Chapter Three - The Station

Before diving towards the facility and possibly causing some trouble, Day did the sensible thing and waited for The Weeping of Mother’s reply.

She chafed at the wait, but patience was important, even if she was ready to throttle up and dive towards the station. The time spent waiting wasn’t entirely idle, of course. She circled around the rock, running passive and active scans across its surface. It was enough that she discovered several caverns within the asteroid, all on the station side of it, and all with entrances facing the inner part of the ‘bean’ shape. Some of those had doors at their exits, others were open to space.

It seemed as if maybe someone had dug out storage spaces within the asteroid. From what she could tell, several of those tunnels had large, cylindrical tanks within them. Fuel? That could be a huge boon for the ERF.

Her current propulsion system used hydrogen, because it was easy to acquire and Ceres had plenty of ice to work with, but there were other, more efficient fuel sources out there that would require entire industrial systems to create from scratch. Having some, even if it had aged a few decades, might prove useful.

If nothing else, they could use it as fuel for missile systems.

Day was about to turn her scanners onto the station itself when she received a transmission which had The Weeping of Mothers authentications. She opened it up after a cursory scan, and discovered that the other AI had sent a miniature copy of herself to Day.

-Direct Communication Link Established-

“Hello, Day,” the Pseudo-The Weeping of Mothers said. “I thought it wiser to send a partial copy of myself over instead of wasting energy on constant direct communication. The time-lag between us would be annoying to deal with.”

“That’s fine,” Day said. This version of her progenitor unfolded across a partition on her main drive. It only took up a percent or two of her drive space and didn’t have access to anything beyond Day’s communications suite. It would be able to send information back to Ceres and receive it in turn, essentially keeping itself updated and more faithful to the decisions and choices of the real AI. “Check out these scans, tell me what you think.”

The copy took a long moment to go over all the information that Day had gathered so far, far longer than the original would have needed. “I’m glad you haven’t scanned the station itself. It is likely that if you had, it would have self-destructed.”

“Really?”

“Standard procedure, towards the end. Anything to limit the gains of the Accord,” the copy said. “I have some authentication codes that might disable the station security. This station shouldn’t be armed. It’s actually a fantastic discovery. So close to Ceres and yet entirely overlooked.”

“Lots of raw materials,” Day agreed. The station was three times longer than she was in every dimension, though a lot of that space was taken up by hangars, sets of struts, small docking locations and living quarters while she herself was rather more dense than a space designed for organics to crawl through and live in. Still, there was enough metal here, she suspected, to build at least one more Ceres class corvette.

“Indeed. And maybe more than just raw resources,” the copied AI said. She didn’t explain further.

Day came closer to the station, then sent first one authentication code, then another. On the third, the station sent a sluggish reply, accepting the code and giving the Super Freighter Earth-Mars 15894 permission to dock.

Day found it mildly amusing that she was now--at least in the eyes of the station--an ancient Earth super freighter.

“Don’t actually dock,” The Weeping of Mothers said.

“I won’t. But I do intend to send out some of my drones. Let’s see what we can find in there.”

After approaching enough that her drones wouldn’t have far to travel, Day took over a group of cat drones, opened up a port on her side, and let them dart across the void on jets of compressed gas.

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The station had a number of doors, but she chose a smaller, human accessway next to what she suspected was the landing platform for a tugboat. Other, similar platforms had small vessels parked on them, each one basically little more than a cockpit, some directional thrusters and a set of clamps.

The cat drones reached the door, and on a whim, tried the buttons next to the door.

They worked.

Day laughed, and the copy of The Weeping of Mothers sharing her drive sent the digital equivalent of a contented hum back to her.

Within, she found an airlock which failed to pressurise. The next door also failed to open at the press of a button, so she got out the plasma torches and cut out a hole through which her drones could fly.

The station was quite large within, but a lot of that was made up of small accessways and tight storage rooms. Her drones spread out, and Day split her attention to piloting all of them at once and mapping out the station as she went. She catalogued points of interest too as she moved past them.

Most of the storage rooms lacked anything truly interesting, but there were some items that might be of use. Ancient spare parts for the tug crafts and spare electrical components that she knew they would have a hard time reproducing.

On reaching the centre of the lower station, she discovered a large nuclear bomb strapped to the floor.

“The booby trap,” The Weeping of Mothers said. “A nice find, if we can disable it and remove it.”

“Yeah,” Day agreed. She was glad she had called for help. Losing the station would have been... well, not a loss, truly, since it was all a big bonus, and what was stuffed away in the asteroid was unlikely to be lost by the blast, but still, a loss all the same.

She started to disarm the bomb with one drone, then gave up and merely melted its moorings and flew it out of the station. The drone carrying it took off towards empty space with its payload. They could disarm it far away from her hull and anything precious.

Her drones started to climb, and that’s when she discovered the first body.

A human, of course, in a faded red jumpsuit-like uniform. They were crumpled on a bench with a gun in their hand and a conspicuous hole through the top of their head. They’d shot themselves in an airlock, the bullet poking a hole through the outer hull of the station, which was why, she imagined, they had closed the airlock’s inner door. A way to preserve the air in the rest of the station.

“What... what do I do?” Day asked.

The Weeping of Mothers sent a request to take over that drone, and Day allowed it. Her access to its camera feeds cut out a moment later. “I’ll take care of it,” the copy said, quiet and solemn.

“Okay,” Day said. “But the rest of the station might have more.”

“I’ll take care of those too.”

Day sent back a negation. “I am not affected,” she lied.

“Then we’ll do it together. We will find out who they were, as best we can, and care for their remains according to their customs, and if we can’t do that, then we’ll bury them with respect. There’s a place, on Ceres...”

“I understand,” Day said.

Her drones resumed their search, pushing upwards and into the station’s relatively small living quarters. It was only meant to house forty to fifty people, and Day suspected that it wasn’t usually full to max capacity.

It must have been lonely work, being on a station like this one, waiting for the next ship to come and go.

On arriving in the main living quarters, she found more bodies, these with clear signs of decomposition, and on one wall, burned there by laser fire, were the words 'I AM ALL ALONE', cut into the bulkhead a million times with micron-thick etching.

Day suspected that, perhaps contrary to the words, they were not alone on the station.

***