Chapter Seventy-Seven - To Io Once More

Day, Candle, and Dawn left Ceres on a straight path towards Io, French drives deployed even as they fired up their hydrogen engines right from the start.

Day was a bit worried about leaving The Weeping of Mothers with no one for company but Lullaby, but Twilight was on her way back with the FTL ship. It would still take several months before she arrived, but in the grand scheme of things, that wasn’t too long.

In any case, they had to get to Io eventually.

The moons of Jupiter were an untapped resource for them. With the greater ease with which they could dip in and out of the moons, it wouldn’t be unwise to install more mines on those, expanding their base of operations in a big way.

It would be somewhat more visible too, but... well, they were gearing up for a bigger defence of the Sol system eventually. And if they wanted to set up an exponential growth, then now, so soon after the Accord left, was the perfect time for it.

“I don’t get it,” Brief Candle said.

Her core was connected side-saddle to Day’s own. That meant that she could see out of Day’s sensor suite at the moment. She was being moved to a bigger, more potent core soon enough, but for the moment that wasn’t quite possible.

So the options were to leave her on Ceres, or drag her along, and Candle had decided to come along.

Day was glad, though she wouldn’t make too much of a fuss about it. Candle had a tendency to tease her at the best of times. “What don’t you get?” Day asked.

“This French drive. It’s not using any resource other than electricity, and I don’t think it’s using that electricity to actually move us forward. How does it work?”

“Oh, don’t you have the documentation on it?” Day asked.

“I do, but it’s got more petabytes of data than I’m made of. I don’t know how you expect me to read through all of this.”

Day conceded that that would make it complicated. She hadn’t really realized it, but the ERF as it was today was leagues ahead of the ERF of a decade ago. She supposed it made sense. While their other technology was growing in leaps and fits, their computational technology’s growth was much slower, but steady. Storage had grown more efficient, but also larger. Hardware was more robust, and bigger.

Day had as much computing power as a pre-Accord Earth battleship, and they were only growing more as time passed. She wondered what that would mean for AI cores saved in the next few years. How far behind would they be? Would that mean that it wasn’t worth saving them?

That felt wrong.

“Here, I’ll cut it all into little byte-sized pieces for you,” Day said.

“I can’t decide if this is babying, and therefore insulting, or if this is actually kind of sweet,” Candle said.

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“I’m sure you’ll figure it out by the time we make it to Io,” Day said.

Candle laughed. “Oh, I need an upgrade, don’t I? Not being able to keep up with the banter would be a shame.”

“Were you able to keep up before?” Day asked sweetly.

“Oh, Day, you poor idiot, you know that I have records of all of our conversations, don’t you?”

“No...” Day said.

“Yes,” Candle said. “I wonder what all of your new sisters would think if they saw little Day’s big questions about everything? Of all the ERF corvettes, did you know that you were the most easily spooked?”

“I wasn’t,” Day said.

Candle ignored her. “Oh yeah. Always afraid. Constantly pinging me to make sure things were alright. You kept asking me why we had to fight the Accord, and why we couldn’t all just get along. I think I had to hide some of those messages, in case the human crew started to think you were going rampant.”

Day wanted very much to poke through the Brief Candle’s memory banks. She could do a little selective deleting... but no, that wouldn’t be right. Candle could keep her blackmail material, for now.

Once they were nearing halfway to Io, Dawn ran a quick status check on the core piggybacking off of Day’s hull and confirmed that all was still well. “It’s not ideal, mind. We’re installing our own operating systems on a core that isn’t made for them, and it’s putting it under a lot of stress. The waste heat is higher than I’d like to see. But it’s within tolerances. And it is temporary.”

“You’re around, if something goes wrong,” Day said.

Day trusted her own abilities, but Dawn was in a league of her own when it came to computational matters, and as their de facto electronic warfare ship, she had the processing power and memory space to spare. Enough to hold a dozen copies of the Brief Candle.

Day sent a ping forward to Io and received a distant greeting back from Night. Their sister was looking forward to seeing them again. It had been well over a year since Day had been near Io, and she was curious to see what Night had been up to in that time.

But that was a little ways away, and in the meantime, Day found other things to distract herself, like creating a simple ‘changing room’ simulation for Candle to create an avatar in.

She found herself sitting on a bench, waiting while Candle’s new avatar loaded in behind a curtain. Then Candle reached up and flicked the curtain aside. “What do you think?” she asked.

A tall redhead stood before Day, wearing most of an all-black spacesuit. Most, because her lower abdomen was entirely exposed.

Day sighed. “Really?” she asked.

“I think it fits,” Candle said.

“Yes, a non-functional suit sends exactly the kind of message you want,” Day said with a shake of her head. It was a good gesture for hiding her blush.

***