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Kitty Cat Kill Sat - Chapter 30
🕑 Added 2022-01-06 17:15:37 +0000 UTCThere is no such thing as the status quo for me.
No sense of stability, nothing I can really take for granted, no emotional bedrock or historical precedent that lets me know everything will be okay.
Oh, sure, I live on the station. But that’s like a feathermorph living on Earth. That, at least, is something to count on. But Earth has volcanos and tsunamis and the milele isiphepho, and sometimes cities just… go away. And my home, sometimes, has chunks carved off, taken over, crippled, or just worn down by time.
I replace what I can. I add anything that looks usable. But the truth is, no matter how used to having a high definition holo-theater I get, there’s always the chance I’ll have to jettison it into space when an isolation cell crashes into it.
I cannot get used to anything.
But, and I admit this with some embarrassment, I have a bit of frequency bias when it comes to life changing events. I need you all to understand; short attention span or not, I *do* have enough knowledge of general mathematics to single pawedly run a golden age Sol University department. And part of that is statistics. I *know*, with all the brainpower I can bring to the fight, that one upheaval does not reduce the chance of the *next* upheaval.
And yet? I mean… in the last few months, so much has changed. I have people to talk to, and a voice to do it with. More and more of my home opens for me, lotus-like. I have more free time, and fewer local emergencies. Even on the surface, things shift; I am worshiped like a god in one small city, and worshiped like a demon on a small island chain.
And I start to think the time of change is done. Surely, with *all that*, it’s time for things to settle down, and get used to this new normality?
I think this because I am an idiot. I am the smartest idiot in orbit, right now.
There is an alarm going… you know what? You probably know this. I don’t think I ever actually monologue like this if there isn’t an alarm going off. Running from place to place leaves a lot of thinking time, and rambling makes a good distraction.
Regardless. Alarm. Sort of.
It’s more of an alert? Or a notification. I don’t know, don’t question me.
The point is, it’s not so much warning me of anything, as it is letting me know someone is attempting to contact me on the point to point laser communication dish. I know this because it’s one of the few pieces of hardware that Troi France installed when they owned the place, and the notification noise is this low, wailing trumpet noise. Like a mourning brass cry, it fills the station’s halls. For not the first time, I wish that there were more crew, so I could be *not* the only person on duty, and the alarms could maybe not be *literally everywhere*. But I live with this burden, so I do what I need to do, and run for the comms conduit the system is hooked into.
While yelling.
“Glitter! I swear to the sun, if you’re trying to find *another* protocol, I’m going to…” I searched for a meaningful, and yet low-impact threat as I also searched for the right ventilation tube that would let me slide up a deck. “To…” I was having trouble with this. “I’ll think of something!” I decided.
Glitter’s voice came back, only barely pushing over the ongoing horn of the notification. Still prim and proper, but with just a hint of sarcasm. “Of course it’s not me. I found all relevant communication protocols days ago.” Glitter says, ignoring the number of alarms she set off herself in the process. “I’m not the only one who would wish to talk to you, after all.”
Well that’s just silly. No one’s ever talked to me… before.
Okay, well, there are people on the surface that contact me sometimes. Usually using language passed down over generations, on antique radio or hyperwave comm units. Also, usually they’re begging for help.
And, I mean, I guess there’s the occasional attempt from an old automated system. Sometimes orbital ones.
Speaking of orbit, I suppose there *are* living people up here. I once got messages from the secondary moon. And a few attempts sometimes from one of the surviving habitats. But it’s not like I carried on conversations. After all, what was I supposed to *say*? It’s not like I can talk to…
…
I can talk to people.
I can *talk to people*.
“Ennos!” I yowl out, the word echoing through the metal ventilation tube as I am carried at high speed up to an access point - one where I removed the grate ahead of time; I’m *learning* - where I am spouted out onto a different deck. “Ennos I can talk to people!”
“Lily, I have bad news.” Ennos yells at me as I catapult down the hallway toward the conduit. “Turn around!” My AR display lights up, showing a path through the station in the opposite direction as my sprint.
“What no!” I can barely hear my thoughts over the horn. “I’m right here!”
“One of your incredibly specific scanner routines is screaming at me that there’s a surface disturbance, and I have no idea why.” Ennos cries out. “And for some reason, this has agitated three different *things* that were dormant in the code, and *I need to hide or something*! Here’s your scanner! Please deal with it!” Ennos goes quiet, the AI cutting the last word with razor sharpness.
