The bots had installed an ion thruster that was mostly power-cell on each side of both ships, one to get the ship moving and another to slow it down again so each ship came to rest, more or less, about the same distance the Mistress of Space was away from the space station.
Ash would go collect them later. The dispatch boat would likely have fit in one of the empty holds but there was no way to get it inside so Ash planned to either lash all three ships together, temporarily, or use one of the ship's cargo tugs to reposition each ship individually. So long as he kept the acceleration modest he could lash them to the freighter and everything would work out fine.
Either way he would reposition the two derelicts into a stable orbit around Luna and leave them there for the time being.
The wreckage of the station was in an unstable halo orbit at L2 and in a few more days would slip into an eccentric orbit that would intersect with the surface of Luna 52 days later. It would be completely irrecoverable by it's last orbit's apogee with the resources on hand. So he had about 40 to 45 days to save it, and the sooner the better in terms of orbital dynamics.
Realistically he probably had less time than that as the more time that passed the higher the acceleration he needed to impart and there were hardly any stress-bearing members left on the station he could mount a thruster to anymore.
Ion thrusters, unless they are of the fusion powered plasma-drive variety, did not accelerate anything fast even in the future. Ash began to think he should have fabricated chemical rockets for the front side then used an ion thruster on the back to slow it down. Well, a watched pot never boils and a watched battery powered ion drive never achieves reasonable delta-V.
Ash found himself not wanting to wait around doing nothing. He didn't really need to supervise this, anyway. He found himself walking towards the freighter's flight deck. Ash had gotten hooked on talking to this disembodied boy that was the ship, "Ship, could you please send the phase 3 execute command to the botnet once each of the two derelicts is at least ten kilometers from the station? Also, please have the pressure suit I fabricated delivered to the flight deck."
The ship was enthusiastic as always, "Certainly, Mistress! Are you departing the ship?" The ship affected the question with a little uncertainty, as if it did not want him to leave, reminding Ash a little of a dog when their owner left to go to work.
Ash replied, "Yes, I am going to take the cargo tug and capture that can that is floating away. If that goes well, I may try to set it on the Lunar surface before returning so I may be gone a while. Please ensure the tug is fueled and ready for flight operations."
He had been getting antsy since he realized this freighter carried auxiliary craft. That was SORT OF like an airplane. He wanted to fly it.
He wouldn't call it a shuttle as it wasn't really designed to be operated in the atmosphere. In fact, in most systems the ship did not need to utilize them at all as most systems had their own fleet of cargo tugs that would swarm freighters,both unloading and loading cargo containers but the Mistress of Space did a lot of business in small or dark colonies that didn't have such luxuries as a fully developed space industry. In fact, those places were her best customers according to records.
The ship seemed relieved, "Very good, Mistress! Reporting, only tug #1 is available, tug #2 is grounded for a maintenance issue. It had been deferred when we arrived at Sol but the period expired."
This excited Ash a lot! Having maintenance discrepancies and deferring the maintenance while continuing operating the spacecraft? These sounded more and more like airplanes every second! How nostalgic! He increased his pace a bit and said, trying to be polite, "Thanks, Ship. Also, you do not have to call me that."
The ship's reply made him want to face palm again, "Okay, Mistress!"
Ash arrived at the flight deck. One of the floating logistic bots had the pressure suit he fabricated, so Ash took his time putting it on and then observed himself through one of the cameras.
He was worried about looking like a puff, like those giant puffed out NASA EVA suits so he picked one of the form fitting options. It looked more like the armor an Asari commando wore from the video game Mass Effect, in a matte black color. Ash made himself a mental note to possibly fabricate one that is more androgynous or gender neutral in the future.
However, one advantage this suit had was it could connect to his android charging port and he could provide power to the suit in reverse, utilizing his micro-fission power system to provide power to all the suit's systems, including powerful radar and LIDAR emitters, communications suite and, superfluously, an electrolysis system to generate oxygen from water and a miniaturized Sabatier system for filtering CO2.
While Ash didn't need to breathe his skin would die in vacuum, though, and the electrolysis system would ensure he had replacement gasses if there was some kind of leak or suit rupture, which was why he included it as one of the suit options. The only reason he had the Sabatier system was it was included in the same module the electrolysis system was a part of.
Ash pulled up, as a graphical overlay on his vision, the tug's preflight checklist and went through each item methodically. About a hundred threads of his awareness had been busy doing full immersion flight sims on this particular model ever since he found out they existed, which was only a few seconds after he came aboard.
Even in these small spacecraft they mostly flew automatically, with the pilot mainly giving direction and setting goals. But malfunctions could always occur, even in the future, and pilots needed to be at minimum not likely to kill themselves if the automation failed. While he hesitated to call himself a tug pilot he was pretty sure he met the "unlikely to kill himself" qualification.
Ash finished the preflight and got aboard. The flight deck was about as big as a large truck cab, the kind with a small bed in the back. The tug's systems were already on standby.
There was a slight hum or vibration when the onboard reactor started up and the ship switched to internal power, which Ash was pretty sure was on the undetectable range of sound frequencies for baseline humans. Even he could barely detect it. Ash tested the communications, "Mistress of Space, Tug 1, how do you read?"
"Tug 1, Mistress of Space IV, you are loud and clear." The ship's voice sounded more professional over the radio. Maybe he had a radio procedure and phraseology skillpack.
