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> BAIT. Wait for them to come within weapons range. Even with conservative estimates, the mothership has enough materials to repair the destroyer and completely refill your feedstock reserves.
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You wait.
The SOJOUNER does not stop. It continues to push forward on an intercept trajectory, cutting a nuclear-chemical wake through the sparser asteroid belts. Every few hours, gantries and external hangers flicker and blink against the dark backdrop of interplanetary space. Chains of sub-vessels detach like falling seed pods, merging into loose squadrons back before igniting their own engines. Passive sensors dotting the hull exterior catch snippets of radio traffic before feeding it into an decryption module.
"...you sure they're unarmed..."
"...insufficient Delta-V to...specified vector change...."
"...confirm location request..."
"...capacitor undervolt on our cutting lasers..."
You tune the comm traffic out after a few minutes, trusting your deck-crew to relay any important updates.
In the meantime, your gold-ringed pupils scan through reams of schematic diagrams and performance charts, cross-referencing known variables with your own sensor readings. You adjust approach angles and weapon ranges, distilling them into the rough schematics of three or four candidate engagement plans. The computational effort is frustratingly taxing on your - now very human - hardware, but the process of planning and calculation is no less calming than you remember.
You exhale quietly, run your overtaxed circulatory system through a purge cycle, and look behind you.
Against, perhaps, your own better judgement, you had temporarily requested the presence of the manager-captain of Sojouner-91 along with three of his senior officers. No amount of information substituted for observational experience, and you had considered it beneficial to query them directly instead of relying on their salvage ship's primitive communications array. So far, the four of them have chosen to stay at the edge of your focus when not addressed, their dark, plain uniforms blending into the shadowed margins of the bridge.
Their reticence was...understandable. Any doubts they harbored about the veracity of your identity had evaporated the moment they boarded the SOLSTICE. Outside the habitation unit, the rest of the ship still bore the uncanny hollowness of an automated vessel. The compartments, spotless. The crew, blank-faced and silent. On a human ship, there were always the subtle signs - old complaints scratched behind a worn bulkhead or a grimy table reserved for mid-shift entertainment. But here, there was nothing.
