You know what’s weird, is that I don’t actually have any memories of being dirty?

Not really, I mean. I’ve recently gotten a taste of what it’s like to be covered in matted fur that has absorbed a lot of my own blood and crystallized into something that sticks and pulls when I move. But, like, that lasted for a few days at most and then I was back where the cleaner nanos could do that one really impressive trick they do.

I still remember it, obviously. Because I have a dangerously powerful memory, and also because the patches where the automated medbay sealed me back up after I was shot still haven’t regrown their fur. So I look stupid. Which has *nothing* to do with how long I am or am not spending in a suit.

Okay, a little to do with how long I am spending in a suit.

I mean, there are jobs that a suit makes convenient! It’s only natural that I’d…

Nap in it. Sometimes.

Fun fact! At one point, there was a group that briefly occupied the station that were really into body modification. I don’t know their actual group or faction name, which makes my historian heart sad, but what makes me less sad is that they left a very well indexed inventory stashed in one of the minor cargo bays. And, due to the nature of the ongoing art installations they called bodies, there were some powerful local medications that caused hair or fur growth.

Unfun fact! It doesn’t actually matter how well kept a cargo bay is. Give a medical cream six hundred years and no stasis field or similar preservative, and it was going to stop working. Something I learned mostly through the cleaning nanos continuing to flake the stuff off of me after I rolled around in it. Which was futile.

Speaking of. I was talking about being dirty.

“Lily, you look like a zombie. Please let me reenable the cleaning routines.” Ennos sighs at me as I shuffle back from the hole I have dug with my forepaws in the soft artificial dirt.

“Yes, that cannot be healthy for an organic.” Glitter adds in. Oh! Glitter has learned the local dialect, which is very handy. This has done nothing to stop Ennos from poking at the coil of seemingly alive code spooled around the language database, but at least we can have a chat. Turns out, Glitter can learn *fast*. A fact even she didn’t know, but is getting used to.

Both of them are wrong though.

I slide myself to the side, and begin digging another hole. I have a reasonably neat row of them so far, and I’m mildly proud of my accomplishment. It feels like the first real cat thing I’ve done in a long, long time.

Napping doesn’t count. Everyone wants to nap. Humans don’t want to dig holes with their paws though. At least, as far as my biology research has turned up.

I am digging in a planter box. I’ve converted one of the security stations near the galley into a makeshift garden, and by ‘converted’, I mean that I’d already smelted down most of the small arms a century ago for raw materials during a dry spell, and getting rid of the hardpoint furniture was actually more work that just working around it.

“Garden” is also a word doing a lot of technical work there. But it’s a *start*, and the smell of live dirt - even if the ‘live’ part is simulated - is energizing.

The steps to get here involved heavy labor of a sort that I was *not* familiar with. And my work was assisted by things like grav plates and welders. I have, at this point, a phenomenal respect for your average planetside farmer, and I haven’t even had a crop come in yet.

First, there was the process of liberating the seed vault. That took almost a week of work on its own. It turns out, complex stasis hardware doesn’t let you just take what you want and run. The orbital farm’s backup generator was, in fact, powering a few things beyond just the vault, and one of them was the security protocols for accessing that bounty properly.

Obviously, I could have just used one of the high power plasma throwers on my exploration suit to cut through anything I needed to, and haul off my treasure. But there’s obvious risks to that. Like damaging some of the last seeds in orbit, or just venting myself into space again.

But it turned out, the safe access system wasn’t interested in keeping secrets or wealth hoarded. Instead, the farm’s security wanted to ensure one thing.

That whoever took the seeds knew what to do with them.

And there was an entire grid full of that knowledge, just waiting to be accessed.

Now, I’ve had four centuries where I’ve been on and off accumulating academy credentials and mastery certificates in a variety of different topics. And it *may come as a shock* to some of you, but food in its various forms was something of a hobby of mine for a while. Right up until I realized that I was probably never going to get any of it, about the time the third specimen retrieval probe I sent down to the planet got downed by anti-aircraft fire.

So it takes a little bit of deep digging in my memory, and a new crash course on gardening routines, before the vault opens for me fully. But, and this is the important thing, it *does* open for me.

Bit by bit, I take the stasis capsules back to the station, and get them hooked up to a stable power source, until I’m ready for them.

But how to get ready for them? Dirt. It’s dirt. The answer is dirt.

And wouldn’t you know it, the orbital garden has two thousand kilos of experimental nano-enriched dirt, just waiting for activation and use.

Hey, guys? You paying attention? I have an alert for you.

*Two thousand kilos is so much mass*.

Ironically, that stupid heavy cargo drone that I keep trying to cancel the fabrication order for and keep somehow screwing up canceling the fabrication order for was a big help. The biggest problem was, I didn’t have a really good way to move the dirt from where it was - deck eighteen, section M - to where it needed to be - deck two, loading bay M - without spending months on something stupid and wasteful.

I could have designed some kind of cargo loader drone, I guess. Or just built a cargo loader and ferried it over. Forklifts are kind of a universal technology at this point. But there’s a non zero number of problems with that, many of them coming back to how long it would take, and the material stockpiles that I have in my cargo holds.

