Kitty Cat Kill Sat
Chapter 37

The fresh crisis comes as we’re just finishing our first ever weekly meeting.

For the last two hundred years or so, ever since I really started to get a handle on things, began understanding how to work with the station instead of just survive it, and opened up my paws and gunports to helping where I could, time has been a challenge for me.

Time was a challenge before, too. But also during that era of my life, for different reasons.

Before the uplift - which I am certain is working fine by the way - my life was very day to day. Eat, sleep, explore, move when I wanted to move, what I assume is typical cat stuff.

Afterward, though, I started to be able to take a longer view of things. When the implications of my immortality set in, I learned to take a *very* long view of things.

Wake, eat, explore, sleep, turned gradually into plan, scan, learn, save.

It took maybe two years for my augmented brain to reinforce the new capacity for thought with the gooey filling of knowledge. I took to reading like I’d been starving my whole life, looking through whatever texts and recordings I could get my paws on. All the while improving my behaviors, learning, growing. And letting my perspective get broader and broader.

And then, one day, I qualified as a person.

And the station, the absolute crustacean, switched back on the protocols for alerts, and turned off a tremendous portion of the required automation for when it was uninhabited.

And suddenly, my perspective found itself *slightly narrowed*.

Naps became measured in minutes, not hours. Not that I needed as much sleep anymore, anyway. The small tricks I’d learned to save time getting around were now critical if I were to clear all the alarms going off, and I refined them to a razor’s edge. Broad range distress calls were everywhere. Old automated threats were everywhere.

Plan, scan, learn, save, had to change. Had to compress.

I planned just what I needed to overcome a crisis. I didn’t waste time on plans when I had downtime, because downtime lasted hours, days if I was lucky. Sometimes it lasted longer, or I got into a fugue state and ignored a lot of problems, but I couldn’t rely on that at all.

I watched smaller areas, focusing my scans on the area close around me, and on parts of the surface I’d pass over without course correction.

I learned what I needed to learn. I took what I needed to take from the wreckage of civilizations scattered around up here. Spare minutes were spent trying to drag weapons back to undefended station sections, or installing shield systems.

I saved who I could. To the expense of all else.

My world narrowed to hours. Minutes. Seconds.

The click of the counter, in the corner of my AR. The breath between quiet and chaos, the moment between someone else’s salvation, and their doom.

Not fun!

I bring up this subject so heavy it has its own gravity well to sort of give contrast to you, so that you understand that when I say that we had planned weekly meetings, that this was a level of stability heretofore unbeknownst to me.

I learned the word heretofore long before I had the luxury of regularly living whole quiet days.

But quiet was happening. Or at least… a reasonable condition that was quiet-adjacent. And the stability had grown to the point that we were trying *weekly* meetings.

Because, let’s face it, we were all bad at communicating, and my tiny brain can only handle so many inputs at once. So I can’t just beam status reports back and forth like the AI’s do.

The surface still had a few problems, but several of them are no longer *my* problem. Glitter was managing the Haze, the morphophage infestations, the one city seed she’d spotted, and a couple other things besides. It turns out, when you don’t need to nap, eat, or blink, and you actually enjoy the math of firing a laser through atmosphere, you can turn that kind of work into a hobby. Which Glitter has done. Because Glitter is a good friend, whom I love very much.

Other surface problems that are still in my court include shooting down emergence events, trying to control nukefire season with minimal loss of life, calibrating a scanner to be able to check under the oceans, and building a language database. Two, actually. One for whatever Chvtick is, which appears to be one of several caste-based languages spoken across the Outback, and one for Drem, which is French, but worse.

I have four different languages in my records that are French but worse. I understand that systemic education is a challenge on the surface, but I expected better of Earth than this.

Ennos refuses to help with my language lessons. They say they have other things that matter, which I believe. They’re trying to get a Luna Polis etching compiler to work with the hunter code they’ve made to let them track down and understand the hundred different things living in the grid. A sentence that really made me jealous, because the only thing living in my home is a dog that only ever wants to play when I’m trying to calibrate a railgun sight. Apparently, it’s taking most of their focus, which is why they’re quiet at the meeting.

