“Orbital insertion HuKs ready for launch, bays open.” Ennos’ clipped and technical voice chimes in my left ear.

“Kessler Syndrome opening in twenty seconds.” Glitter adds, voice a combination of musical and professional.

“Drone swarm online, enhancement networking online, engines primed.” I check my readouts. “Namata engines coiled.” Some things I have to check and relay manually, or the AI’s won’t be able to fully see them. “Stealth check?”

A ping comes in from Jom, exactly on schedule. Our stealth systems are holding, and the launch window is facing a surface that can’t shoot back at us effectively, and everything that could have shot back is either orbiting above us, or scrap. Even Glitter is basically invisible.

In retrospect, I’m not sure why I asked for a stealth check out loud when we’re in a comms blackout. That’s… kind of what stealth entails, up here.

“Landing site swept. Clear.” Ennos adds.

I flick one ear, otherwise totally still. “Three. Two. One.” I give a totally unneeded countdown to my digital companions. Maybe Dog cares about it, I dunno. It makes me feel official. “Launching.”

On the other side of the crystal tungsten window, eight anti-glowing engines latch onto the fabric of gravity, and the drones in the bay vanish out the open launch window faster than my eyes can follow. Under my paws, the deck feels like it’s rippling; behind me, a clatter sounds as an ancient communication pad falls off the arm of one of the neural control chairs that Real America loved so much. The command readout displays the closest approximation of tracers as it can manage, based on known capabilities and the tightbeam bursts of communication they’re sending back to us.

“Drones hitting atmosphere now.” Ennos says two seconds later. “Maneuvering independently.”

The room goes silent. The three of us are all, in our own way, staring at the same display. The same data set. We’re watching to see if our upgrades, made bit by bit over the last week, are enough.

One of the tiny glowing dots, the mechanical paws I’ve flung down to the surface, blips out. Then another.

My paws impact the controls as I hiss commands at my AR display. Show me what’s happening, show me what went wrong.

Maneuvering is still ongoing, the drones slowed just enough to not rip themselves apart on reentry. But that was enough. Surface defenses have detected them, and lacking any kind of authorization codes that work, are trying to pick off my fleet.

“Command codes for the Thermic Sea defense platforms have registered.” Glitter informs me, not disparaged by the destruction on the screen. “Landing authorization for the airspace of what was once New Vatican have been rejected. Landing authorization for the Sleeping City has been ignored. Orbital permissions for Imperion gun platforms ignored. No one is left to listen, the defenses are still firing.”

Another dot blips out. Then two more. The swarm is dumber with less processing power.

They don’t even break through the upper atmosphere. If I went to a window and looked down, I could probably see the concentrated explosions and plasma flashes through the orange and white swirl of clouds.

“All drones nonresponsive.” Ennos sighs.

“Excuse me a moment.” I gently bat the hovering earpiece away with a paw, set my local status to non-broadcasting, step away from the controls, and then scream.

Well, it’s more of a caterwaul really. I’ve got about fifteen solid seconds of wailing before I run out of breath, and I put it to good use, tiny lungs expelling what I’d call a fairly impressive volume and a mild amount of catharsis.

Afterward, I remove the privacy filter from my settings, and flick my tail as I return to the conversation. “So that didn’t work.” I say.

“Lily, you do realize neither of us are affected by-” Ennos starts to say something, but Glitter cuts them off.

“At least,” my weapons platform friend muses, “this wasn’t an emergency.”

She is, technically, correct. “That’s not *wrong*, exactly.” I tell her. “But it did use up most of our stockpile of MX-11 on the engines, and I don’t actually know where to get more of that.”

There’s a spark of static from both their communication channels. “Please don’t say that.” Ennos sounds exasperated. “We can tell there’s something wrong there, and it starts logic loops.”

Whoops. I hadn’t actually realized just saying the designation name of a paramaterial would cause problems. I adjust my conversation plan, and make a note to preemptively apologize at some point for when I screw it up and give them AI headaches.

AI don’t have heads. Coreaches? Persona-aches? Processor-

“Lily?” Ennos’ voice snaps me back to reality. “Are you there?” They sound worried. Probably because they know me.

“Hm? Oh, yeah. I’m fine.” I answer. “It’s just… too much. It’s always too much down there. No landings, no takeoffs, and it feels insurmountable to deal with. How much longer, until there’s nothing left to shoot? I’ll probably last that long. But I’d hoped that a bunch of stolen encryption would solve the problem.”

“Under the Solar War Convention, it’s legally not stolen, it’s recovered, as the original owners are dead.” Glitter cheerfully tells me. Thanks, Glitter. I will attempt to appreciate this small mote of existential dread. “With this materially expensive test run out of the way, what now?” Glitter’s voice hides a secret eagerness that I’m pretty sure she’s modulated just enough to let show through on purpose. “Perhaps a game of some sort?”

