Chapter 5

Chapter 5

It worked! I have made a friend!

Okay, so, thats a bit of a lie. I say it worked as if my original plan was a success. What I was not telling you was that it has been over a week of failed attempts trying to communicate with the old weapons platform in orbit around the prime moon.

I did manage to figure out when it was built, and why. About a century ago, for the Worshiper Wars that destroyed most of the lunar surface cities. Its called a Divine Eye, in a way that is actually a really clever pun when written in the particular dialect of its builders.

The archives I have are incomplete, but I get the impression that the AI on this thing is smarter than this entire space station twice over. And far, *far* more capable of becoming bored.

So of course I tried to say hi.

Radio didnt work. Tight beam communication didnt work. Subspace broadcast didnt work. *Superspace* broadcast didnt work, which surprised me because that ones basically just screaming that works in vacuum.

Im not even sure why the station has a superspace antenna setup? Though the way the logs around it were scrubbed is the same kind of sloppy work that the Real America occupiers did when they tried to abandon ship. Which sort of makes me want to blame them for this idiot setup.

Of course, it *was* a viable option. It just didnt work. And at a certain point, I started to think it wasnt just my poor grasp of Chinese causing the problem.

So I switched to trying something a little more clever, and a little stupider.

It wasnt like we were riding high on piles of wealth, but Im pretty sparing with how I spend the collected supplies that I acquire up here. There *is* a finite amount of junk I can turn into bullets, after all. So Ive got some stockpiles to dip into.

And I did so, firing up a fabricator that I knew existed, but had never actually physically visited. This actually required a minor spacewalk from me; the fabricator has an airlock, which I know how to open, but *not* the internal door.

Fun fact, it took less effort to get the station to make me a spacesuit than it did to get it to open a damn door. I mean, I made the suit two hundred years ago. Shortly after that, in a flight of childish fancy, I also made myself a suit thats really some kind of horrifying amalgamation of power armor and a strike craft. I have never had a reason to wear that one.

The fabricator is one Ive never used because its primarily for building drone chassis. And the stations maintenance bots are built somewhere else, or just kept up to standards by the local nanoswarm. Right now, though, a drone is exactly what I need.

It took less than two hours for the drone I needed to be assembled, outfitted, and fueled. Thats legitimately less time than it takes for the foundry to make a railgun round; I think this replicator might be one of the fastest pieces of tech on the station, now that Ive seen it in action.

After that, it was just a matter of adding one final touch, and sending the thing off. Controlled, of course. Im not trusting a program to guide this one, and not just because the station has so many security locks on that kind of thing that it might actually vent me out an airlock before letting me get away with it.

One pass of the drone by my target. Then another, making sure that the underside was revealed to the weapons platform that I *knew* could see the lunar surface. It must, *must* be able to see what I had sent its way.This chapter is updated by nov(e)(l)biin.com

I admit, Id given a mewling wail of sorrow when I saw it open fire. Thin crackling lilac lashes opening up on the drone on the second pass. The scanners from both the station and the drone rendering it in detail. Id been prepared to just give up then, except

Except the drone didnt shut down. Didnt take critical damage. Just kept its trajectory, and stayed under my remote command.

Curious, I brought it back to the station, docked it in one of the actual drone bays, which might be getting some actual work to do now, and went to check it out.

The underbelly of the drone, a smooth metal surface that was easily twenty feet long and half again as wide, contained two things. The first was my addition. A messily etched message, carved with the paw-laser on my suit.

Hello! It read. Would you like to be friends? It said this in two languages, and I wont lie, neither of them looked like they were written by anyone who had graduated kindergarten.

And underneath, in equally sloppy lines, as small as possible to fit more words in and still glowing with pale purple-white radiation, was a reply.

Most of it was either boring, scary, poorly understood, relaxing, or comfortable. A lot of it involved eating.

It was a torment that I cant really explain, to know that even with my inherent feline taste buds not being even remotely close to a humans, that I had once tasted *tuna*, and may never again experience that.

I scarfed down another recycled, nutrient rich, flavor deficit ration bar, and got back to work.

I had six hours before Id be in drone range for conversation again. That was enough time, baring any more emergency alarms, to try to find a faster engine schematic to strap onto the drone craft, to figure out what it would take to tow a weapons platform, and to redouble my futile hope that I could find a working hydroponics station still in orbit that I could eat.

Just eat the whole thing. I dont care. I will gnaw through bulkheads to get to a goddamn carrot.

My dreams of having anything in my diet that wasnt bar-shaped were interrupted by another klaxon.

Ive mentioned before that I can, in fact, sigh. It never feels like it helps, but I do it anyway.

A quick check of the AR windows popping up around my head shows that its something actually incoming on *us* this time. Two ten meter long objects rapidly closing on the station, and appearing uninterested in communication.

I bolt for the nearest weapons blister, mewing out commands as my paws pad in soft thuds on the metal floor. The information Im hoping for comes back to me; theyre not missiles, theyre drones of some kind. Scanners show theyre armed, but not if theyre armed *enough*.

The question I really have is where the hell they came from. Though I already know the answer, I get confirmation as the archive sweep I ordered returns a match.

Theyre United Eastern Bloc hunter-killers. Drones built to kill drones, specialized for low orbit and upper atmosphere work.

The UEB. I am, by necessity, a student of a few historical cultures. And the name of one of the biggest enemies of Real America fills me with a grim lack of surprise.

I may, *may*, have assumed a little too much in terms of my superior control of the orbit of Earth. I may also have just used Real America drone designs to talk to a space gun having an existential crisis.

I added redesign drone silhouettes to my list of things I needed to do.

The incoming drones were zeroing in on the docking bay where Id landed my own communications platforms, either not knowing or not caring that the drone Id launched was almost entirely unarmed. This was actually hugely lucky for me, because it meant they were trying to approach the station from above, and it was one of the places where I had almost complete control of the defensive weaponry.

The first drone took a hit from a flak web, the physics-angering burst of electromagnetic interference packets turning its control programming into sludge and melting half the important circuits on the thing.

The second drone, perhaps sensing the death of its companion, began firing on my home, and my heart stopped as the AR projection of our battle showed the incoming track of the projectiles.

Then the bullets hit the stations shield, and didnt even register as a power fluctuation.

The hunter killer, which would have been a serious threat to my own communication drone, swooped past, and I cut it in half with a void beam.

I let out another breath I had been holding.

Well. That was something else to look out for every time I had a small chat with my new friend.

Maybe instead of conquering a floating garden, Id just take over the enemy drone bay instead. Save myself the headache.

Well, one headache. It wasnt like I was strapped for sources these days.