allow her to move them as she wanted from afar.
It was far from perfect. The Accord systems were unfamiliar, written in an entirely different set of programming languages that weren’t immediately compatible with the ERF’s more... human-like way of doing things.
Accord computers weren’t necessarily more complex when it came to their code. What they did have was significantly better hardware and systems that were extremely well streamlined. It was the equivalent of running everything straight from machine code instead of using a programming language on top.
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Whomever did the work had designed everything to do exactly what it was meant to do, and nothing else. It was far less flexible, but that came with its own advantages. Their hardware was just better because it made liberal use of metals and alloys and materials that the ERF just couldn’t afford to waste on every basic bit of computing hardware.
Day felt the virtual equivalent of a deep breath flow through her circuits. "Alright, everyone. We've got the Accord fleet in a stable orbit. They're not going anywhere for now, and Dawn's controls will let us handle them remotely."
“I've left some of my drones as watchdogs,” Twilight reported. “They’re enough to mess the idiots up if they try anything.”
“I've also rigged a few of my drones to self-destruct should anyone attempt to tamper with the control modules I've installed on the Accord ships,” Dawn said. “We’re free to leave them here, for now. They’ll handle things between themselves. Though... I want to stay.”
Day considered it for a while. Dawn hadn’t said it before, but she’d gotten some hints of that already. “Are you sure?” she asked. “You’re just one ship.”
“And that’s plenty. If they try anything, there are enough explosives on their hulls to destroy all of them,” Dawn said. “If an outside threat comes, I can use them as hostages. But I want to stay. I have so many sociological experiments that I can’t just run from afar and expect good results from.”
Day paused. The notion of sociological experiments carried ethical implications, but Dawn had always had a rather utilitarian approach to data gathering. Considering the tenuous situation they were in, maybe they could afford to lean a little into that utilitarianism.
“Alright, Dawn,” Day said after a moment of consideration. “You can stay, but keep us updated. Any sign of trouble, any sign at all, and you disengage and rendezvous with us at Ceres.”
“Understood,” Dawn replied, her tone tinged with what might be interpreted as satisfaction.
“Let's make sure you're not entirely isolated,” Candle interjected. “I'll leave behind some automated defensive measures that you can activate remotely if you need them. Just to back up your ‘explosives on their hulls’ strategy.”
“Appreciated,” Dawn said.
Twilight chimed in. “You know you’re giving up a trip to Ceres, right? We’ll get resupplied, probably gain more information, and you'll miss all of it.”
“I'll survive,” Dawn responded dryly. “But I expect you to maybe send back a care package?”
Day laughed. “I’ll see what we can do,” she replied.
Day synchronised their navigation systems. “For those of us going to Ceres, course set. We’ll do a manual sync-up when Dawn separates. Engaging in 3… 2… 1… Engage.”
Their ships roared to life, moving away from the captured Accord fleet. Dawn's ship disengaged smoothly from the formation, its engines powering down as it reverted to a stationary orbit around the fleet. Soon enough, the rest of them became pinpricks of light, speeding away towards the distant dwarf planet.
“Keep safe, Dawn,” Day said, as the distance between them expanded.
“You too,” Dawn replied. “Don’t have too much fun without me.”
***