Chapter Sixty-Six - Inhospitable
Lullaby was holding them back a little. The larger destroyer didn’t just outmass Day and Twilight by a significant amount, but she was also dragging along an entire MAC cannon.
“Just a quick check,” Day said. “Is everyone alright?”
“Fine here,” Twilight replied. “Still hate this new drive though.”
Day, Twilight and Lullaby were all using their new French drives to move ahead, the long panels unfolded along their sides and catching any stray particles as they flew towards the inner planets. The occasional sparks they threw out weren’t so easy to detect, even if they cast some radiation back behind them, what was really loud about the drives was the electromagnetic ‘net’ ahead of them trying to pull particles closer.
Twilight was right to be concerned, the French drives were far more noticeable than their chemical or ion drives. But Day had argued that their pros outweighed the cons. An added source of low-cost, consistent acceleration wasn’t to be dismissed so easily.
“Everything’s fine,” Lullaby replied a little later. “Have we found a place to set the gun up yet?”
Day scanned ahead of them. There were a few places where they could place the MAC cannon between Ceres and Mars. Ideally, they’d have it close enough to their base on Ceres that it could serve to defend it and maybe distract the Accord if they ever came too close, but it couldn’t be so close that the Accord would come and snoop around Ceres if they ever discovered it.
Having it close to Mars made sense as well, they wanted it to be able to take out ships snooping around the planet.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t have everything, orbits didn’t match up that way, so Day settled on looking for something good enough. Closer to Ceres, but in the inner part of the belt so that when Mars happened to be close, it would still be within targeting range.
That was the beauty of a weapon’s system whose range was measured in AU.
They still weren’t sure how effective MAC guns would be against the Accord, but Day suspected the answer was ‘very.’ The Accord were primed to defend against particle cannon fire and missiles. The MAC was a purely kinetic weapon. There was no good defence against a quarter ton of tungsten ramming into something at speeds that needed to be described with exponentials.
“There’s one,” Twilight said as she pointed out an asteroid out ahead of them. It was quite large, almost entirely round, with a slight rotation to it. That would make aiming more complicated, but it would also mean that the cannon could be aimed anywhere as long as they placed it somewhere with room for its turreted mount to turn and elevate.
Day judged it to be a decent enough candidate, and all three of them executed a turn and burn, slowing them right down.
Before she was slowed too much, Day opened up her drone bay and launched a single drone. The one that Dawn had given her back in Ceres’ orbit.
The drone flipped away, spun until it was facing Mars, then fired up its drive and shot away like a missile.
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“What was that?” Twilight asked. “Lose a part?”
“No, it’s a survey drone,” Day said. “It’s going to head to Mars and start searching for ERF ships. There’s still a number of them over there, and I’m hoping we’ll find a few in good enough condition that their cores are intact.”
“Huh, not a bad idea, I guess,” Twilight said. “Anyway, where do we install this thing?”
They searched around the asteroid, poking at it with a few ground-penetrating scans before they found a nice flat area.
Day had some drones start to dig out tunnels into the stone while Twilight started to flatten the ground properly and Lullaby worked to unstrap the MAC cannon from her hull.
With three ship’s worth of drones all working as one, the project was surprisingly easy. Within a week they had a platform set up, with batteries and a small dumb AI buried deep into the rock where they wouldn’t be detected so easily.
Heatsinks for the cannon were dug into the asteroid as well where they could vent their heat into the stone itself. It wasn’t perfect, but it would help hide the MAC cannon a little. They even covered the gun and its platform in a large tarp, coloured to match the stone around it. Small wires worked through the tarp would hopefully act as a faraday cage, but Day knew it wasn’t the most effective defence.
They set up a sensor suite nearby, with antenna set across the surface of the asteroid for communication and telemetry. Then Day laid down a pair of Accord-style laser turrets a few hundred metres away from the MAC cannon. Those would be the cannon’s only defence against a long-range missile attack.
They’d predicted that if the Accord noticed the cannon (hopefully after the cannon had hurt them) their natural response would be to send a few longer ranged missiles against it. After all, the cannon was fixed to an asteroid, and it could hardly dodge.
They might also shoot at it with particle cannons, but at the ranges they were dealing with, Accord guns would likely miss something as small as the cannon.
“And... done!” Lullaby said before she yawned over the line. “Can we stick around here for a while?”
“To test the cannon?” Day asked.
“... sure. I was thinking more because we need some rest. That was a lot of work.”
Day suppressed a sigh. “I think it would be best if we continued on Mars-ward. We have a few more gifts for the Accord, don’t we?”
“Okay,” Lullaby said, and Day was glad that her new sister, as implacably... calm as she was, was also not the sort to argue too much about having to do stuff. Lullaby would fit in just fine, she felt.
They boosted Marsward, and on the way, all three of them launched a trio of stealth drones in a far orbit of the red planet. They’d adjust their own flight paths so that they were more or less equi-distent around the planet, and then they’d wait.
If and when the Accord returned, all it would take as a signal from a member of the ERF for those nine drones to sneak closer to the Accord and launch nuclear payloads at the enemy.
Slowly and steadily, the Sol system was becoming less hospitable to the enemy.
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