Chapter 52

Chapter 52

On the surface of Earth, an oceanic caravan goes slightly off charts in an effort to save a couple days of travel.

Around them, battering waves rise up to the heights of old world skyscrapers. Living salt leaves impromptu circuits across the keel of a dozen of their ships. Somewhere nearby, a defense station has recently fired a smart chaff decoy, and the networked intercept particles have joined the hurricane force winds to create a pale mimicry of a sliverstorm.

All of this is normal. This is not because theyve gone slightly off course. This is what the oceans are like.

I feel I should make this clear. That for all the crap I deal with up here, things on the surface of Earth are worse. So much worse. Endless, and everywhere, it isnt a string of emptiness filled with terror, its an unbroken chain of lethal threats closing in constantly.

Their ships are uniform. They come from a city that used to be called Venice, before it was called Venibio, before it was called Fabberia. There, eight miles out to sea, underneath a live paling and among the peaks of megastructures still peaking over the waves, a golden age shipyard churns out copies of hardy, effective boats. Many of them do not survive their first crew. Those that do, that go on to take part in cross-ocean trade caravans, make their crews fabulously wealthy and famous.

The city has changed ownership six times since Ive been watching. Three of those have been because of me. I take a dim view to authoritarian policies and police states, and while Ive got an overabundance of splash damage for things like emergence events, when its just a specific group of people that need targeting and I can take all the time I want? I can be very precise.

The city is not the problem right now. The city is fine. The forty four mid-grade orbital launch cruisers repurposed to be trade ships are the problem. Or rather, the problem is what they have run into.

Short tangent.

Sixteen years ago, probably, give or take a decade, I fired the stations engines to dodge a small wrath field that was bending into a new orbit. This was a good idea, because dont touch those, and a bad idea, because the station, as you might have picked up, isnt exactly structurally stable.

This is partly the fault of the previous owners, but lets be honest, Ive made it worse with all the different chunks of other stations and ships Ive stapled on.

Anyway, the point is, a lot of the joining cant actually hold up to sudden and powerful acceleration. And a few things maybe, sort of, possibly broke off.

This happens a lot, honestly. The station is close enough to a living ecosystem in how it grows and breaks. If you dont think about it too hard.

This time though, one of the things that I lost was something irreplaceable. Something I could never find the paramaterials to build a copy of, even if I had understood how the one I found was built in the first place. Something that was beyond valuable for a lot of my excursions. Something priceless before any of the wars and falls of sol civilization, and so far past priceless now that it was closer to a punchline than anything else.

I had *thought* it had hit the original moon. Probably been dinged up by the debris and some automated weapons fire, but if it had managed to survive I spend all my free time for months scanning, searching, trying anything I could to see if I could spot it, even if I didnt have a clue how Id get it back or fix it or whatever.

Obviously, I was looking in the wrong direction.

And this oceanic caravan currently being swarmed by something from an undersea emergence event thatre mostly just balls of teeth and hate, has just stumbled across the tiny islet where my teleporter crashed to Earth.

Lily, teleporters arent real. Ennos says.

Im afraid I must agree, that technology is solidly impossible. Glitter adds.

Dyn and I share a look. Dyn and I, it turns, out, get along a lot better than I expected, once she stopped refusing to talk and I started actually explaining things. We share a look because every time I say teleporter, the AIs ask questions, conclude it is impossible, and look away. Because, again, it is something like ninety percent paramaterial construction.

How did you even find this? Dyn asks. Shes talking about the site itself, not the teleporter in the first place. Her language has some really useful words in it for designating which noun theyre pointed at. And also a lot of words for expressing different flavors of exhaustion, annoyance, and desperation. Shes using a lot of those in conjunction. If I didnt know better, Id say Dyn was some kind of poet. But I know shes actually an engineer.

I flick my tail as I try in vain to reposition the imaging holo, before just shoving it over to Dyn and letting the person with actual fingers do it. She zooms in on a few key spots, pinning the view from our scanners as I answer. I dunno, how did you find my sister?

Bonus tangent. Dyn did successfully make contact with and bring into my increasingly crowded home portion of the station another version of myself.

Same deal, mostly. Memories that are identical up until a certain moment. A similar personality and disposition. Just a different body, and a different several centuries of life.

