On the surface of Earth, an oceanic caravan goes slightly off charts in an effort to save a couple days of travel.

Around them, battering waves rise up to the heights of old world skyscrapers. Living salt leaves impromptu circuits across the keel of a dozen of their ships. Somewhere nearby, a defense station has recently fired a smart chaff decoy, and the networked intercept particles have joined the hurricane force winds to create a pale mimicry of a sliverstorm.

All of this is normal. This is not because they’ve gone slightly off course. This is what the oceans are like.

I feel I should make this clear. That for all the crap I deal with up here, things on the surface of Earth are worse. So much worse. Endless, and everywhere, it isn’t a string of emptiness filled with terror, it’s an unbroken chain of lethal threats closing in constantly.

Their ships are uniform. They come from a city that used to be called Venice, before it was called Venibio, before it was called Fabberia. There, eight miles out to sea, underneath a live paling and among the peaks of megastructures still peaking over the waves, a golden age shipyard churns out copies of hardy, effective boats. Many of them do not survive their first crew. Those that do, that go on to take part in cross-ocean trade caravans, make their crews fabulously wealthy and famous.

The city has changed ownership six times since I’ve been watching. Three of those have been because of me. I take a dim view to authoritarian policies and police states, and while I’ve got an overabundance of splash damage for things like emergence events, when it’s just a specific group of people that need targeting and I can take all the time I want? I can be very precise.

The city is not the problem right now. The city is fine. The forty four mid-grade orbital launch cruisers repurposed to be trade ships are the problem. Or rather, the problem is what they have run into.

Short tangent.

Sixteen years ago, probably, give or take a decade, I fired the station’s engines to dodge a small wrath field that was bending into a new orbit. This was a good idea, because don’t touch those, and a bad idea, because the station, as you might have picked up, isn’t exactly structurally stable.

This is partly the fault of the previous owners, but let’s be honest, I’ve made it worse with all the different chunks of other stations and ships I’ve stapled on.

Anyway, the point is, a lot of the joining can’t actually hold up to sudden and powerful acceleration. And a few things maybe, sort of, possibly… broke off.

This happens a lot, honestly. The station is close enough to a living ecosystem in how it grows and breaks. If you don’t think about it too hard.

This time though, one of the things that I lost was something irreplaceable. Something I could never find the paramaterials to build a copy of, even if I had understood how the one I found was built in the first place. Something that was beyond valuable for a lot of my excursions. Something priceless before any of the wars and falls of sol civilization, and so far past priceless now that it was closer to a punchline than anything else.

I had *thought* it had hit the original moon. Probably been dinged up by the debris and some automated weapons fire, but if it had managed to survive… I spend all my free time for months scanning, searching, trying anything I could to see if I could spot it, even if I didn’t have a clue how I’d get it back or fix it or whatever.

Obviously, I was looking in the wrong direction.

And this oceanic caravan currently being swarmed by something from an undersea emergence event that’re mostly just balls of teeth and hate, has just stumbled across the tiny islet where my teleporter crashed to Earth.

“Lily, teleporters aren’t real.” Ennos says.

“I’m afraid I must agree, that technology is solidly impossible.” Glitter adds.

Dyn and I share a look. Dyn and I, it turns, out, get along a lot better than I expected, once she stopped refusing to talk and I started actually explaining things. We share a look because every time I say ‘teleporter’, the AIs ask questions, conclude it is impossible, and look away. Because, again, it is something like ninety percent paramaterial construction.

“How did you even find this?” Dyn asks. She’s talking about the site itself, not the teleporter in the first place. Her language has some really useful words in it for designating which noun they’re pointed at. And also a lot of words for expressing different flavors of exhaustion, annoyance, and desperation. She’s using a lot of those in conjunction. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Dyn was some kind of poet. But I know she’s actually an engineer.

I flick my tail as I try in vain to reposition the imaging holo, before just shoving it over to Dyn and letting the person with actual fingers do it. She zooms in on a few key spots, pinning the view from our scanners as I answer. “I dunno, how did you find my sister?”