My ‘incredibly specific scanner routines’ are the only way I can get parts of the station to acknowledge that emergence events even exist. Also, I don’t really want to leave Ennos in the dark with a bunch of weird attack programs roaming around their home. I course correct, snarling as I feel the brass horn beating into my sensitive ears, and haul myself toward the command and control deck.
Emergence events are weird. Weirder than normal, I mean. We’ve talked about them before, I think, so I won’t overwhelm you with complaining.
Long story short, digital minds have a bizarre blind spot for the things. But if you put in hyper-specific physical conditions to search for, automated sensors and ground-pointing lenses can at least pick up the after effects. And then let me know. Inconveniently.
The command and control deck provides me with enough screens and projections of information to keep a team of twenty data archeologists busy for a month. I flick my eyes around and scour what I specifically need to know off the surface in about fifteen seconds, and then hop up onto the console station of the station’s non-existent engineering chief, perch on top of a control board without hitting any of the buttons and launch myself up into a *different* ventilation shaft.
I love these things. They’re so convenient.
What I don’t love is whatever is going on surface side. An emergence event, probably a class 2 or 3 at a guess, somewhere on York Isle. This is one of those ones where, no matter what I do, the local ecology is going to be hosed; it’s partially underwater, and whatever’s coming out is obviously aquatic.
Recordings that I try not to focus on show local fishing skiffs being torn apart by swarms of something small and made of teeth. By the time I reach the firing cradle for the majority of my guns that point downward two minutes later, most people within a quarter mile radius are dead.
They’re mobilizing a defense, judging by the energy readings. Some kind of highly reflective screen projected around the rivers that cut through the isle’s artificial land mass. Scanners feed me knowledge of a thousand pinprick emissions of weapons fire. This is *good*, hopefully. If I’m lucky, they can clean up after I close the breach.
The breach in the middle of a small river, surrounded by support struts and possibly populated civilian stacks.
Tricky.
This would be less tricky if I didn’t care about mass murder, which is inconvenient for me, a cat who does care. But we live with our choices, I guess.
I eyeball the terrain, and make a choice, pushing my paw down and cycle the main gun to a category one swampstriker round. This is close enough to count as ‘swamp’, and it’s not like I’m arguing semantics with the laws of physics here. My main concern at this point is doing the rapid double checking while the *terrible and enthusiastic* alarm is *still going*.
I slap the control with a paw, extended claws scratching slightly on the surface.
The deck under me shudders as an electric charge accelerates my chosen weapon to high speed. It threads a path through the orbital debris around us, hits atmosphere with a purple-red glow, and flashes through the sky trailing what I imagine is a beautiful plume of white fluff.
The emergence event turns into localized weather as the railgun slug kicks up a few hundred thousand gallons of water into the air. Along with a few thousand of whatever those teeth-things were, hopefully dead of kinetic shock.
The impact is focused *down*, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t collateral. Some of the nearby buildings, which I can only hope don’t have people in them, collapse under the blast. The screens around the shores hold back the worst of the debris, but a couple of them show failing energy readings, and I can unfortunately picture the scene of superheated water and high velocity detritus cracking agains them, the survivors having nothing to do but hope it holds.
But I can’t help with that.
My part is done. The source is gone, and it’s up to them now to recover.
My job *now* is to go turn the alarm off.
I do a quick mental check, and retrace my route through the ventilation tubes. Ennos isn’t giving me a map, so I assume they’re still busy; I’ll lend a hand after this, but I will go *mad* if I try to do any kind of modifying coding while this dismal horn is still going.
At the door I need to go through, literally *at the door*, one of Glitter’s waiting camera drones shifts to focus on me as I scurry up. My legs are so tired at this point; I’ve done far more distance running than a cat was ever meant for today.
“I apologize.” Glitter says, and I immediately resign myself to not answering the incoming call. This, I can tell, is going to be a distraction. “Correct.” The weapons platform AI tells me. “There is what appears to be a fast attack craft approaching on an intercept course. My tactical code indicates that it was dormant until we began receiving this communication request, so I suspect it is…”
“I’m gonna shoot it.” I decide instantly.
“That may not be necessary.” Glitter starts to say. “There are a number of-“
“Glitter.” I say, pulling up an AR window with a quick verbal command, and starting to swipe through local space sensor readings until I find the high speed object she’s talking about. “It’s an automated craft, coming to kill us.”
