Have I mentioned, before, that I am shockingly unmodified?

My body rejects most augments, in all their various forms. I can’t install any wetware, host a native nanoswarm, implant backup organs, or graft new limbs on. It’s all very pedestrian, and I’ve just had to learn to live with the normal number of cat parts.

That said, I am still stronger, healthier, and faster, than I think most people would ever really suspect from a cat, much less a cat in my age bracket.

This is helped along by lifetimes of memorization, pattern development, and practice. I know where everything is, in all the areas of the station I’ve spent centuries prowling. Oh, there’s new parts to explore - there’s *always* new parts to explore, right now there’s just more at once than I’m used to - but that doesn’t fundamentally change the fact that I can navigate an orbital infrastructure environment at a breakneck pace.

Sometimes literally, but we don’t need to talk about that.

Behind me, something wrenches a hull plate out of alignment, something sparking and a protesting klaxon sounding deeper within the station. I do not see what is chasing me, but it is *obviously* chasing me.

We haven’t figured out what the not-really-ghosts are, but we’ve got some rules down.

They’re semi-physical, they’re easily distracted, seem to have some kind of line of sight limitation, and they’re taking over the camera drones. And repair drones. And generally anything with a complex enough mechanical substrate. Weirdly, they haven’t gone for any of the grid hardware yet. Also, when they do pour themselves into one of the little camera drones, the things tend to short out shortly after, and whatever was inside spills out. I can *feel* it when they do that.

I absolutely do not want to be the thing they try to possess.

But at least we know a few things.

There’s a row of suit storage lockers along the wall up ahead, as part of a circular room that has a direct airlock chute to the outside of the station. Whoever built it had crew members of wildly different sizes, and the lockers are arranged as such. This makes it comically easy for a master of the pounce like myself to scale up to the ceiling in three easy bounds. Up here, where the grav plates effect trails off sharply, I can shoot forward off the last locker, and into a ventilation shaft.

And I’m in the clear. It’s dark here, but it’s dark here because we don’t put lighting strips in our vents. And as someone who has at this point built a few vents, I get to use the collective ‘we’. The point is, it’s not the dark of being chased by hungry shades.

I give a meow in my native Cat, sending a signal through to Ennos that I’ve passed the first checkpoint.

A minute and thirty seconds later, I claw my way over the edge of an upper deck, rear legs kicking wildly to find purchase on the lift shaft I’ve decided to climb up. Even in half gravity, it’s still a massive chore to navigate maintenance ladders without thumbs. Or proper elbows.

I haven’t been spotted. Checkpoint two.

Now, for the tricky part. I need to get to the drone bay where I’ve been doing my import runs from. Fortunately, I picked one close to the core systems I tend to operate, because I didn’t want to drag three thousand kilos of dirt across an inch more space than I was required to.

Unfortunately, that part is going to require me to go through a dark zone.

If I’m very lucky, I won’t get caught. Which is good, because I’m given to understand there are several old human mythologies that believe that the more black fur a cat has, the luckier it is.

I wish I’d had more time to regrow my fur. Maybe should’ve had the medical dispenser give me something for that, stockpile that extra luck. That’s probably not a thing, but these days, it can be hard to tell, and every advantage helps.

I am approaching the refinery floor that I need to cross. This one is fun, for certain definitions of fun. When I need to get past here in a hurry, and all the machinery is turned off, the refinery has a couple weird quirks that I like to exploit.

Control for speed, jump, grab that grate and pull myself up, get a running start, and fling myself into the open air over three hundred feet of piping and heating elements.

There is, twenty feet into this place, a spot where the grav plates don’t line up properly. If it were actually dangerous, the station would have performed emergency repairs a long time ago, or at least asked me to authorize them. But as it stands, it’s just a bizarre curiosity, maybe even the reason this refinery was mothballed and had crates of ancient gravitronics gear lying around.

It’s a thin wedge of space that’ll make you feel a little disoriented if you walk through it. Or, if you throw yourself through the distortion twenty feet over the deck, instead it performs a weird gravity lensing effect, and fires me like a railgun round across the space.

Three hundred feet in a second. A pile of old pillows and worn blankets pilfered from a dozen crew quarters, marked with shaky etched writing as ‘linen storage’, catches me. I walk it off without too much damage. I am already moving again, we’re on a time budget here.

I cross a dozen intersections, flying past doors and bulkheads I barely process. And then, I am in the dark.

Again, something takes notice of me. It coils out of the dark, but this one doesn’t rend and pull at the station. Instead, there is just the soft rustling of air on my fur, and the feeling of something curious.

I am out of the dark.

The thing stops following when I clear another heavy security door, and seal myself in the segment that has my precious heavily armed fighter suit. Checkpoint three, last one.

Whatever these things are, that are tearing up my home, they’re getting faster. More power conduits are being drained, more systems being compromised. There isn’t time to play this safe, not that doing so is a hobby of mine anyway.