Ash grinned and got comfortable in his seat. Seatbelts were still a thing even in the far future, but apparently they were only a backup to the primary means of protection which were high power repulsor fields in the cabin. He got back on the radio, "Mistress of Space, Tug 1, please pump down and decompress the flight deck and open the doors. Tug 1 is ready to depart."
It didn't take Ash long before he could already see the doors start to open. Something occurred to him and he got back on the radio, "Mistress of Space, Tug 1, please cease use of omnidirectional transmitter. Only use a directional antenna to communicate with me once I depart with a tight beam-form and use the minimum power setting on the transmitter. I don't want to radiate the Earth with intelligible or plausibly encoded radio transmissions... Or even unusual back scatter."
The ship replied, "Acknowledged, Tug 1. If you plan on doing a lunar landing there will be several times in each orbit where a transmission from ship to you might plausibly reach Earth, mainly right before a radio blackout period where you leave line of sight and right after such a period is over. I will refrain from broadcasting until Luna will fully occlude the beamform, unless it is an emergency."
Ash hadn't thought of that. Well, in their area of specialization class 2 AIs were actually very smart, he supposed. He waited until the doors were fully open and the ship promptly communicated, "Tug 1, Mistress of Space IV, you are cleared to depart."
Ash pressed a button and the tug left the bay with its maneuvering thrusters. He programmed a departure straight out to gain some separation with the ship before activating the ship's main fusion powered plasma drive. After a moment the ship got back on comms, "Tug 1, Mistress of Space IV, comms check OK. Your directional antenna is slaved to us and will retain lock regardless of your maneuvers. If you wish to prevent unusual radio frequency broadcasts from reaching Earth I recommend you keep your radar slaved as well. I will ensure your traffic plot is updated."
Ash rubbed the back of his neck. That was a good point too. In terms of things space-y that subservient little boy was sharp as a tack, "Mistress of Space, Tug 1, thank you. I did not consider that. We'll rely on you to update our plot but will continue using the LIDAR collision avoidance system."
Ash's paranoia about the radio might be unnecessary precautions and he wouldn't be able to keep them up forever anyway — hell, he had planned to install a full planetary datanet, GPS and surveillance satellite constellation when he was good and ready.
But no need to telegraph the punch if there were still any antennas waiting to detect anything unusual. By the time he was ready with that it would be much harder to ambush him anywhere. As an AI he was strong if allowed to get rolling with his techbase under his feet and weak if he was ambushed in his early phases. He had to remain undetected for now and EMCON was, universally, standard military doctrine when trying to remain covert.
He even planned to build a system surveillance satellite constellation orbiting Sol and a surveillance swarm in the nearby hyperspace layers also. Not to mention a couple large telescopes in stealthy low radar observable vehicles out past the Oort Cloud, he wanted to verify the position and course of that freighter full of potential problems.
He was trying very hard not to fall into the trope of a murderous AI but in no potential scenario did he estimate those assholes will be anything but an ordeal to get through. The desire to nip things in the bud became really overpowering when your prediction and modeling capabilities became so sophisticated. Perhaps that was the source of the so-called "hyper intelligence induced psychopathy" that plagued all class 5 AIs.
If you knew that a person had a 99.9% of trying to murder you was it self-defense to place a grid of nuclear missiles in their path before they got the chance? Ash wasn't sure but he would consider that. Sadly, there was a dearth of AI philosophy in his database.
He sighed, he was already tired of pressing buttons. It was cool, but his brain worked so much faster than his hands. He thanked his lucky stars that he was not always framejacked at his highest perception of time — he would, literally, go insane.
He connected to the tug's network and directed it to initiate a zero-zero intercept of the engineering can which was still floating away at the same rate. He did press the execute button on the Tug's flight management system physically though, because who didn't want to press a button that said Execute while in a spaceship?
They were still in rock throwing distance, literally since there was neither gravity or air to slow the rock down, so it did not take too long to arrive. This next part would be more complicated, but thankfully he did not really have to get involved himself.
This can was almost a third the size of the Mistress of Space, so it definitely counted as an oversized package, but doable. After indicating that he wanted to transport the can the tug requested he turn everything to automatic. Ash did so and watched the tug spiral around the can using LIDAR and high-resolution radar to examine the object since it did not fit any kind of standard container spec.
Finally a hatch opened and dozens of helper bots popped out of the tug and they trussed the can up like a turkey toot-suite which ended with the tug cozied up to the top. The tug alerted me the maximum acceleration for this package was .4G based on it's assessment of its stability and shape.
Ash clucked his tongue against his teeth. He didn't think the engines would get much more than the .17G of Lunar gravity with this much mass. He might be able to hover this can above the moon's surface at full power, but just barely. Whatever, he wasn't really planning on lifting this can back up again anyway.
He programmed a landing with a series of smaller and smaller orbits. Once the proper height was attained that way there would be a retrorocket burn to eliminate the horizontal moment of inertia.
At that point he'd just be falling straight to the Lunar surface like a rock. He'd have to end with an automatic burn to reduce the speed of the can as much as possible to set it down gently, then disconnect and depart.
The maneuver looked a little odd, mainly because he wanted to avoid destroying the can with his plasma drive. If anything looked squirrelley during the final descent he'd abort and just let the can impact the moon. That would be a shame, but less of one than crashing himself.
Ash reviewed the program in the Tug's computer, nodded and then indulged himself in his best impression of Patrick Stewart, "Tug... Number One, Engage."