Chapter Thirty-Seven - The Junker Nine

After securing the mine, removing the drug runner from its interior, and watching for a day or two to see that everything functioned correctly, the three of them set out. Night filled one of her cargo holds with the first batch of iron ores they’d collected, and her onboard refineries were already hard at work sifting through the material and melting it into usable ingots for her printers.

The second load was picked up by a transportation drone running entirely off of electric-ion drives. It started its long trip back to Ceres. It would take several months for it to arrive, and by the time it did, two more drones would be behind it on their way to Ceres as well. More drones would leave their planet base and create a cycle going to and from the mine with supplies.

It was all raw materials, and would take some time to process, but they were materials they needed to keep things going.

In the meantime though, they had something to explore.

The Battle of Junker Nine occurred early on in the Accord-Human war. It was one of the first big skirmishes between the two factions, and one of the few situations where a human crew had had some time to prepare and act against the Accord, at least initially.

The Junker Nine was a heavy salvage vessel out from Earth. It was a two-hundred and twelve metre long industrial ship, with several compactors and cranes for grabbing onto orbital debris.

As humanity expanded into space, they discovered the value of keeping their orbits clean. A loose bolt ramming into a spacecraft could spell doom for the entire vessel and its crew. So the Junker Nine was tasked with clearing out that kind of mess.

The crew was in jovian orbit when the Accord arrived and started bombing stations and destroying ships, and they had decided to do something about it.

“This is a mess,” Night said.

They found the Junker Nine more or less where they expected it to be. The massive ship had been punished quite hard for trying to stand up against the Accord, but by its very nature as a heavy scavenging vessel, the Junker Nine was built to last and to take a beating.

The Accord favoured light particle cannons, which could punch a needle-thin hole through metres-thick bulkheads at decent ranges and which by their nature as a charged particle cannon, also acted as something of an EMP.

The Junker Nine was too tough for a few hundred tiny holes to matter to it.

The ship was drifting in empty space, its holds ripped apart, several of its crane arms bent out of shape, and its drive was nothing but a burnt husk.

Still, for all that the ship had paid the ultimate price, it had succeeded.

The Junker Nine held the back half of an Accord destroyer in its many claw-like gripping arms.

“Tough bastards, huh?” Twilight asked as she zipped around the wreck. There was a good portion of the Junker Nine missing on the far side, Day discovered as Twilight sent her scans back to her.

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“Yeah. I’m surprised they managed to take out a destroyer at all. They’re tougher than the corvettes by far.”

Accord destroyers outmassed their corvettes three times over. And while the corvettes had a pair of particle cannons, the destroyers had several more, as well as a whole suite of point defence emplacements and a lot more missile tubes.

A lot of the forward bulkheads on the Junker Nine had been turned into slag, and Day imagined that the destroyer had turned all of its point defence onto the ship in order to get it to back off, but to no avail.

Day was growing to have a new appreciation for sheer mass and heavy plating. Some score-marks suggested that even some particle cannon rounds had glanced off, and some of them looked like they hadn’t penetrated all the way through some parts of the ship.

The Junker Nine wasn’t unarmed. It had a trio of anti-meteor guns of its own, though two of the three had been ripped clean off and the third looked like it had fired until its barrels warped. Day noted a few tiny punctures in the Accord destroyer, probably from that very same gun. It didn’t have the penetrating power to get past most of the Accord armour, but it still punched through in a few spots.

Night deployed her drones and they started to skim across the Junker Nine, some of them dipping into the ship and scouting out the interior.

“Lots of internal fires. Holes... basically all over. The fuel tanks are all punched through, though a couple self-sealed. The reactor’s leaking like a sieve back here, the batteries caught fire at some point, and the entire bridge got slagged.”

“We’re not going to be fixing this one up,” Day said.

“No way,” Night said. “But hey, this is a lot of raw materials. Processed steels, plastics, the works.”

Day hummed a pleasant note, then sent out a few of her own drones to investigate the Accord destroyer.

Half the ship was missing, or more than half, really. The Junker Nine had grabbed onto the destroyer’s lower third with what looked like harpoons with magnetic heads with heavy gripping hands.

They’d turned salvaging equipment into a decent short-ranged weapon.

The destroyer hadn’t just been ripped in half, she realised. It had been sawed apart in places by the Junker Nine’s arm-mounted saws.

Day’s drones circled the destroyer’s back half. “We have... about a third of a destroyer propulsion system here.”

“Think we can use it?” Night asked.

The system was far from intact. “Maybe,” Day said. “We’ll have to tow it back to Ceres, then bring it down to the surface carefully. It’ll be a lot of work.”

“We can bring the rest of the Junker Nine here too,” Night said. “Or leave one or the other behind.”

“Hmm,” Day said. “It’s an option, sure. Did you still want to visit NOVA QUANTUM while we’re in the area?”

“I’d like that,” Night said. “We’ve been corresponding a bit. She's not that bad.”

“We’ll need to secure all of this stuff first,” Twilight said.

***