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Kitty Cat Kill Sat - Chapter 25
🕑 Added 2021-12-18 18:59:03 +0000 UTCIn an effort to make writing this a little less stressful than my usual thing, I'm trying to keep chapter length to *around* 2k words. To that end, this is sort of a 'part one of two' chapter. It is also the first chapter where Lily doesn't shoot something, either literally or metaphorically!
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The exact nature of the station’s haunting still eluded me.
Hello. It is time to talk about ghosts.
Or at least, it will be, after a brief update-based tangent.
The station is currently holding in matched orbit with the debris cloud from the destroyed ship. A good chunk of debris, in any spaceborne combat, is going to just kind of vanish. Not literally ‘poof gone’ vanish, but with nothing to slow it down, small chunks of kinetically encouraged material are going to start moving, and basically not stop. So, they’re gone.
What’s left of a destroyed ship tends to be the still connected pieces of hull, the things contained within, and stuff cut away with beam weaponry that still has a matched velocity. This close to a planet, also, gravity tends to help keep stuff clumped up, especially if it’s soon going to be crashing into the planet. This close to Earth, there’s something like five thousand still operational surface stations that project something akin to the old interdiction field I still have stapled to a drone somewhere around here. They help too.
We’re here for four hours. Any longer and we risk getting hit by an oncoming ultra-dense section of the orbital scrapyard that I have on my map, or by a recycler swarm that holds this general zone, or by one of the hostile energy fields that prowl these areas outside of my station home’s normal mapped out course.
We have engines, in three styles. We can go wherever we want. But we tend to stay in our normal orbit, because going too far into the unknown is a massive threat. Not everything shows up on scanners, not everything announces its presence. I’ve bumped into an isolation cell once before, in a single casual accident, and it cost me two whole levels of space station.
Anyway. We - myself and the two AI - are here at the closest thing to the site of this noble ship’s death. Why, I couldn’t quite explain. I had set the course here immediately after the ship’s death, but I didn’t really understand why. Well, technically, I had ordered Ennos to set a course here, and then remembered painfully that Ennos wasn’t capable of actually doing that yet.
Were we here to investigate the launch? To salvage it? To hold a sacred call for the dead?
Possibly all three.
I do not, exactly, know how my home is haunted. I’ve said the *word* a lot - haunted - but I never actually thought about what it meant. It’s a feeling, first, and a reality second. Sometimes, I am watched from angles that make no sense. Small noises that the machinery doesn’t make, physical sensations that cannot be brushed aside as radiation poisoning. Parts of the station I just don’t go to, because the dark there fills me with an animal dread that I haven’t felt since I first learned how railguns work.
There are a few undeniable things, though. Something here is looking out for me. I avoid, carefully, thinking ‘someone’, and I especially try to not consider that I know exactly who that someone is. But even without naming names, something has been doing *something*.
Cats don’t just randomly get the ability to speak, for one thing. Especially not from a point exactly an inch and a half to the right of my throat.
It’s possible I’m looking at this wrong, and it’s less that the station is haunted, and more a matter of *how haunted the station is*. But regardless of what, who, or how, the core thing I keep trying to remember is that no matter *how* haunted we are, it’s still something that’s either helping, or hasn’t been able to kill me in four centuries.
Why am I bringing this up?
Ah. Funny story there.
While my home is rather ambiguously haunted, and the exact cause of that haunting could be anything from a degrading ancillary AI to a glitch in the lighting electronics, it is *rather challenging* to say that the wreckage we’re standing post at isn’t *incredibly haunted*.
I need to interrupt my thoughts as I take this corner. Oh, I am running, by the way. I’ll explain as I go.
My paws slide across the deckplate; I keep my claws in so that I get maximum slide distance, using the far wall to stop my momentum before I take off again. Behind me, the corridor lights cut out with a shower of sparks and a scream that is absolutely not just from warping metal. But I’m moving too fast, and the darkness just barely laps at my heels as I sprint down toward the next emergency door.
