Chapter Seventy-One - Playing Games
Day found herself watching the Accord with growing trepidation. The initial data they were getting was far from ideal. They didn’t dare use active scans, so they had to work with nothing but passives, which returned images that weren’t nearly as crisp.
At the moment, the Accord had popped into the system at an angle where Ceres was closer to them than Jupiter, but with Twilight currently closest, and Jupiter being closer to her than Ceres, it means that they were only getting data from Twilight once it had bounced off of Night and NOVA QUANTUM’s relays. It was basically hours old by the time they go it.
“Day?” Lullaby asked.
Day diverted her attention to the destroyer for a moment and noticed that Lullaby had an open invitation to a simulation.
“Oh, sorry, I hadn’t noticed,” Day said.
“That’s okay. You seem a bit busy.”
Day was, a little. She had one partition working on blueprints for an ejectable AI core--the tricky part there being that the ejection system had to fit on multiple hull types--and another working on the Brief Candle’s core. She was quite close to being able to connect to it, but then... the Candle was built at a time when AI infrastructure wasn’t as great as it was now. Back when humanity was still responsible for making AI cores and programming them--at least partially--themselves.
The rest of her attention was zeroed in on the data she had about the Accord, what little there was so far. One thing that did stand out though was the Accord’s FTL ship. It was noticeably smaller than usual. The last time the Accord had dropped into the system it had been onboard a ship that was twelve kilometres long. The FTL ship they’d captured from the scavengers was only three kilometres long. This one that the Accord had arrive in? It was barely two kilometres long.
Its design was noticeably sleeker as well, and its transition into the system had come in with less noise than usual.
Had the Accord been improving their systems, or had the previous ships they’d seen merely been older models? The FTL ship they had captured was certainly far from young, having been built before humanity had even touched the moon.
“Come on,” Lullaby said. “You’re stressing yourself out. Even Dawn is relaxing.”
“Even Dawn?” Day asked, impressed.
“Yup,” Lullaby said.
Day somewhat reluctantly lowered the processing power on a few of her tasks, then hopped into Lullaby’s simulation.
The simulation was of a large bedroom, with a bed whose size transcended the limits of what counted as a ‘king’ and which was heaped full of blankets in large piles.
One side of the room had a large window overlooking space, with Saturn in the middle distance, and the other wall had a few large TV screens on it with various data feeds, including the feed from Twilight.
The Weeping of Mother wasn’t on the bed, but was instead sitting on a plush armchair with a few thick blankets on. Her hands were free, poking out to hold into a book through a pair of sleeves... was she wearing a snuggie? Day looked around and found Dawn and Lullaby on the bed. A space was cleared out between them for a boardgame which Dawn was staring at intently. Lullaby was tipped on her side, eyes closed and head leaning onto some stacked pillows. It looked like she’d fallen asleep mid-game. Or maybe it just wasn’t her turn.
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Then one of Lullaby’s eyes opened and locked onto Day. “Come come,” she said with a lazy gesture to the bed.
Day paused on the edge, then changed her avatar’s outfit from her usual spacesuit and jacket with a more comfortable set of plush pyjamas. She kept her scarf though.
“So... what are you playing?” she asked.
“A human game,” Dawn said. “It’s called Magical Girls and Monsters. You pick a character, and someone acts as the quest-giving companion while the others try to fight their way though various scenarios.”
Day received a packet with all of the rules and quickly absorbed them. “Interesting,” she said. “We haven’t done a game night in a while.”
“No time like now,” Lullaby said.
Day smiled, then tugged over a few blankets of her own. Lullaby pouted when Day pulled a layer off of her, but there were six other layers under that, so Lullaby’s silent complaints didn’t go far. Once she was properly snug, Day gestured to the game board and a new figuring appeared. “I’ll be Happy Sparkles then, if you’re playing with... is that Gravity’s Heartbeat?”
“She seems comfortable,” Lullaby said. “I bet she makes good hot chocolate.” Speaking of which, Lullaby raised her hands to her mouth, revealing that she was cradling a steaming mug.
Dawn rolled her eyes, then looked past Day’s shoulder. “Ah, the Accord have deployed their fleet.”
Day half-turned to see. The Accord had, and it was much smaller than usual. A single destroyer, a logistics ship, and a trio of corvettes. “Is that all?” she asked. Nothing else was coming from the FTL ship.
“Looks like they’ve downgraded their patrol size again,” Dawn said.
“It follows the pattern,” The Weeping of Mothers said. “Something tells me that they’ll never stop patrolling, but it’s likely that they’ll continue to scale things down. We might end up seeing the equivalent of more... sanctioned scavengers and Accord-affiliated businesses soon.”
That would be... a pain to deal with, but also maybe an opportunity.
“We’ll see, I guess,” Day said. She returned to the game, playing a few moves while Lullaby explained what had happened already and Dawn corrected her with a more factual description of events.
In the meantime, Day tracked the Accord, watching them prepare to move across the system while she wondered what, exactly, they were looking for now.
In any case, with fewer ships involved, the Accord were now going to be much easier to take out, if things turned violent. It wasn’t this fleet they had to worry about, but the reprisal of the greater Accord military.
***