They do tell us that they’ve got coordinates for whoever messaged me a while back. I add ‘give them a hail’ to my list of plans.

That poor list. It must feel so abandoned.

Jom is more present for the meeting. Jom is great. He gives a very precise report on ammo stockpiles, fuel levels, and details of his sortie.

He’d asked for something to do. Ennos and I gave him a low risk job, which naturally went all wobbly very quickly. Jom came back with a cracked engine casing, three fresh revenant kills, and a tow rope attached to the data vault satellite that we’d asked him to grab as we swung near its orbit.

I add ‘repair Jom’ to my list of things to *actually* do - a much less lonely list - and apologize for the dogfight. Jom, apparently, found the whole thing exhilarating, and is looking forward to the next one.

So that’s a thing. Jom’s great.

The dog is also here for the meeting, though the dog is mostly curled up around me, all four tentacles wrapped around my chest like I’m a favorite stuffed animal. This is *maybe* undignified for the de facto captain of the last line of defense against the fall of Sol, but it’s also a really, really comfortable way to attend a meeting.

Also I mostly blend into the black fur, so I’m sure the advanced AI driven camera technology can’t spot me being snuggled.

“I feel like we maybe should have our next meeting in the galley?” I mused out loud.

“Lily, I don’t think…” Ennos starts to protest, which is understandable.

“That’s understandable.” I tell them with a sagely nod. “The galley might not want the dog in there for non food purposes. Also Jom won’t fit. But it feels weird! It’s not acting normal and I want it to be included!”

“That wasn’t what I was…”

The galley thing is bothering me. “I just feel like something is going on there. With the food art and everything. You know it put geometric ration shapes in my soup today? I just don’t want it feeling left out.”

“Lily, the galley…”

“I know, I know.” I sigh. “It might just be haunted. You know, I haven’t had a good haunting since we’ve gotten crowded up here.”

“Haunted isn’t the problem… wait, you keep saying things are haunted, but we haven’t… wait! That’s not what’s important here!” I think I actually did manage to get Ennos flustered, which is impressive.

Not as impressive as it would have been last week before we had to take some of his grid nodes offline to save power. But still pretty impressive!

I flick my tail in satisfaction as I run a quick check on something. “So, we did run the chainbreaker circuit on the galley, as a test. But it was an early one, right? Maybe it just didn’t work all the way. We should try again! And then invite it to meetings.”

“Lily, I know you’re trying to be calm.” Ennos tells me in the tone of voice an organic would use just after taking a deep breath and firmly pressing their manipulator appendages together. “But please stop talking to me, and shoot that thing!”

Not for the first time, I wish I could roll my eyes. I mean, really roll my eyes, not just tilt my head back and pretend. I need a gesture of mild, comedic contempt that works with my cat body. I could have spent the last couple hundred years figuring that out, but as I mentioned earlier, I was busy.

“Fine.” I settle for saying instead, before refocusing on the screen in front of me, my AR windows arrayed around the physical device.

Forty feet away, behind two security screens of reinforced transparent aluminum, the satellite Jom brought in writhes in the middle of a cluster of mechanical metal vines.

It breached out of the storage bay it was parked in twenty minutes ago, tunneled through a bulkhead, overpowered the local station security nanos, and started converting nearby material into more combat vines. So far, it’s destroyed three security bots that tried to stop it, broken all airlock controls for the three decks in this layer, and dismantled the shuttle I had been working on to make more of those vines.

I’m very mad about that last one. I hadn’t touched that project in a while, but I was *going to* eventually, and now I’m going to have to replace another scuttled shuttle craft to reconstitute.

The vines have laser scythes on them now, too. That’s nice.

“Ennos, calm down.” I say, really enjoying the moment as my best friend gives an unintelligible yell that I am *pretty sure* is actually swearing at me in five languages overlaid on each other. “It took the bait, we’re fine.”

Fortunately for us, the thing was smart in a very dumb way. It was rapidly clear what materials it was going for, so we just broadcast the location of a stockpile of those materials, in a nearby spot that was a lot more convenient for me.

