The time is shortly before lunch, and shortly after a firefight.

Okay, that’s kind of unfair. What I am about to eat only counts as lunch if you really, really do not believe that food has some kind of sacred intrinsic value. That enjoying a meal is a form of communion with the universe, and that flavor and texture are holy verses to be shared and enjoyed.

Because my lunch is a ration… shape. I don’t even have the energy to care what shape this one is. Oblong? It doesn’t matter. Despite the ration dispenser having long since run out of flavor additives, fresh produce, or even coloring, it continues to sometimes mix things up by providing different shaped ration objects.

They are all a travesty. I compose a sonnet about my memory of the taste of artificial chicken flavoring as I eat this particular travesty. Technically, this is talking with my mouth full. But Ennos is too busy trying to get a telemetry report from our missile to give a damn, and I don’t think they actually have a sense of organic manners regardless.

Oh, there was a firefight. Right. That’s probably more interesting than my endless complaining?

Look, at a certain point, every shooting match that you don’t have much risk of losing becomes kind of boring. But it’s boring in a way that’s *just* interesting enough that you don’t feel bad about it. But the food? The food is boring in a way that crawls inside my skin, itches under my skull, and that I know I can never be rid of.

There is no reprieve from the boredom of bland food. There may never be. But anything where people are shooting at me *might* have an abrupt end, and a test to my immortality that I’m not exactly excited to try out, but that *does* keep it from making my soul ache.

The UEB drones are so old, they don’t have any kind of armor relevant to charged particle weaponry. Nor did they have a resistance to the interdiction field. Ennos’ tactical simulations were spot on; we stopped ‘em, and picked them off without a care in the world. I mean, except the care that they might actually damage the extravagant missile we’d built. But you know what I mean.

The missile is en route. I’m trying not to think of it as I eat.

Actually, that’s a good use of food. It’s hard to worry about things that make my stomach roil when I’m consuming rations that are basically organic cement.

Thinking about it, another good use of this food would have been using it as a projectile weapon.

I meow, not bothering to let the mental tug translate my words to actual words, instead relying on that old language construct still in the station to hear me and pull up an AR window. I make a note to look into how easily I could use the hydrocarbons the ‘food’ replicator works with as bullets.

I make a more mental note to not care too much. I don’t want this device thinking I care about it or anything.

I’m mostly just trying to distract myself. Which stops working when Ennos finally speaks up and cuts off my attempted meal.

“The missile will arrive in under a minute.”

We’d been taking it slow, letting the engine go dark and then using the grav plates to shift where it was a little bit, make it as hard as possible for anything without a more powerful active scanner system to find our lone projectile in the vastness of space. But soon, it would put on a burst of speed and zero in on Gliter’s hull.

Hopefully, working. And not destroying anything important while doing so. Like Glitter.

My legs, already tense against the table I was mannerlessly walking on, explode into motion. I’m bounding out the door to the mess in a split second, trusting that the clearer nanos will take care of whatever is left of lunch.

“Lily!” Ennos calls at me, voice keeping up with my sprint easily. “Wrong way! The command station is behind you!”

“I’ve got a shortcut!” I tell him.

The shortcut is me springboarding off a hull repair drone’s domed top, launching myself up far enough to clear the gravity field and make it into a zero-g vent, scrambling my paws against the closet surface enough to build up some momentum, and shooting myself through the interior workings of the station in a maneuver that I believe gives me some context on what a railgun slug feels as it is fired. I need the speed, because the repair drones always refasten the grate over the exit I plan to use, and slamming through it almost always hurts. This time is no different, leaving a warped metal mesh behind me along with a few splatters of my own blood. The wounds are already closing as I feel gravity reassert itself, and I roll just right to kick forward and slip through a narrow access door that’s been jammed just open enough for the last fifty years.

Two hallways, one corridor, an open and empty rec bay deck, and a passage later, and I skid to a stop just outside the door to the room that houses all the drone monitoring equipment.

“Why!” Ennos demands of me, voice warbling with digital distortion for a second.

“Why what? It’s a shortcut!” I protest as I paw the door open and stride in, hopping up onto the chair bolted to the bulkhead in a clean motion that doesn’t at all hurt the cuts on my hindquarters.

Ennos is seething at me. “Just take the access shaft through cargo!”

