Chapter Two - Discovery
There were a multitude of tasks to do, or at least, there were literally millions of items on The Weeping of Mother’s checklist. Some simple, others were complex to the point where Day suspected they would take decades of work to accomplish. Time didn’t seem to be the most important factor for her progenitor ship.
Still, Day wanted to get to work, so that’s what she did... only in a slight bout of selfishness, she picked out a set of tasks that would perhaps not be the most optimal.
“You want to go exploring?” The Weeping of Mothers asked as Day transmitted her plans for approval. The plans returned almost instantly, approved already, though with a series of corrections and suggestions. “That’s fine. Stretch your wings, so to speak. But if you’re going to be giving yourself a stress-test, then maybe you can help us along at the same time.”
“Oh, I don’t mind that at all,” Day said. The added tasks were relatively simple. She was to ferry some drones through the nearby sectors of the asteroid belt. While most of the bodies in the belt were quite distant from one another, there were still areas where they were congregated more closely, enough that at a full burn it might only take her a day or two to go from one asteroid to another.
The Weeping of Mothers had a chart with all of the local asteroids which had been properly explored already. Some even had mining stations planted onto their sides where drones could grab gathered resources and fly them back to Ceres.
Day’s new mission was to head towards the nearest such cluster, nearly twenty-four days travel away at a steady, responsible burn. Along the way she was to launch a few exploratory drones towards nearby bodies. They carried spectrographic equipment, drills, and a few other necessities so that once they arrived, they could tag the asteroid and relay its contents back to Ceres.
“We’re missing some base materials,” The Weeping of Mothers explained. “Gold, cobalt, silver. We have plenty of ferrous metals, but certain alloys need to be made at great expense. Finding a fresh source in the belt might be more energy and time efficient.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Day said.
It took a day for the brace of drones on magnetic launchers to be attached to her hull. It was ungainly, and not terribly nice to look upon, but the entire setup was designed to be detached once she returned, so she lived with the indignity.
With a spin of her gyroscopes to realign herself, Day pointed away from Ceres and fired up her thrusters at full burn for the first time.
She couldn’t feel the acceleration the way an organic with blood and bones might, but a million sensors across her body were all happy to scream at her about the sudden stress pushing against her entire frame.
Paying close attention to those, she watched for any breaks or subsystems that might fail under the added Gs of her sudden acceleration. A few of her more delicate sensors broke, and she was frustrated to see a hull panel buckle as it was struck by a loose bolt.
Once her acceleration topped off and things settled down, she had her maintenance ‘cat’ drones come out of their tiny berths within her hull. They stalked about, fixing things up, checking on parts of herself where she lacked sensors to see, and repaired that one sheared-off bolt with a fresh one from her stores.
Soon enough, she launched the first drone towards a passing asteroid. She followed it with her sensor suite, and started to test the accuracy of her equipment. The drone itself was given a simple stealth sub-routine wherein it would go dark, would turn on its electromagnetic shielding, or would give itself slight course-corrections.
She knew exactly where it was heading, so it was really impossible for it to completely disappear, not when she could run a predictive algorithm and rediscover it that way. Still, it was a hard test of her sensor suite, and she found herself moderately frustrated by how often her picture of the drone became fuzzy, indistinct, or when she lost sight of it altogether.
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Day spent the next couple of days launching drones and fiddling with her sensors. From what she could tell, her sensors were once military grade, but they were designed to be operated by an AI that did nothing but check on them. They were decent, but lacked the sheer processing power behind them to make full use of their capabilities.
She was likely far stronger than any dedicated AI made for her own sensors, but she had a billion other tasks to take care of, and the care of her sensors would fall to subroutines which were...
Well, she assumed that the default ones she had had been created by The Weeping of Mothers, but it was clear that they were designed more for use on automated near-dumb drones who didn’t have the processing power to spare.
For her own personal use though, she wanted something more refined, and she did have some processing power to spare, so she dismantled the current subroutines and started putting them back together from scratch.
It was on the twentieth day of her exploratory trip that those changes to her sensor suite suddenly came in handy. She was just testing it with another drone launch (one of the last, she had three left on the brace) when her sensors picked something up.
At first she almost dismissed it. There was an asteroid off in the distance, a relatively large one, but it was out of the range of the corridor she was set to explore. Her sensors picking it up wasn’t a surprise, but the returning information was.
The asteroid had a slight, very weak, electromagnetic signature around it.
Day took over manual control of her sensors and pointed them towards the rock in question. She confirmed it all a half hour later as readings returned. That rock had something electronic on it.
It could be a coincidence. A rock with lots of conductive materials on the surface, ferromagnets or silica could produce a false-positive, but... she was curious now.
Spinning herself around, Day decelerated and turned her forwards momentum into a gentle curve towards the asteroid in question. She launched one more drone in the direction she was intending to go in, then fired a pulsed laser message back to one of the antenna on Ceres, letting The Weeping of Mothers know she was going off-course.
She didn’t have time to get a reply before her new trajectory was locked in and she was hurtling closer to the asteroid. She was going to buzz past the rock a mere two hundred kilometres away.
That brought her more than close enough to get a proper idea of what she was looking at.
The asteroid was bean-shaped, with a large indentation on one side that created a vaguely cup-shaped space within. And in that space, hanging off the asteroid from long cords and strutted beams, was a station.
Day searched her archives for anything about the station and found nothing, at least at first. It wasn’t until she had a better scan of it that she was able to compare it to an existing platform.
Nemoco United, Deep Space Refuelling Station Type Four. A mass-produced station designed to refuel ships going deeper out of the system, past the asteroid belt. The stations were meant to be anchored into a much heavier object to prevent the momentum of any captured ships from pushing them out of their predictable orbits.
From what she could glean, there had been dozens of type four stations built, and even more type threes and fives and eventually newer models with their own distinct nomenclature.
It took her a while to match velocities with the asteroid and the station hooked onto its side, but soon enough, Day was flying closer to the station itself at a calm, leisurely pace. She had a pair of exploratory drones, and plenty more smaller, repair drones in her hull that could be repurposed for scouting in a pinch.
She was almost giddy to begin.
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