Chapter Sixty-Seven - Necropolis Mars

If Earth was humanity’s graveyard, then Mars was its necropolis.

The red planet had been home to humanity’s first extraterrestrial bases, and humanity’s first colonies. Great big domes lined the equator, with smaller outposts in remote locations. The Martian ice caps had been in the process of being melted, and enough greenhouse gases had been pumped into the atmosphere to create a thin shield around the planet.

From what records Day had, she knew that the terraforming of Mars still had centuries to go. Comets and distant icey asteroids were supposed to be shipped in and pulverised in orbit to seed the planet with more water. A few small solar mirrors, each nonetheless a dozen times longer than Day herself, still hovered in orbit, though several had been struck and destroyed.

There wasn’t much of humanity left on Mars itself.

The bases had been purged in nuclear fire, the colonies ripped apart from orbit. Crashing warships--mostly human, with a few Accord exceptions--had riddled the planet’s surface with new craters.

There was no life on Mars anymore, but that wasn’t what they were looking for.

“I’m picking up a whole lot of wrecks,” Twilight said.

There were several dozen large wrecks in orbit. Stations, mostly, with a few larger ships slipping into the ‘larger’ category.

There were hundreds of smaller craft as well. Lost ships all around Day’s own size and smaller. Shuttles, fighter craft, transports, large industrial drones, and twisted chunks of unidentifiable scrap.

There was more metal in Mars’ orbit than in every ERF ship altogether ten times over. So far, the ERF had held off on scavenging these. With a small orbital base, maybe a shipyard around Mars, they could feasibly clean up the entire thing in a few years and collect literal tons of material every day. But it would be obvious.

Now they had something of an excuse. All they’d have to do was clean up and base or anything before the Accord arrived, and maybe leave some large, glaring hints that scavengers had been around. The scavenger’s records suggested that while the Accord frowned heavily on the presence of grave robbers and scrap thieves, they usually didn’t bother doing anything about it.

After all, what the scavengers collected ended up back in Accord space. In a small way it kept the economy rolling.

But they weren’t there for salvage.

Day opened up her communications for the signals from both the specialised scanner drone Dawn had built for her and for returns from the stealth drones hovering around the planet at the moment. All of that data, coupled with what she was picking up herself and what Twilight and Lullaby could see was adding up to a much clearer image of the situation around Mars than anything they’d had before.

“That’s a lot of ships,” Lullaby yawned. “Going to take a while to sort this out.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

She wasn’t wrong. There were a number of ships that were... not intact, but at the very least not entirely destroyed. Some--when she looked closer--had signs of having been hit by particle cannon rounds. Those could easily knock out critical systems while leaving the rest of the ship more or less intact. Others were simply dead with no clear reason as to why they’d gone dormant.

EMP strikes? Hard system failures? Maybe they’d pushed their hulls too hard and something gave. From her spotty memories of the defence of Mars it was entirely possible that the poorly repaired ERF ships and hastily-built AI fleet had failed in a number of ways.

“Alright,” Day said as she finished her preliminary scan. She tagged thirty ships as potential survivors.

Her criteria for which ship took priority were simple and she listed them to her sisters in decreasing order of priority. If a ship met all or most of them, then they’d be worth checking out:

* Ships that were seemingly intact

* Newer, ERF ships

* Warships

* Ships whose orbits would eventually lead them to striking Mars within the decade

Non-ERF ships were unlikely to have full AI cores, though she wasn’t going to dismiss the idea entirely. She was also not going to look at stations. Those had mostly been struck hard by the Accord, but some stations were massive, and even a few missile strikes had left large portions of them intact enough that it was worth checking them out... eventually.

Day added one last ship to the list. It only fit a few criteria, it was smashed to bits and heavily scarred and damaged, and it didn’t belong on the shortlist... but she added the ERF Brief Candle near the top anyway.

“Let’s split these up into three. Ten for each of us. The goal is to extract AI cores where we can. I don’t think we can bring back much in terms of materials. Our secondary objective is to see if there are any weapons systems we can reactivate, even temporarily.”

“A nice surprise for the Accord when they come around?” Twilight asked.

“That’s the idea, yeah. In the past they just orbited around Mars a few times then flew back out. Once in a while they’ll take a potshot at something. If we time it so that a number of the wrecks open fire all at once, we might surprise them and damage their ships. They likely won’t be expecting that kind of attack and if we do end up fighting in Mars’ orbit, it’ll be handy to have more firepower.”

“Yeah, got it,” Twilight said.

And with that, they got to work.

Day wanted to reach the EFT Brief Candle first, but it wasn’t the nearest ship and going to it first would require some backpedalling to hit up all the vehicles she was going to check, so she held back and tried to be patient.

Her sisters hadn’t pointed out that she was doing this for her own reasons, so she wouldn’t burden them further by being impatient.

Soon she’d be reunited with an old, nearly forgotten friend, one way or another.

***