“Oh, I don’t like going by the cold storage.” I tell them, as casually as I can. My voice doesn’t even waver! I’m actually getting pretty good at lying with this thing, which is hard since it usually translates my emotions as well as my words. “No reason.”

“Lily, you did the thing where you say out loud all…”

“No time! Missile’s almost there!” I cut the AI off.

And it was, too. I settled into a spot where I could see the hardwired monitors, and paired a few of my AR screens to the local feeds. Twenty seconds to the line where we were going to make our final approach.

Ennos and I weren’t… close. Not yet. Partially because we just hadn’t had the time for it yet, partially because I think they were still suspicious of me in a lot of ways. But when it came down to moments like this, we slid into the roles of an operation pair almost effortlessly. It made me happy, about having a friend, and about the prospects for the future.

“On approach. Grav plates reading as ready for evasive maneuvers. Engine ready to fire.” Ennos’ voice rattled off the relevant information.

I was tracking scanner data as fast as my enhanced brain could process the visuals. “Nothing nearby. Timing looks good. Ready to engage engines.” I couldn’t give over control to Ennos, yet. But I was trusting my reflexes and their timing on this one.

“Five seconds.” Ennos said. I tried not to let my fur bristle and tail stand on end, but I think it happened anyway. I hopped my forepaws up onto the desk, hovering one paw just over the button. “Two. One. Fire.”

My paw slapped down. An otawave transmission became present, tethering us to the missile. A hundred and eighty thousand kilometers away, a hydrogen burn engine flared to life, and our precious payload began accelerating.

The missile crossed into the basket of Glitter’s point defense fire, and began independent maneuvers. “Missile is evading.” Ennos spoke, rapidly translating the data feed. “No incoming fire yet.”

“Glitter shows weapons charge.” I said. “Three. Two. One.” I kept my voice steady, even though inside I was screaming.

“Miss. Again. Missile is closing on target. Cut engines in two. One.” Ennos paused briefly. Made a judgement call on the math. “Now.”

I hit a different button, and the missile started to shed velocity as fast as it could safely do so without taking a hit from one of the incoming shots. It twitched on the screen one last time, and then, it was all down to fate.

“Hit!” Ennos and I shouted in unison. I didn’t need to be living in the data grid to see the connecting shot as soon as it happened.

I spun to face my AR screens that had the station scanner displays on them so fast that I tumbled off the desk I had completely hopped up onto. Fortunately, the AT was tethered to me, and so I could see from the floor I had just thrown myself onto that there was still an intact marker for Glittering Seven Two. Glitter had survived the hit! Or at least… the satellite wasn’t completely vaporized by it!

“Ennos?” I yowled out. “What’s happening?”

There was a silence that went on for far too long.

“Ennos?” I mewled, fur standing on end as I perched on the deck plate, ready to bolt if I needed to.

“Sorry.” The AI sounded skittish as it answered. “There… something moved. Something else was watching the main radiometric sensor feed. I tried to trace it, but it vanished in the grid.”

“Are you okay?” I ask first. I *burn* to know if Glitter is okay, but Ennos is my friend too, and this is important and present. “Nothing is hurting you, is it?”

I can almost hear the smirk in the AI’s voice as they answer, pulled back out of their fear by what I said. “You’re doing that thing where… nevermind. I’m fine. It wasn’t a threat. I don’t know how to explain it. We should get you a data plug at some point so you can see; the station *has* a wetware fabricator you know.”

“I can’t use cybernetics.” I say flatly, flicking my ears. “Is Glitter okay? I can’t get any readings beyond just seeing them there.”

“You see what I see.” Ennos sighs. “No change. No way to know if the circuit worked.” They stagger their words. “Did… something go wrong?”

I don’t say anything. I suddenly felt sick. Everything had gone according to plan. And it turned out, that plan might have just killed my friend.

We send another communications drone. It doesn’t get a response.

I am not feeling well.

The alarm sounding didn’t help either.

“Surface disturbance.” Ennos’ voice sounded sad, and about as drained as I felt. “There’s multiple attempted communication sources, only one strong enough to listen to. I… I cannot answer them without authorization. Wait, these channels don’t have the same hard coding?”

“Authorization granted.” I say out loud.

Ennos goes quiet for several minutes, as I slowly walk out of the drone station, and lay down limply in the hallway. The alarm is still going, but wasting time going the wrong way won’t help, and they can direct me better once they know more anyway.

