I am on a table of some kind. Or, maybe not a table. I am not supposed to be on tables, but I have been put here, so it cannot be a table.

It is metal, and smooth, and also warm and alive. It is a strange not-table.

Also I cannot move. Am I not supposed to be able to move? Maybe I am just very tired? No, no. I am awake. I think.

-I am not awake-

I am awake, and cannot move. Something is wrapped around my legs. My paws are tied together. Some kind of flexible snake thing, the sort I always see my mom and the other one working with.

And the others, too, before they went away. Humans and their cords. Maybe they thought they were snacks.

-They didn’t go anywhere-

Oh, mom is here. I can see here if I stretch myself up in a curve on my side. I meow at her as loudly as I can, to let her know I cannot move. She will help.

“Let her go, Gunther.” Alice says in a voice that contains the cold cruelty of a knife. “Or I will fucking end you.” She’s holding one of those dangerous things, the things the humans are always nervous around.

-She’s holding a gun-

“Not a chance, Al.” Gunther replies. I twist to see if I can see him, and I can! He’s on a table, too. Why are we allowed on tables today?

His table is in the middle of the room, kind of. I guess mine is too. The room is too big for me to understand the whole thing. I’d need to see all of it, and sniff the corners, before I could know how big it is. But it’s big! Bigger than the house. Bigger than the shuttle, absolutely. Not bigger than outside.

I miss outside.

“It doesn’t work, Gun.” Alice says with her angry voice. “Get off the platform, and we can get out of here. It doesn’t… it won’t work.”

“You don’t know that.” Gunther says. I yowl helplessly at him, trying to get his attention. He twitches toward me, and I see he has a danger toy too. He’s pointing it at my mom. “What am I supposed to do? Give up? Just die? You know what’s waiting for us if we leave without results.”

“Then we don’t leave!” Mom yells, and I scream with her. “Just stop! Turn it off!”

“You’re not gonna kill me over a fucking cat. I don’t care if you gave it your bondname.” The bad man says.

Mom ripples like she’s about to pounce. “Turn it off.”

Gunther moves.

I jerk awake before the gunshots.

I am greeted, in waking from my lived nightmare, by a cacophony. “Turn it off!” “Lily!” “Awoooooo!” Someone is yelling in a voice I don’t recognize, someone is yelling in Ennos’ voice, a dog - probably my dog, if I analyze this carefully - is howling, and there is a middle pitch klaxon going off.

I make a noise - or attempt to - that would get everyone to shut up. It doesn’t work. I think I just yawn?

I am so tired. I hadn’t slept in days. There’s been nonstop problems for at least thirty hours. And for all of those hours, I’ve been troubleshooting the surface and local space. Often by shooting troubles.

Don’t judge me. I must make small jokes or I will scream.

First - first? The sequence slides out of my brain - there was an early model Real American frigate that had its engine light off and started crashing through stuff. Then, groundside, your standard bug dimension emergence event. Then, someone tried to breach my cordon around the sleeping city. Then another emergence. Then an active war drone smashed into the lower decks of the station, pissed off the energy creature that lives down there, disrupted my power supply in the middle of an important data transmission, and also shot me at least six times before I got it. *Then*, because this *keeps going*, some idiot on the surface who didn’t realize I had at least one functioning scanner for this tried to smuggle an antimatter bomb into Melbourne, and now there’s a new crater outside Melbourne. Then a nuclear mine activated, and I shot it. Then the station lost an engine when we had to maneuver past an asteroid that had been pushed into the wrong orbit. Then another emergence, this one orbital, which are always a pain to deal with because there’s no backstop to hit with kinetic rounds and you need to use actual explosives. Then… there was something else. At least one or two more things. They were also terrible.

I had actually gone to sleep with an alarm still going, because it was just for an incoming communication, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t keep going. I am a *cat*. I’m not built to go without a nap for more than an hour. There is only so much I can do.

There’s nothing I could do.

There’s… I can’t be everywhere. I keep trying, and failing, to be everywhere. And I’m falling asleep when people need me.

Everyone is yelling at me to turn off the alarm. I reflexively check one of the omnipresent AR displays I keep up. I have been asleep for seventy eight minutes. Good enough, I guess.

I tune everything out. This is easier than you might think. I have a lot of practice ignoring alarms, and people yelling at me is just a slightly more complicated alarm; it takes more effort to filter the pattern, but it’s not impossible.

I breathe. Filling my lungs with processed station air, my precious O2 supply, cool and dry and sterile. I hold long breaths, and let my body wake up slowly. As much as my body needs to wake up, obviously.

The lingering dream threatens the edges of my mind. A reminder that I am different. That ‘I’, as much as I am a thing, am broken in an existentially terrifying way.

It’s harder to push away than normal. I didn’t used to dream this much. But I manage. Breathe some more. Let my thoughts touch on better things. I can get more work done today. I can eat some vegetable soup later. Maybe, if it quiets down, get a game of long range combat Go in with Glitter.

Yeah. It’ll be okay

I open my eyes. Yelling is still happening. I turn intelligent eyes on my new visitor, and speak, and everyone shuts up. Okay, everyone but the alarm shuts up.

