Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Standing silent watch

Empty winter sentinel

Hiding and screaming

I feel like I have inadequately explained just how much of a hazard it is to just exist in the orbital lanes around Earth.

There is *so much* stuff up here. From communications buoys to custom manufactured summer homes, labs that were cutting edge when they were launched by governments and megacorps and labs that outstrip every piece of tech in their predecessors that were stationed by hobbyists, life pods, derelict in system ships, dyson swarm receiver mirrors, arcologies, secure vaults, and of course, the leftover weapons of a hundred idiotic wars.

Once the population of Earth really got into offworld resource processing, the colonization of local orbit really took off. Cutting the costs down by a factor of a thousand just by virtue of not having to launch all that metal into orbit was a massive boon, and it led at least two thousand years or so of people building everything they could fit.

And lets get something straight here; you can fit a *lot* in orbit.

Theres actually a lot of orbit. Its not a flat plane; though the stuff thats designed to talk to the surface does tend to want to be on as close to a flat plane as possible. You can go up or down just as easily as you can move north or south, and theres layers and layers to the shell of stuff up here.

But despite how cluttered it can feel sometimes, with the constant warning alarms about incoming impacts or projected crossing paths, humanity hasnt had time to truly fill the whole sky with junk. And Ive mapped out maybe, *maybe*, a single percent of it in my time up here.

Its just too big. Its multiple Earths worth of space to fill, and humanity didnt manage to cover even just the surface of the planet in their hay day. Im looking at it right now, as I try to get a magnetic tether lock on a passing satellite. I can see a hundred dots of light that arent stars out there, and a hundred more spots of darkness where the actual star field is obscured by something running dark. And yet, for all that stuff, theres still enough open room for the grapples to miss, *again*, as I fumble the shot.

This satellite, which I have good reason to believe used to be some kind of orbital laser canon, has been drifting closer and closer to my home for the last week. And Im both increasingly paranoid about slowly approaching objects trying to appear ordinary, and also just generally avericious when it comes to easy targets.

The reason it was an easy target was because Id blown off its primary firing lens, after it had taken a shot at something on the surface. The reason I wanted it, was because the shot was alarmingly high powered, and judging by the age and size of this particular floating doombot, it wasnt running on battery power.

Power is a constant concern for me. I have the racks of void batteries, yes, and they can keep the lights on. Also a solar array to help keep them charged, which is eh. Its eh. I wont lie to you; the sun doesnt shine here as much as Id like it to. Between the swarm and the junk, there isnt as much sunlight as Id like. And it was never meant to be a permanent solution anyway; the solar panels were actually something I stole and bolted on before I found the engineering control that let me start routing power more effectively.

And that might give the mistaken impression that I have it well in paw now. I dont! I have a lot of things that need that sweet sweet lightning juice to get done; whether its firing the guns, generating complex carbohydrates out of vacuum states to make rations, keeping tight beam channels to message drones open, or the frankly extortionate upkeep costs of cooling the computational grid that the baby seed AI is growing in. My most common thought is I wonder if that has a reactor in it I can steal?

Well, here and now, the answer might be *yes*.

I dunno who built this damn thing, but its clearly something that was meant to be a legacy weapon. Something that would last generations without needing human interaction beyond ordering it to fire. In fact, its entirely possible its recent shot was someone calling down a strike, and I hope that either it wasnt important and missed and no one will need this thing again, or that it hit and they still wont need this thing again. Because it is *mine* now.

As soon as my paws *work* right, dammit. I missed again. It takes *six minutes and eight seconds* for the grapples to retract and lock into firing position again. I know, because Ive counted it four times now. The fifth and sixth times, I just ran off to grab food and trigger repair routines rather than wait, sprinting back to take another shot when it was time.

This particular control pod, for the magnetic grapples, is one I dont use very often. I could, in theory, be snapping up a whole lot of different things out here and building a bigger and bigger station with more space magic nonsense, but lets be honest; I have my paws full already. Also my power grid. Ill make an exception for anything that has a food stasis block full of synthburger, but aside from that, Im not here much. I solve most of my near impact problems by either feeding them into the foundry to turn into raw resources and subsequently railgun ammo, or by shooting them with the railgun ammo.