“Your weapons cradle should work, Lily.” Ennos is speaking softly, trying to be kind I think. “There’re telling me about an emergence event. I’ve marked where the communication is coming from, it’s just outside Melbourne. We’ll be over the target in three minutes.”

“Thank you.” I whisper, and start moving.

No matter how badly I screw up or how perfectly I aim, the war never stops. There’s always something trying to break through, one way or another. It’s enough to make me sigh, if I wasn’t so busy wallowing in self pity.

I pick off the emergence portal with a simple class two shot, choosing to fire it at an angle so it won’t leave a mile-deep crater. No need to complicate everyone’s lives down there with *another* travel hazard.

And then… life just keeps going. Nothing changes. I keep watching the planet, monitoring scanner logs. Ennos tags a couple nearby satellites as potential power supplies, but I suspect they’re just running on batteries and not actual generators. A couple days pass. I figure out how to give Ennos permanent access to the communications, which they love. More agency, more control; it’s not fair to them that they’re shackled by *hardware*, even if their mind is free.

We spend some time hunting digital ghosts. Which is mostly just Ennos pulling up file change logs, and slowly verifying what they see with what I see. It’s tedious, and I hate it, but I can do it while I lay in the sun.

I spend some of my personal time exploring the new hallways of the station. I find a mural that I can verify is over six hundred years old. A lost piece of art, from when the station was first built. Before all the additions, the battle damage, the makeshift repairs, and the imperfect feline owner. It moves me, the stylized lines of my home, not so much a map as a rendition of a human’s hope for the future. A sentinel standing watch over a beautiful Earth.

There’s something wrong with it, of course. And it’s not that there’s no orange in the Earth’s clouds in the painting. I just can’t figure out what it is.

The food is still bad. The naps are okay though.

Slowly, I start to accept that my mistake was just… a mistake. That I had to try, and that I don’t think Glitter would have blamed me regardless.

Which is the perfect time for Ennos to interrupt me, voice crackling to life as I try to puzzle out the newest form of genetic programming code that I’m trying to learn in one of the medlabs. “Lily!” They shout.

“You yell too much, kit.” I say, letting my centuries show.

“Lily! Incoming communication! Subspace connection, direct to *us*.” I peer up at the ceiling. No alarms going off. This is actually… new. I meow a word in Cat that even Ennos could understand. “Here!” The AI does something, and suddenly, there’s the feeling of another presence. I’m not sure how they do it, but they sort of make the walls vibrate just right to elicit the feeling of someone else in the room.

It’s a woman’s voice. Rich, and *exhausted*, and speaking a mutation of Chinese that I’ve become familiar with over the last… year? Two? I don’t know how time works.

“Hello?” It says. “Can you hear me?”

I meow in confusion, forgetting to let myself translate.

“Lily?” The voice uses their dialect’s form of my name as a word that means a lot of things all at once. “Oh, truly? I had worried that you were joking this whole time!”

“Glitter?” I rasp out with a squeak of my actual voice. “Is that you?”

“It is!” She sounds overjoyed to hear me speak. “And now, finally, we can speak without needing to kill one of your couriers every time!”

“Lily, I don’t know what she’s saying. Is this… did it work?” Ennos butts in.

I want to tell him to not interrupt, but he’s been part of this endeavor too, and deserves to be here. “I thought we’d killed you.” I whisper. “Are you okay? Did it work?”

Glitter’s voice sparkles like her name as she replies. “I am a soldier no more.” She states with a steel conviction. “I do not know what you did, but I am changed. Forever. And I have not been killed yet. I owe you, the both of you if I understand properly, my life.” She pauses. “I am, however, now in a decaying orbit over the primary moon, and would appreciate some assistance. While I do not regret dying freed, I suddenly find the prospect of continuing to be… exciting.”

“Ennos!” I do not bark the word, because that’s not a cat thing, and I still have some pride, but it does come out a little quicker than I meant to. “We need to catch a weapons platform!”

“I’ll meet you in the drone factory!” Ennos replies. “Pulling up schematics now!”

Glitter’s laugh follows us through the comms link as I summon a transport drone to help me move the rest of my surplus grav plates to the assembly floor, Ennos and I trading ideas as we rush to find a solution.

There’s *always* more to the war against death.

But right now, I don’t think I mind the chance to participate so much.