Chapter 36

Chapter 36

Zero gravity is weird.

Also not real, technically. I understand that gravity doesnt actually ever hit zero, really. I am, if you want to get pedantic, actually just falling toward the planet and failing to hit anything. So is everything else up here.

Except for the debris that deorbits fairly regularly, leaving red and green streaks of light across the poisoned atmosphere of Earth as it burns up. That stuff is completely failing to fail to crash.

In a way, this makes everything less impressive. But also sort of not? A billion flying hunks of metal, rock, and sometimes barely-hanging-on living things, all of us falling together and missing the ground over and over. Its the sort of elegant ballet of physics that probably attracted humans to math in the first place.

Anyway, the point is, outside of the stations zone of influence and the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grav plates that it contains, I *feel* very zero-gravity. Physics aside, the sensation of weightlessness and lack of control could have been very unsettling.

Especially for me! Because I hate that!

Which is why Im glad that I decided to do external repairs on Glitter wearing my overdesigned space armor, and not just with my bare paws. A hundred kilos of grav plate wrapped around me personally gives me a lot of emotional security out here.

I dont know where I was going with this.

Look, Ive been out here for four hours, and frankly, the fact that I was able to focus that long on a single thing is kind of a minor boon already. The work of checking Glitters shell for damage, running a structural analysis, and then either removing whole damaged sections to replace, or sealing, treating, and filling breaches, is tedious to a degree that I am finding aggregating.

Im not a stranger to drudge work. Ive replaced hull plates, rewired engines, hauled bodies, manually cleaned railgun magnets, and spent whole lifetimes processing space junk. But with all of that, I at least had the option to just run off and do something else when I got exhausted.

Here, its just me, Glitter, and the emptiness around us.

And Jom, who is supposed to be helping, but is really just bringing me reinforced metal plates when I ask, and otherwise is flitting around the safe stealth zone near the station, seeming to be enjoying stretching his engines?

Oh, and all the debris, yes. So not really that empty after all. But look, Im not going to get distracted by semantics.

What *are* you getting distracted by then? Glitter asks me.

Were my comms on that whole time? I mew curiously.

Yes. Glitter confirms. You know you are not required to

Oh hush. I lightly hiss back. You were in *terrible* shape. This is the fortieth tiny hole Ive patched up, you had a whole chunk of armor plate that was crumbling from something weird, and your engines didnt even work. I didnt even know you *had engines*, Glitter! Youre allowed to tell people when you need help! Especially me, since Im your friend, and own a space factory!

The weapons platform - the *mobile* weapons platform - hums at me in that polite musical way that she tends to do when shes casually running conversational circles around me. I had wondered where the replacement parts came from.

Oh, Ennos helped me get a deep vibrational imager working. We just put one of the working thrust nodes you have in there, and then used that to draft blueprints and rebuilt the innards of the rest. That was actually the easy part. At least the door was actually where it was supposed to be. I pause. Wait, hang on. No distracting me! You need to ask me when you need repairs!

Ah, yes your eternal desire to be allowed to prowl through all rooms, even those that do not exist. Glitters voice lilts with a smile as she pokes fun at me.

They were real when I started! I allow myself a small distraction, before I turn back to my work.

Glitter needed a lot of repairs. A lot of these issues werent cosmetic, either. Properly sealed hulls exist for a reason, and its not just keeping all the air in. Cosmic radiation is a *problem*, among other ambient threats in the Sol system, and I want my friend to not just shut down one day unexpectedly from hardware corruption.

Shes been idly acting like this is just a hassle for me the whole time, and I am getting frustrated with it. I mean, not enough with her personally or anything to stop helping; Im still absolutely paying attention to the sealant clasp as it does its work on this particular hull breach. But its stopped being amusing how resistant to repair she is.

Weve been talking this whole time, sometimes about things weve seen, sometimes about people she knew. Sometimes, Glitter sings while I work. But woven through it, the small reminders that shed be fine if I just left her as she is.

Which, uh, no?

Joms been having fun. Well, fun? I dont know, he says that being unshackled lets him finally use his body the way its supposed to be used, not how it was ordered to fight, and I *think* that translates to fun. Hes been enjoying these little outings at least, flitting around like a shark in the limited space available, burning through fuel reserves pulling frankly ridiculous maneuvers that no organic could survive unassisted.

