Chapter 58: C: One Chance

Rafaela wasted precious minutes listening to her ship's core explain how it had been able to detect that they were even moving, let alone "launched" as it had described. 

"The original core has many more inbuilt devices, such as a small gyroscope and even an internal radiation meter," Sys20si informed her rather enviously.

Being unplugged from its ship and disconnected from any networks should have left both cores basically blind. The fact that the old core had actually contained such measuring devices as part of its core unit made her even more suspicious about just what kind of scout it had been originally. She eyed the bulkier, somewhat dull, and scruffed surface of the reassembled old core warily and then looked at the shiny silver surface of the newer core with disapproval.

"Nevermind that," she said shortly. "How much longer would it take if we stop the archiving when we reach the end of my mother's history with the old core?"