I slide on my flank to in front of the drone bay floor door, a command starting the process of it hissing upward. I don’t wait, I just roll under the multi-ton steel block, popping back to my feet as it starts to shut behind me. Shouted commands bring the construction arms online, pull my fighter suit onto the line. I have laser etched marks on the assembly line where I need to stand if I don’t want to get fur or parts of my tail pinched off, and I plant my paws there.

I need to stand still for roughly fifty two minutes and eight seconds, with the improved assembly routines that Ennos designed cutting a lot of small flaws out of the process. Which is, let’s be real, something that comes close to feeling like a lifetime while I wait with my back to the door for a ghost to murder me.

And I’m not talking about a cat lifetime! I mean *my* lifetime! That’s objectively more lifetime. An order of magnitude more lifetime.

I mean, yes, it does feel like I’ve had that ‘back to the door available for ghost murder’ feeling going on for most of it. But I think that’s just a part of being alive, and it’s never supposed to be literal? It is literal now. I like it even less.

Somewhere, somehow, far on the other side of the station, Ennos blows something up. The explosion is barely audible from here, but I feel the mild thrum of the deck that isn’t in line with how my entire life as felt. My paws know, instinctively, that something has gone wrong.

Or in this case, that the distraction has started.

I try not to flinch from it anyway, even knowing it was coming, as one of the assembler arms fires a sealing bolt into the combined helmet shell about half an inch from my left eye. Another muffled blast, another thud of the suit coming together around me.

This is going to be a long forty minutes.

I try humming to distract myself. I am bad at humming. My voice can do weird awkward chirps that I hate, at best. It’s twenty painful minutes in when I realize I could maybe make my projection voice hum, if I really wanted to.

It takes me ten minutes to figure out how to not just get it to replicate the dumb chirps. Then I almost instantly realize that it’s just not very satisfying.

With five minutes to go, there is a scrape of an incompressible material against the metal of the assembly floor door. I cannot see it, but I can hear as something dangerous starts clawing. Attracted to the power draw, the heat source, or maybe just to the abstract of my life. I bet any ghost would be happy to eat me. I bet I’m delicious.

The final sealing bolt is put in place, and the suit is secured. It’s not done yet, but as of this moment, before the command gear comes online, I cannot see or hear or know anything at all outside of my confinement. With the floating feeling of the inertia gel containing my limbs, the darkness is near total sensory deprivation.

My mind, enhanced and flawed in equal measure, races. A thousand possibilities, a thousand angles of monster sneaking up behind me. There’s no way they wouldn’t spot me, standing here out in the open. Seconds stretch to eternities as I wait with an almost physical pain.

My next drone armor assembler factory *thing* is, I decide, going to be camouflaged.

Something thumps into my flank, lightly. I almost scream. Okay, I do scream. With both voices, I scream. But there is no follow up strike, nothing kills me just yet.

Then, the suit comes alive. Information and light floods my vision, camera feeds and sensor readouts, life support comes online, the engines and motors fire to life, and I can *move*.

The bay door is *open* in front of me. I don’t know why, but it’s saved my life. A scattergun blast of unsecured materials and half finished projects rapidly receding into the vacuum ahead of me.

And clawing its way up the floor, fighting against the howling atmosphere being sucked out, something shimmering and blue and *reaching for me*.

“Go!” I whisper/is whispered to me.

And the suit obeys.

The command helmet makes the suit my skin. The grav plates are guided by my reflex, the limited ion engine pushed by my instinct.

I pirouette out of the bay. The machinery clamps on my paws release, and I am off, flinging myself into the void so fast I’ve cleared the station in a blink. I go high, staying out of reach of the semi-physical claws of the thing hanging onto the deck.

My AR interface was gone from the moment I was sealed in here, but now it is replaced by a new set of digital information flows. Pre-loaded scanner sweeps show, as best as the station can determine, where the stray junk in the area is. And the projection that highlights otherwise dark chunks of metal and rock also plots a path for me.

Toward a cluster of bright green lines in my vision, and the destroyed wreck of the last ship to try to join us up here.

And suddenly, I’m safe.

It’s a paradox of an emotion. I have spent the vast majority of my life on my home. I know the feeling of every span of that deck under my paws, I am comfortable there. Being outside is harrowing, and not just because of the endless screaming vacuum around me that threatens to end my life in a million ways. But now, here I am, out in open space, relying on a limited fuel supply when there’s nothing close enough to use the grav plating on, hurtling toward an unknown beacon of doom. And I feel safe.

Or at least, far safer than when I was on the station while it was being actively attacked.

This trip, with engine burning, is three minutes long. I let the feeling of the suit and its sensors become my world. I push and pull off of gravitational platforms, learning the limits of my motion. I am moving so fast that if I tapped a piece of dust at this speed while unarmored, it would pulverize me. But the suit protects me.

