Have I ntioned, before, that I am shockingly unmodified?
My body rejects most augnts, in all their various forms. I cant install any wetware, host a native nanoswarm, implant backup organs, or graft new limbs on. Its all very pedestrian, and Ive just had to learn to live with the normal number of cat parts.
That said, I am still stronger, healthier, and faster, than I think most people would ever really suspect from a cat, much less a cat in my age bracket.
This is helped along by lifetis of morization, pattern developnt, and practice. I know where everything is, in all the areas of the station Ive spent centuries prowling. Oh, theres new parts to explore - theres *always* new parts to explore, right now theres just more at once than Im used to - but that doesnt fundantally change the fact that I can navigate an orbital infrastructure environnt at a breakneck pace.
Sotis literally, but we dont need to talk about that.
Behind , sothing wrenches a hull plate out of alignnt, sothing sparking and a protesting klaxon sounding deeper within the station. I do not see what is chasing , but it is *obviously* chasing .
We havent figured out what the not-really-ghosts are, but weve got so rules down.
Theyre semi-physical, theyre easily distracted, seem to have so kind of line of sight limitation, and theyre taking over the cara drones. And repair drones. And generally anything with a complex enough chanical substrate. Weirdly, they havent gone for any of the grid hardware yet. Also, when they do pour themselves into one of the little cara drones, the things tend to short out shortly after, and whatever was inside spills out. I can *feel* it when they do that.
I absolutely do not want to be the thing they try to possess.
But at least we know a few things.
Theres a row of suit storage lockers along the wall up ahead, as part of a circular room that has a direct airlock chute to the outside of the station. Whoever built it had crew mbers of wildly different sizes, and the lockers are arranged as such. This makes it comically easy for a master of the pounce like myself to scale up to the ceiling in three easy bounds. Up here, where the grav plates effect trails off sharply, I can shoot forward off the last locker, and into a ventilation shaft.
And Im in the clear. Its dark here, but its dark here because we dont put lighting strips in our vents. And as soone who has at this point built a few vents, I get to use the collective we. The point is, its not the dark of being chased by hungry shades.
I give a ow in my native Cat, sending a signal through to Ennos that Ive passed the first checkpoint.
A minute and thirty seconds later, I claw my way over the edge of an upper deck, rear legs kicking wildly to find purchase on the lift shaft Ive decided to climb up. Even in half gravity, its still a massive chore to navigate maintenance ladders without thumbs. Or proper elbows.
I havent been spotted. Checkpoint two.
Now, for the tricky part. I need to get to the drone bay where Ive been doing my import runs from. Fortunately, I picked one close to the core systems I tend to operate, because I didnt want to drag three thousand kilos of dirt across an inch more space than I was required to.
Unfortunately, that part is going to require to go through a dark zone.
If Im very lucky, I wont get caught. Which is good, because Im given to understand there are several old human mythologies that believe that the more black fur a cat has, the luckier it is.
I wish Id had more ti to regrow my fur. Maybe shouldve had the dical dispenser give sothing for that, stockpile that extra luck. Thats probably not a thing, but these days, it can be hard to tell, and every advantage helps.
I am approaching the refinery floor that I need to cross. This one is fun, for certain definitions of fun. When I need to get past here in a hurry, and all the machinery is turned off, the refinery has a couple weird quirks that I like to exploit.
Control for speed, jump, grab that grate and pull myself up, get a running start, and fling myself into the open air over three hundred feet of piping and heating elents.
There is, twenty feet into this place, a spot where the grav plates dont line up properly. If it were actually dangerous, the station would have perford ergency repairs a long ti ago, or at least asked to authorize them. But as it stands, its just a bizarre curiosity, maybe even the reason this refinery was mothballed and had crates of ancient gravitronics gear lying around.
Its a thin wedge of space thatll make you feel a little disoriented if you walk through it. Or, if you throw yourself through the distortion twenty feet over the deck, instead it performs a weird gravity lensing effect, and fires like a railgun round across the space.
Three hundred feet in a second. A pile of old pillows and worn blankets pilfered from a dozen crew quarters, marked with shaky etched writing as linen storage, catches . I walk it off without too much damage. I am already moving again, were on a ti budget here.
I cross a dozen intersections, flying past doors and bulkheads I barely process. And then, I am in the dark.
Again, sothing takes notice of . It coils out of the dark, but this one doesnt rend and pull at the station. Instead, there is just the soft rustling of air on my fur, and the feeling of sothing curious.
I am out of the dark.
The thing stops following when I clear another heavy security door, and seal myself in the segnt that has my precious heavily ard fighter suit. Checkpoint three, last one.
Whatever these things are, that are tearing up my ho, theyre getting faster. More power conduits are being drained, more systems being compromised. There isnt ti to play this safe, not that doing so is a hobby of mine anyway.