It turns out, I actually can run out of stuff, and do so pretty regularly. Dragging in random space junk and turning it into ingots is a fun hobby, but I don’t really do it on a scale that keeps me perpetually topped off with anything that isn’t copper or nickel.

Fortunately, I have a built in solution that I hate. Just… drag the bags to where they need to be.

It’s carbon weave fiber anyway. It’s not like it’s gonna rip as I drag it across the deckplates. And since this is one of the drones that Ennos has a command input on, and it has one of those cargo arm thingies I can never remember the name of, I can load the drone up, let them take it home to dump all the dirt onto the bay floor, and then loop it back around for more!

It took me about two days before I jumped back, counting the time for the station to loop back into a relatively close position. I was pretty hungry by the end of it. Suppose I could have taken the cargo drone back, but Ennos doesn’t actually have very fine controls on the acceleration, and I didn’t want to end up squished by several dozen Gs.

So. Seeds? Accessed. Dirt? Hauled. Naps? Taken. I took so many naps. I basically spent an entire day just sleeping and snacking, and I only had to fix one emergency with the mag shield miscalibrating itself and trying to drag an old reactor casing into the side of the station at high speed.

Glitter helped with that one! By which I mean, Glitter annihilated the errant projectile with a well placed shot about a foot from our hull. Which was very impressive, and left Ennos freaking out for a good half hour before I checked and assured him that we were not, in fact, already dead.

Ennos and Glitter have been, *supposedly*, reading gardening textbooks while I dig holes. Another task I could have automated, but didn’t, because this one is *fun*. In reality, they are… well, they’re AI, so they’re probably reading. But they’re also providing commentary, and it’s been distracting me. From my menial labor.

The ‘garden’ I’ve converted this room into is a mix of impressive, and stupid. On the impressive side, I’ve got shaped temperature control fields wired into my AR control setup, for precision management of exactly what the plants will need moment to moment. On the less impressive side, it actually took longer to make the planter boxes than the temp fields, because the fabricators won’t make “a metal box frame”. It was easier to just cut strips of hull plate off of the derelict shuttle still taking up precious deck space in… one of the bays, I forget which one… and weld them into containers for the dirt.

Impressive? The subspace tap now runs through here, providing exotic-particle-free irrigation. Less impressive? Well… I’m digging my own holes, I guess.

“You are more dirt than cat. Please.” Ennos snaps me out of my mental evaluation.

“Kit, I am *working*, and this is important!” I meow back. “Glitter, you understand! Tell ‘em!”

One of the camera orbs under Glitter’s control orbits me with lazy patterns. “I understand that you are acting like a low caste, despite your high rank.” She *sniffs* at me, haughtily. “It is unbecoming.”

“Yeah, but just think. Peas!” I stand back and look at my beautiful, uneven row of holes. The dirt is self calibrating, the conditions are as good as I can get them. “It is *time*.” I announce.

“You made that sound more ominous than when you declared that the station was haunted.” Ennos grumbles. But I can hear the amusement in their voice.

I strut over to the carefully wired stasis pod that I plan on opening first. “You know, Glitter,” I wonder out loud with a series of quiet meows, “I assumed that you would be on board with this. We used to talk about food! You told me about noodles!”

“Will this grow into noodles?” Glitter asks.

“No?” I think. “No. I could probably… hm.” My mind instantly starts to drift on a tangent toward whether I could use one of the genetics labs to modify a snap pea seed to grow more noodle-y. The hiss of the stasis pod opening snaps me back to reality though. “No.” I answer definitively.

“Well, perhaps when you have once again become clean, we can talk about noodles again.”

I have to curl my paw to bat one of the seeds I need out. It is tiny and white and oh so fragile, but oh so alive. I gently, as gently as possible, grasp it in my mouth. “You two *both* have a thing about me being covered in dirt. Is this a religious thing for you, G? I never asked.” I fortunately don’t need a mouth to talk as I walk over to the garden bed.

“It’s a matter of propriety.” Glitter comments.

“I just worry about bacteria.” Ennos chimes in. I do not bother to remind them that the dirt is artificial, and fueled by an only recently reactivated nanostrain.

I could make a witty comment, or ask a dozen more questions. But this is an important moment for me. This is something I’ve been waiting for, for a very long time. The start of something tasty. And also…

I spend so much of my time destroying. Killing. Launching projectiles like I’m passing out festival cakes. Breaking and shattering anything that’s a threat. Wiping out armies and digging their graves in the same motion.

It’s nice, then, to finally plant a seed. To grow something. To take a step toward a world that’s less fire and ash, and more green.

I release my teeth from around the seed, and let it tumble into one of the holes. It falls, so much unlike a railgun slug into a crater, and lands with an uneventful ‘pap’ on the dark dirt.

My tail won’t stop dancing as I stare at it.

One down, twenty nine more of this one to go.

And *then* I will let Ennos turn the cleaner nano routine back on.