I have ruled out *ghosts* from the haunting list this time. Ghosts aren’t stopped by security doors.
I get enough distance from the disturbance on this straight shot of a hallway that my AR flickers back to life, and I yell a command at the local station system to prepare to seal the door I’m bolting toward like my life depends on it.
Three seconds and a dozen rapidfire steps across the deck, and I fling myself over the lip of the security door, momentum taking me entirely through the low gravity connector room and over the other side, tumbling into a structural hub. It used to be a common room, but I moved a lot of the pillows and stuff to more useful places, so now it’s mostly just a long room that serves as a connective point for a bunch of different corridors that lead to more interesting places.
The door seals shut behind me as the last of the lighting breaks, plunging the hall I was just in into darkness.
“Okay!” I announce. “Docking bay is compromised!”
“This is not good.” Ennos sounds remarkably calm, considering the circumstances. I expected them to be panicking about death by ghosts by this point. “Lily, please. I am panicking silently. Also I have lost contact with my remaining drones on deck twenty seven. But station metrics show a spike in power draw from one of the fabrication factories in that section.”
“That’s bad!” I agree. “Is it the drone factory running off more heavy cargo drones again?”
“Oh. No, that was me.” Ennos replies. “Before I was fully informed about the challenges with getting something offworld, I had planned to attempt to lift a quantity of produce from the surface as… it doesn’t matter. This is not that.”
“What!” I roll onto my side, staring up at the station’s ceiling as I try to catch my breath. “You were making me a birthday gift? That’s… I need to get you a birthday gift!”
Ennos is not willing to be sidetracked. “Lily! My birthday isn’t for months, and I would like my preemptive gift to be *dealing with the ghosts* thank you!”
“They’re not ghosts, they can’t go through doors.”
“Revenants then! Condens! Specters! I don’t care! Whatever they are, they are running our fabricator! Probably in a way that will be lethal to us!” Ah, there’s the classic Ennos panic. “Did you get what you needed?” Ennos asks suddenly.
I pull myself up to sit on my haunches, spitting out what I’d been holding in my mouth so I could lick at the rapidly fading line of blood on one paw where I misjudged a jump. “I did. One hard copy of the emissions readings. Void, I never realized how much I take the grid for granted, even when it is inconvenient.”
“The nearest compatible data reader is two decks up. Mycology lab.”
I yowl pathetically. Mushrooms again. Fantastic. “Fine.” I say with my voice. “I’m moving. Any word from Glitter?”
“Nothing.” Ennos sounds… very small, in that moment. “Hurry please. There’s a zero-g access shaft that way.” They pull up a guide light in my AR. I’ve long since stopped trying to secure it; I kind of forgot that ‘unshackled AI’ actually means something. “I’ll meet you there.”
“Dark zone?” I ask.
“Midway up the access shaft. It’s the fastest way, and the whole deck is out.” Ennos is obviously trying their best to stay calm. “I’m sorry.”
I give a flick of my tail. “It’s fine. What’re they gonna do, kill me?” I ask sarcastically. “Good luck. See you there.”
Deep breaths. Cats don’t really do deep breaths, but I like how it feels. Deep breaths, pick up the data chip in my fangs, open the door. The corridor is still lit. A curved line of doors leading to crew quarters is ahead of me, Ennos’ guide light stretching out to where I know a hatch is waiting.
Looks clear. I explode into motion anyway. Distance carved away by running and rapid reflexes. When I make it to the hatch, I don’t even bother to stop, just slamming into the ladder and slinging myself upward. Then I’m in a null gravity area, and up doesn’t mean anything. I’m just going forward. Pulling faster and faster, momentum building up to the maximum speed I can pull a paw across a handhold at.
Then I’m passing through the dark. It’s just normal darkness, nothing metaphysical about it. But there’s a feeling, as I catapult through, that there’ something else *here*. A sensation of air being pushed and pulled around my fur, of something pacing around me, of claws not entirely unlike mine...
Back into the light and heat.
