There was the tap-tap-tap of footsteps on the other side of the door, resonating through the metal of the floor, and both of them fell silent.
"I- I actually don't want you to go out there." Kalitan whispered. "It's probably nothing, it's just… the militia is very protective, but also don't… take a lot of chances. With outsiders."
"They didn't seem too bad." Lera whispered back, and she winced.
"You weren't being considered outsiders." she replied. Lera nodded, eyes wide, and her hand fell to the mass of equipment at her belt.
To her holstered ACER pistol.
---
"-we're having trouble with the exterior docking rings. You have to understand, these systems are very old."
"Is there another airlock we can use? We just want our people back." Chrissy replied. Behind her, the doors slid open and Tai'lon entered the bridge, and Admiral Laiconva's helmet moved in a way that seemed to indicate no. Light flicked over the helmet, a fearful green and yellow.
"I'm sorry, we'll let you know as soon as we have it fixed." he finished, then the line cut.
"...I have a bad feeling about this." Chrissy said, sinking back into the captain's chair. "He's scared."
"You know, I got that impression too." Sandra said, unsure how she knew that. "What do we do?"
"I don't know. They basically have all our command staff." Chrissy said, leaning her chin on her hand and thinking hard. At that time, it hadn't seemed unreasonable for them to transfer over for the meeting, things were entirely friendly. "Perhaps sending everyone with authority on an away mission wasn't the best idea."
"... and Lera." Sandra said. "Did we get a reply from her yet?"
"Not yet. I've sent another few messages. Everyone else is at the airlock, Captain says they're not being allowed to leave, same excuse."
"This is transparently a hostage situation." Tai'lon said, taking a seat at the astrogation station. "But they are yet to make demands. Unusual."
"We have to figure out what's going on, but we have to do it subtly, because everyone is still really tense," Sandy said, tapping her fingers together under her chin. "And direct questions might lead to direct confrontation while our people are over there. Correct?"
"Correct," Tai'lon said, frowning.
The two of them were sitting together at the console controlling the Newton-2's sensor apparatus, which were all aimed at the Runner fleet. The homeship itself was the current target of their close in inspections, and it was impossible to tell if the docking rings were or weren't working - but Sandy's gut said no, they were definitely working. She had tracked too much constant traffic between the homeship and the rest of the Runner fleet.
The view swirled and then focused in on the oblong shape of the Scorpion-4.
"Hm?" Sandy looked at Tai'lon, who was operating the controls, his brow furrowing, his ear points turned slightly down in concentration. "What are you looking for?"
"I'm not entirely sure," Tai'lon said, quietly. "But...I suppose that I have what you humans call a hunch."
"Ah, you mean a supposition based on a bunch of half-conscious, barely remembered factoids bouncing around inside of your mind that you cannot fully articulate?" Sandy asked with a little grin.
"Yes," he said, then tapped a few buttons - bringing up the Runner fleet over the past few hours. "...there." He pointed at the siloship. "That's what I was looking for - that stationkeeping burn."
All ships were in motion, at all times. When a fleet was in formation, that meant they had shared or nearly identical orbits - in general, it was easier for a ship to catch up or slow down to meet another ship in the fleet by adjusting an orbit along the same plane. Even with antimatter torches and faster than light travel, plane change maneuvers are more expensive than they were worth. This meant that the entire fleet was less of an amalgamation of ships in a loose cloud and more of a long string of beads, with the siloship near the front and smaller ships nearer to the back, and all of them were in a high orbit above the gas giant.
Gas giants were excellent places to remass and even generate energy - as several ships had deployed magnetodynamic tethers down through the immense world's magnetosphere and were siphoning off electrical energy, likely to charge capacitors or to run portable atom smashers to create what little drips and drabs of antimatter to supplement whatever their fusion generators could create. However, they had an unfortunate side effect of also being huge dense masses - masses that dragged upon all the things in their orbit.
This meant that ships, even those in 'stable' orbits, had to periodically expend reaction mass to keep themselves in formation. Stationkeeping, in other words. It was also why space stations, despite stationary being a part of their name, still needed engines.
Sandy frowned as she and Tai'lon watched the stationkeeping burn on repeat five, six, seven times in rapid succession.
"...it's too short," she said, nodding.
"Precisely," Tai'lon said.
"That doesn't mean they fired the nukes," Sandy said.
"Excuse me, what?" Chrissy stepped from the center of the bridge to the two of them. "I only caught half of that."
"The Scorpion-4 is not massive enough," Tai'lon said, with growing confidence. "If you gave me a few minutes, I could probably calculate out the exact amount of mass it has to have lost-"
"On it!" Sandy pushed her chair along the tracks that ran along the edge of the bridge floor. She started to punch in computer keys - and soon, the chirruping voice of the computer filtered through the air.
"What could account for-" WORKING! "-the mass loss?" Chrissy asked. "Maybe they took parts - habitation sections, the cryodeck?"