“That… seems likely.” She admits slowly. “However…”
Glitter, I have noticed, almost never actually contracts me. She’ll *hint* at it, but never actually tell me I’m wrong. I mean, we’ve only actually been talking for a couple months, but still, I’ve got this part of her locked in.
And she’s doing it now. She won’t tell me I’m wrong, but she’s trying to get some kind of point across. She doesn’t want me shooting down this ship. Why?
I double check my scanners. No obvious markings, no factional indications. No known point of origin, either, which is common; if anything spends any amount of time in Earth’s shadow, I have no real way to trace changes in position.
It’s just a normal FAC. The kind of craft designed for nothing in particular, except for being flexible. Mediocre at everything. Hundreds of different polities have built these things, and they almost always converge on a boring design. The space-built ones are just compact bricks with guns and engines, so expendable they don’t even round the corners for better ablation to keep the AI pilots alive for more than one or two engagements…
Ah. There it is.
I pull my paw back from the button that may as well say ‘remotely shred fighter craft’.
I should set it to say that. File that thought away for later.
Instead, I turn and haul my tail to the engineering workshop. One of them, anyway. One specific one.
The one that still has a partially open missile casing; an unused backup from a project that, in contrast to my normal affairs, worked the first time.
Switching to speaking cat, because I actually know the commands for this one better in my cobbled together language, I order the station to rotate a cleared missile tube up to the loading deck, and then tag a cargo drone to meet me at my destination.
It is at this point, darting into my workshop, and experiencing a pleasant reminder of the first thing Ennos and I worked on together, that I am reminded that I have no thumbs, and this might be a challenge.
The backup is already in a secure casing, though. It’s just a matter of me fumbling it into the missile casing, and welding it down to the right hardpoints with my little paw laser. Which *sounds* cute, I’m sure. But I’m on a possibly literal deadline, and while I bet I’ll be able to laugh about this later, right now I’m getting frustrated trying to hoist the box up and over the lip with my badly evolved forepaws.
I get it in two minutes. The cargo bot zooms in right as I’m finishing, like the station has developed a sense of dramatic tension. Which would be *bad*, I think? I’ll think about it later.
Payload? Sealed. Bot? Assigned. Missile? On the way to be loaded.
I trust, as my ancestors have done for generations, in automation, and scurry myself back to where Glitter is waiting. By the time I arrive, there’s a logistics notification waiting for me in my station log that the assigned task is done. Which is perfect timing.
“Okay!” I announce to the camera orb, which makes a slight twitch as Glitter reassumes direct control of it. “I’m gonna shoot it!”
“...As you say.” Glitter sounds distant. Disheartened.
“I’m gonna shoot it with the cagebreaker payload we used on you.” I inform her. “Actually, I should be clear on this; I’ve already shot it. Or rather, the shot is happening. Look, if you’ve been talking to the ship, and want to let it know not to try to intercept that missile, now’s the time, is my point.” I say with an amount of smug satisfaction.
Smug satisfaction is, in my entire life, the best recreational drug I’ve ever encountered. And it is *so much better* when you can do it around other people. Wow, I had not realized how spicy this was. This is like candy. I should do this more often.
Glitter is in the process of spinning a formal poetic statement of gratitude, but I am sadly not in a position to listen. Mostly because my ears are about to start bleeding, and I *really* need to answer this damned call.
So I slide under the orbiting camera drone, into the comms conduit, find the right console - this takes me longer than firing both weapons at both targets put together, and I have gone mad. It’s too late for me now - and hit the pattern of buttons that I *think* accepts the incoming transmission to an otherwise isolated system.
Mercifully, the incoming communication notification ends. Silence is like a balm.
“...Hello?” I say as the array aligns and returns the point to point beam transmission.
Hello is how people start conversations, right? I don’t do this often enough to know.
A screen comes to life. I find myself looking at a human woman. Old, by human standards, and clearly genetically adapted to life in space. Maybe seventy or eighty years old. Modified, too. Her bald head has a number of visible cybernetic implants in it. But her large hazel eyes are all natural, and widen as the connection stabilizes. Behind her, a worn, battered, and scraped bulkhead shows age beyond her own. But for all the damage, the room she’s in is clean. Maintained. Just… used. Hard, and for a long time.