I bleed momentum at my destination the hard way, impacting the rubber coated edge of the access port hard. Something cracks inside of me, but gravity is back, and I don’t have time. Behind me, the thing in the shaft is moving, and the power is draining out of the various systems behind me as it gives chase.
This door? Sealed.
Ennos and I reconvene in the mycology lab. Turns out, this one is in microgravity, and it was *way* better maintained than the unauthorized psychedelic grow op I found so long ago. They actually disposed of their samples, so it’s just a sterile room mostly.
“Okay.” I say after five minutes of awkward attempts to access a complex data storage device with only my mouth. “Got it?”
“Got it.” Ennos replies after a couple seconds. Six hours of sensor data across thousands of kilometers of local space, and it took them seconds. “There’s an open tesseract bridge between us, and this point here.” A model of our station is projected, spinning to show where we’re looking nearby. “It matches to the last spotted position of this.” Ennos adds in the destroyed Earth ship, showing chunks of debris around the signal. “There’s a secondary signal that’s harder to get a lock on, but it appears there’s also something *here* that whatever is infiltrating us is also linked to.” They pause. “Also, Glitter is here. Still showing signs of power use, but cut off somehow.”
“Tesseract bridges are for physical connections, not data.” I comment. “Also no one’s used those since Luna Polis… uh…” I try to think of a way to say it delicately.
Ennos sighs. “I am aware that we might be removed from reality at a moment’s notice. I assure you, I will be screaming later, when we have time.” It’s good that they’ve got their priorities sorted out. “Regardless, yes. It is meant for physical connections. But seeing as whatever is coming through is physically damaging our home, I would say that is happening.”
“Super.” I comment dryly. “Okay. I’m gonna shoot it.”
“That is your answer to everything.” Ennos sounds put out, but I don’t say anything in response, just staring at the map until they add to their comment. “Alright, you’ve convinced me.”
I try not to let my tail flick too much in amusement. “What’s facing it, firing arc wise? I’ve lost engine control so I can’t rotate us.”
“Railguns 14, 16, 20 through 26, and 30. One bombardment canon that I do not think would have the accuracy you are looking for. The singularity shotgun, a plague dropper, five different pain inducers. Two missile tubes, four particle beams, one inferno lance, a magnetic flux projector, an x-ray array that you have marked as ‘no’, the third and fifth segments of the pulse field generator, and the point defense flack cannon that you have named Larry.”
“Oh man, I remember back when I named guns.” I muse distractedly. “Okay, I’m going for the lance. Least likely to be interfered with by… what?” I pause as Ennos brings up a diagnostic for the inferno lance. Offline. “Great. Okay, the pulse field… offline too. Do we have access to *any* of this?”
“No.” Ennos says, a creeping dread in their voice. “All armaments are unpowered.”
“Oh.” I am completely disarmed. That’s never happened before. “I… uh…” Apparently panic isn’t just Ennos’ job. “I should… um…”
I should what? I am, suddenly, very small indeed. I am a *cat*, playing at participating in a world where most weapons fire projectiles bigger than I am. I can’t build anything new myself, I can’t apply the vast amount of engineering knowledge I have without thumbs, I can’t just pull a solution out of...
“Lily?” My friend’s voice draws my focus, cracking the shell of dissociative anxiety around me.
I look up. “Huh? Yes. I’m fine. I just… what…”
“I’ve found you a working gun.” Ennos, my best friend in the world, tells me.
A video window opens near my eyeline. A real time feed from a part of the station we still have control over.
I built two space suits, once upon a time. One, modified for engineering and exploration, perfect for actually having something approaching fine motor control. And one…
One designed like a strike craft.
Ablative armor, field scramblers, stealth systems, sealed and secure and ready to go, with two high powered plasma throwers on the flanks.
All I have to do, is get to the drone bay, and hope that nothing bothers me for the hour it takes the armorer system to seal me into it.
“I think,” Ennos says, apropos of nothing, “that I have an idea for a distraction. To buy you some time.”
I have decided that I will be getting my friend a very nice early birthday gift.