But my point here is, I havent bothered to modify this for my own use. If Id just spent the hour and a half it took to load into my drone suit, I could have technically saved time by now by doing it right the first time. But I got cocky, and now Im just bitterly screaming loud meows at the targeting hologram every time the impossibly slippery weapons platform is missed by my shot. Again.

I might need to shoot it again. Because Im going to say, because its shielded. And not just because Im feeling spiteful.

Youve gotta wear down your prey before going in for the capture, I suppose. And I have fully contextualized this thing as prey now.

Attempt fifteen failed. The satellite is absolutely mag shielded.

I got some food, and took a minute to reorganize station power for a few minutes to run the subspace tap to refill our water stockpile.

Attempt sixteen, correcting for magnetic interference, failed.

I took a break, taking advantage of a shifting dyson swarm to bask in direct sunlight for a good half hour.

Attempt seventeen failed, but in a way that let me highlight where exactly the mag arrays on the satellite were.

Now I wasnt just not discouraged. Now I was actively feeling pretty clever.

Attempt eighteen was, technically, not attempt eighteen at all, since I wasnt using the grapples.

Obviously, if I was trying to take the interior of the weapons satellite intact, I couldnt just put holes in it until the magnetic distortion failed. That would be just as likely to leave a cloud of radioactive dust drifting through the upper atmosphere. Which would be bad, for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that I didnt need even more scanner disruptions. Also radiation tended to be bad for about half of the things living on the planet below.

The solution to that problem then, obviously, was highly specialized ammunition.

Dont you use highly specialized ammunition as a solution to a lot of problems? You ask.

Yes. Because at a certain point of specialization, ammunition can do anything, and about eighty percent of my tools are guns, so I work with what Ive got. Get off my tail. Sheesh.

The specialized ammo in this case is something that the foundry had a pattern for, which I accidentally built a lot of early on in my access and intelligence, and havent actually gone through the stockpile of. Part of me keeps thinking I should disassemble them for the materials, because part of them is a paracausal metamaterial that I have no real way to ever get more of. But its really hard to think of a practical use for a substance that rapidly absorbs kinetic and thermal energy from a set direction and funnels it in timed bursts in the opposite direction, at an exponentially faster rate the more energy is released? I mean, Im sure there *is* a use for it. Thats sort of what makes it worth it for the risk to harvest of this stuff in the first place. But Im not actually an engineer, much as I hate to admit it. Im a tool user, not a tool maker, and I just dont know what to do with this aside from make weird shaped bullets that reverse their own flight path a split second after impact.

I send a logistics order to the warehouse bots to load a strike drone with a couple of these things. Twenty minutes of sprawling on the back of a roaming fracture check bot as it unwittingly drives me to my destination, I hop up into the drone control seat, launch my little problem solver, and use the mercifully competent auto-aim feature to highlight and pick off the two magnetic warping points on the outside hull of the satellite.

I only actually hit one of them. Because the bullets go backward. As in, back to what *fired them in the first place*. I dont know why I didnt see this coming. I also dont know why this ammunition was a pattern loaded in the fabrication plant at *all*. The drone goes down in a hail of scrap a split second after it fires, leaving me watching with a dull feeling of frustration and an angry hiss at the sudden loss of materials and resources.

That was my mistake. But maybe itll be good enough.

Attempt nineteen. I plant my rear legs in the bolted down swivel seat, and hop half up onto the control bank. The hologram aiming enables, and I gently guide the targeting to where I want it, waiting patiently for the laser cannon to spin to the side where Ive blown off a clean me-sized crater.

Both grapples connect perfectly. I carefully, *carefully*, lift a paw to hit the command to retract my prey, making absolutely sure not to do something stupid and hit the impossibly stupidly placed disengage button that is right next to the correct one.

I can feel the deck vibrate a little as the nearby grapple motors apply the force needed to pull in the fish Ive hoooked.

One problem down.

Now.

Station! Tell me how to properly install a six hundred year old fusion reactor! This will be important in six and a half minutes!