Chapter 46

Chapter 46

The airlock hissed as it cycled. I mean, I assume it hissed. My suit was a lot of things, but Id actually forgone high fidelity external audio feeds for the engineering suit. Id needed the space to fit a backup control node inside the sealed cat shaped armor.

But it made Dyn nervous, so I assumed a hiss was happening.

Dyn had actually been the one to crack the airlock systems. I was going to just deploy one of my nanoblooms on it, but without Ennos encryption-shattering presence, it would have taken more time. And more importantly, more backup power. Which is when the young woman surprised me, carefully selecting a couple of the tools shed brought along and kneeling down on Joms extended maintenance ramp while the fighter craft kept us in on perfectly synced vector so that she could pry open a panel and send a small electric pulse into it.

The emergency airlock protocol triggered instantly, and it began cycling to let us in. What impressed me most was that she knew to not go for the airlock control itself; those are always rigged to a hostile bureaucratic mess of interlocking problems on old corp ships like this. Instead, straight for the *actual* bypass that the corp-employees engineers put in and never told anyone about.

Except other engineers, obviously. I feel like I should make that clear. Engineers can keep a secret, if all non-engineers involved in the system are dead.

And also if the documentation is bad.

The documentation on these ships is really bad, let me tell you. I studied a number of blueprints and code copies that I got off an executive satellite I once salvaged, and the first time I actually tried to *board* one of these, like, a hundred and fifty years ago, it nearly killed me. Because all the notes, all the schematics, theyre all lies. Lies to their enemies, lies to their bosses, lies to their stockholders, just a big wad of deception all the way down. I had wanted to make some kind of joke that the only thing accurate was the shape, but *that didnt turn out to be true either*, and the blueprints had claimed it was a proprietary profile masking technology, but it was actually just terrible construction.

I think what Im getting at is, dont trust corp engineers? Yeah, lets go with that.

The airlock finished hissing, matching our pressure to the inside of the frigate, and Dyn and I prepared to move in.

For me, that meant bouncing back and forth between my front two paws, trying to get a feel for the mild updates Id made to the control hood so that I could keep the suit as disconnected from the station as possible. I was just waiting, really, For Dyn, that meant leveling her weapon at the airlock and dropping into a braced stance, keeping her magnetized boots firmly sealed on two points of deckplate.

Where the black did you even get a gun? I asked over our link. Dyn didnt answer me. Probably because she was too busy fiddling with her gun.

Actually come to think of it, shed been picked up with basically nothing but a suit that only technically qualified as spaceworthy. Where did she get *any* of the twenty different tools hanging from rigging points on her exo?

Id ask later. She probably wouldnt answer that either.

The airlock finished opening, letting us into the frigates central chamber, and we got to see first hand why this ship was dead when it had minimal external damage.

Ancient corpses in crew suits, now nothing more than skeletons, lay strewn across the deck and in many cases slumped over consoles. The commandmind tank that sat at the back of the bridge was dry, all the water long since having leaked out of the hole in it and been processed by the remnants of the climate system, leaving just the husk of the massive dead crustacean inside. There were small splotches of battle damage, but not a whole lot else.

Except for the sleek, boxy black shape of a corporate mechanized warform sitting off to the side just behind the comms console.

It was powered down, having turned itself off to conserve power probably right after it put one of its impact spikes through the skull of the comms officer that it was still stabbing; an ancient moment of violence that had lasted for centuries.

Dont touch that. Null prodden ka. Dyn and I spoke at the same time, before sharing a glance with each other.

I was starting to like Dyn. Which was fun. Maybe shed feel the same after this.

We moved across the bridge, checking everything that had happened here. The whole internal design of this ship was *grey*, with just a corp logo on the internal doors and shoulder patches of the crew suits to bring any amount of color in. Solar-Krupp, read the company name.

Awkwardly moving a skeleton out of their chair with a crash of old bones, I hopped up to the chair and triggered the interface system for my suit. Without the suit, threading the adaptation cable into the proper slot would have been a nightmare, but here, my paws were a lot less limited and a lot more *covered in grav plates*, so I made it work.

Aaaaand nothing.

Because everything is turned off. Right.

Backup powers dead. I sent over to Dyn, who just nodded. Shed been looking around the bridge while I got my connection set, and by the time she moved over, taking slow, deliberate steps to make sure both boots were on the deck as often as possible, she had a half dozen new objects attached to her rigging. Including another gun.

Where do you keep finding those? I asked, and got no answer. Just her pulling a thin roll of electrical cel out of a pouch on her ankle, peeling it open to a strip, and sticking it to the side of the console I was at.

I waited patiently as she got a slim metal rod, and a vibrational drill out, made a hole, and started prodding to try to connect the cel to an internal power supply.

For someone who was carrying around an infinitely higher percentage of guns than I was, Dyn was really being careful here.

My normal method for salvaging is well, it hasnt been *gentle*, I can tell you that.

