Chapter One Hundred and One - Colonisers
Day didn’t like interacting with the prisoners directly. They were... not like her family.
Was that wrong? She didn’t dislike them because of their alien-ness, she disliked them because they were so... organic. A conversation with them was a slow, plodding thing, and it didn’t help that the Accord language was inefficient in a way that no human language she was aware of had been.
The different species had different methods of communication, as suited by their biology, but most of them had verbal components and the Accord’s default language--notably not the one usually spoken by the shark-like Ethopians who generally seemed like the ones in charge--was a convoluted mess.
The language they spoke within their own species was quirky, and sometimes strange, but at least it was usually straightforward.
Day imagined that if she was a human, she’d have a pounding headache at the moment, but she wasn’t so she endured.
“Prisoner C-451, I am going to show you a series of images, and I’d like you to tell me what you can about these. More details would be better than less. You will be rewarded with additional food rations and shower time for your cooperation,” Day said.
Or a recording of her avatar said it, this time to one of the more cooperative prisoners in their little institution.
The jail had grown a fair bit over the last year or so. They needed more greenhouse space to accommodate more prisoners, especially if they wanted to store foodstuff for later, and then Dawn noticed that several of the prisoners were starting to suffer from muscular issues.
The Accord races seemed to take to life in space better than the average human did, and there were signs of genetic modifications to make them more capable of life in zero-g, but it was still taking a toll. That, and the lack of exercise.
So they added two large wheels around the asteroid, allowing the aliens to experience something approaching a half-g of centrifugal gravity. It helped.
Dawn had kept expanding the prison into the side and interior of a large asteroid not too distant from Ceres, one that didn’t have any usable materials, but whose composition was dense enough to make it a useful shield against radiation.
With plenty of recyclers and materials taken from the captured Accord ships to keep things going, the prisoners now had a decent space to live in.
Dawn had introduced them to games and human media as well, to... mixed results.
She mostly found it amusing to encourage the ‘otaku aliens’ who were fans of humanity and its old media. Day wasn’t so keen on that, but it was harmless, and maybe made the aliens more comfortable with dealing with her avatar.
She refocused on C-451 as images appeared on the screen before him. Some were scans of the still-distant FTL ships, others were pictures touched up by the best imaging AI they had to fill in the gaps.
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The closer the FTL ships came, the clearer the images became.
Day diverted her attention elsewhere for a moment. Her hull was still near Ceres, and there was some minor communication lag between herself and the prison asteroid. Not that she cared. When C-451 finally finished staring at the image, her recording of his reply was forwarded to her, and she listened to it at 128x speed. If she didn’t then the slowness of organic speech really tried her patience.
“Yes, I recognize these. That one is a military ship. Old. At least five generations old. But tough. Good ships. Some of the first good FTL from when the Accord was spreading faster.”
“Good how?” Day asked.
The reply took a while to return, but she was only paying it half an ear as she carefully rearmed herself. She and her sisters were adding torpedo launchers to their hulls. They were designed to be stealthy, and also be jettisoned post-launch.
Twilight had even designed some with signal reflectors and decoys built into the launchers. Once the torpedo was away, the launch tube would detach with a small burst of pressure, and then the tube would try to pass itself off as the very ship that had launched it. It was clever, but any halfway decent ECM would see through it. They could also drop the pod, then launch from it later, to strike enemies form strange angles.
“Yes, before that, FTL would have the entire crew be awake. Or the crew would be in cryo but with AI to pilot the ship. The half the times the crew would mutine. The AI-controlled ships weren’t better. The AI would go mad.”
Day filed that for later. The Accord had issues with rampancy too, then, at least over the long term. Did that mean that if they ever reached an Accord system, they’d meet proper AI there? It was interesting to think on, but not a concern at the moment. “Thank you. What about these other two ships?”
C-451 looked at the other two with his bug-like compound eyes. “Those are newer. Corporate ships. See, there aren’t as many guns, and that big one couldn’t take a single hit, and the hangar’s smaller, for smaller civilian ships instead of military craft. This one here, that’s a heavy hauling ship. Tough. Not pleasant to ride.”
Interesting, and it matched what others had said. “And why would these three arrive in a system at the same time?” she asked.
C-451 shifted his body in a way that Dawn’s body-language reading software suggested was surprise. “For the same reason we came. There’s materials to salvage, and a system to colonise. The Accord must always spread. The system is... was supposed to be, safe. Now is time for its first new colonists to come and settle.”
That tracked with what others had said as well.
These three Accord ships weren’t here for war.
No, they’d won that war already. They were here for the spoils. The radiation around Earth was weakening, the dust on Mars settling. It was the ideal time to start terraforming and preparing Sol for new inhabitants.
Too bad the system wasn’t as empty as they thought.
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