I watch the station slip by as we zoom over it, the momentum tugging at me, but kept manageable by my suit, before we pivot in a dizzying spin, and I find my view changing abruptly to a small energy screened gap in the stations hull as we slide into the docking bay. If the cleaner nanos allowed for dust, there would have been a gale of it kicked up in a plume as Jom tips up before pitching us perfectly down to a soft landing, extended landing struts perching like a multi-limbed clawed beast on the hull with a single elegant motion. Meanwhile, I have to frantically adjust my grav plates as I slide halfway back toward the rear of the ship Im sitting on top of, as I take the landing with a complete lack of attention and nearly fall off at high speed.

Thanks for the ride! I give the ship an affectionate headbutt before I hop off, double checking all my gear and readouts before I begin to make my way to the drone bay to get the suit taken off, paws striking the deck metal on metal as I prowl off.

The docking bays cargo exit, the doors I tend to use because theyre the easiest to leave open in a flagrant disregard for security or safety, takes the enthusiastic strut out of my walk almost right away.

It had taken me a while to realize this, but the station actively expanded its own aesthetic.

Every new deck, every addition, even the modules and hulls that Id stolen from the wreckage around us and added to my home. All of them, as the core station *thing* integrated them into the whole, changed a little.

Not too much. Never the core function, never the layout or anything like that. Just little things. Slightly wider halls, more accessible furniture, smoother edges. And, subtly, the decor.

Which was why there was a mural of the station down here on the wall facing these big cargo doors, painted onto the hull in timeless markings that could never have been made by the original builders, but had at some point been added. A copy of the dozens of others in the original core and beyond.

These murals had been annoying me for a while now, because every time I saw one, it just felt off. Not off in a big way, not like there was some weird conspiracy going on. Just that I was missing something obvious, and it would stick in the back of my mind until I got to the galley and had my lunch of one gloriously carrot zested ration-thing.

I stare at the mural, the image of a shining protective bastion perched over the Earth below, before shaking off the feeling of personal ignorance and heading to the drone bay. The suit is starting to itch, and I

I turn around. Look at the mural again. At the artistic rendition of shield bubbles, comm arrays, and sensor bristles.

I spark into motion, back into the docking bay where Jom is starting a power cycle sequence. I need to go back out! I say, dashing past the fighter craft who gives me a questioning ping. I saw it!

My paws pad across the couple hundred metered of empty docking bay, the space meant for thousands of incoming and outgoing transfers a day continuing only one single craft right now, before I fling myself back into the void.

Well, fling. Grav plate maneuvering isnt as fine tuned for spaceflight in this suit as it is in my other one, but I can still move pretty fluidly. I run along the outside of the station, orienting the hull as down while I sprint, legs sometimes angled behind me as I take thirty or fifty foot jumps across the smoother parts.

I have to run a long way. The station is huge, and I should have asked Jom for another ride. But eventually, I reach the part of the station that faces up, away from Earth. And I fling myself off it, kicking away with magnetic and gravatics to float away, keeping inside the stations stealth field but rotating myself to look down on it.

A space station. My place of residence, my base of operations, the place where I was made into who I am, and where I lost everything I was. The place where all my friends live with me, where we keep an eye on things up here.

An ancient collection of machines, built around an alien device, added to by dozens of peoples, conquered and explored by dozens more. A shining beacon, a shield, a *survivor*. Lonely, but not really all alone up here in the night.

The Earth is framed behind it, with the partially dyson swarmed sun in the background casting just enough light that it looks like a good approximation of that same mural of this place on the walls.

In space, gravity is relative. Up and down are subjective to whats near you, and what youre inside. And I never needed to really question the shared gravity orientation of the inside of the station.

But now, all of a sudden, I find it *very strange* that when I plant my paws on the floor, its my tail thats facing toward the planet.

Its the silliest thing, now that I can see the whole picture. Its not some conspiracy or haunting or dark secret. The reason that Ive been feeling like the murals were wrong recently is because it is only recently that Ive *left the station*. My mind, fractured and frantic as it is, has finally had the data to make a connection.

The sensors in the mural point *down*. The comically powerful coherent light spike canon points *up*.

My station is upside down.

I start laughing. A mad, chirping cackle in my organic voice, with the projected voice wrapping around me in a wildly different tone of smug satisfaction. Two different laughs, one of them not exactly mine suddenly. And yet, before I can be concerned about that, I realize that I am floating a little too far from my home.

I file this new problem away under deal with it later, and ping Jom for a pickup. At least *one* thing isnt going to bother me anymore. For that reason, anyway.

Lunch is going to taste so smugly satisfied today.