I have never flown like this before. Escaping the danger is a rush, and it mixes with the sensation of pushing this suit to its limits, leaving me to warble out a cry of elation as I soar. The only thing left now is the time limit; to eliminate the threat before Ennos is threatened. And I am already moving as fast as I can without risking catastrophic failure. Which is to say, failure where a mote of metal carves through my armor so fast I’m dead before I realize it.

I sing as I thread myself through derelict satellites and the wreckage of ancient wars. I flinch in sympathetic pain as tiny impacts dot my suit’s helmet and chest. I coil myself in a hunter’s pose as I cut around the remnants of an ancient transport hub, paws skating across the ruined hull on runners of projected gravity as I curl up over and into clear line of sight to my target.

Something is casting a directed signal into our station.

I don’t bother checking. Plasma throwers track to exactly where I’m thinking about, take a split second to charge, and then fire. I hear the hum through the suit diagnostics, and just in my ears, a resonant tone that fills my helmet briefly.

The source of the ghosts dies in a barrage of four charged bolts. The shining silver emergency force field around it does very little to protect it from the high energy weapons I’m sporting. And just like that, the mission is done.

“-ly! Any time you…! Oh.” Ennos’ voice suddenly fills my comms. “Well. Yes. I wasn’t worried at all.”

“Liar.” I meow back. “You okay?”

Ennos takes a full third of a second to collate information to answer. “We’ve lost power in section C. Two of our grid nodes are crippled. One of them was about to compromise my primary processor segment when you… you did stop them, yes?”

“Yes.” I say. “I’m heading back now. Just as soon as I check one thing.”

“Marked on your HUD.” Ennos already knows what I’m looking for. That kid is too smart for me, sometimes. Most times.

Five minutes of careful gravity hopping later, I find the rest of the wreck. Or part of it anyway. The ship was carved apart, but this section broke free after about half of it was turned to molten slag, and wasn’t targeted by followup attacks. Something about this place, though, was important. The device that was throwing those projections at us was drawing something from here, some kind of activation signal maybe. I need to know. Curiosity, as they say, is important to cats.

I crawl inside, using my propulsion to keep myself from touching the still glowing edges.

This ship was cramped, packed full of machinery that is now either turned to shredded chaff, or just unpowered. Even the emergency lights are off, power having drained away by now. Thin aisles of space between stations, spare gear storage surrounding every free spot, it was built to move as much as possible, as effectively as possible. Economy, over comfort. Important when you’re trying to break out of a gravity well.

At the back half, I find what I’m looking for.

Stasis pods. Or something like them. There’s been a few hundred interpretations of this tech over the years. Sleeper cells, stasis pods, cryo beds, and a dozen others, each with a few unique variants all their own.

These ones are occupied. Sort of.

They’re crammed in with the same consideration for maximized spatial use as the rest of the ship. Sixteen of them, in a kind of honeycomb pattern against the back of the deck. I approach the first one, and peek inside, and see… well, one of our ghosts.

The thought clicks with a technology I know exists. Used heavily by lunar colonies for a while, especially the ones that used autonomous bodies so heavily. When the mind is what’s important, your life pod should save that, right? Capture the thoughts of the person in the pod, send them somewhere safe. Probably tried to link to the station because of all the Luna Polis tech on board from a millennia ago.

Up close and organic, they’re much less scary. A little over a meter of height, with long bone spikes of fingers that would almost be claws if they weren’t blunted. Extended faces with a large central eye like a rounded hexagon. They’re not human, but I’ve never seen them before. All I know is they didn’t deserve this.

The pod is powered off.

An instant later, my suit screams an automated warning, and the nanobloom on my back explodes into defensive life. A nearly invisible battle takes place in the space around me over the next five seconds as my swarm overwhelms and destroys another rival that was trying to compromise the armor.

A murderer nanoswarm, the kind that you fire from a projectile to seek out sophont life and leave infrastructure intact, is torn arpar. But it has already done its work. The person inside the pod is dead, face a mask of pain even through alien features.

No wonder the ghosts were so pissed.

I check the rest of the pods. Lifeless, lifeless, lifeless. Dead, dead, dead. Their faces are cold and angry and hurting.

Except the pod on the end.

It’s still on. Emergency power readings say it’ll hold for another three days or so. The occupant, still alive. And as I look, the reason becomes clear; they’re unlike the rest of the crew. They’re something different.

The pod contains a dog. Sleeping happily, head curled on its paws, tentacles wrapped around its eyes. I can’t see any breathing, but the pod reads the occupant as alive and healthy.

Murder swarms target sophonts. By luck of being just under the line, we have one survivor.

I check my life support. Plenty of time to sort this out. “Ennos.” I speak over the comms. “I’m coming back soon. One guest.”

“Understood. I will begin quarantine procedures.” Ennos tells me, failing to understand but trying their best I suppose. “I’ve made contact with Glittering, as well. She will require extensive repairs, and your aid, but she is alive.”

I let out a sigh of relief. That was something I had been terrified of.

Okay.

Time to clean up this mess.