“I’m still worried that you said you figured out how to play chess with a laser.” I say. “But also, not yet. I need to get the engines firing to take us back up into a higher orbit, before one of the mobile fields finds us. After that, we’ll see?”

A small beeping begins sounding. Low and constant, it calls my attention to it almost immediately.

“What’s *that* alarm?” Ennos asks, a bit of the old panic seeping in.

“Hull breach.” I swipe a paw over my face, trying to swat away the growing exhaustion this day is already promising. “It’s fine. This is the one for ‘something has broken but the atmosphere bubble is holding so it is okay to not worry yet but please fix it’. So.”

Glitter’s nearby camera drone duo tilt slightly as she asks. “So?”

“So I’m going to go fix it.” I say. “Before it gets louder.”

Ennos’ next question almost makes me laugh. “I may regret asking, but. How loud does it get?”

I’m not actually sure of the answer, because I always fix the holes before I run out of air or get sucked into space. “Pretty loud?” I say. “Pretty loud. I should really go deal with that.” The beeping gets slightly louder. “Oh, yeah. Okay!”

It turns out, exhaustion burns off pretty quickly when an insulation compartment collapses and you need to really push your paws as fast as they can go. Well, I need to. You may or may not have paws.

The exhaustion comes back when I’m done though. Everything quiet for a minute, and nothing breaking, everyone off on their own tasks. The perfect time for a nap.

_

I am standing in a cargo hold, staring up at a smoothly sealed compartment two meters over my head, trying to figure out how, exactly, this is going to go down.

Well, I’m pretending I’m planning. I’m actually screaming on the inside and trying to keep cool. As captain of this ancient and noble battlestation, there’s a certain level of decorum that I am…

Hey! Stop laughing!

Anyway, the problem is manifold in its complexity, and yet, stupidly simple in where the bottleneck is.

Let’s start with the inciting incident here. The subspace tap is broken.

Now, the subspace tap is useful for between two and eighteen different things, depending on what you need. I use it for clean water, and then feeding that water into a hydrogen cracker to get most of my air. It’s also pretty handy for generating highly dangerous radiation patterns if you overclock it or tweak the settings even slightly, so that’s… let’s not go into that.

As for how it’s broken, it’s still in normal territory. One of the control circuits is worn through. They only last about a hundred years, so replacing them is just kind of a thing I need to deal with. Shoulda been more on top of it, but they can kinda turn to dust out of nowhere, so I won’t blame myself too much.

Okay, new control circuit. Ah, but I don’t have a spare, because I used the last two about two months ago when the *others* needed replacing. So. Make a new one.

Now it’s time for a little complexity. The only circuit presser I have currently operational is one that I salvaged from a Empirica Technicanica war factory a while back. I did this to replace the only machine I had that could create complex circuits, because there was a whole *thing* with some kind of living ooze melting its way through one of my factory decks. Not important. Anyway.

I hadn’t actually made a subspace tap control circuit with the new presser. And in fact, didn’t actually have a design file saved *anywhere*, that I could find.

So I spent some time doing meticulous and kinda painful work with my claws, prying one of the working control circuits out from where it was latched in. And after that stupidly high finesse ordeal, had to get it to a scanner while it was in its impossibly delicate deployed form.

Dog actually helped a lot there! He’s a very good boy, and carries things with his tentacles a lot less aggressively than a lot of the different models of cargo bots around the station.

So the scanner needed a battery replacement. The fabricator that can make that one isn’t gridlinked, so instead of manually moving the blueprint over which would take a while, I just manually bring the materials it needs to it. One of those materials is energized lithium, which is kept in a radiation chamber for some reason, which took half an hour to give myself authorization to get into and then involved a brief chase with some kind of highly intimidating ghost living in the radiation field.

The other material I need is a quantity of liquid CCI2F2, which actually is stored exactly where it’s supposed to be, but it’s an autoloader cargo bay, and apparently *that one* took a missile strike at some point, and has been cut off from maintenance routines and pretty damaged for a *while* without my noticing. I don’t… use a lot of dangerous liquids, weirdly?

So I print off some replacement cabling, secure the bay, connect it to the station properly, get it acknowledged, order a repair bot to get in and fix one of the cargo loader systems, and then remind it to give me my refrigerant. Politely, obviously. I say please. But also right now.

And the container in the cargo loader is, for some reason, password protected. Not the loader itself! Just the container! The unconnected, unlinked container, that I can’t just loose a dramatic encryption-shattering AI on!

