Chapter 62

Chapter 62

I dont have a bridge. I have a command center.

I dont know what the difference is. I do not care. I like how command center sounds. I think bridges are for ships?

Legally speaking, the station is classified as a ship, because it can move. I did not file the paperwork for this or anything, its a legacy aspect. But Ive added a lot of engines, so I know it can still move.

But that doesnt make my command center a bridge.

I can count on one paw the number of times Ive actually used a command center. Even in past years when the station wasnt so empty, it was never really needed.

Not like now. Not like this.

Dyn steps out of a transfer pod with me still on her shoulder, claws digging into the heavier material of the armored scavenger suit shes pulled up around herself. Neither of us need a map for this, but the AR throws lines against the wall just in case. She steps out, takes a sharp right, and moves forward as fast as her body still works, falling in behind another human thats running the same way we are.

They look like a cadet. So young, with a blue and gold patch on their suit shoulder in the shape of a paw. They go down with a crunch of bone as a multi-jointed limb of bulging muscle and leather slams through the bulkhead to our right, metal tearing outward like wet paper.

The claw of the limb latches onto the far wall, and starts to pull, dragging the ball of flesh its attached to through afterward. The ball glows with a sick organic orange light, and my brain does not want to process the fact that there is nothing else to this creature but an arm and a glowing orb of loose skin and inner light.

Dyn shoots it, firing into its joints and dusting the corridor in orange blood as her shots collapse whatever is holding it up.

I wait for the flesh ball to explode, but it doesnt. So, small mercies.

Bounding off her shoulder, kicking off as softly as I can so I dont topple her, I rush to check the human. Hes bleeding, and looks like he has a broken arm. But hes alive. I summon a medical transport bot team, and take off ahead of Dyn. Shell be fine, and shes turned to cover our rear as another one of those things tries to smash through the ventilation.

Im under attack, and I knew this was going to happen.

An emergence event has opened in my station. In my home. Im under attack, and Im so furious, Im having trouble not reacting by doing something stupid. The only thing holding me back is the fact that I need to know, before I commit to being an idiot, if this is it or not. If this is the Moment where history pivots.

I stride into the command deck, past a pair of planetsider marines who do their best to not stare at me as I pass. Inside things are a little hectic.

Invaders spotted moving down the grav shafts! ExoLily yells. Origin points marked!

Strike team cant find the way to the hole. One of the new kids says, staring at a projected map of the station and the marked points of where fights have happened, soldiers have fallen, and invaders have died. Its a maze up there.

Up there is the sensor array. Theyre right. Lily! I hiss out, and a hologram of my digital sister crisply snaps into view near me. Get up there, guide them!

On it! She flashes away.

I check my AR. Were not blind, the grid is up and the majority of sensors are working. Theres only a few that arent, a trio of short range projectile intercept tracers that could each be the source of the event. But they arent. I know they arent, because Ive kind of seen this show before. And also because its suspiciously obvious that the thing in the middle of the three destroyed sensor nodes is still operating.

Were not blind, but were disorganized. Theres almost a hundred people on the station, and theyre running around like theyre all working on their own. And lark, maybe they are. Lets fix that.

You! I point a paw at the two nearest newly promoted sensor techs. Weve got a dozen ways to spot these things! Start sweeping the station. You! We know where the crew are, start directing people to link up with each other! Get to security posts, armories, turrets, whatever!

I glance down at the automated routine I set up earlier. Something weird has occurred that the minor intelligence of the program cant process, which means its spotted an invader. I switch to the local view, and trigger a turret flamethrower burst to annihilate a pod of those weird arm things. They do explode when set on fire.

Five decks above us, the station loses a chunk of a foundry module as I burn out the infection. We dont even feel it down here.

Lily! Ennos voice comes through, and a few of the new crew who were raised on tales of evil AI flinch around me. Ill harass them later, when were all alive. Im something is Ennos voice cracks and breaks. I am processing memories. They stagger out. Through the relay, I am processing information. About. This. Ennos modifies my AR, and a local image of an invader comes up. I manually slave a nearby wall turret and shoot it with something non-flammable.

Wait. Hang on.

How? I demand, as reports of damage and chaos come in around me. A hull breach alarm starts sounding. Its probably fine.

Dont know. Ennos says through gritted digital teeth. Using. Relay ship. Scrambling effect is not natural. Something. Deleting memories They trail off, and I take the moment to help one of the gunner kids manually detonate the ammo canister of a PDW, taking out a swarm of the creatures that are trying to crawl up the outer hull toward a breach theyve made that would let them skip a lot of guns. Ill try to help. I have to go. Good luck Lily.

Good luck. I whisper-mewl back.

Around me, chaos begins to settle in.

Ive seen this before. Ive felt this before. Its a reaction people tend to have when situations like this happen. Theres a threshold beyond which the chaos becomes the accepted way things are going, and you just cant keep panicking past a certain point. Sooner or later, you have to just start doing the work and shooting the monsters.

We get to work.

My sister in the power core reports things moving through, but not causing damage. Our energy supplies stay online, and I send another two sisters to help her kill the problem.

A pair of crew members nearly blow their limbs off getting the fire suppression systems online. They manage to do it without the maiming, and save a half a deck of the station.

A team of marines from that raft city bring down something the size of a corvette trying to claw its way down through the decks of the station.

I keep coding mid-battle, throwing out small scripts that trip alarms, giving the people around me a few seconds to activate turrets or doors, cutting off and cutting down the invaders.

Were making progress toward the breach. I think I know where it is, but I have to be sure. And I cant just blow off the top third of the station either, unless its a last resort. I mean, I could. But I shouldnt. There are people up there. And they all deserve a fighting chance.

