Chapter Twenty-Three - In the Grace
The warhead-less torpedo crawled across space with an incredible 1.9kmp/h of relative acceleration.
Day was rather ecstatic by the progress though. The torpedo was ugly of course, but it was also a scientific experiment of sorts that she had dug into while waiting for her repairs to be done.
Night was already waiting in low-orbit around Ceres, and Day would have been with her, but her gyroscopes had malfunctioned on launch. She’d noticed that the systems had been overly stressed on their return trip to Ceres with the Accord corvette, but didn’t realise how badly so until she started doing checks on herself before her launch.
It was best to repair that kind of thing while she was still stationed on Ceres and in her berth. It meant more drones nearby to conduct the repairs, and all of The Weeping of Mothers’ infrastructure for making new replacement parts.
They were already building materials for their next sister. The skeleton of that ship was laid out already, and some drones were starting to work on other parts of the vessel.
All in all, it meant that Day had time to kill.
“What are you doing?” Night asked.
Day knew that her sister had been watching her experiments. She’d felt the sensor pings on her new torpedo design a few times already. “I’m trying something,” Day said.
“Is it even working?”
“I think so. I’m getting some acceleration.”
Night scoffed. “Under two kilometres and hour. That’s not fast enough for anything.”
Day hummed to herself. “True. But it’s got a very low energy cost, and low signature.”
“Yeah, but at the speed it’s moving the enemy will have time to see it coming and react with the naked eye. Plus it’s glowing a bit.”
That was true. The torpedo created a very faint, short-lived glow whenever it accelerated certain kinds of particles out of its rear. It was barely visible, but barely wasn’t enough. “This is called a French drive, after its inventor. It basically scoops up ionised particles and accelerates them using an electrical field. The push back from that acceleration pushes the ship forwards. But since the particles weigh very little and the push isn’t very strong...”
“You’ve basically got all of the acceleration of a fart,” Night said.
“Basically. It’s quiet though.”
Night observed her for a while, then Day noticed that Night’s internal factories were producing something. An hour or two later, Night was launching a dozen miniature torpedoes. They had everything from laser-thrust systems, to different flavours of ion trusters and even some chemical thrusters. “You’re right, it’s quieter than all the rest,” Night said.
“It’s mono-directional,” Day said. “And even that’s not perfect, the thrust cone is somewhat randomly shaped.”
“Yeah, sure, but you could tie some proper boosters onto it. Use this French drive to crawl closer to the target while mostly invisible, then blast out at them,” Night said. “Or... you could make a bigger drive?”
“It has a poor relationship with the square-cubed law,” Day admitted.
“Of course it does,” Night muttered. “Can’t use it as the power source for a torpedo platform, then?”
Day considered it, then ran a few simulations. “We could. Want to test it to scale?” she asked after sending Night her simulation results.
They spent the rest of the day building to-scale replicas of Day’s idea, then improving upon it. Night’s ability to rapidly print out their ideas and launch them with her drones meant that while they were relying on simulations for initial designs, they could rapidly test them and see where simulation didn’t hold up. It meant both improving their sims and finding issues in their designs.
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In the end, they had something shaped like a shark. At least Day saw something of a shark in the design. Night didn’t, but Day suspected she was just being difficult.
The platform had a wide mouth at one end which narrowed down at the rear. Two fins stuck out from its sides, each with a pair of launch tubes built into them. The platform was angular, and with their final version, Night covered it in careful etchings and none-reflective paints.
It was as hard to detect as anything they’d made so far. With its energy signature basically at zero and its drive creating no real direct heat, the entire platform could only be spotted by a lucky lidar bounce or via line of sight, and even then, that wouldn't give away its purpose. It was small as well, only seven metres long and five wide and tall, with a taper at the end.
Not so small that it couldn’t be noticed, but small enough that it would be dismissed as a ship.
And, of course, it carried four torpedoes. They had nuclear--Night insisted--shaped charge warheads.
If their sims were right--it was one of the things they didn’t dare test out in the open--then the nuclear blast would bathe a target in X and Gamma rays before the explosion itself cooked them... assuming they go close enough for that.
“We’d need lots of these to catch the Accord. They have good point defence.”
“I can make one a day,” Night said. “The torpedoes take longer than the platform.”
“We might want to look into ways of making the platforms have cold-launch capabilities. That way they can launch multiple times, then wait for pickup without being seen.”
Day was starting to spin up new ideas for torpedo designs when she got a ping from The Weeping of Mothers. It was an invitation to a simulation.
-Direct Communication Link Established-
Day appeared within a train car, scenery zipping by outside of the windows, the floor beneath her feet rumbling with a steady cadence. She was in a car that had a bar along one wall, with stools and a few blank-faced patrons sitting at nearby tables and chatting aimlessly.
The Weeping of Mothers was standing next to the bar, smiling at a dog drone placed down a coffee onto the counter which she picked up. “Hello, Daybreak, hello, Night,” the older AI said.
“What’s up?” Night asked as she appeared next to Day with her arms folded behind her head.
“I thought you might want to meet your new sibling,” The Weeping of Mothers said. “Her core has spun up and she’s ready for a chat, and I imagine to help run things while we get her ship built up.”
"Oh, sure,” Day said. She glanced over to the bar. “Where is she?”
“Hi!” someone said from right behind Day.
She jumped and turned around, finding a girl standing there, even though the simulation’s backend didn’t indicate anyone should have been there at all.
“Hey,” the girl said with a wave. She was a bit shorter than Day, though her cat ears made up for it a little, with long bluish-black hair, bronze eyes, and a grin so mischievous it was downright dangerous. “I’m In the Grace of Twilight, but you can call me Twilight... when you happen to see me.”
***