Zero gravity is weird.

Also not real, technically. I understand that gravity doesn’t actually ever hit ‘zero’, really. I am, if you want to get pedantic, actually just falling toward the planet and failing to hit anything. So is everything else up here.

Except for the debris that deorbits fairly regularly, leaving red and green streaks of light across the poisoned atmosphere of Earth as it burns up. That stuff is completely failing to fail to crash.

In a way, this makes everything less impressive. But also sort of not? A billion flying hunks of metal, rock, and sometimes barely-hanging-on living things, all of us falling together and missing the ground over and over. It’s the sort of elegant ballet of physics that probably attracted humans to math in the first place.

Anyway, the point is, outside of the station’s zone of influence and the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grav plates that it contains, I *feel* very zero-gravity. Physics aside, the sensation of weightlessness and lack of control could have been very unsettling.

Especially for me! Because I hate that!

Which is why I’m glad that I decided to do external repairs on Glitter wearing my overdesigned space armor, and not just with my bare paws. A hundred kilos of grav plate wrapped around me personally gives me a lot of emotional security out here.

I don’t know where I was going with this.

Look, I’ve been out here for four hours, and frankly, the fact that I was able to focus that long on a single thing is kind of a minor boon already. The work of checking Glitter’s shell for damage, running a structural analysis, and then either removing whole damaged sections to replace, or sealing, treating, and filling breaches, is tedious to a degree that I am finding aggregating.

I’m not a stranger to drudge work. I’ve replaced hull plates, rewired engines, hauled bodies, manually cleaned railgun magnets, and spent whole lifetimes processing space junk. But with all of that, I at least had the option to just run off and do something else when I got exhausted.

Here, it’s just me, Glitter, and the emptiness around us.

And Jom, who is supposed to be helping, but is really just bringing me reinforced metal plates when I ask, and otherwise is flitting around the safe stealth zone near the station, seeming to be enjoying stretching his… engines?

Oh, and all the debris, yes. So not really that empty after all. But look, I’m not going to get distracted by semantics.

“What *are* you getting distracted by then?” Glitter asks me.

“Were my comms on that whole time?” I mew curiously.

“Yes.” Glitter confirms. “You know you are not required to…”

“Oh hush.” I lightly hiss back. “You were in *terrible* shape. This is the fortieth tiny hole I’ve patched up, you had a whole chunk of armor plate that was crumbling from something weird, and your engines didn’t even work. I didn’t even know you *had engines*, Glitter! You’re allowed to tell people when you need help! Especially me, since I’m your friend, and own a space factory!”

The weapons platform - the *mobile* weapons platform - hums at me in that polite musical way that she tends to do when she’s casually running conversational circles around me. “I had wondered where the replacement parts came from.”

“Oh, Ennos helped me get a deep vibrational imager working. We just put one of the working thrust nodes you have in there, and then used that to draft blueprints and rebuilt the innards of the rest. That was actually the easy part. At least the door was actually where it was supposed to be.” I pause. “Wait, hang on. No distracting me! You need to ask me when you need repairs!”

“Ah, yes your eternal desire to be allowed to prowl through all rooms, even those that do not exist.” Glitter’s voice lilts with a smile as she pokes fun at me.

“They were real when I started!” I allow myself a small distraction, before I turn back to my work.

Glitter needed a lot of repairs. A lot of these issues weren’t cosmetic, either. Properly sealed hulls exist for a reason, and it’s not just keeping all the air in. Cosmic radiation is a *problem*, among other ambient threats in the Sol system, and I want my friend to not just shut down one day unexpectedly from hardware corruption.

She’s been idly acting like this is just a hassle for me the whole time, and I am getting frustrated with it. I mean, not enough with her personally or anything to stop helping; I’m still absolutely paying attention to the sealant clasp as it does its work on this particular hull breach. But it’s stopped being amusing how resistant to repair she is.

We’ve been talking this whole time, sometimes about things we’ve seen, sometimes about people she knew. Sometimes, Glitter sings while I work. But woven through it, the small reminders that she’d be fine if I just left her as she is.

Which, uh, no?

Not to ruin my streak, but it’s been a whole three days since anything went horribly wrong, and this seems like a perfectly good use of that free time. Better than sitting on the station trying to read eight hundred year old civics textbooks and arguing with Ennos about what range of taste a cat actually has. Also Glitter is important.

The clasp lights up bright red, a matching glow from an icon in my personal display signaling a successful process, and I practically deflate with relief.

“Finally.” I find myself mumbling.

Glitter stops broadcasting the quiet chiming ballad she’s been singing. “Oh?” She asks me through the suit’s speakers. “Am I now meeting your standards?”