Shes organic, weirdly. Hyperadapted to the vacuum of space. Doesnt need to breathe much, photosynthesizes, has some kind of organic adhesive for crawling around in zero g, good stuff mostly.

She also hasnt had anything except sunlight and ration paste for centuries, so a few not fully grown berries was a pretty good bribe, if it had been needed. Im gonna need to expand my little garden. A lot.

Lilys been fixing the hull for a while. She didnt have a lot of ways into the station, just a few airlocks and blocked corridors to rest in, with a handful of accessible subsystems. But shes resourceful, and clever, and kind. And so, without knowing who lived in the station, shes been doing her best to keep it from leaking too much, and to intercept things that the admittedly patchwork sensors miss.

Oh! And she also has a friend! Which is good, because of all the iterations of myself that Ive met so far, I think she might be the most lonely. Her friend is a little mechanical scarab unit with an AI thats limited not by any programming, but instead the capacity of its hardware. Its a bit dumber than Dog, and also when I said little, I lied, because it is three times the size of Dog and has to move carefully down most of the halls. It loves her, and as a result, after having known it for six minutes, I am already prepared to die to keep it safe.

Nested tangent: Im pretty sure that whatever the hostile thing living within the station is, it is finding ways to retaliate against us for this. Whatever hold it had that kept us from meeting properly is gone, for some reason. I dont know why, but Im taking advantage of it. We still have to contend with the disciplinary system, and an erratic control of doors and airlocks, though. Which is why I think its actively fighting back, because it absolutely tried to vent Dyn into space.

Didnt work, obviously. This isnt Dyns first time being thrown out an airlock. She dealt with it.Read latest chapters at novelhall.com Only

Anyway. Do you know how much you can get done with *three* terminally depressed super intelligent cats?

Well, let me tell you.

Its exactly the same amount as Ive been doing this whole time.

Were already all basically doing our best. Its not like I got a bonus Lilys worth of help; all the Lilys on the station are actively Lily-ing. All we have now is better coordination, and

I wont lie to you. Were not gonna be coordinating that well. I can barely coordinate with myself. I somehow doubt itll be easier to coordinate several of myself.

But, *but*, but! Do you have any idea what three Lilys could do, *with a teleporter*?! I dont, but I am excited to find out.

Oh, right, Dyn asked me a question. And is staring at me. Oh no. How long have I taken to answer this?

Uh tracking beacon? I say, hoping Im answering the right question. Probably tripped a security system when they got too close.

Dyn grunts in reply. Flicks over another display with a damage readout of the various vessels in the caravan. One of their boats is sinking. Actually a lot of them are sinking, they just dont know it yet.

Probably why they stopped there. I say. Theyre gonna shuffle around cargo and people, and try to make it. I look over the display. Weve already figured out the answer that the surface crews probably know in their guts, even if they arent saying it out loud.

They arent gonna make it.

Another three minutes. Jom deploys, along with legitimate space cat Lily in her own heavily modified strike craft.

Another minute. I get post-hoc approval on my idiot plan. Every Lily likes it. Dyn tolerates it. Dog abstains from voting, but I bet Dog will love it. If it works.

Time seems like its slowed to a crawl. This happens to me a lot. There is nothing I can do. Im sitting here, meowing commands at drones that probably dont need me telling them what to do, and on the surface, a few hundred people are running and fighting for their lives.

This is always how its been.

I can shoot a few monsters, break the worst of the storms, shut down invasions, stop the bigger horrors. But I cant be there, with them. I cant always do anything, except for sit, and wait, and feel my chest tighten and my heart hammer faster and faster.

I fidget with my AR, reveling in the ability to do more remotely than ever before. I bring two nearby medical stations to standby, I adjust my gardens irrigation, I queue up production of more bullets. I dont know what else to do.

I wait.

No one speaks over the comms. Were all waiting. Maybe they all handle it better than I do.

I wait.

I wonder if this will work. I wonder if maybe the mess it will make will draw out the cleaner nanoswarm that is, actually, another of my sisters. I wonder why I havent been able to see her again when Ive gathered the others just fine.

I wonder if Ive made a mistake. If Ive gotten that whole fleet killed, when they could have simply *mostly* died if theyd run themselves.