Bonus tangent. Dyn did successfully make contact with and bring into my increasingly crowded ‘home’ portion of the station another version of myself.

Same deal, mostly. Memories that are identical up until a certain moment. A similar personality and disposition. Just… a different body, and a different several centuries of life.

She’s organic, weirdly. Hyperadapted to the vacuum of space. Doesn’t need to breathe much, photosynthesizes, has some kind of organic adhesive for crawling around in zero g, good stuff mostly.

She also hasn’t had anything except sunlight and ration paste for centuries, so a few not fully grown berries was a pretty good bribe, if it had been needed. I’m gonna need to expand my little garden. A lot.

Lily’s been fixing the hull for… a while. She didn’t have a lot of ways into the station, just a few airlocks and blocked corridors to rest in, with a handful of accessible subsystems. But she’s resourceful, and clever, and kind. And so, without knowing who lived in the station, she’s been doing her best to keep it from leaking too much, and to intercept things that the admittedly patchwork sensors miss.

Oh! And she also has a friend! Which is good, because of all the iterations of myself that I’ve met so far, I think she might be the most lonely. Her friend is a little mechanical scarab unit with an AI that’s limited not by any programming, but instead the capacity of its hardware. It’s a bit dumber than Dog, and also when I said little, I lied, because it is three times the size of Dog and has to move carefully down most of the halls. It loves her, and as a result, after having known it for six minutes, I am already prepared to die to keep it safe.

Nested tangent: I’m pretty sure that whatever the hostile thing living within the station is, it is finding ways to retaliate against us for this. Whatever hold it had that kept us from meeting properly is gone, for some reason. I don’t know why, but I’m taking advantage of it. We still have to contend with the disciplinary system, and an erratic control of doors and airlocks, though. Which is why I think it’s actively fighting back, because it absolutely tried to vent Dyn into space.

Didn’t work, obviously. This isn’t Dyn’s first time being thrown out an airlock. She dealt with it.

Anyway. Do you know how much you can get done with *three* terminally depressed super intelligent cats?

Well, let me tell you.

It’s exactly the same amount as I’ve been doing this whole time.

We’re already all basically doing our best. It’s not like I got a bonus Lily’s worth of help; all the Lily’s on the station are actively Lily-ing. All we have now is better coordination, and…

I won’t lie to you. We’re not gonna be coordinating that well. I can barely coordinate with myself. I somehow doubt it’ll be easier to coordinate several of myself.

But, *but*, but! Do you have any idea what three Lily’s could do, *with a teleporter*?! I don’t, but I am excited to find out.

Oh, right, Dyn asked me a question. And is staring at me. Oh no. How long have I taken to answer this?

“Uh… tracking beacon?” I say, hoping I’m answering the right question. “Probably tripped a security system when they got too close.”

Dyn grunts in reply. Flicks over another display with a damage readout of the various vessels in the caravan. “One of their boats is sinking. Actually a lot of them are sinking, they just don’t know it yet.”

“Probably why they stopped there.” I say. “They’re gonna shuffle around cargo and people, and try to make it.” I look over the display. We’ve already figured out the answer that the surface crews probably know in their guts, even if they aren’t saying it out loud.

They aren’t gonna make it.

Especially not with the multiple emergence events under the ocean between where they are, and the closest bit of safe water.

With heavy enough bombardment, I can shut off most of the holes in space. But that’s not the real problem. The problem is, I’ve mostly left the oceans alone, and those portals have been open for *decades*. The sea here is the territory of creatures that are a lot more vicious than they reasonably should be. And it just won’t be enough; the simple math on when I’ll be in the firing envelope, and how many shots it will take, makes that clear.

With a light bombardment, I could *maybe* screen enough of the perpetually hostile xenolife to get one or two ships through alive. One or two out of, what, thirty?

These ships run on skeleton crews. Why wouldn’t they? They don’t have ammo for the guns, or targets for the ECM. But a skeleton crew is still thirty to fifty people.

“Dyn.” I say, and she snaps her head up at my tone. Concern in her eyes.

“Oh no.” Ennos says. They’ve heard this tone before too.

