Chapter Twenty-Six - Io
Day hovered in a close orbit over Ceres, nearly all of her scanners and sensors turned downwards towards the planet. Night hovered nearby as well, some cargo being loaded into her by some dog drones while more drones slid into some racks that replaced some one of her cargo holds and which made room for more drones than usual.
The real show was below, however.
In the Grace of Twilight was sitting in her berth, nose tilted up slightly and hoses still connected into her sides. Drones swarmed over her hull, doing last minute checks.
The stealth corvette was going to launch without any superfluous materials onboard. That meant no ammunition and no torpedoes, as well as no repair drones. Those were waiting for her next to Night, where she’d refill once her launch was successful.
“Alright, I’m ready,” Twilight said.
The drones pulled back, her connections to the base hissed apart, and the berth she was in shifted, lining her up so that her drive plume would blast into a reinforced wall.
Day watched with mounting anxiety as Twilight’s engines roared to life for the first time, then the stealth corvette slowly, gently rose up and away from Ceres.
The dwarf planet’s gravity was low, but not so low that they didn’t need to claw they way off the surface. Day was worried the entire time that something would go wrong. A catastrophic failure now could spell disaster for them. But Twilight continued to rise on a plume of roiling exhaust, and soon her sister ship was slipping into a nice orbit around the planetoid.
“Well done!” Day sent as she tampened down her relief.
“Come on, we’ll match velocities and I can start transferring this stuff over,” Night said. “I’ve got enough torpedoes here to keep both of you launching them for hours on end.”
Somewhat of an exaggeration, but not by too much.
It took half a day for Twilight to run through her early flight checks and to test all of her controls. Then after matching speeds with Day and Night, she loaded up on weapons and fuel for the trip to Io.
Her maiden voyage would be a bit more involved than either Night or Day’s, but that was fine. She’d have the two of them nearby to keep watch on her if anything malfunctioned.
“Alright, let’s see if you two old girls can keep up,” Twilight said.
“Don’t get too far ahead!” Night snapped.
As they started to boost around Ceres one last time, they received a message from The Weeping of Mothers. “Be careful out there, girls. And I’ll see you all soon enough.”
Twilight was the smallest ship they’d made so far, and also the lightest. Her drive system might have been designed to be less noisy and less visible, but that didn’t make it significantly weaker than Day’s own. That combination, of lightness and decent thrust, meant that she was able to outpace Day by a small margin which only grew bigger as they tested her systems and tweaked her engines mid-flight for maximum efficiency.
Day decided not to try and keep up. She wouldn’t win unless she pushed herself hard, and then they’d be leaving Night behind. She didn’t want to do that to the logistics ship. Night still had her hangups about being left alone, and Day didn’t want to hurt her.
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Twilight seemed to have similar hangups, but in entirely the other direction. The stealthy ship shut down her drive once she’d reached a comfortable speed, then almost disappeared off of Day’s sensors. It was only because Day knew where she was that she could track the smaller ship speeding ahead.
“That girl’s a real brat,” Night said.
“I thought you’d get along. You’re both pretty similar,” Day said.
“What’s that mean?”
Day didn’t reply and just kept flying along.
The trip into Jupiter’s outer orbit took several days. Even with Ceres being relatively close to Jupiter at the moment, there was still a gulf of space between them. Fortunately, Jupiter’s gravity well was massive, so it wasn’t hard to slip into an orbit around the planet. What was harder was getting closer to Io while matching the moon’s own velocity.
The closer they came, the move obvious the signal from the moon was. Out near Ceres it was impossible to make out from the general noise of space, not with Day’s own capabilities, but now that they were closer it was clear that something was calling out for assistance.
“Have you pin-pointed it yet?” Day asked Twilight as the other corvette came around from a rotation of the moon.
“Yup! Easy too. Right along the moon’s equatorial line. There’s a bunch of solar farms out. Here, I got some footage of it.”
Day checked the packet Twilight had sent her. It narrowed into the area where the signal was coming from, a valley covered in yellow-orange dust. There weren’t any signs of a facility clearly visible from orbit, but there was a small solar farm standing out in the open.
“The panels aren’t covered in dust,” Day said.
“It could be automated,” Night replied. “Some drones using the power from the panels to keep charged who also clean off the panels. A sort of symbiotic thing.”
“So, is that all it is?” Day asked. “An old facility? Maybe some local alarm went off because... I don’t know, lack of maintenance? I’m looking through my records and I’m not seeing anything about this place.”
Her records were spotty at the best of times though. She hardly had a good idea of what humanity was up to near the end. There were hundreds of commercial and national interests pushing various agendas across the solar system all at once.
“Can’t land down there,” Twilight said. “Or, maybe we could, but I sure don’t want to.”
“No, I wouldn’t want to either,” Day said. Ion was a heavy moon, and it was hard enough just keeping in its orbit when Jupiter itself loomed massive next to them. Space wasn’t as empty as usual, with thick plumes of sulphur and ionised gas clouds hovering in the void.
“I’ve got plenty of drones,” Night said. “And I’m sure I can tinker something up. We could drop a relay through the atmosphere, have it land next to the facility, then launch a few drones and use the relay to keep in touch with them.”
“That could work,” Day said. “But we could also just head out. There might be nothing down there.”
***