Chapter One Hundred and Twenty - Drones

Day watched herself from the digital eyes of one of the Ceres-based construction drones. It was one of the larger models, with a hull longer than Day’s own, though it was little more than a skeleton of girders around exposed components and mountings for arms and attachment points for smaller repair drones.

At the moment, she was being fitted with two new turrets.

She had run through several hundred thousand anti-missile simulations, destroying a digital copy of herself with literal billions of Accord missiles performing at their best.

The simulations might have been blatantly unfair, but they gave her a good idea of where to place the equipment she was adding now.

The issue, she had discovered, was less that she had blindspots to look out for than the simple fact that even with full coverage, her point defence could still be overwhelmed.

The optimal solution was to cover her hull in ten move turret emplacements. Two on either side, and three above and below.

That optimal solution was also ridiculously inefficient. There was a reason most warships weren’t covered in bristling arrays of guns. Turrets were heavy. The ballistic turrets she preferred needed ammo stowage and were designed to fold back into her hull for protection, which created a weakness that needed reinforcing.

So, she hadn’t gone with what was optimal for coverage and anti-missile protection. Instead she’d picked a middle ground.

Two new turret arrays. One port and another starboard, squeezed into the space between her hull and the newly installed French drives. They’d provide decent cover, had room for heat venting and batteries, and wouldn’t interfere with the drive at all.

It was better than what she’d had before without adding so much mass that she made herself easier to hit.

The rest of that missing point defence would come from elsewhere.

Day glanced to the side where ten ships were parked in Ceres’ orbit.

Calling them ships was perhaps a misnomer. They were half as long as she was from engine to bow bow, with fat middles and conical noses. Each ship had a pair of winglets on its sides with a large ball in its middle. Those contained a single laser point-defence array that could spin around and fire in almost any direction.

The new ships were almost nothing but fuel bunkers and ammo stowage within, with some space for repair and transport drones as well.

They were a collaborative design, with Twilight, surprisingly, offering a lot of the original design elements.

She called them puppy drones, and they were meant to tag along after EFR warships. Each one of them had room for half as much fuel as an ERF corvette and carried enough ammunition and raw supplies to keep one of them going for an extended period of combat.

The added point-defence was just a cherry on top.

Surprisingly, the ships didn’t help with their torpedoes. Instead, the puppy drones could each launch a pair of torpedoes independently, which almost made it useless to use them to replace torpedoes that they’d fired themselves.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The puppy drones wouldn’t be worth much in a head-on confrontation. They had no real armour, in order to keep them as light as possible. A single strike from almost any Accord weapon would take one out.

But that single strike would be one less attack aimed at a real ERF ship, so even in that case, it might well be worth it.

Twilight was mostly excited by the prospect of having the drones pass themselves off as something they weren’t.

A longer-ranged scan of the drones when they were going loud could easily be fooled to make each one look like a corvette of Day or Twilight’s size and capability.

It essentially tripled the size of their fleet as far as the Accord would be able to tell.

“How’s it coming along?” Candle asked.

“Decently well,” Day said. “Give me another day and I’ll be ready to go. Did you need the drones I’m using?”

“I wouldn’t mind them,” Candle said. “But take your time, even if you handed them over now, it wouldn’t do much more than shave half a day on my own build time. I won’t be moving for another week no matter what.”

Day glanced over to where Candle was berthed. She was in Ceres’ orbit as well, currently being swarmed by repair drones of every sort. It looked like half of Candle's hull was disassembled at the moment, though Day knew that wasn’t actually the case. It wasn’t far from it, but it wasn’t really half. It was just that a lot of the deeper strikes into Candle’s hull had penetrated enough that full repairs meant removing structural parts of her body and either reforming them or replacing them outright.

It was better to do that than to patch structural weaknesses and hope that they wouldn’t be a problem later.

They had the time, so why not use it? Besides, not repairing that kind of problem could mean a failure far in the future.

“Better to fix the problems now than regret it later,” Day mused. She glanced back at her own hull-in-progress.

“Exactly,” Candle agreed. “We've gotten a chance to breathe, but we have to make sure we're not just catching our breath--we have to be getting stronger.”

“I can’t disagree with that,” Day said, still watching the automated welders secure the new turrets into place. “How are you holding up otherwise?”

“Emotionally, you mean? You know, it’s cute how much you worry about what I’m thinking. But honestly? I’m still trying to process the fact that we won that engagement,” Candle admitted. “I went into it expecting the worst, and now here I am, getting fixed up.”

“That's because you fought well, and we had a plan. Luck might have had a part in it, but never forget that we earned that victory. Though, it's also a reminder that we have to keep pushing our advantages.”

Day paused as she got a ping from The Weeping of Mothers. “We have an issue,” the older AI said.

Day received a transmission from The Weeping of Mothers. It was their sensor network, the segment of it keeping an eye on the Accord-Mars fleet.

The fleet had split apart, and a good third of it was leaving into an orbit that seemed very much as if it would bring them to Ceres.

“Well, that’s something,” Candle said. “Maybe I’ll need that half-day boost after all.”

***