I don’t get *why*. It’s not a bad tone! It’s just my normal impossible non-cat voice, but half terrified and half amused, and half unbelievably smug about the idea I’ve just had! I talk like this all the time!

Wait, okay, no, I figured it out.

“Oh dear, what is about to happen?” Glitter says, just as the tacnet chime with Jom requesting information about the predicted blast radius.

“Okay, I get it! Empty void, you all are insufferable!” I meow angrily. “I’ve got an idea! But we need to get in touch with the surface.”

“Done.” Glitter says. “Comms channel open. Patching through your display now.”

I blink. That was… different. Fast. Is this what it’s supposed to be like to run a space station? The crew you work with and the tools you have access to just work, and solve problems?

I like it.

For the first time in a while, *I* wait for *someone else* to answer their comm. I relish the feeling. I try to relish it while ignoring Glitter guiding Dyn through some kind of religious mantra meant to either bring good fortune, stop bad fortune, or just keep someone calm while I enacted a plan.

When the captain of the caravan finally answers their phone, it’s in the middle of me trying to explain to Glitter that I can’t actually tell her my plan, in a way that works around the reality block that machines seem to have when it comes to certain phenomena. I trail off rapidly as I face the projected image of the ship’s bridge, and the eight foot tall hexapedal woman staring at the screen with barely disguised alarm on her furred face.

The bridge is missing a chunk of itself. Wind whips rain through the breach, spraying what is obviously frigid water into the space in sheets. Crew, mostly humans or whatever species the captain is, stare at me with whatever sets of eyes they have available.

“This system has never worked.” She opens with, projecting calm into the modified Spanish trade dialect she’s using, folding her arms over her chest.

I have two thoughts. One is that I am probably going to just bulldoze through this conversation, and the other is that she has *paws*, but her paws have *thumbs*, and how this is the perfect example of how cold and unjust the universe is. I have a tertiary thought that it is good that I can speak Spanish, because Ennos would get a processor ache trying to translate what I’m about to say.

“My comms officers are good at their jobs.” I say, instead, hoping I didn’t say anything else out loud. The captain’s eyes pivot, and I realize that she was focusing on Dyn, and not me. But Dyn is busy finding targeting solutions with Glitter, and I’m the one talking. So now…

“What is this? I don’t have time-”

“You don’t have time because your fleet is sinking.” I say bluntly, glancing at Dyn as she mouths a question at me. “Are any of the things with the really long teeth tentacles your pets or something?”

“…No?”

“Good.”

Dyn hits a button, and I paw a command authorization that pops up that I really need to figure out how to bypass. Six seconds later, seven hundred slagrounds find their way into the waters around the ships, melting through the high density organic armor of whatever nightmare creations were sneaking their way up the hulls. I see a few streak by outside the cabin of the ship, followed by shouting and frantic motion from the crew in the background.

“We cannot keep this up.” I say as the captain catches a feathermorph crewman lurching to the side as the ship lists. “You are going to be overrun if you don’t move, and if you do move, you’re going to lose ships. Probably most of them.”

“We know!” The captain bellows at me. “We know.” Her voice stills the space she’s in, her crew staring at her at the acknowledgement of their impending doom. “But we don’t have an option. Unless you’re offering one?” The words are a lifeline for the people watching her.

And I give them what they’re praying for. “The rock you’re stopped at has something of mine on it.” I say. “We can’t take your cargo, but I know it has transit capacity for at least a thousand people. I *know* you have less than a thousand people. I just need your engineers to make a few modifications.”

The captain stares at me. “Where… are you going to take us?”

“Up.” I meow. “And, eventually, back down somewhere else.”

“These ships are our lives.” She says. But her heart isn’t in it. Neither is her crew’s, as someone stumbles into the bridge and yells something about losing the cargo bay of another ship, and the storm getting worse. “We cannot-“

She gets cut off again as Glitter lances a high powered laser through the atmosphere and spears something the size of one of the ships but a lot slimier before it can surface. The beam lasts for four seconds before orbital intercept chaff cuts it off and a few gunnery positions start tracking it back to the source.