“Not even close!” I cheerfully reply as I plant my paws on her hull and grab the clasp with my mechanical jaw, plucking the magnetic tool off of her and attaching it back to my foreleg. “There’s so much more to do!” I give only a slight pause, not enough for Glitter to politely begin to reply, before I add, “But not today. And also most of what’s left is just cosmetic. How do you feel about the purple? Because let me tell you, it’s kind of hard to synthesize, but I’m willing to do it if that’s the color you like.”

“I’m sorry, you are planning to repaint my shell?” Glitter asks. “Lily, that is a waste of material resources. I do not condone this. Spend your energy and wealth elsewhere?”

I only half listen to her protests, instead navigating the overly complicated command and control interface that’s recently been added to my drone armor. “Nope! Gonna make sure you look good!” I say, finding the thing I was looking for and sending out a short range ping.

The software isn’t actually *overly* complicated. It’s just regular complicated, because it’s designed to allow someone to access multiple pieces of information about an ongoing battle, and issue commands across distances so large that time to receive communications starts to become relevant. It’s not great at the timing, but then, humanity never got to the point where they really needed warfare systems for multi-planet battles at .1c.

Still, it’s got a lot of options, and I’ve been half-requested, half-ordered to get familiar with it.

The ping I’ve sent returns a confirmation, and two seconds later, a darting shadow slips under the base of the station, angling up toward where Glitter orbits relative to us. Jom, the fighter craft whose recent addition to my home has been one of the more stable and sane things to happen recently, flits into view as he comes to a perfect stop relative to my perch on Glitter.

Recently, he asked where he fits into the chain of command, and I admitted that our idea of ‘chain of command’ was less of a chain and more of an orb. Hence my pseudo-order to learn this particular software; Jom has chosen to interpret this as everyone having command over their own area of expertise. Which I actually really like, but my imposed lesson plan is still something I don’t see myself needing. I’m not planning to take control of a squadron of Joms.

I shouldn’t have thought that out loud. That’s how the universe gets ideas.

“Okay, my ride’s here.” I tell Glitter, cutting off whatever she was saying about how wasteful paint is as I shift my grav plate strength with a mental nudge, and give a graceful bound over to the base of Jom’s hull. “I’ll open a high bandwidth link when I’m back inside, and we can start planning out what sort of patterning and accents you want, okay? I’m thinking gold and black for the weapon mounts? Really lean into looking glamorously dangerous?”

“I don’t...” Glitter’s voice sounds almost nervous.

“Hey,” I say, trying my best to be reassuring, “you’re not a soldier or a weapon anymore.” I don’t know why it suddenly comes to mind. “You’re just one of us. And when you’re Us, you get to look nice while you save civilization.”

“...thank you.” Glitter whispers to me.

I flick my tongue out, going to causally lick at the back of my paw before I remember that whole ‘hundreds of kilos of grav plate’ thing, and end up just staring at a raised armored paw instead. “Don’t mention it.” I say. “Or do! I don’t know how this goes!” I am in a good mood today; no amount of interpersonal drama is going to get me down. “Now, onward, Jom! To the docking bay!” I angle my paw out toward the station, making sure my grav plates have me locked in place.

My incredibly deadly brick shaped steed doesn’t move.

“Jom?” I say again, looking down at the fighter craft under my paws. “Hello?”

The fighter doesn’t reply.

Under *most* circumstances, this might make me nervous. I have the full specs for the Javelin Orbital Marauder, after all. If Jom decided to try to kill me, out here, I’d be kind of out of luck; he can pull maneuvers of up to twenty six Gs without hardware fault, he’s got a pair of null blade projectors, and twenty sliverguns mounted around the hull for prolonged engagements. Hell, all he’d really have to do is turn on his force screen while I’m standing here and it’d cut my legs off.

The Javelin Orbital Marauder is a terrifying piece of hardware. Though mostly, it’s terrifying by context, because you have to pair it with the fact that these things were mass produced as canon fodder for corporate skirmishes in the asteroid belt.

Glitter chastising *me* for wasting resources is a joke when we’re sitting in a graveyard of waste so far beyond the scale of a nice coat of paint that it’s a travesty.

Not worried about Jom though. I should make this clear, I’m just bored and tired and my mind isn’t built to stay on topic.

“You little snark.” I mutter, opening up the complex set of maps, overlays, and command systems in my display again, and sending a command ping. Return to dock, escort, low priority. Basically, don’t hurry, and don’t fling me off.

I can *feel* how smug Jom is as the fighter body slips into motion, taking an easy curve over around the vaguely implied diamond tip of the station’s upper decks and all the monitoring arrays, antenna, dishes, and other scanner apparati hanging out up here.

Jom’s been having fun. Well, ‘fun’? I don’t know, he says that being unshackled lets him finally use his body the way it’s supposed to be used, not how it was ordered to fight, and I *think* that translates to fun. He’s been enjoying these little outings at least, flitting around like a shark in the limited space available, burning through fuel reserves pulling frankly ridiculous maneuvers that no organic could survive unassisted.

