Chapter Thirty-Three - Long Wait Over

Day continued to watch the Accord fleet cross through the Sol system. It was a quiet task. The fleet might have gained a lot of speed after their slingshot around the sun, but the distance they had to cover was still multiple AU long.

Still, they were leaving, and that’s all that really concerned her for the moment.

She had a lot of work to do once they were gone, and she was looking forward to it. Hiding wasn’t something she’d enjoyed.

Day didn’t think of herself as much of a fighter or warrior, but she still would have rather fought than hide... if the odds weren’t so unbelievably unfair.

It would take years to gather the materials and build a fleet capable of facing the Accord head-on, but they’d get there, eventually.

In the meantime, she had time to spare, so she dove into herself and started to sort through things.

There was a lot of data she’d collected over the last few months that was just not useful. Even compressed and stored for another time, it wasn’t something she had any real use for in the short term, so she requisitioned a databank from Night and started to store that information there. They’d be able to stuff it away somewhere for another time in a secure place.

Mostly it was all sensory data, telemetries, small adjustments and old code she’d clipped off from subroutines which she’d long since improved. The more he dug around, the more inefficiencies she found though. Most were minuscule, shaving billionths of seconds off of her processing time, but those added up when there were trillions of lines of code working together.

Time flew by beyond her hull as she carefully went through the process of self-improvement. It was tedious, sure, but when she came back out for metaphorical air, she always felt just a little lighter, a little sharper. It was also meditative, in its own way, to go over past thoughts and see how they could be improved.

In the end, her processing power wasn’t much more than a percent faster, but that was a decently large change considering she hadn’t improved her hardware at all. It had all been about the software this time.

Not that she’d say no to a hardware upgrade at some point.

Once she was done with her self-improvement, she decided to tackle the data NOVA QUANTUM had given them. Not just the raw data captured by her scanners, but also all the ways her scanners worked.

The improvements were impressive. It seemed as if NOVA QUANTUM had started with the same run-of-the-mill scanner suit that Day and her sisters had, but had improved it slowly, over a literal decade. Some of the changes were so obvious that Day wondered why they hadn’t done them yet, others... not so much.

An entire year of data was strangely corrupted and misshapen, apparently since NOVA QUANTUM had decided to find exactly the best bandwidth range for interpolation using simple brute force.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

It had yielded results, but it had also taken what was clearly a long time to perfect.

NOVA QUANTUM’s way of doing things seemed to shove aside good in the pursuit of perfect, and that wasn’t something Day was used to, not when she was so frequently low on resources and materials and ship-power.

Still, the results spoke for themselves.

Day continued to tinker with the project files for the advanced scanner suite, looking for ways that they could implement it onboard her frame. It was a lot larger than her current suit, and a little more power hungry. It would require some small modifications to her frame to install, but she thought it was worth it.

While one part of her worked on redesigning her hull to accommodate the scanner system, the other answered a call from her sisters.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Hey,” Twilight said.

“Hmm,” was Night’s reply.

“What’s going?” Day asked. It could have been another social call. Twilight was quick to get bored, and when she was bored, she’d poke and prod at the others. Night was a little better, but the AI would still fire off frequent ranging pings, almost as if to make sure that Day hadn’t flown off into the distance.

“We were talking about what to say to The Weeping of Mothers,” Night said. “You know, about what we discovered.”

“Ah, that,” Day said. Truthfully, she’d been trying not to think about it too much. The confrontation would happen soon enough, and she cold only hope that it would end well.

Night sent back an affirmative. “You’ll talk to her?” she asked.

“I can, sure,” Day said.

“Cool. We’ll use a proxy to do the chat. I have a satellite set up for it. Twilight will be running silent and I’ll be monitoring your core for intrusions or possible backdoors,” Night said. “I’ll have my EMC suite running at full power the entire time, with all non-direct coms off.”

“You’re treating this as if we’re meeting with a hostile AI,” Day said.

“Aren’t we?” Night asked.

Twilight butted in, then. “Night wants the entire conversation to take place at torpedo-point.”

“We’re not aiming torpedoes down onto The Weeping of Mothers,” Day said.

“We can be subtle about it,” Night said.

Day waited, unamused, then sent back a hard negation. “No. We’re goingto address this as equals because that’s all that The Weeping of Mothers has ever treated us as.”

“Maybe she treats you as an equal,” Night said. “I always felt like she was treating me more like a kid.”

“Maybe because you have a child-like fascination with weapons of mass destruction,” Day pointed out.

“Hey!”

Twilight’s laughter filled the air between them.

For a moment, it seemed like that was where the argument would end, then they all received a signal from Ceres.

“The Accord have reached their FTL ship. They’re moving out of the system. Hello girls. It’s nice to be able to talk again!”

***