I notice that there’s a smaller image in the corner of the screen showing myself. Probably what the station is transmitting back.
“Sah, chumah?” The woman started to say, right up until she saw the video feed. And then, her tone changes to something that I *think* is annoyance. “Jest? Za you?”
Right. Linguistic drift.
Well, let’s try anyway.
“Hello.” I say again, cheerful as I can be. “My name is acting commander Lily ad-Alice. May I ask why you’re calling?”
Wow, I managed to be polite to the people who’ve been ringing in my skull for the last hour. I’m impressed with me!
On the other end of the transmission, I can see the moment the woman realizes that perhaps the cat she is talking to is, in fact, not a practical joke. I see her look down, check her worn input board, and then snap her head back up so hard I’m worried her lightweight bones might shatter.
There is a look in her eyes that I instinctively recognize as fear.
“Ahm baddun here!” She exclaims. And then *bows* to the screen. No, not just a bow; she’s practically prostrating herself for the camera. “Mass slippup! Null con, null con!”
Her words are rambling, filled with a hard edge of panic that I am very used to hearing from humans when they call in emergence events or roaming monsters or other genocidal disasters for me to shoot. The kind of fear that their world is ending, and they’re taking a long shot on living to see tomorrow.
Except… this is different.
She’s not calling because something is threatening her. Hell, she looked almost *bored* before she saw me.
She’s afraid of *me*.
And from the way she reacted, she wasn’t expecting to see a heavily armed cat.
Oh no.
I deflate slightly, sagging back into a sitting position on the chair that I’ve never figured out how to adjust into a higher position as I realize what’s going on.
I’m a wrong number. And apparently a terrifying one, too.
“Oh.” I mumble, trying not to look at the screen. “Uh… yes. It’s fine. No hard feelings.” I say. The woman doesn’t really respond directly; she’s still not looking at me, still repeating the same words that I think are meant to be placating.
I cut the connection.
I sit in the comms conduit for a while, just staring at nothing in particular. I didn’t actually activate the lights when I came in here, so it’s mildly dark and unpleasantly cool. But I don’t really have the energy to fix that, or go anywhere else right now.
I just want to sit. Or lay down. Not to nap, just to expend less energy.
Some time later, Ennos’ voice finds me.
“Lily? Are you alright?” The AI sounds a little echoy. “Is this where you are? I can’t tell, it looks like you’ve been here a while, is that right?”
“‘m fine.” I mutter. “Oh. Oh, I forgot to help…” My stomach roils. I forgot my friend. I’ve been sitting here doing nothing while Ennos…
“Hey.” The AI interrupts me. “I’m functional. And largely undamaged. Also, there is now one fewer conflicting piece of code regarding the short range heat detector. For reasons I will not explain.” Ennos pauses, and I get the impression I am being studied. “Are you alright? You do not look well.”
“Am I scary?” I ask with a soft mewl.
“Terrifying.” The AI deadpan responds. “Why, yesterday, I watched you menace a grow bed full of bell peppers with such fervor, they may never recover. And the cleaner nanos report that you shed, constantly. You are an icon of nightmares, truly.”
I almost laugh. But not quite. “The person who was calling was scared of me.”
“Interesting.” Ennos says. “More likely, they were scared of the station. *You* are soft and non-threatening.”
“The station isn’t threatening!” I meow back in protest. “It’s home!”
“...Okay.” Ennos concedes, and I already know that I am crushingly wrong. “Hey. Please eat something. I can’t… make you. But I would appreciate it.” Ennos is wrong; they can make me. Asking in a compassionately concerned tone is far more than enough to make me do anything they want.
Lunch is a schematic for a drive shaft assembly, rendered in ration. I am, for the duration of my meal, less sinkingly exhausted, and more confused. It still tastes like ration.
Maybe a nap would help. Maybe I can nap until I am not sad anymore. Maybe I can take several naps, until I am not sad anymore.
Ennos interrupts my attempt at the first nap, just as I am getting settled. “Lily, I would like to wish you good rest.” They say. “But also… why is there a whole fighter craft parked in our upper bay?”
I exercise my right to make this someone else’s problem.
“Ask Glitter.” I yawn.
Comments
Miriam Brown
poor Lily… thanks for the chapter, always nice to see Lily get a case of emotions
Lessthan
Thank you for the chapter! I really like the idea of a cat running a killer space station. Contracts should probably be contradicts.