I consider equipping the cargo loader with an electrosaw. But I stay calm, because I’m a reasonable adult or something. The container is marked as personal property. I trace down the name in the system, and find it to belong to a long dead Troi France technician who was stationed here. By their regulations, all her passwords should be kept in a hard copy with her personal effects, and since apparently this whole place is one giant archive and-or garbage dump.

So now I’m standing in the fourth or fifth cargo bay of the day, staring up at a perfectly smooth sealed container that reacts to *palmprint* and wondering where I went wrong in life.

Maybe I was a very bad cat in my last life. Maybe this is punishment for something. I bet my previous reincarnation used to knock breakables off shelves. That would explain it.

I’m sure there’s another way around this, but part of me is making mental preparations to just build a bigger reservoir, capture an ice comet, and purify water from that, because it would probably be less work.

Which is the point one of Glitter’s drones flits in, followed by the unfamiliar sound of heavy footsteps on the deck as Dyn follows the drone in.

The young woman stops as she catches sight of me, worn and wrinkled skin of her face tightening as she winces, her grey hair pulled back around her ears. But she doesn’t run.

I try to make sure that the spirit-demolishing frustration I’ve been feeling today doesn’t show in my eyes as I watch her over my shoulder. Flicking an ear, I wait patiently for her to address me, if she wants to. I’m trying to be nice.

“You need help?” Her rough voice comes through with a slight electrical buzz from one of her augmentations. I’m gonna need to get her into a real medical facility at some point. That’s probably not a good sign.

I shake myself slightly, tail coiling around my seated form as I realize what she just said. “Oh! Uh… yes? So, I’m trying to fix the subspace tap, and the circuit is broken, so I need to get a scan of the-“

Dyn holds up a hand thick with callouses and scars, two of her fingers replaced with bulky tool-filled cybernetics. “Stop.” She says bluntly. “Short version.”

I trail off, looking down at the deckplate as I sort through my ongoing quest. When I look back up at her, I have a much more simple explanation. “Open that.” I meow, pointing with a paw up at the storage pod.

Dyn nods, steps around me like she’s terrified I’m an AP mine or something, and presses her less-metal hand against the trigger. The pod hisses open, and Dyn looks down at me, before glancing back into it, and giving a tiny shrug to herself. Then she grabs the contents and passes them down.

A small bag of faded photos and suit patches. A journal, on actual paper, that looks prepared to crumble to dust. A handful of traditional Troi France charms and pins, including rank tags. And one standard issue crystal display pad.

I pull the pad aside with my paws, plug it into the portable battery I’ve brought as part of the only proper plan in this whole mess, and authorize myself to be authorized to read the contents.

It’s the fourteenth password in the thing. I’m pretty sure none of these other systems even exist on the station anymore.

“Thank you.” I tell Dyn with as much heartfelt gratitude as I can bring to bear. She just nods at me, and steps back silently. I watch her out of the corner of my eye, seeing her standing there as Glitter’s drone hovers around me, watching what I’m up to. “Uh… do you… need anything yourself?” I ask.

“...Why do you need articles of the dead?” She asks, Ennos whispering the translation into my ear for the words I haven’t learned yet.

I brighten up. “I am so glad you asked!” I mewl out with a feline grin and a rapid back and forth flick of my tail. “Come with me!”

Password saved to AR display. Password goes into cargo loader. Loader gives me the canister I demand of it. Refrigerant goes into fabricator. Fabricator makes my a hyper-specific battery format. Battery goes into scanner. Scanner… scans. Good job scanner, I’m not mad at *you* today.

Scan gets passed to Ennos who verifies the engineering format, and saves it as a recognizable file. File gets loaded into the circuit presser. Presser looks like it’s *about* to say it needs a material, but I threaten it with a glare, and it starts its run smoothly with the bunkered supplies.

I print four hundred backup control circuits. And then I get Dyn to load the two that need replacing. Because she has fingers, and her fur won’t get stuck.

“Anyway,” I tell her, finishing the running explanation, “that’s our water situation sorted. Thanks! Sorry for all the running. I get excited.”

She looks at me like she’s just realized something from the casual tone of my words. “Null press.” She says, Ennos leaving the obvious slang untranslated. “This was… the most familiar thing here.”

“What, the running back and forth chaining together infuriating roadblocks just to get one single thing to work properly, because you’ll die without it?” I ask, kind of horrified to hear the answer.

Dyn nods. “Exactly.” She says. “And you can’t even launch any of it out an airlock, because you’ll need it later.” And then, having said the most words in one string since the first time she accidentally opened a tightbeam comm to the station, Dyn closes her mouth back into a thin line, and abruptly turns to make her exit back to her quarters.

Oh no. Oh dear. She’s exactly like me.

I should see how that move in decor gift is going. She could use a nice apology from the universe.