"The siloships, according to postwar-" WORKING! "-documentation, are approximately-" WORKING "-fifty percent reaction mass, forty percent missile, and ten percent 'everything else,'" Tai'lon said. "It seems unlikely they aren't nearly fully fueled: they would surely refuel the warships first, and civilian ships last, upon entering a system."
"WORKING!" the computer siad.
"So, you think this much mass loss can only be accounted by missiles being...they might have been moved?" Chrissy suggested.
"Unlikely," Sandy said. "Launchers aren't complicated machines, but...they're still mass. These missiles are like fifty meters long with big MIRV warheads, they're for reentry, not space combat."
"Yeah, most of those ships are cut to the bone. Where would they even put them?" Jae-Haw said.
"Yeah, why put nukes on them when you have a big honking huge missile carrying siloship for you?" Sandra concluded, then she turned as the result printed out from the tiny slot on the computer with a soft brrrt-RR-brrt-CHATTERCHATTERCHATTER noise. She tore it free, reading it...and slowly, she started to frown.
"How much mass are we missing here?" Chrissy asked.
"Nearly a thousand metric tons, Jesus Christ, that's ten missiles with a hundred and fifty warheads each, each topping at, what, sixty megatons!?" Sandy asked. "What'd they shoot it at?"
"Combat? With pirates or governments or the like?" Nhi asked.
"They're useless in ship-to-ship combat. They're high-flow, low-endurance engines, like thirty seconds of burn and minimal corrective abilities. They're for scattering smart warheads into a planetary atmosphere, not for fighting." Jae-Haw said.
"Bombardment missiles. Like the ones the Aquillian Empire brought to Earth at the start of the war." Tai'lon said. "The ship is useful as a weapon of intimidation and mass destruction, just having it would be an enormous boon in the form of a deterrent for the fleet, but it would not contribute much to a larger battle."
Chrissy closed her eyes, putting her hand on her chest. "They're city killers," she said, quietly. "That's all they're good for."
"... we should get scanning. Get the full array pointed their way." Chrissy said, "They'll know we're doing it, but the time for niceties is rapidly running out." Sandra rushed to start punching things in, lights blinking across her console. While the main rule was that you never pointed your engines at somebody, pointing your main sensor array at somebody was typically frowned upon in casual circumstances. It was an invasion of privacy, something you only did when you were expecting a fight.
She paused for a moment, a light blinking on her console, and then she turned to see Tai'lon staring at the viewscreen.
"Uh, Tai'lon, I need you to give me helm for a second. Need to focus the dish." Sandra asked, and Tai suddenly seemed to come back to reality, reaching down to flip the switch. The viewport tumbled slightly as the ship slowly came to its new bearing. Sandra leaned in close, narrowing her eyes. "Shit."
"What?" Chrissy asked, then she saw it too. "Shit."
"Not only are there missing missiles, just like you predicted, there's abrasion around tubes six, eight, ten and twelve," Sandra said, pointing at the screen. The Newton's main array was massive compared to the rest of the ship, and this close they could scan the inside of the launch tubes from behind the hatches. "That's the kind of wear and tear you only get on multiple launches - hot launches, which meant that they were worried about point defense. Or...return fire." She bit her lip. "I...was kinda hoping we wouldn't find this."
"Why?" Tai'lon asked.
"Because...okay, selling nuclear bombs is not a great look," Sandy said, turning on her seat to face the rest of them. "But it's a fuck of a lot better than shooting them at people."
"This, combined with their cavalier attitude towards genetic engineering is not painting a complimentary picture of the Scorpion-4 crew," Tai'lon said.
"They thought our species was extinct," Jae-Haw said, crossing his arms over his chest.
"That is not a sufficient explanation for what may be mass murder," Tai'lon said, frowning.
"We don't know everything," Chrissy said. "...is there...atmospheric wear and tear? The kind that we might see from them bombarding a planetary body?"
Sandy sighed. "That's a lot harder to prove conclusively. Like, this ship goes into orbit around planets all the time as part of a Runner fleet. But…" She looked at the screen. "There's not an exceptional amount of abrasion or thrust burns or anything like that. This isn't definitive!" She pointed her finger at Chrissy, warningly. "So don't take it as definitive. We'll have to perform more detailed scans..."
"Test firings." Nhi offered, then wilted. "Not… ten test-firings…"
"What do we do?" Jae-Haw asked.
"Right," Chrissy sighed. "If they think that we're going to...start anything, well, they have the Captain, they have Jools, they have Lera..."
"And more guns," Jae-Haw said.
"Yes, that too," Chrissy said, nodding. "We can't be hasty. Let's see what we can figure out, and act from there."
---
You have 3 followup questions you can ask about the Siloship. Make a plan and write out the questions below. Remember, your scanners are really powerful and basically magic, so you don't have to make guesses: you can ask very direct questions and you will get answers.
Remember, your questions can include asking about Locks, in case you want to look into its defensive or offensive capabilities.
You also have 3 Data on the Siloship, which might be useful later.
