Chapter 42

Chapter 42

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

Repeat.

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

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

But it cant last.

I face myself. Or something that looks like me. She stares at me 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 same thing. I think I do. I have always been here. She replies. Somethings 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 something thatll be done overnight, and in the meantime, sleeping somewhere that enables me 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 me awake thing is kind of the only way I wake up anymore, so I didnt mention it earlier.nove(l)bi(n.)com

But that doesnt mean 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 time in a while Im tracking something as small as a single vehicle, and as problematic as an actual person.

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 come back to that, but also means 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 name 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 me 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 someone. But not me, 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 moment, exactly where they are crawling. They dont even have time to understand that they have been killed, much less to feel pain, or scream. A merciful 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 means 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 me still needs a job before it goes insane. And maybe my human guest would like some 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 remember names! - to design and produce some kind of pleasant wall decor suitable for crew quarters for culturally traumatized elderly cyborg women. It answered back almost immediately with cheerful acknowledgment of the order, and asked how many I wanted.

For some 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 name, but well work on that) sent back a projected materials invoice and timeline. Its nice working with professionals sometimes.

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