Especially when the out comes in the form of a Polite War killbot slicing through the rest of the door that Dyn and I had wedged open with a plasma cutter.

I scream something incoherent. Dyn shoots it. Like, repeatedly. Softmetal spikes and some kind of green flash erupting from the two different guns she has on her as she reacts like a veteran soldier, pouring violence down on the armored form.

The killbot doesnt even flinch. Though it does turn toward her.

I see the strike coming, my reflexes giving me a tiny window to act. I dont have a plan, I just have an impulse. And with nothing else to do, I interpose myself between Dyn and the spike coming her way.

It catches me in the chest, my leap having put me just in front of her head. My suit loses integrity rapidly, a breach registering in my displays, followed by a blossom of pain in my ribs and stomach. The killbot doesnt look *surprised*, exactly, but I do like to think that murdering a surface pet species at least causes some consternation for the Polite War programming in its head.

I hit the floor at its base, Dyn having scrambled back from the thing to keep firing on it from behind the quartz loop of the zero point reactor, probably hoping it wont blow the whole ship just to shoot her. The killbot steps around me, its hexapod legs vibrating the deck as it passes by.

I itch. And hurt. But also, I itch.

And in my vision, as the helmet readout flickers from a cut power line somewhere, one word forms itself as the cleaner swarm that tagged along with me writes itself in front of my eyes.

Nanos. It says. In large, glowing, all capital letters. A demand.

I mewl out a command to my suit, not being able to count on my body to stitch itself back together in time to help Dyn. I have one option here, if shes going to live, and thats to trust these things. This tiny little stowaway that waited until the station couldnt see to talk to me. That, just maybe, is more on my side than I ever knew.

Engineering bloom. Full manual control unlocked. Nano engine online. Stabilizer field online. Coherence code unlocked.

Get em. I yowl.

The cleaner swarm, or whatever was masquerading as it, flows off my fur like a line of ants. Through the suits channels, into the engineering nanobloom, into the now dangerously uninhibited nanotech core. My suit starts flashing a *lot* of warnings as an external force takes over the tool. I even get a message buried in the code that my suit is trying to broadcast a grey goo situation alert, along with a prayer for salvation. I jam that one.

The co-opted nanoswarm flows out like water, converting what it needs from the deck plate and local controls, building enough of itself to make a basic form. The killbot kicks through a stabilizer cord, and moves to spear Dyn, and I scream a Polite War authorization challenge at it. It turns, reacting to an ancient treaty I dont have a stake in, and the distraction lasts just long enough for the nanoswarm to hit.

Its built a roughly quadruped shape, and when it nails the killbot near its center mass of armored plates, stealth fields, and era-spanning batteries, it lands with its front two legs. Legs that morph into vibrational claws, then something else I dont recognize, the nanoswarm burning power at an absurd rate as it tears into the killbot.

Not just tears into. Converts.

Im watching in mild alarm and also laughing triumph as the swarm shreds the war machine, turning more and more of its outer plate into more nanobots to augment its structural mass. The nanoswarm dodges a plasma cutter that sweeps over it, *ducking* by flattening itself down to the surface of the bot before springing back like a non-Newtonian fluid and pouring more strikes into it. It converts more matter, coalesces a body of sorts, then a fifth limb out the back of the form. Then, the warform grabs it with a magnetic net, and flings the nanoswarm violently across the engineering deck.

It turns with a stuttering mechanical movement, plasma blade raised, ready to kill.

And Dyn shoots it again. Still not doing anything, but boy is Dyn not here to get stabbed without a fight.

I stagger to my feet, flesh knit back together. Limp forward toward the thing, turning my suit to wide band broadcast. I start yelling code commands at it, firing off attack code, looking for any kind of weakness to exploit. At one point, I hit upon something that makes it pause, but then it tries to laser me in half and I have to roll to the side, losing the edge of my suits paw in the process. The roll hurts a lot, I think some of my ribs are still broken.

But corp era killing machine or not, theres only so much abuse something can take. I fling another command code at it, Dyn shoots it, and from the rear, I see the nanoswarm closing in. Die! Dyn and I scream together.

Then the nanoswarm screams it too. Plunging a clawed arm into the center mass of the machine, and ripping out its computer core.

The killbot drops inert. The nanoswarm eats a little more of what it wants from the thing, before stabilizing. From her hiding spot, Dyn rises up, breathing heavy and shaking as she stares at the form perched on the killbots frame, looking like fuzzy static made manifest. Thanks Lily? She says slowly.

No problem. The nanoswarm and I say together in two languages.

We look at each other. Its got a thin frame of a body, limbs with claws, a fifth limb that twists like a tail, and a vaguely familiar face made out of overlapping triangular nanoswarm panels. Its wearing the body of a cat, almost as well as I do.

The nanoswarm shifts, and the form opens one green eye. It looks really familiar.

Hey. It says with a buzzing meow in perfect spoken Cat.

Hey. I tell myself.