Kitty Cat Kill Sat Chapter 42

Wake up, eat real food, talk to my friends, garden, study, play an increasingly complex board ga with Glitter, eat fake food, play with Dog, build, salvage, sleep.

Repeat.

Repeat over and over and over, until the warm fog of mory holds nothing but the peace of the mont and the horizon of the past.

No one needs anything from . No one asks anything of . Theres just us, and the future, and the quiet.

But it cant last.

I face myself. Or sothing that looks like . She stares at with questioning dream eyes. How did you end up here? The rippling electrical reaction in the shape of a cat asks. I could ask her the sa thing. I think I do. I have always been here. She replies. Sothings changed. You can-

I jolt awake.

Id been having a good dream. Apparently Id been sleeping while in my weapons crche, which is new. And also possibly very risky! Its been a joint project for a week now to strip back the restrictions and put a few cat-and-AI-friendly automation patches into place, but its not sothing thatll be done overnight, and in the anti, sleeping sowhere that enables to drop kinetic payloads onto the surface with the twitch of a paw seems irresponsible?

That had been a nice dream. I felt like I was floating. Possibly I felt that way because Im in the one spot in the solar system designed to be ergonomic to a cats spine. But its also possible that my subconscious is recovering.

Recovering from what, you ask? Could be anything. Theres a long list of options.

Oh, I woke up because of a targeting alert. I feel like the whole alarm startles awake thing is kind of the only way I wake up anymore, so I didnt ntion it earlier.

But that doesnt an I should neglect it. I check the newly refocused EM tracking scanner, pointed at a large swath of Earth in a much more useful resolution courtesy of Ennos finding the commands to order the repair systems to recalibrate it to be *optimally* efficient, as opposed to simply *functionally* efficient.

Our target is moving.

I begin cycling the void batteries, dumping a few hundred hours of charge into the capacitor for the void beam, and drag a paw across the projection map in a rough line that *should* be an on target intercept.

This will be my third shot, and so far, the other two havent been nearly as on target as they should have been.

This is also the first ti in a while Im tracking sothing as small as a single vehicle, and as problematic as an actual person.

I should start from the beginning.

Four hundred and twenty one years ago

No, this isnt going to work. Ill get too distracted. I should start from a more recent beginning.

So ti ago, an amount of ti that is too short for to have added ntal weight to it, and too long to rember properly, a young feathermorph on the surface got ahold of an ergency signal communication unit. They, by accident, ended up contacting . I, on purpose, may have eliminated a few pressing threats to their village.

In the ti since then, I may have, through an irresponsible resource expenditure, sent a sentient construction swarm to that sa village to just kind of hang out and be friends. Because that is how I think friends work, and so far, nothing has proven wrong. I have additionally directed a couple local wanderers groups, one pack of refugee orphan shadelings, and a fairly large rchant caravan that had almost been eaten to the sa village. I also made so art for them!

Not all of this at once, that would be irresponsible. Obviously.

I like this village. Its in a spot where I pass over it roughly once every three days, no matter which of my three clear orbital corridors Im on. So I can check in when Im not scrambling for sothing or asleep.

And the last ti I passed over, I got a ssage through that ergency beacon. For the first ti in months.

Soone had been killed. More specifically, soone had been murdered.

I deal with a lot of garbage on the surface. When I got the ssage, I was in the middle of trying to get the munitions factory to accept a modified blueprint for a paramaterial enhanced splatter round that I could use to redirect sentient hostile weather patterns. This isnt new. This is just a job that I do. My paws cant do everything, Im working with tools not built for , and not every problem on the surface can be solved by orbital bombardnt. But I *still havent run out* of problems that can.

And yet, all of a sudden, I have a problem that is both small, and deeply personal. I hadnt really realized that Id been thinking of this village as close to my heart, but now that its impossible to avoid, I find that I cant stop thinking it. Which is a big problem.

Because its happened before.

And every ti, I outlast them. As individuals or as communities, I keep going, and they dont. I live, and they dont. And it hurts every ti, and I fall back to a cycle of barebones maintenance and killing the largest threats and sleeping too much, until I can stop grieving.

