Chapter 57

Chapter 57

Someone has tampered with my garden.

I mean, they didnt steal anything. Or break anything. Or anything bad actually.

What I should say here is that someone has improved my garden. Why they would do this, I do not know. Possibly because they have some ulterior motive to steal my precious produce.

Ennos! I command, in my best commanders voice. Open a case log! I have detective work to do!

Lily my friend sighs to me. Your garden has been moved to a dedicated hydroponics system. Its on deck nineteen, in one of the shielded segments, and it is doing much better now that it has more dedicated support mechanisms. Ennos pauses. I say much better, but it has only been six hours, so I suppose well have to wait and see. But it is doing much better.

I am aghast. Ennos, I am aghast! I exclaim. Who has touched my precious lunch?

Tiska and Dyn, primarily. Ennos replies without hesitation. Lily, just go to the hydroponics and look at your garden, and stop being aghast. The AI sounds distracted. I know this game Ennos, I know youre not actually distracted. Your mind expands further with each grid node and processor segment you occupy. You cannot become distracted from me.

Wait, hang on.

We dont have a hydroponics bay. I say with deep suspicion, considering doubling down on this investigation. I vented it into space. For reasons. They were good reasons.

Im sure they were. And we do now. Because Dyn and Tiska went and extracted roughly eight hundred kilos of various salvaged machinery from the orbital farm that you originally took your seed vault from. And then assembled it into one of the gap spaces on deck nineteen. And that is where your plants are. Now go look at it, because I need to focus.

Alright, alright. Im not always a horrible gremlin harassing my friend when theyre trying to get work done. I can calmly go look at wherever my dirt was absconded to.

Wait, no, hang on.

Dyn and who? I know Dyn, I dont know the other name. I am about to ask Ennos, and may in fact already have asked Ennos without realizing it, but I decide that I can solve this one myself, because theres a likely answer.

I open up the crew manifest in my AR display, and scan through it, still getting used to the modified system that reads my eye twitches to do what I want it to. Its amazing, it doesnt require me to get a full body workout to look at a menu, and it takes a while to get over a couple centuries of practice in one specific thing.

Ah, there. Tiska. Shes the feathermorph girl who stayed aboard when everyone else got teleported back to the surface. Sort of. Shes on shore leave right now.

On the surface. Exploring the growing city Ive been keeping an eye on.

My heartbeat speeds up.

I could go down to the surface. I could set my paws on soil and feel organically filtered UV on my fur and breathe lightly radioactive air. I could leave the station.

I dont realize whats happened until I notice the pain. That every muscle in my body has tensed up as tight as they can wind, that my claws are out and ablating themselves on the metal of the deckplate. That my vision is swimming and my pulse is racing.

The surface. Earth. I could go there. It wouldnt even be that hard.

But I am instead hyperventilating, finding myself pitching sideways, my flank impacting the wall before I slide down and make a mild effort to curl my legs in on myself.

I cant breathe. I cant think. My body is injuring itself from the strain, and I can feel it knitting damaged muscles back together. I cant move past the suddenly uncaged panic. I could go to the surface. I should go to the surface. But I am terrified, beyond reason, beyond thinking.

So I lay in the slightly sloped corner where the wall meets the floor, and let go of everything, eyes staring without seeing at the far wall, the world rushing past in a hiss of white noise in my ears.

An indeterminate amount of time later, my sister finds me. A Lily in the shape of a thought without physical form, she settles around me like a drift field; never quite occupying the same space as my body, but causing something more than just a physical pressure all the same.

She doesnt say anything, really. I guess she doesnt need to. And I wouldnt really be in a good place to listen even if she did.

Part of my mind - the detached, floaty, distant part, thats just sort of divorced itself from the overwhelming wave of fear and catching-up stress - wonders if her body rejects her like this too. Wonders just how many times shes been alone for this, like I always was. If her own tribulations were just as overwhelming as mine, or worse. If she has to sometimes live with laying unmoving on the deck?

What does a psychic idea of a cat lay on, when theyre in distress?

I bet its comfier than a deck.

I am uncomfortable.

Slowly, laboriously, I pull myself back together. Start breathing normally again, uncurl my legs, let my muscles stop burning so much from straining. I still dont get up, but I do open my mouth to let out a very soft mew. I dont tap into my sisters voice to say it, Ive had a cat word for this feeling for a very, very long time.

I dont like this.

Yeah. The resonance of a cat curled around me says sadly.

I take a few more minutes to realign the connections between my mind and body. Thanks. I say.

And yet it feels wrong. I dont feel like I should. Not just shouldnt rest, but shouldnt let go of my control of the station; what little control I have, anyway. Though that control grows every day as Ennos cuts through cybernetic security and Dyn leads engineering teams and my sisters and I pass on the knowledge of centuries to those who can use it better than we ever could.