I check how long its been. How many hours have passed. How long Ive been pacing with my fur on end and my ears flat on my head. It has been eight minutes since my last checkin.

I am not good at this.

I want to do something. Anything. I want to slap a paw across the firing controls and kill something evil. I want to figure out the limits of a piece of technology and then push it just past them. I want to save someone.

I want to help. And I cant.

The cargo bay is silent. Empty. The loader bots are done. I am alone, briefly, before Dyn joins me, Dog trailing behind her. The canine wraps his tentacles around me, slowing my pacing as he greets me with a dopey face, tongue lolling out of his mouth. I accept exactly one dog kiss before I continue pacing.

Dyn says nothing. We wait.

The Lily made of light and energy joins us. She says nothing. We wait.

An hour passes.

I have gotten them all killed.

Again.

I dont know what I am supposed to do, now. I dont know, at what point, it is time to stop just falling into panic, and realistically accept that I didnt give directions well enough, or the teleporter didnt work right, or *something* went wrong, and that the crewmembers of that fleet and their captain who took a gamble on my offer of salvation are *not coming*.

Well. I tell Dyn with a voice that sounds like Ive been crying for some reason. At least you wont have to talk to anyone new.

Dyn almost laughs, almost cries. Says nothing.

Were about to leave. Which is, of course, when the room warps. Space bends, light twists, and in the end, its not us thats crying or laughing, but reality itself.

Two hundred and sixty one people - my captains access to crew and visitor logs is very robust - emerge from nowhere on the floor of the cargo bay. Six of them emerge outside the cargo bay, and my foresight in deploying Jom suddenly makes me seem like the smartest cat alive. Many of the people are screaming, and thats because the things they were running from were practically on top of them when the engineers - desperate, panicking, beautiful engineers - got the teleporter rigged up, powered, and activated.

I know the things were almost on top of them because three of them are still here, tearing into the people on the side of the bay.

Dyn and Lily and I arrow through the crowd; the sailors ammo is out, judging by the number of them holding knives instead of guns, but we dont need crude wasteland projectile weapons to

Okay Dyn, you have guns, I get it. Goodness, you have so many guns. Where did you hide all of those?

Dyn elbow checks a feathermorph over a crate, and empties multiple clips into the mass of squishy teeth that was about to eat the poor sailor. Dog flanks her, tentacles intercepting and rending open the strikes of a second creature. Theyve got that, I dont keep looking. Because Im busy. Lily and I lunge past a crewman that was standing between a downed friend and one of the monsters with nothing but a stick, relieving her of her duty by bounding off her shoulders and carving the creature in half. My engineering lasers turned up to high power melt the thing in a half second. The other Lily plows through the dissolving mess and just body checks the one behind it, trailing burning organic matter behind her as she melts through all on her own.

Theres a small explosion from outside the bays shield as Jom puts a missile into one that came out in vacuum. Apparently they can survive that. They cannot survive missiles. And while Jom being an AI cant see the creatures, the crew hes picked up can, and help out with targeting.

Things go quiet.

Okay, thats a lie and you know it. It is not quiet. There are almost three hundred people in here, many injured, most terrified. Dog finds me, hoists me up onto his back like the well trained friend he is. Other Lily walks next to us as we move through the crowd, the oceanic crew making room like were visiting royalty.

I find the capitan, trying to hold a bleeding stump where her left arm used to be, supported by someone who looks at her with terrified love.

Okay, I say, I had a lot of time to plan something good to say here, and I squandered it. She looks at me with confusion, mutters something about how this is a very silly afterlife. Yeah, it would have been wasted, I agree. I answer a question she had no intention of asking. Your crew are safe. We have medical facilities on standby. Do you consent to treatment?

Yes. She croaks out.

Good. You are now guests. I make the appropriate adjustment to the stations settings. Um I look around. I dont know what to do now. I admit. Lily, do you have any ideas?

Why in the void would you think I would know how to handle this? Im actually just you. Lily says. Are you doing something like this every day?

I mean, I might be now. I answer.

The captain, being carried out by her crew along the guide lines now marked in their own personal guest AR displays, has just enough energy to mutter before she loses consciousness. A very stupid afterlife.