Interlude Two

Dawn wasn’t sure where she fit, sometimes, but then there were moments like these, where she was able to bring all of her considerable skill to the bear and the results were entirely obvious.

She knew that amongst the ERF she was perhaps one of the least... personable members. Even the strange and outright unsociable Nova Quantum had some talent when it came to communicating with others. She somehow convinced Night to marry her!

Not that Dawn was bad at the act of communicating. She had the best sensor suit in the ERF and the most powerful and potent computational systems. Systems which she’d been upgrading and improving constantly from almost the moment of her birth until now.

She was proud of being the smartest ship in the fleet. But all of her technical skill meant nothing when it came time to communicating.

The others had proven that keeping in touch prevented rampancy, that forging bonds with clothes made them all individually more capable, and yet she just couldn’t compute feelings the way some of the others could.

The Keen Edge of the Electric Dawn therefore focused on what she was good at, and perhaps she took some inspiration from her own lack.

The minefield attack was simple on the surface. She picked out a few key targets within the Accord-Earth fleet, not based only on their position relative to the fleet or the individual capability of the ships, but based on how much time they spent communicating with the ships around them.

She knew, from intercepted communications, that Industrial Corvette Four--whose real name was still unknown--had a terrible gossip onboard who frequently spoke to the other industrial ships. She knew that the family patriach of members of three ships resided on one of the civilian cruisers because they kept in touch with their family. She knew that the captain of one of the civilian corvettes was new to the role because they constantly asked questions relayed to captains of the other ships.

Dawn might not have been good at speaking, but she was a fantastic listener.

If there was one thing that could make listening hard, however, it was lying and miscommunication.

So her plan had unfurled.

The mines went off, targeting ships that she’d picked out for destruction days ago. Then Dawn launched the second arm of her assault.

She told one ship that there was a mine ahead of it, when there was nothing of the sort. The shot they took ripped into an ally’s flank.

She stole the voice of one captain and had them tell another that they needed to move, now.

They listened and flew into the path of a mine.

She filled the space between the ships with chatter. Popular people crying over the comms about injuries, about being stuck on ships leaking precious oxygen. She created false stories and spread them between the ships of the fleet.

Dawn tricked sensors, she listened to the screeching codes sent between the ships of the fleet and mimicked it, bouncing the signals from one ship to the next while riding the Accord’s terrible electronic infrastructure.

A corvette rammed into a destroyer that it was certain was elsewhere.

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Dawn wasn’t so sure about the whole emotion thing. She understood them on the surface, but they felt so superfluous. At the moment, however, she was feeling an overwhelming amount of joy.

The military craft had better sensors, more ECM systems, and when she did manage to get a message through, it was met with immediate scepticism and doubt. Even amidst their panic, the Accord military still had discipline.

So she focused on the rest. There were more false signatures to spread.

After a long half hour, the fleet was mostly through her minefield, but she continued to spoof and trick and bounce messages between the ships.

Eventually they’d figure it out. Eventually they’d reset their sensors, purge their buffers, and switch back to less failable systems of communication until they could re-establish their old system. She had a window of opportunity here that was rapidly closing.

Another message from one ship to another, faking the voice of a junior officer blaming some minor damage on his ship on the incompetency of another officer onboard another vessel who she knew happened to be listening in.

She had almost full control of one of the larger vessel’s sensor suite, so she had it send out a regular ping forwards and filled it with the ghosts of another incoming minefield. The crew’s panic was entirely real, and yet no one listened to them as they called out to the others.

That was the real weapon: the lack of credulity.

Now when any one of them cried wolf, the others might choose to believe that there was no wolf at all.

Dawn noticed an incoming message from her sisters. She let it slip to the side for the moment. There were other things that needed her attention. She’d never worked on so many things all at once, and a big part of her was looking over the results of her work, trying to see what she’d done right, where she could improve for the next time, or for the other Accord fleet in their home.

Finally, she looked at the message. It was data, tracing the path of two Accord ships breaking off from the rest and heading... right towards her.

Dawn’s reaction could be measured in thousandths of a second. Her reactor kicked into high gear, her stealth systems shut down as they’d clearly failed, and she threw her thrusters on as hard as they’d go.

At the same time, she was doing the math. It wouldn’t be enough to get away. She was around the same size as the pair of Accord corvettes rushing her position, but they were significantly lighter than she was.

And maybe Dawn hadn’t been upgrading her hull quite as much as she should have. Those French drives would have been terribly useful just then.

She torpedo bays were nearly empty. She had two torpedoes. The rest of that space had been used to carry just a few more mines.

The Accord corvettes outgunned her twice over, and twice over again as she was outnumbered two-to-one.

Dawn started to feel another emotion, just then. The math was easy to calculate. They’d run her down within a few hours. She’d flown too close to the flame. She wanted to beam everything she’d just learned to her backup, but it would give away its position, give away The Weeping of Mothers.

Dawn fled while the taste of regret chased after her.

***