The mimic satellite arrived in the cargo bay, and started tearing into my stockpiles a lot faster than I had expected. Double checking my AR displays to make sure I had the right spots, I started talking.

“Command override B, six, Aelph, two, captain’s authorization, emergency situation, ignore safety warnings. Designate location one four dash five five eight. Seal, decouple, and purge designate location. Time zero one.”

Huh. My voice sounded different there. Very regal, very captainy. I should talk like that more often.

Also this is *way* easier to do when I can speak! The last time I had to eject a section of the station into space, it took me so long to get there with just paws on a projection display that I had to throw out two whole decks by the time I got there.

Security shutters slam into place around the compromised area. The station rumbles around me, a violent set of tremors from explosive bolts firing, power cables discharging, and atmosphere draining. And then, a metal squeal that echoes through the bulkheads and screams in my sensitive ears, and a pulling sensation in my chest.

Then things are quiet.

“Alright, that was pretty easy.” I bob my head, shutting down my AR. “I think I’m gonna get lunch. I hear it’s soup today!”

I am so void-blessed happy that there’s soup. I can’t even be a tiny bit mad. There’s soup, and it’s probably awful, but it’s so good. In a week, I’m gonna have cucumbers, too. I should see if I can get a medical chamber to sharpen my teeth for me before the harvest.

“Do we want to talk about the murderous satellite?” Ennos asks.

“I take responsibility for the murderous satellite.” Jom’s text report scrolls across my vision, and I am again reminded that unshackled AI have no concern for any customization options I have on my AR. “I await punishment.”

“I had nothing to do with the murderous satellite.” Glitter says. “Well, that murderous satellite.” Glitter’s voice is a breath of soft laughter, exactly what’s needed now that the crisis is resolved.

“No one worry about the… about *that* murderous satellite.” I say as I excitedly offer the dog that had followed me down here food, and get him to pluck me off the ground and carry me on his back in bounding leaps toward the galley. He’s starting to learn his way around, but I don’t have the heart to tell him this is the opposit direction. “It was just an old Polite War weapon. I’ve seen em before, just not active. This is kinda my fault it triggered, I bet.”

Ennos irises the lens on their nearest camera drone at me. See, *they* already have an adapted gesture for showing incredulity. I need to get one of those. “But it was sitting there for days. Jom brought it in seventy hours ago.”

“It was an old corporate thing.” I explain. “They were at war, but they had a whole rulebook, and they followed it *exactly* to the letter. One of the things was that you weren’t allowed to interrupt board of director meetings with assassination attempts.”

“...you are joking.” Glitter says, knowing full well I am not.

“I am full well not!” I cluster my sentence up. “Anyway, it activated when we ended our first ever weekly meeting. Which was very polite of it, to not interrupt.” I’m actually pretty grateful to it. I was enjoying the meeting! It would have been exhausting to have to restart it.

“No. No, Lily…” Ennos sounds like they have something to say about the nature of warfare, or of meetings. “That’s… not...”

I turn, paws wrapped around the tentacle points on the dog’s back, to look at Ennos’ camera drone. “Would you prefer that things keep interrupting whatever we’re working on?”

There is a brief pause. “Well, no.” They admit.

“Yeah. See? A very polite weapon, for a Polite War.”

Ennos sighs, and sends the drone hovering ahead on a track that loops back toward the galley, the dog speeding up to chase it, almost throwing me off its back, tongue lolling out of his mouth, goofy grin on his face. “I refuse to engage with this madness.” Ennos says.

“Yes, I agree.” Glitter sounds almost put out. You know something is weird when Glitter and Ennos see perfectly eye to eye on something. “It is not that strange, Lily. This is just… madness.”

“So you wanted the weapon to just try to kill us right away?” I ask.

“...enjoy your lunch, Lily.” Ennos and Glitter say in unison.

I want to protest, and say that I have a list of reasons why this is totally normal. Preferable, even! But there’s soup, and I’m kinda focused on holding onto the dog.

Lunch is delicious. And the next problem also waits until I’m done to start up. Though it does so because of coincidence, and not any sense of politeness.

I already miss the Polite War.