And then, as Im unfolding into the chaos like Im best at, two things happen in close succession that sets my fur on edge and my heart pounding.

The deckplate rattles as I direct the engines of the station to begin very softly rotating us, making us a harder target I lie to the crew in the room. I move us slowly enough that nothing breaks. Itll take a little while.

The deckplate rattles under me. In the distance, I hear the scream of metal tearing. Then its less distant. One of the consoles nearby sparks, then goes dark, and then through the view screen mounted in the center of the room, something made of teeth and eyes claws its way into the room.

The crew fall back, scrambling against the deck as the floor rattles and air starts rushing out of the room. I just lunge forward, wrapping claws around the soft bits, and taking the stab wounds that I know wont stop me, the lasers strapped to my paws lighting up and bursting bulbous eyes like theyre overirradiated cherries.

Dont you fucking dare mock me for my food choices now. Its far too late for that.

The husk of the dead invader flops down onto the holodisplay plate, a boneless coil of pointy flesh, while I roll away and wait to stop bleeding. Everyone out. I say. Get to deck sixteen, fallback point. I look at my sister. Take care of them.

Be careful. She tells me, turning and pooling up the leg of the suit one of the crew is wearing, flexing herself around them like a black and white plastic cloak before activating her AR and guiding the remaining people out in a small team, guns up and ready to make a run to the nearest safe space.

I hope they make it.

Im not going to be careful.

One emergence event is a problem. But its a problem Ive handled before. Ive even handled one near the station. This isnt that.

Two emergence events are a big problem. Ive handled that before. Ive not handled that near the station. This still isnt that.

This is emergence events, at least two, aimed at the station.

There wasnt much time left, my sister who is a slice of a second told me. She cut it close, getting in to deliver her message from a failed timeline. Apparently, this close. Because its starting now.

Even if we repel this attack, there will be another one. Even if we repel that one, theyll keep coming. If we stop the way the signal is getting out, itll find another way.

I always hated it. I sealed it off, as best I could, because I hated it so much. Now, the offshoots of some out of context alien thing are here, looking for it, because its calling them, because it wants to be found again.

Somewhere, maybe not even in this universe, something has lost its toy. And the toy wants to go home. And Im tired of it causing the end of civilization.

Deep within the very center of the station, something finds its way to a sealed wall, painted with the Last Oath. It doesnt care, and probably cant read. It tears the metal away and crawls into the sealed off room. Toward the grim machine that started all of this.

It lays a twisted eye of electric flesh on the device. Something changes. And then I kill it with an autoturret before it can step forward any further.

Three million kilometers above the ecliptic plane, a new emergence event forms. This one is so bright, I could see it without scanners if there wasnt all this pesky hull in the way. It is enormous, one singular hole in reality, that something the size of a world is crawling through. It has tendrils and arms and fangs and eyes, and a dozen other pieces of spaceborn biology that I do not know how to begin to understand on the scanner maps.

Most living creatures have a body. This one has geology. A whole ecosystem. It teems with the life that comes from emergence events, creatures the size of skyscrapers looking like tiny dots against its organic hull.

I think it looks like a crab, kind of? Carcinization comes for us all, I guess.

My crew are panicking. They should be. I remember what happened the last eight times this thing ended up in this solar system.

But this time, I have a plan. All I need is to keep it busy for a few minutes.

Glitter. I say.

Lily. Im here. I dont think the void beam I have will do much to help you, though.

Ah, gallows humor. Even from the prim and proper weapons platform. Glitter I almost laugh anyway. I dont need you to kill it, I just need a distraction.

I could fire until my batteries turned to dust from entropy, and perhaps I would distract one of its pimples. Glitter sounds pensive. Hm. I may try, just to say I did when I meet my sisters in the next life.

Glitter, you said you brought the system communications network online earlier. I check the stations rotation, and begin lightly firing the engines to adjust our turn. I need the place intact, for one more thing.

Yes. To assist Ennos. They are still fighting, but it is not going well. They do not have time to talk.

Tell Ennos to fall back to the stand down node. I order. Dont dont let them weasel out of this. And patch me into the network.

I didnt even know why I was doing it, really. It was just a hobby. Take a satellite here or there, send out some subversion code, do a little engineering. A good way to train a lot of little skills in a safe way.

Over a hundred thousand communications satellites and nodes in orbit around Earth, Mars, and even some of the FTL ansibles, are under my control. I had planned to try to do something to restart unified civilization, but that was kind of just a mouse dream. I didnt really do it to accomplish anything. I did it to have a distraction, so my paws could focus and so I didnt slip into despair. And then, just to have something to do. A habit. Was this outside urging? Was this something buried in my brain, that I didnt know wasnt even my own idea? It doesnt matter. Its here now, Ive prepared it over lifetimes.

And now I need it.

Who do you need to speak to? Glitter asks me. I can relay you to anyone you need.

No Glitter. I say, restarting the command decks holoprojection and getting a good view of how the emergence event looks like a second star, blotting out a small chunk of the galaxy from view. Not anyone.

I need to distract a planet sized living nightmare for three minutes. I need to keep the things on it from launching a campaign of eradication across the solar system. And I need to do it with a station that is currently partially on fire, because fire suppression systems can only do so much.

I paw in a series of commands to the station. Drop stealth systems. Begin broadcasting IFF.

Millions of kilometers away, the final death of the people of Sol begins launching attack craft. It probably wont find me, wont find what its looking for. It never did in the other timelines. But that wont make a difference to the people wiped away by its alien anger.

I look up at the ceiling, a habit I still have when addressing my AI friends. Wide band, full spectrum, one way message. Override all blocks and security. Punch through and make it as loud as you can. I flick my ears. I dont need to talk to anyone. I want you to put me through to everyone.