“Here’s a map.” I say, sending the information down. It’s not much, but the island isn’t that big anyway. “Get your people to this position. Get *this* to your engineers; they’re going to need to memorize as much as they can before leaving, because you’ll be out of touch once you start moving. And you’re going to need to carry one of your ship’s reactors with you.” I meet the captain’s quartet of beady black eyes. “We can cover you, but you need to *move*.”

More things are moving in the sea around them. I pick one out and railgun it while Dyn focuses on trying to control the smaller ones. To the crew on the ships, the world is ending. The sky has now truly opened up, but instead of a storm of rain and wind, it’s fiery bombardment, and the clap of thunder as the air stitches itself back together behind our shots.

The captain is still staring at me, projecting a calm across her people that I frankly find impressive, if a little stupid at the moment. Thunder sounds from through the comm and she’s briefly illuminated from behind by the artillery shell vaporizing several cubic miles of ocean somewhere in the distance.

Then her eyes crack, and she makes a decision.

“All hands!” The captain yells. “Prepare to abandon ship! We move inland!” She looks at me, one more time, and I give her a nod and a flick of my ears. “I’m trusting you.” She says. “If you get us killed, know that my vengeful wraith will seek revenge.” And then, without any further words, she turns and gallops away to direct the evacuation.

“Oh no. A ghost.” I mutter sarcastically. “That’ll be new.” Dyn pauses, and turns to give me an incredulous look. “Oh, don’t give me that,” I tell her, “you can’t be surprised *now* that the station’s haunted.” I hop off the seat I’ve occupied, transferring local command to Dyn. “Keep firing. I have to go get a cargo bay cleared.”

“Why?”

“Because if this works, we’ll need an open space, and the cargo drones don’t work super fast.” I pause, then set a command out over the tacnet, deploying Jom out to close patrol around the station. Surface engineers aren’t stupid, but I *am* asking them to hotwire a teleporter, and the chance of target drift is real.

Twenty minutes later, Glitter checks in. The ships are evacuated, and she and Dyn are dropping a rolling bombardment behind the sailors as they head for their goal. She has questions about the goal, and demands I stop answering them as soon as I get to the teleporter again.

Five minutes after that, we start to slip beyond where we have a clean shot. I’m still emptying out one of the larger cargo bays. We are out of contact with the surface; they’re on their own.

Another three minutes. Jom deploys, along with legitimate space cat Lily in her own heavily modified strike craft.

Another minute. I get post-hoc approval on my idiot plan. Every Lily likes it. Dyn tolerates it. Dog abstains from voting, but I bet Dog will love it. If it works.

Time seems like it’s slowed to a crawl. This happens to me a lot. There is… nothing I can do. I’m sitting here, meowing commands at drones that probably don’t need me telling them what to do, and on the surface, a few hundred people are running and fighting for their lives.

This is always how it’s been.

I can shoot a few monsters, break the worst of the storms, shut down invasions, stop the bigger horrors. But I can’t be there, with them. I can’t always do anything, except for sit, and wait, and feel my chest tighten and my heart hammer faster and faster.

I fidget with my AR, reveling in the ability to do more remotely than ever before. I bring two nearby medical stations to standby, I adjust my garden’s irrigation, I queue up production of more bullets. I don’t know what else to do.

I wait.

No one speaks over the comms. We’re all waiting. Maybe they all handle it better than I do.

I wait.

I wonder if this will work. I wonder if maybe the mess it will make will draw out the cleaner nanoswarm that is, actually, another of my sisters. I wonder why I haven’t been able to see her again when I’ve gathered the others just fine.

I wonder if I’ve made a mistake. If I’ve gotten that whole fleet killed, when they could have simply *mostly* died if they’d run themselves.

I check how long its been. How many hours have passed. How long I’ve been pacing with my fur on end and my ears flat on my head. It has been eight minutes since my last checkin.

I am not good at this.

I want to do something. Anything. I want to slap a paw across the firing controls and kill something evil. I want to figure out the limits of a piece of technology and then push it just past them. I want to save someone.

