Chapter Ten - Jaunpuri XII

After leaving C-189.587.889 behind (though she was certain to leave some of her drones behind as well. Mostly to salvage what little was there and to have a good relay marker as she ran her investigation) Day pushed out across empty space, but she did so following a specific route.

The thousands of simulations she ran had given her several clues about what had impacted the asteroid and where it had ended up.

First, she had C-189.587.889’s dimensions and composition scanned and dialled in so that her simulations had a far more accurate picture of its weight. Comparing that to its previous rather predictable trajectory, she was able to calculate within a respectable margin of error the exact mass needed to push the asteroid onto its current trajectory.

Then she had the impact zone. It wasn’t as precise, but she was able to make a prediction on the angle of the impact against the rock’s surface and deduce from that where the impacting object had flown to. It was a guess with up to point-two degrees of potential error, which was massive when the scale was as huge as space.

But she also had an idea of the speed at which the impacting object, or objects, were travelling, and with those data points all collated, she was able to draw a rough approximation of where the wreck was at that very moment.

Now all she needed to do was reach it.

That area was still quite large, but since it was mostly empty space, all she had to do was move at a slower pace than usual and spread out her drones.

It took two days after reaching the start of the bubble where she suspected the wreck would be for her to finally pinpoint its location. It was a little bit outside of her expected range, actually, but not so far outside of it that her longer-ranged scans wouldn’t pick it up.

She course-corrected so that she would swing around the wreck while recalling her drones before they got so far that they’d risk running out of fuel before reaching her.

As she manoeuvred to match velocity with the wreck, she also let loose her scanners across the distance the entire time.

The wreck was, as she suspected, composed of two ships. Only one of them was identifiable. The ISRO Jaunpuri XII. She looked through her limited database of human ship registries and was surprised to find a hit on the ship.

The Jaunpuri XII was an Earth-to-Mars-orbit transport vessel, designed to ferry goods and passengers between the two planets. It had once been a science vessel, but had been repurposed for more commercial tasks for reasons she couldn’t guess at.

It was, at its end, a human-piloted light freighter. It still outmassed her, with a length of 112m when it was intact. Now its entire front half was missing, and the stump that remained, mostly its thruster pack and some of its central hull, was rammed deep into the side of an Accord ship.

That ship had no real designation that Day could work off of, but The Weeping of Mothers had provided observational logs of Accord ships, and by human classifications, that would make this one a corvette.

She circled around the wreck again, her drones scurrying out towards it even as she continued to watch.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

The Jaunpuri XII was an angular ship, with a bridge mounted above it and design that clearly had a top and bottom.

The Accord ship next to it used a design language that was incomparable. The ship was taller than it was long, and its beam was wider than its length, though not by much. It was almost crescent shaped, with weapon emplacements on either side of its middle where they could aim out ahead of it, and more mounted within the crescent which hid its thruster banks.

It was, in a word, alien.

The strange sheen of the metal of its hull added to the impression.

Day couldn’t help but compare herself to the ship, even now that it was in such a sorry state.

It had two particle cannons. Had, because the Jaunpuri XII was currently lodged into its side where one of them should have been. The freighter had taken out most of the centre of the corvette, and the lower half of the crescent was outright missing.

Within the inner curve were the ship’s main thrusters, but also a number of small missile bays. Day imagined that the ship could feather its thrusters in time to avoid frying any missiles it flung out, and it could fling quite a number. She counted thirty-two launchers on the upper half alone.

The only other weapons were a pair of exceptionally mobile laser emplacements at the top of the hull which could fire across the entire arc of the ship and which was probably matched at the bottom by another similar array once.

Her own weaponry... well, the Accord ship’s cannons weren’t as large as her in-line main gun, though the difference wasn’t that great. And theirs could move and were turreted, had better heat-dispersions from what she could tell and... and she was feeling a little peeved that a ship of a similar class was better armed than her.

Better armed and armoured. The Accord’s hull plating design was better than what Day had.

It was little wonder that humanity had lost.

And yet, here was an Accord warship, defeated by an ancient light freighter, likely piloted by someone brave who knew exactly what would happen when they weaponized their ship’s mass.

They weren’t unbeatable. In fact, even though the Accord ships were better than anything humanity had, they hadn’t come out of the conflict without a bloody nose.

Humanity had still lost, but they’d made that loss cost something. Or so Day hoped.

She started the delicate and tedious process of trying to figure out how to return these two vessels back to Ceres when she ran into a slight problem.

She couldn’t take both.

The Jaunpuri XII was rammed into the Accord ship, but the two had come loose, and now were only barely held together. Worse, the impact sites on both ships had essentially fallen apart. Trying to press them together wouldn’t be possible, and she didn’t have enough drones to weld the two together in a way that would be safe to travel with, not unless she spent weeks arranging things on the fly while simultaneously growing further from home.

She had to make a choice. The alien ship, with significantly less mass but some perhaps new and interesting technologies to play with, or the much larger Jaunpuri XII, which had enough raw materials to kickstart the production of another ship altogether.

***