I slide on my flank to in front of the drone bay floor door, a command starting the process of it hissing upward. I dont wait, I just roll under the multi-ton steel block, popping back to my feet as it starts to shut behind . Shouted commands bring the construction arms online, pull my fighter suit onto the line. I have laser etched marks on the assembly line where I need to stand if I dont want to get fur or parts of my tail pinched off, and I plant my paws there.
I need to stand still for roughly fifty two minutes and eight seconds, with the improved assembly routines that Ennos designed cutting a lot of small flaws out of the process. Which is, lets be real, sothing that cos close to feeling like a lifeti while I wait with my back to the door for a ghost to murder .
And Im not talking about a cat lifeti! I an *my* lifeti! Thats objectively more lifeti. An order of magnitude more lifeti.
I an, yes, it does feel like Ive had that back to the door available for ghost murder feeling going on for most of it. But I think thats just a part of being alive, and its never supposed to be literal? It is literal now. I like it even less.
Sowhere, sohow, far on the other side of the station, Ennos blows sothing up. The explosion is barely audible from here, but I feel the mild thrum of the deck that isnt in line with how my entire life as felt. My paws know, instinctively, that sothing has gone wrong.
Or in this case, that the distraction has started.
I try not to flinch from it anyway, even knowing it was coming, as one of the assembler arms fires a sealing bolt into the combined helt shell about half an inch from my left eye. Another muffled blast, another thud of the suit coming together around .
This is going to be a long forty minutes.
I try humming to distract myself. I am bad at humming. My voice can do weird awkward chirps that I hate, at best. Its twenty painful minutes in when I realize I could maybe make my projection voice hum, if I really wanted to.
It takes ten minutes to figure out how to not just get it to replicate the dumb chirps. Then I almost instantly realize that its just not very satisfying.
With five minutes to go, there is a scrape of an incompressible material against the tal of the assembly floor door. I cannot see it, but I can hear as sothing dangerous starts clawing. Attracted to the power draw, the heat source, or maybe just to the abstract of my life. I bet any ghost would be happy to eat . I bet Im delicious.
The final sealing bolt is put in place, and the suit is secured. Its not done yet, but as of this mont, before the command gear cos online, I cannot see or hear or know anything at all outside of my confinent. With the floating feeling of the inertia gel containing my limbs, the darkness is near total sensory deprivation.
My mind, enhanced and flawed in equal asure, races. A thousand possibilities, a thousand angles of monster sneaking up behind . Theres no way they wouldnt spot , standing here out in the open. Seconds stretch to eternities as I wait with an almost physical pain.
My next drone armor assembler factory *thing* is, I decide, going to be camouflaged.
Sothing thumps into my flank, lightly. I almost scream. Okay, I do scream. With both voices, I scream. But there is no follow up strike, nothing kills just yet.
Then, the suit cos alive. Information and light floods my vision, cara feeds and sensor readouts, life support cos online, the engines and motors fire to life, and I can *move*.
The bay door is *open* in front of . I dont know why, but its saved my life. A scattergun blast of unsecured materials and half finished projects rapidly receding into the vacuum ahead of .
And clawing its way up the floor, fighting against the howling atmosphere being sucked out, sothing shimring and blue and *reaching for *.
Go! I whisper/is whispered to .
And the suit obeys.
The command helt makes the suit my skin. The grav plates are guided by my reflex, the limited ion engine pushed by my instinct.
I pirouette out of the bay. The machinery clamps on my paws release, and I am off, flinging myself into the void so fast Ive cleared the station in a blink. I go high, staying out of reach of the semi-physical claws of the thing hanging onto the deck.
My AR interface was gone from the mont I was sealed in here, but now it is replaced by a new set of digital information flows. Pre-loaded scanner sweeps show, as best as the station can determine, where the stray junk in the area is. And the projection that highlights otherwise dark chunks of tal and rock also plots a path for .
Toward a cluster of bright green lines in my vision, and the destroyed wreck of the last ship to try to join us up here.
And suddenly, Im safe.
Its a paradox of an emotion. I have spent the vast majority of my life on my ho. I know the feeling of every span of that deck under my paws, I am comfortable there. Being outside is harrowing, and not just because of the endless screaming vacuum around that threatens to end my life in a million ways. But now, here I am, out in open space, relying on a limited fuel supply when theres nothing close enough to use the grav plating on, hurtling toward an unknown beacon of doom. And I feel safe.
Or at least, far safer than when I was on the station while it was being actively attacked.
This trip, with engine burning, is three minutes long. I let the feeling of the suit and its sensors beco my world. I push and pull off of gravitational platforms, learning the limits of my motion. I am moving so fast that if I tapped a piece of dust at this speed while unarmored, it would pulverize . But the suit protects .