I want to help. And I can’t.

The cargo bay is silent. Empty. The loader bots are done. I am alone, briefly, before Dyn joins me, Dog trailing behind her. The canine wraps his tentacles around me, slowing my pacing as he greets me with a dopey face, tongue lolling out of his mouth. I accept exactly one dog kiss before I continue pacing.

Dyn says nothing. We wait.

The Lily made of light and energy joins us. She says nothing. We wait.

An hour passes.

I have gotten them all killed.

Again.

I don’t know what I am supposed to do, now. I don’t know, at what point, it is time to stop just falling into panic, and realistically accept that I didn’t give directions well enough, or the teleporter didn’t work right, or *something* went wrong, and that the crewmembers of that fleet and their captain who took a gamble on my offer of salvation are *not coming*.

“Well.” I tell Dyn with a voice that sounds like I’ve been crying for some reason. “At least you won’t have to talk to anyone new.”

Dyn almost laughs, almost cries. Says nothing.

We’re about to leave. Which is, of course, when the room warps. Space bends, light twists, and in the end, it’s not us that’s crying or laughing, but reality itself.

Two hundred and sixty one people - my captain’s access to crew and visitor logs is very robust - emerge from nowhere on the floor of the cargo bay. Six of them emerge outside the cargo bay, and my foresight in deploying Jom suddenly makes me seem like the smartest cat alive. Many of the people are screaming, and that’s because the things they were running from were practically on top of them when the engineers - desperate, panicking, beautiful engineers - got the teleporter rigged up, powered, and activated.

I know the things were almost on top of them because three of them are still here, tearing into the people on the side of the bay.

Dyn and Lily and I arrow through the crowd; the sailor’s ammo is out, judging by the number of them holding knives instead of guns, but we don’t need crude wasteland projectile weapons to…

Okay Dyn, you have guns, I get it. Goodness, you have so many guns. Where did you hide all of those?

Dyn elbow checks a feathermorph over a crate, and empties multiple clips into the mass of squishy teeth that was about to eat the poor sailor. Dog flanks her, tentacles intercepting and rending open the strikes of a second creature. They’ve got that, I don’t keep looking. Because I’m busy. Lily and I lunge past a crewman that was standing between a downed friend and one of the monsters with nothing but a stick, relieving her of her duty by bounding off her shoulders and carving the creature in half. My engineering lasers turned up to high power melt the thing in a half second. The other Lily plows through the dissolving mess and just body checks the one behind it, trailing burning organic matter behind her as she melts through all on her own.

There’s a small explosion from outside the bay’s shield as Jom puts a missile into one that came out in vacuum. Apparently they can survive that. They cannot survive missiles. And while Jom being an AI can’t see the creatures, the crew he’s picked up can, and help out with targeting.

Things go quiet.

Okay, that’s a lie and you know it. It is not quiet. There are almost three hundred people in here, many injured, most terrified. Dog finds me, hoists me up onto his back like the well trained friend he is. Other Lily walks next to us as we move through the crowd, the oceanic crew making room like we’re visiting royalty.

I find the capitan, trying to hold a bleeding stump where her left arm used to be, supported by someone who looks at her with terrified love.

“Okay,” I say, “I had a lot of time to plan something good to say here, and I squandered it.” She looks at me with confusion, mutters something about how this is a very silly afterlife. “Yeah, it would have been wasted, I agree.” I answer a question she had no intention of asking. “Your crew are safe. We have medical facilities on standby. Do you consent to treatment?”

“Yes.” She croaks out.

“Good. You are now guests.” I make the appropriate adjustment to the station’s settings. “Um…” I look around. “I don’t know… what to do now.” I admit. “Lily, do you have any ideas?”

“Why in the void would you think I would know how to handle this? I’m actually just you.” Lily says. “Are you doing something like this every day?”

“I mean, I might be now.” I answer.

The captain, being carried out by her crew along the guide lines now marked in their own personal guest AR displays, has just enough energy to mutter before she loses consciousness. “A very… stupid… afterlife.”