“Oh hello!” I say. “Nice to hear you talking to us. How’re you settling in?”

The child glares at me through mismatched eyes, one organic and one an obvious piece of cyberware. I take a minute to remind myself that this woman isn’t just an adult, but an *elder* by human standards. “Turn off the alarm.” She says bluntly in the strange cant of her people.

“That’s good.” I nod to the answer she has not given. Of course I’m gonna go turn off the alarm, the thing is loud and horrible. But I’m tired and don’t feel like humoring anyone but myself. “I can’t officially assign you to a crew quarters, but go ahead and pick one out on the upper deck if you want to switch. Oh, avoid the barracks! That place is rude.”

“Turn off.” She says slowly. “The alarm.” The dog growls at her, and she stares at it as its tentacles and forepaws wrap protectively around me.

“Lily,” Enno’s voice comes through softly, and the woman flinches, glancing around furtively, “please, I can’t read the data off this one. Are we close to death at the moment?”

I listen to the alarm for a minute. It’s the sound of of my own jury rigged communications nodes makes. “No.” I say definitely, turning to do my best to pet the dog’s ears as he curls around me. “Just someone calling. Are there any… more alerts?” I ask, terrified.

“Yes my friend.” Glitter’s voice adds to the scene like silk. “Though they can wait. Jom and I have been handing what we can. We… have a… present for you?”

I have never heard Glitter sound uncertain before. That’s *terrifying*.

“Gift how, exactly?” I say, trying not to say the thing about her being terrifying, and probably succeeding.

“They parked a Recovery Era orbital industrial repeater next to the station and told it we’d find work for it.” Ennos said. “So, you know, be ready for that I guess.”

Cool. Great. Actually, that is kind of cool. I bet I can find work for a…

I double check my mental notes. Don’t those things inevitably turn into paperclippers? Cool. Great. But with less enthusiasm this time.

I exfiltrate myself from my protective dog pillow, and head for one of the room’s access points.

“You coming?” I call back to the cyborg still in a staring match with the dog. And also the dog, I suppose. Both of them follow me, anyway, the woman keeping her distance from my friend.

On the way - which is the *long way*, since I doubt my new human can fit through the vents - I keep myself amused by catching up on incoming reports, and assigning what I can to the station’s systems remotely.

We have a huge amount of plutonium in one of the hazardous material hoppers. Did I pillage a breeder reactor? Where did this come from?

Whatever. I queue up production of five nuclear stack chargers, which should minorly improve our power situation and will last a century before I have to do anything about it again, even if they won’t be done being fabricated for months. The rest of the plutonium can just… sit there. Ominously?

Eventually, after roughly one million years too long to spend on a walk, we come to the comms station. I sheepishly duck under the piece of technically-wall-art that I installed here a few decades back to make bounding around the corner easier, and head to the particular space where the alarm is pointing to. Behind me, the new girl hisses in a breath of air as she sees the equipment.

Months and months of getting used to having a voice, having AI companions, having a dog that can manipulate things better than I can, and I’m still constantly being frustrated with having paws. It takes me two tries to bat the activation switch before the woman I rescued last week leans over and flicks it.

I want to glare at her, but I don’t. Because what I really want is to glare at the evolutionary pressures that led to me not having opposable thumbs.

The alarm goes quiet as the transmission is acknowledged.

“Receiving.” I say simply into the communicator. I used to use a bell, and sometimes still do for certain people. But there’s something satisfying about actually speaking to someone like this.

A strained voice, mostly human probably but with rapid popping clicks woven into the words, replies. They speak in a language I don’t know, and only say a couple sentences before they stop.

Then, ten seconds later, the exact same message repeats.

“Ennos…” I start to say.

My friend preempts my question. “Distress call.” They confirm, a tiny distortion in their words as I realize they’re speaking in two languages at once for the benefit of our guest. “Automated. I can’t translate just based off that.”

“It’s a common format.” I sigh. “Name of ship or speaker, nature of disaster, coordinates.”

“Wide band, off an echo beacon. We have no way to find them.” Ennos informs me sadly.

Not that I didn’t already know.

Guilt twists inside me as I process the thought that I don’t need to feel bad about falling asleep during this alarm. The speaker lived or died without my intervention, and wouldn’t have had help from me either way.

More often than I would like, there is nothing I can do about the problems I see.

I’m supposed to be the guardian of the solar system, but I can’t even find a single person calling for help if they aren’t on the easy target of a planet.

I jump off the desk, and head for the door, the automated message starting to repeat again behind me.

“Turn that off.” I command my new comms officer in an exhausted voice. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

Behind me, after only a moment’s hesitation, there is a click, and silence.

For the first time in days, the noise in my life is reduced to the tap of claws on metal deck plate. The chaos quells. The problems are gone for now.

Tomorrow, I will have more work to do. A dangerous factory unit. A conversation with a reclusive outsider. Restocking, rearming, repairing.

Today, I can stop. I sit in the galley, and am served warm soup, and I lap at it until I am sated, and I fall asleep.

I dream of after the gunshots.