Maybe Im being stubborn. Maybe Im just terrified of giving up command. Or of losing what little home I have.

Of losing my last tether to my mom.

I know theres something more here. Dyn thought the strange shifts in space and feeling of being watched would go away once my psionic sister pulled herself together, but thats not ever what it was thats been watching over us. Ennos thought the same thing about the stations grid, but they were wrong too.

My mom is still here, somehow. Keeping me safe. And I cant leave now.

Ive been dreaming again. More and more lately, the dreams come through with less grey and more of my sisters. Theres more of us on this station, though we havent found them yet.

No, I cant leave. And I cant risk giving up command until Ive seen the end of it. I dont know what that means, but I know Alice trusts me, and I will not fail her.

A wave of coyrofluid washes over me as I fail to tighten a bolt properly, and I remember that I am supposed to be working on a cloning vat, not getting lost in my own thoughts.

This, I say slowly, is disgusting. I can taste it. Oh void, why can I taste it? Had I known I could have eaten this stuff, even when I was on an all-ration-paste diet, I do not think I would have. Maybe once every five years I would have sniffed it, and then run. Just to be sure. Oh no, its leaking into between my toes, oh no. No, this was a mistake. I should have done this with a fully sealed engineering suit. Outside of the station.

Are the air processors even going to be enough to handle the smell?

I am saved from my torment by two of my sisters arriving, one of them an amorphous blob that mimics a cat shape pretty well but also mimics *my* cat shape in a way that lets her roll over my fur and slide away along the deck plate carrying the offending fluid that was covering me inside a sealed pocket of ooze.

Oh wow, this is really awful. Lily says, even as the nanoswarm version of myself gets to work annihilating the scraps of matter in the air with a glittering dust that she shakes off her back. Ugh. Why can *I* taste it? Oh, oh no. Ive made a mistake.

I said the same thing. I tell her, wiggling my hind legs so I can push myself slightly further under the vat so that my multitool can reach the clip I actually need to get to. Thanks though!

Youre lucky were the same cat, or Id be very mad at you! She tells me.

Im mad at myself all the time, why are you special? Nanolily asks as she finishes purifying the air and leans her wide triangular eyes down to look at what Im doing. Left. She advises. Wrongly. Im the engineer here, let me work. Though shes right; Im mad at myself all the time, why is this one Lily special?

I got stuck in a therapeutic isolation tank for about twenty years once. The half-collapsed cat shaped ball of slime says. It wouldnt let me out until I underwent a marginal rate of self improvement.

Is it still around? I ask.

Do you have twenty years to spare? She asks me with ears extended like vector points.

I blink up at the machine Im working on. I suppose I dont. Yes. I say.

We can do some breathing exercises later. She tells me. Did you know I have to breathe?

You got ripped in half last month. I remind her. I do not remind her that she got better, that would ruin the effect of the statement. Also, why are you two here?

Ennos sent us. Said you were covered in slime.

I attach the last wire I need to, and start trying to figure out how to extract myself from this prison of technology. Howd you get here so fast? Theres no access vent near here.

Gravlift! They say in unison. Which is worrying. The gravlifts dont work. Yeah, they dont, but Ennos got the shafts online, so you can still dive down them if you dont care about the impact at the end! Nanolily says. And I dont, because my pain receptors dont actually work properly anymore. Oh, *that* sentence isnt okay. We need to talk about that later. Anyway, we were supposed to clean up before that stuff melted the sensors in the region. The fumes eat glass or something. So, whatre you up to? She asks in a rush of rustling words.

She offered me engineering advice without knowing what I was working on. I am mildly offended. But I answer anyway. Cloning vat. I say. Partially because we need to grow Dyn some new parts before I get her into a vivification pod, and also partially because Luukri and Malom were being really sad the other day about not being able to have a kid, so Ill offer them this as part of their pay when they end up leaving.

The whole thing? Lily asks, pooling herself around and over the floor-to-ceiling glass tube. Why these things are always glass Ive never understood.

No, just the clone. I roll my eyes. The hard part was actually getting their genetic material to be compatible, since theyre different species. But the modification array is something I rewrote a loooong time ago, so I had some experience with it, and I just ended up selecting for desirable traits and making modifications to a basic biped template thats not technically human, but should be genetically compatible with either species.

Dyn said the hard part was because they were both male. OozeLily says, depositing the liquid shes carrying into a sealed biohazard canister with a sigh of relief.

Dyn doesnt have fleshwarden certifications and eight years of paws on genetics experience. I snort.

Everyone wants to give me advice on how to do my job today, I guess.

My sisters listen to me ramble about gene templating for a while longer, absorbing the information along with actual training nodes from our AR displays, as I work. We spend some quiet time together like that for almost an hour, until another alarm sounds.

And then we run, together, to face disaster.

Lily was right, though. If you dont care about the impact at the end, the gravlift shaft is a really fast way to clear multiple decks at once.