I have never flown like this before. Escaping the danger is a rush, and it mixes with the sensation of pushing this suit to its limits, leaving to warble out a cry of elation as I soar. The only thing left now is the ti limit; to eliminate the threat before Ennos is threatened. And I am already moving as fast as I can without risking catastrophic failure. Which is to say, failure where a mote of tal carves through my armor so fast Im dead before I realize it.
I sing as I thread myself through derelict satellites and the wreckage of ancient wars. I flinch in sympathetic pain as tiny impacts dot my suits helt and chest. I coil myself in a hunters pose as I cut around the remnants of an ancient transport hub, paws skating across the ruined hull on runners of projected gravity as I curl up over and into clear line of sight to my target.
Sothing is casting a directed signal into our station.
I dont bother checking. Plasma throwers track to exactly where Im thinking about, take a split second to charge, and then fire. I hear the hum through the suit diagnostics, and just in my ears, a resonant tone that fills my helt briefly.
The source of the ghosts dies in a barrage of four charged bolts. The shining silver ergency force field around it does very little to protect it from the high energy weapons Im sporting. And just like that, the mission is done.
-ly! Any ti you! Oh. Ennos voice suddenly fills my comms. Well. Yes. I wasnt worried at all.
Liar. I ow back. You okay?
Ennos takes a full third of a second to collate information to answer. Weve lost power in section C. Two of our grid nodes are crippled. One of them was about to compromise my primary processor segnt when you you did stop them, yes?
Yes. I say. Im heading back now. Just as soon as I check one thing.
Marked on your HUD. Ennos already knows what Im looking for. That kid is too smart for , sotis. Most tis.
Five minutes of careful gravity hopping later, I find the rest of the wreck. Or part of it anyway. The ship was carved apart, but this section broke free after about half of it was turned to molten slag, and wasnt targeted by followup attacks. Sothing about this place, though, was important. The device that was throwing those projections at us was drawing sothing from here, so kind of activation signal maybe. I need to know. Curiosity, as they say, is important to cats.
I crawl inside, using my propulsion to keep myself from touching the still glowing edges.
This ship was cramped, packed full of machinery that is now either turned to shredded chaff, or just unpowered. Even the ergency lights are off, power having drained away by now. Thin aisles of space between stations, spare gear storage surrounding every free spot, it was built to move as much as possible, as effectively as possible. Economy, over comfort. Important when youre trying to break out of a gravity well.
At the back half, I find what Im looking for.
Stasis pods. Or sothing like them. Theres been a few hundred interpretations of this tech over the years. Sleeper cells, stasis pods, cryo beds, and a dozen others, each with a few unique variants all their own.
These ones are occupied. Sort of.
Theyre cramd in with the sa consideration for maximized spatial use as the rest of the ship. Sixteen of them, in a kind of honeycomb pattern against the back of the deck. I approach the first one, and peek inside, and see well, one of our ghosts.
The thought clicks with a technology I know exists. Used heavily by lunar colonies for a while, especially the ones that used autonomous bodies so heavily. When the mind is whats important, your life pod should save that, right? Capture the thoughts of the person in the pod, send them sowhere safe. Probably tried to link to the station because of all the Luna Polis tech on board from a millennia ago.
Up close and organic, theyre much less scary. A little over a ter of height, with long bone spikes of fingers that would almost be claws if they werent blunted. Extended faces with a large central eye like a rounded hexagon. Theyre not human, but Ive never seen them before. All I know is they didnt deserve this.
The pod is powered off.
An instant later, my suit screams an automated warning, and the nanobloom on my back explodes into defensive life. A nearly invisible battle takes place in the space around over the next five seconds as my swarm overwhelms and destroys another rival that was trying to compromise the armor.
A murderer nanoswarm, the kind that you fire from a projectile to seek out sophont life and leave infrastructure intact, is torn arpar. But it has already done its work. The person inside the pod is dead, face a mask of pain even through alien features.
No wonder the ghosts were so pissed.
I check the rest of the pods. Lifeless, lifeless, lifeless. Dead, dead, dead. Their faces are cold and angry and hurting.
Except the pod on the end.
Its still on. Ergency power readings say itll hold for another three days or so. The occupant, still alive. And as I look, the reason becos clear; theyre unlike the rest of the crew. Theyre sothing different.
The pod contains a dog. Sleeping happily, head curled on its paws, tentacles wrapped around its eyes. I cant see any breathing, but the pod reads the occupant as alive and healthy.
Murder swarms target sophonts. By luck of being just under the line, we have one survivor.
I check my life support. Plenty of ti to sort this out. Ennos. I speak over the comms. Im coming back soon. One guest.
Understood. I will begin quarantine procedures. Ennos tells , failing to understand but trying their best I suppose. Ive made contact with Glittering, as well. She will require extensive repairs, and your aid, but she is alive.
I let out a sigh of relief. That was sothing I had been terrified of.
Okay.
Ti to clean up this ss.
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