Chapter Sixty-Eight - the Curse of Hope
Day took her time going over the ships she’d marked. The first few were in... less-than-ideal shape. It was strange being so close to corvette hulls that were, in every way that mattered, nearly identical to a hull she’d once had herself.
She extracted a pair of cores from two ships that had been taken out when their reactors went offline. A third came from a destroyer that had been struck by multiple missiles. She wasn’t exactly sure what had killed the ship, but she imagined that the multiple strikes had knocked a number of things loose.
The other ships were a mixed bag. Wrecks missing a large portion of their mass, a few that had their AI cores shredded by passing particle cannon rounds, and one ship that seemed entirely intact. She couldn’t figure out why that last had stopped functioning, but an exploration of its AI core showed that it was entirely fried.
The only possibility was... a self-termination?
Day took the cores that she could, and when a ship still had functional weapons systems she left a few drones behind to reactivate them. There were plenty of unfired torpedoes left, as well as racks of missiles and point-defence guns that ran on independent systems disconnected in large ways from the rest of the ship. A precaution against ECM that never came to any use.
Now it would all be turned into a nasty surprise for the Accord if they came around.
Some of the ships, especially those in a certain band around Mars seemed... Day wasn’t sure. They had lots of scorch marks on their hulls that suggested close-range fire from an Accord point-defence system, but that didn’t make sense from what she knew of the battle around Mars.
Then she discovered one large wreck--not one of those she was investigating, it was far too damaged to salvage a core from--had writing seared into its hull plating. Clan Ato Was Here, the writing said in Accord standard.
Day restrained her anger. There was no one to lash out to out here, not now. To the Accord, what they were defacing was little more than a hulking ruin, not a grave of fellow hulls, but the disrespect irked Day in a way that she didn’t expect.
Then she reached the Brief Candle. The Candle was a frigate, a Venusian design, just like Day’s first hull. Humanity hadn’t mastered building ships that were designed entirely to be operated by AI yet, and the Brief Candle was a sign of that. It was a crewed ship, 195 metres long and 65 wide at its prime, with four protruding gun batteries on its sides and several smaller point-defence emplacements on its aft, fore and along its dorsal region.
She was designed after humanity had had its first run-ins with the Accord, and it showed in the number of point-defence guns she was equipped with. A direct counter to the Accord’s missile-spam strategy.
It hadn’t worked.
Day slowed to match the ship’s tumble through an elliptical orbit around Mars that would, in a decade or so, lead it to skim past Mars's outer atmosphere. That would slow it down, and its next orbit around would have it coming closer and closer to the planet.
She imagined that it would break apart long before it was tugged into the planet’s gravity well once and for all.
The Candle had been struck amidships by an Accord missile, but that wasn’t what crippled her. There were puncture wounds along the aft of the ship, particle-cannon strikes that sunk deep into the ship. One of those had broken something important in one of the Brief Candle’s reactors. The radiation levels around the ship were too high for comfort, and it seemed as if she’d been vented from multiple points.
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The crew should have been in space suits before the fighting started, and the ship should have been depressurized, but it seemed as if that hadn’t been the case everywhere.
The more Day looked, the more painful injuries she found.
Then she came around and discovered a long message cut into the frigate’s hull. Laser fire, weak enough not to burn through, but strong enough to leave a clearly visible mark.
Nothing but Chum.
Day stared at the message for a moment, wondering if she’d translated it correctly. Then she sent a message to The Weeping of Mothers and Dawn, asking them for clarification on its meaning. They could ask some of their prisoners for a better, more nuanced translation.
The reply came back two hours later, as Day was starting to investigate the interior of the ship.
“Hello, Day,” Dawn’s synthesized voice said. “We questioned some of our captives about the message you discovered. As you know, the standard dialect that the Accord uses is one of four languages that they frequently speak. In this case, the word Chum is a loan word from the Forty-two clans. Our translated, English word for it, ‘chum’ meaning cut or ground bait is accurate, but there’s a secondary meaning. It’s an insult, it means something that’s worth so little that its only value is to be slaughtered for the experience gained from the slaughtering. I think there’s more depth to the word, more cultural nuance that’s lost to us. I will continue to interrogate our captives about it, and perhaps I’ll begin to ask more questions about other such terminology.”
Day sent a perfunctory ‘thank-you’ back, then stared at the message for a little longer.
She deployed her laser arrays and slashed a line across the entire thing. Then another and another, erasing it.
Within the Brief Candle her drones found the room where the AI Core was supposed to be, tucked away between the main engineering section and the reactors, right in the centre of the ship.
Right where the Brief Candle had been struck by an Accord missile.
The entire room was nothing but a hollow, burned out cavity.
Day... Day didn’t know what to do. This was always a possibility. It was likely, even, that she wouldn’t find anything, but she’d built up some hope that she would find something, that there would be something left of someone who’d once been a friend.
Hope, she found, was sometimes a curse.
She almost turned away and burned off to the next ship to check. Almost. There were other cores on a ship as large as the Brief Candle, but a cursory look suggested that the backup cores would all be stored in the engineering section, which the area punched through by dozens of holes.
She sent a few drones in, cutting through bulkhead doors with plasma torches and ripping past crumpled corridor spaces.
And there, sitting with two holes punched neatly on either side of it, was the Candle’s secondary core, scorched and burnt and dented, but otherwise intact.
Day reconsidered hope, for a moment.
***