Chapter Twenty - Tricky Return

Day didn’t expect that dragging the Accord corvette back would be so stressful, but it seemed like everything that could go wrong, chose to do so.

First, one of the tow lines snapped. It wasn’t the end of the world. They had linked the ship between themselves so that if the lines snapped it wouldn’t hurtle into them, and the corvette had a number of drones attached to it with their own thrusters acting to keep it steady.

Of course, the moment that line snapped, it swung back, whipped into one of the drones, and sprayed its remains across empty space and set the entire wreck to twisting.

It took some careful manoeuvring and nearly half a day’s time just to stabilise it once more and reconnect the ship to both of their hulls.

An inspection of the line showed that it had been worn down next to the break, likely because of improper storage in Night’s cargo bay. The newer ship took full responsibility for that, but it still very obviously angered her and that turned her mood sour.

Then, on the latter half of their approach to Ceres, Night detected an electronic signal coming from the wreck, and they had to abort their orbit and change their flight pattern while they investigated the cause.

They didn’t need the wreck calling back to the Accord with the location of their base on Ceres, or even the pattern they flew to get there.

As it turned out, though, it was mostly a false alarm. The signal came from within the crew quarters, from a small device in a locker stuffed next to the equivalent of a bed for one of the Accord Cs. The mosquito-like alien had something similar to a smartwatch. Or perhaps it was merely a personal computer.

They broke into the device, finding it entirely devoid of any sort of firewalls or protections, and after a few hours of trying to decode the Accord’s strange and oddly simplistic programming language, discovered that the signal was most likely destined for another system within the ship itself.

It was an alarm, basically, telling the user to do some routine maintenance and checking on the ship’s main computer for the state of the items to be maintained.

Just in case though, Night chewed up one of her modular cargo holds for raw materials with her fabricator and built a wire mesh cage which they wrapped around the corvette and electrified. It created a rudimentary faraday cage, which would hopefully trap any EM signatures within the confines of the corvette. Then they sent drones in to dismantle anything with even the slightest bit of power.

It pained Day a little, but they had to jettison the missiles. Each missile had an electronic suite in them which could relay information back to the corvette, and presumably, to other Accord ships. It was all basic stuff, like relative position and velocity, fuel remaining and warhead status. The kinds of things that a missile needed to relay in order to have its targeting adjusted on the fly.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

They couldn’t afford to have the missiles relay their position on Ceres, and taking them all apart was an arduous task that Day didn’t want to conduct in empty space. The only tools capable of handling it were onboard Night, and they didn’t need a missile triggering an anti-tampering failsafe while inside one of their hulls.

One day they’d get a rack of missiles onto a remote station with the right tools, but that could wait.

With their cargo more firmly secured, they resumed their trek back to Ceres, taking it a little slower for the sake of caution.

Their sensors didn’t detect a peep from the ship, even as they entered a stable orbit around Ceres (and zipped past EFT The Ticking of the Clock, which Day pinged in greeting, much to Night’s amusement) and finally arrived in a nice, stable orbit about their main base.

Tug drones rose up, and with enough thrust to carry a ship ten times as heavy as the corvette, they lowered it down to the surface and into a facility that The Weeping of Mothers uncovered for them.

It was buried twenty metres deep into the rock of Ceres, with dozens of electronic countermeasures embedded into the walls to keep the contents nice and isolated. That was on top of the protection afforded by having tons of stone between the facility and the surface.

“Beautiful work, girls,” The Weeping of Mothers said as they hung out in close orbit. “I’ve turned some cat drones to taking the ship apart. It will take some time, but I’m certain we’ll learn plenty about the Accord from this.”

“Yeah, we’ll figure out what makes the bastards tick,” Night said. “I don’t like the idea that they’re even a little bit better than us.”

“That won’t last forever,” Day said. “Every time we steal one of their secrets and improve upon it, we gain a little bit of an advantage over the Accord.”

"I appreciate the corpses as well,” The Weeping of Mothers said. It was a disturbing thing to hear from her progenitor. Day sent a curious ping back, asking for clarification. “Humanity has a long and storied history with biological weapons. It would be a shame if we didn’t continue that sort of tradition.”

“Oh,” Day said.

It was true that one day they intended to bring the fight to the Accord themselves. She wasn’t sure what to think of that. Then again, her progenitor’s name might have been a hint about her intentions there.

“So, are we getting back to work yet?” Night asked. She already had resupply ships heading up into orbit to meet her with replacement parts and a new cargo container to replace the one she’d cannibalised.

“I... maybe,” Day said. “We might want to stay here for a little bit. If this wreck unlocks new technologies to try, then we might want to copy and install those right away, if only to test them while we have the time to do so.”

“That doesn’t sound like work,” Night said in protest, but she didn’t push the issue.

Day appreciated it. She was feeling the stress at the moment.

***