I watch the station slip by as we zoom ‘over’ it, the momentum tugging at me, but kept manageable by my suit, before we pivot in a dizzying spin, and I find my view changing abruptly to a small energy screened gap in the station’s hull as we slide into the docking bay. If the cleaner nanos allowed for dust, there would have been a gale of it kicked up in a plume as Jom tips up before pitching us perfectly down to a soft landing, extended landing struts perching like a multi-limbed clawed beast on the hull with a single elegant motion. Meanwhile, I have to frantically adjust my grav plates as I slide halfway back toward the rear of the ship I’m sitting on top of, as I take the landing with a complete lack of attention and nearly fall off at high speed.

“Thanks for the ride!” I give the ship an affectionate headbutt before I hop off, double checking all my gear and readouts before I begin to make my way to the drone bay to get the suit taken off, paws striking the deck metal on metal as I prowl off.

The docking bay’s cargo exit, the doors I tend to use because they’re the easiest to leave open in a flagrant disregard for security or safety, takes the enthusiastic strut out of my walk almost right away.

It had taken me a while to realize this, but the station actively expanded its own aesthetic.

Every new deck, every addition, even the modules and hulls that I’d stolen from the wreckage around us and added to my home. All of them, as the core station *thing* integrated them into the whole, changed a little.

Not too much. Never the core function, never the layout or anything like that. Just little things. Slightly wider halls, more accessible furniture, smoother edges. And, subtly, the decor.

Which was why there was a mural of the station down here on the wall facing these big cargo doors, painted onto the hull in timeless markings that could never have been made by the original builders, but had at some point been added. A copy of the dozens of others in the original core and beyond.

These murals had been annoying me for a while now, because every time I saw one, it just felt off. Not off in a big way, not like there was some weird conspiracy going on. Just that I was missing something obvious, and it would stick in the back of my mind until I got to the galley and had my lunch of one gloriously carrot zested ration-thing.

I stare at the mural, the image of a shining protective bastion perched over the Earth below, before shaking off the feeling of personal ignorance and heading to the drone bay. The suit is starting to itch, and I…

I turn around. Look at the mural again. At the artistic rendition of shield bubbles, comm arrays, and sensor bristles.

I spark into motion, back into the docking bay where Jom is starting a power cycle sequence. “I need to go back out!” I say, dashing past the fighter craft who gives me a questioning ping. “I saw it!”

My paws pad across the couple hundred metered of empty docking bay, the space meant for thousands of incoming and outgoing transfers a day continuing only one single craft right now, before I fling myself back into the void.

Well, ‘fling’. Grav plate maneuvering isn’t as fine tuned for spaceflight in this suit as it is in my other one, but I can still move pretty fluidly. I run along the outside of the station, orienting the hull as ‘down’ while I sprint, legs sometimes angled behind me as I take thirty or fifty foot ‘jumps’ across the smoother parts.

I have to run a long way. The station is huge, and I should have asked Jom for another ride. But eventually, I reach the part of the station that faces up, away from Earth. And I fling myself off it, kicking away with magnetic and gravatics to float away, keeping inside the station’s stealth field but rotating myself to look down on it.

A space station. My place of residence, my base of operations, the place where I was made into who I am, and where I lost everything I was. The place where all my friends live with me, where we keep an eye on things up here.

An ancient collection of machines, built around an alien device, added to by dozens of peoples, conquered and explored by dozens more. A shining beacon, a shield, a *survivor*. Lonely, but not really all alone up here in the night.

The Earth is framed behind it, with the partially dyson swarmed sun in the background casting just enough light that it looks like a good approximation of that same mural of this place on the walls.

In space, gravity is relative. Up and down are subjective to what’s near you, and what you’re inside. And I never needed to really question the shared gravity orientation of the inside of the station.

But now, all of a sudden, I find it *very strange* that when I plant my paws on the floor, it’s my tail that’s facing toward the planet.

It’s the silliest thing, now that I can see the whole picture. It’s not some conspiracy or haunting or dark secret. The reason that I’ve been feeling like the murals were wrong recently is because it is only recently that I’ve *left the station*. My mind, fractured and frantic as it is, has finally had the data to make a connection.

The sensors in the mural point *down*. The comically powerful coherent light spike canon points *up*.

My station is upside down.

I start laughing. A mad, chirping cackle in my organic voice, with the projected voice wrapping around me in a wildly different tone of smug satisfaction. Two different laughs, one of them not exactly mine suddenly. And yet, before I can be concerned about that, I realize that I am floating a little too far from my home.

I file this new problem away under ‘deal with it later’, and ping Jom for a pickup. At least *one* thing isn’t going to bother me anymore. For that reason, anyway.

Lunch is going to taste so smugly satisfied today.