I see the trap closing. But I walk into it anyway.

Now, the hard part about tracking a murderer is that verifying things that have happened in the past is basically impossible with just a normal view of the ground from above. Im technologically advanced, Im not a ti traveler. And despite my often reckless nature, I dont *really* want to bomb a mostly innocent person.

But that doesn't an I cant check sensor logs. Both my own, and I others that I can steal! It took an hour or two, mostly to get in and out of the engineering suit, but I made the leap to a listening post and took over its recent records for myself, adding to my own logs from the last ti I did a flyover.

Then its just a simple matter of comparing heat and energy signatures, mapping movents of people on the ground, and finding the perpetrator.

With a bunch of gaps in the logs. And poor sensor resolution. And a phase cloud drifting in the local weather patterns. And the villagers having moved the body so I dont know where it was originally.

So I actually lied to you when I said it was simple.

At first, I asked Ennos and Glitter for help, which is when I learned that phase clouds are artificial and actually composed of billions of paramaterial particulates. Which is scientifically interesting, and I will absolutely co back to that, but also ans Im doing this manually. I considered asking my human resident, but shes been exclusively occupying her newly assigned quarters, one specific chair in the galley, and the path between them. I told her we could talk when she was ready, and I think she took it as a threat.

I consider asking Dog, too - I have decided the dogs na is Dog by the way - but Dog is more interested in the chew toy I made for him out of hyperreactionary rubber. So no help there, either.

So I search, and plan, and hear another broadcast about a second murder. I put the pieces together as my heart breaks, and I eventually spot an engine signature from a vehicle that arrived through the cliffs and valleys around the village, but never approached. Its there again when the third murder happens, before speeding away back into the low terrain under the jagged cliffs, out of my ability to kill it without causing massive ecological damage.

But thats fine. Because I have more eyes than I know what to do with.

And now, at a higher focused resolution, I can see the singular person disembarking their vehicle, keeping low as they stalk toward the village. Theres a symbol on my scanner display notifying that a level two personnel baffle has been deployed, and marking the three spots on the map where Im supposed to think the target is, lines traced back to the idiot who thinks theyre fooling anyone.

Well. Theyve been fooling soone. But not , now.

The void beam lances down like lilac lightning, fractal arrays of energy curving in on themselves as the simplistic weapon warps through the phase cloud and nails the ground as close to my prey as I can make it. Which is, in this mont, exactly where they are crawling. They dont even have ti to understand that they have been killed, much less to feel pain, or scream. A rciful and clinical end to a murderer. The beams attack pattern etches a twenty length long zone of death into the sandy dirt in a half second, annihilating a chunk of the surface and turning the rest to smoothed glass, before it burns through its power supply and cuts off.

I take a deep breath, untense my inadequate feline muscles, and slump back in the crche. I take ten minutes before I start to move again.

The engines need to be secured and activated; well stay in stationary orbit for a day or two, to make sure that was the real problem. This ans Ill need to divert a lot of power to the aft mag shields, but thats okay. Were only a little bit screwed on power right now, this will be fine if I shut down a lot of stuff.

After that well, back to work. Ive still got stuff to do. That automated manufacturing ship thing thats parked next to still needs a job before it goes insane. And maybe my human guest would like so kind of decor for her quarters? Is that a human thing?

I decide it should be tradition here, and since Im in charge, that makes it tradition by default. I ask the Orbital Era industrial repeater - see, I can rember nas! - to design and produce so kind of pleasant wall decor suitable for crew quarters for culturally traumatized elderly cyborg won. It answered back almost imdiately with cheerful acknowledgnt of the order, and asked how many I wanted.

For so reason, I think it sounded offended when I said one? So I added hundred onto the end of the sentence, and pretended I just got a hairball in the middle of speaking to deflect suspicion.

The repeater (which will need a real na, but well work on that) sent back a projected materials invoice and tiline. Its nice working with professionals sotis.

Ennos disagrees with on that, but theyre biased, because they have to work with , and Ennos likes for so reason.

Its been a nice day. Ive gotten a lot done, I feel rested, and its only three hours in. I should nap in the weapons crche more often.