Chapter One Hundred and Sixteen - Unconditional
Day spun around, main thruster firing in quick bursts to regulate her speed. Her guns twisted about and fired a few last shots.
The fight--at least where she was--was over.
The Accord cruiser was listing dangerously, flames billowing out of holes punched into its side. The only signals coming from it were emergency broadcasts, automated systems screaming for attention and the desperate remains of the ship’s crew calling out for help. She was surprised that anything had survived at all. The ship was a charred husk more than anything else.
The frigate was in a better state. Not to say that it was doing well. The ship had dozens of holes punched into it, and was still venting air, but after disabling its armaments and ripping away a number of its sensors, the ship had been left more or less intact.
Its reactor being hit had taken it completely offline. Now the ship’s power was coming back in flickers and starts. They were running off of batteries and maybe a smaller secondary reactor. Not enough power to be a threat. Certainly not enough for the ship to do anything but run on the bare minimum.
“Want to handle the talk?” Candle asked.
“The talk?” Day asked.
She scanned Candle again. Something she’d been doing routinely since the fight had ended. Candle had outright lost one of her main guns. A shell had detonated while being loaded. A lucky shot that ripped the gun out of its housing from the insides. The rest of her wasn’t in great shape either. He hull was a pockmarked mess of tiny pinprick holes and scorchmarks.
A lot of the damage was superficial, rounds punching into but not through her armour, laser and scoured across her hull without finding anything important to burn.
Still, most of the damage being superficial meant that some of it wasn’t. Day connected herself to Candle’s network and winced at the number of alerts going through her friend’s body. She wasn’t even sure where to begin with the repairs.
“Hey,” Candle snapped. “Fix your own sorry behind before checking mine out.”
“Huh?” Day asked as she tried to parse that.
Her own hull was... admittedly not in ideal shape. That last missile detonation had been close. One of the coolant reserves for her main reactor had started to leak, and she’d lost a few repair drones when she was jostled about by the blast.
It wasn’t terminal, however, she could fix it, given a few days and some added materials. She eyed the cruiser, and a small subroutine started measuring out the cruiser’s hull plates to see what would work as replacement parts.
That would have to wait, however. Dawn was still in trouble, and Day was in no condition to reach out and help. Right now, if she faced off against two Accord corvettes, she’d certainly not come out on top.
They didn’t need to let the enemy know that. “The is the ERD Daybreak on Ceres,” she announced across every Accord channel. She was speaking in their own tongue, of course. Or one of them, the language they’d determined was best suited to communicating with the most members. “This Accord fleet is infringing upon territory held by the ERF. Such transgressions must be met with force. But we are not without mercy. Power down your weapon systems and accept an unconditional surrender.”
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She eyed the pair of Accord corvettes, waiting for them to slow down. They’d be on Dawn in seconds. Twilight would only be arriving to intercept them a minute or two after they’d finish riddling Dawn full of holes.
“What are the conditions of this surrender?” came a reply across all channels. It was from the larger station being moved towards Earth.
“There are no conditions,” Day said. “You will surrender. The other option is death.”
The Accord station took a few seconds to reply, perhaps weighing the gravity of the situation. After all, the ERF had just managed to disable a cruiser and a frigate, both heavily armed and well-protected.
"Your point has been made abundantly clear," came the eventual response. "We will accept your surrender."
Day let out an electronic sigh. “Recall your corvettes,” she said.
“I cannot do that,” came the reply.
Day froze up for just a fraction of a second. It made sense, though, the Accord clearly had a line drawn between its military and its civilian factions. The civilians surrendering didn’t mean that the remaining parts of the military would do the same.
In fact, the military probably had a vested interest in not surrendering at all. In a normal war, a surrendering civilian could expect a certain level of treatment—protection under the rules of war, perhaps even some level of autonomy in the aftermath. The military, however, risked imprisonment, disarming, or even execution depending on the terms of the surrender. Given that the ERF had made it abundantly clear that their terms were 'unconditional,' the military might be disinclined to follow the civilian sector's lead.
"Then what can you do?" Day queried, irritation coloring her digital tone. Her sensors showed the corvettes closing in on Dawn. Twilight would be too late; she knew it, and the Accord had to know it too.
"We can guarantee the safety of your fleet from any further actions originating from our civilian and administrative sectors," came the response.
Day processed this, weighing the worth of half-measures. It was a risky play. "If you can't guarantee a complete cease-fire, I will consider your surrender incomplete. The consequences of such will be... obvious."
For what felt like a long cycle but was only seconds, the Accord was silent. Then finally, "I will personally send a cease-and-desist to the military commanders. But understand that my reach has its limits."
Day's sensors pinged. The Accord corvettes had slowed down, engines flickering as if uncertain.
"Seems like your reach is longer than you thought," Candle chimed in, clearly watching the same data.
***