The hull of the Last Ship slips by the station, the mercantile dreadnaught on a close approach to Earth and giving approximately zero cares about any stealthed or disabled objects in its path.

It turned out, when you had a hull profile forty miles long, and self healing ablative armor plates, you didn’t really notice if things got out of your way or not.

I don’t really know when I started mentally capitalizing that title as a proper noun. I doubt the ship itself cares. It’s automated, not alive, as far as I know. Not that my communication attempts were ever that refined. Maybe it is another life, floating up here with the rest of us. Maybe I could talk to it. Maybe we could work something out.

Unlike me, the Last Ship has some kind of library of merchant authorization codes, and knows how to use them. Every time it parks in orbit, I try to steal a few of them out of the transmissions, but it usually doesn’t work. I’m usually pretty busy.

Right now, I am also busy. I am teaching one of the new kids how to achieve a firing solution for a Cimmerian gauss bolter while under pressure. I am doing this at maximum efficiency, because I am a very good teacher. It is a known fact that cats are exceptional at training people, I’m sure. And that’s before you account for a cat that’s technically earned a tree of life in both psychology and education.

I say ‘technically’, because I still haven’t gotten the remnants of the earth based educational institution to broadcast my credentials. Their servers are all constantly busy. And also I had to drop an orbital strike on the last one of their comms stations once, when it started trying to send out a memetic gene-locked sleeper agent activation code to every communication device within its range. So I’m probably never getting my certificate.

It turns out the hardest thing to keep intact on Earth, or in all of Sol system really, isn’t a building or a ship or even a life. It’s a system. An institution, a lineage, a pattern.

Villages don’t last long. Neither do independent companies. Religions basically only exist as expressions of cultural lessons on what you shouldn’t touch and where you shouldn’t travel. There’s a few great cities holding on, admittedly, but they have their own long term problems.

That’s the problem. Not just a problem, but the big one. The one I haven’t been able to do much about. No matter how many threats I kill, no matter how many wars I stop, nukes I intercept, monsters I put down, breaches I seal, or nightmares I lay to rest. It never matters. Because it’s not enough to build anything.

Sometimes a village will rise up that will thrive for a while. Sometimes a mercenary company will see some long term success exploring and clearing the forgotten lands. Sometimes there are heroes.

Then they die. And I don’t. And I get to see what they built crumble away. Just like it always does.

The Oceanic Anarchy lasted for thousands of years. I’ve lived in their shadow for centuries, learned from their records, adapted to their technology, tried to hold up a small bit of their ideals. And I still can’t imagine how to put together the pieces of something that… *big*. That grand; not just in terms of territory but in terms of trust. How many people trusted them, for their whole lives, and had that trust repaid by the bonds of civilization a thousandfold? Billions. Trillions.

It hurts to feel like the most of that I can ever recapture is picking off a UCAS Reaver corvette before it can latch onto the Last Ship and start trying to cut into the hull.

I’m sure the big lug could deal with it. But this is good practice for the new gunner. Who is doing *excellent* under my tutelage, thank you!

“Do we have a firing console that works with non-human physiology?” The feathermorph boy asked me at the start of this. And then another twice throughout the process, each time staring with increasing frustration at the keratin of his talons that didn’t register with the right reaction speed on the touch screen.

“Not that I’ve found!” I answer. “We can probably build one now. Now, clear the lock and establish it again. Quick! Things are at stake!” I cheerfully paw the command I have up that scrambles the display.

After a few more dry runs, and checking the math, I have him hit the firing command. Somewhere about two hundred kilometers away, a pirate ship that refused to participate in the diplomatic process begins to participate in the entropic process. I congratulate him on the good shot, and learn in that moment that he was under the impression this was a training exercise in the sense that it was a simulation.

Thirty percent of one awkward conversation later, I am mercifully called away by another alarm.

_____

The Last Ship does not answer any of our hails. But, sitting in a circular conference room with Glitter’s increasingly elaborate attempt at a custom remote body and my more energetic sister, the three of us talk to the people that *do*.

Runner Jek Em is legally classified as human, even though he’s got more replacement parts than Dyn does, the cybernetics bulging under dark tattooed skin. He’s also legally classified as property, which he feels compelled to tell us due to some powerful induced hypnotic programming. Glitter makes an attempt to figure out who, exactly, we will need to shoot to fix that, but it doesn’t go anywhere right away. He greets us with a recitation of the last oath in a language I vaguely recognize as Spanglese. I’m fluent in it, because I’ve had a lot of time to learn a lot of things. Glitter is fluent in it because AI’s cheat. I don’t hold it against her.

The kid is either unsettled by the fact that I am a talking cat, which seems to be tied into an old gremlin tale his people have, or unsettled by the fact that Glitter’s current body has a lot of exposed wiring and looks like some kind of grim war-spider. Either way, the conversation starts off rough.

Which is a shame, because he’s the one on the Last Ship who answered.

He’s not the only one there, but he’s our point of contact for now, and he’s who we’re going through for information.

Glitter continues to impress me. The weapons platform seamlessly flowing between personas as we talk, until settling on exactly the right attitude to get the responses she’s looking for. Those responses being *answers*.

It sort of bothers me when the version of herself that Glitter settles on to use for this is the somewhat imperious courtier attitude that she originally had toward me when she thought I was owed something. Except this time, it’s turned outward, like a fusion torch converted from engine to weapon, and it’s a little terrifying?

Especially when it actually starts to work.

“I am sorry, exalted.” Jek Em says. “I cannot tell you what my mission was.” He pauses, and somehow, Glitter makes the arachnid body she’s building for herself feel like it’s *raising an eyebrow*, which is just masterful. That’s a level of precision I can only match with surface to ground weaponry, and she just casually deploys it in conversations. “But… I could discuss the voyage itself?”

“Acceptable, for now.” Glitter says, and I settle back against my napping sister to listen.

The Last Ship goes between Earth and Europa, an automated route. Each time it comes into orbit, it drops a swarm of shuttles to various points below. But those points aren’t random.

“We must select them.” Jek Em tells us. “There is an interface. It is… simple, once you know the language. It is an old language. I cannot read it, but can recognize many of the patterns.”

“Could you teach it? Could be useful for getting shuttle access to the station.” I ask. “Or, just, fill out a database entry for us? We could almost certainly pay you.” I’m learning commerce! Glitter says I’m bad at it. Glitter is giving me a look now. Maybe I said something bad. Oh, I didn’t make a specific offer, that might be it. “We could pay you in eight tons of rare earth magnets?” That sounds pretty good. People like those, and I have too much overflowing my material hoppers anyway.

“Lily…” Glitter’s remote frame *sighs*. Why does *everyone* except me get to sigh?! This isn’t fair.

Jek Em cuts off whatever Glitter is about to say, comms lag leading him to unintentionally interrupt. “I cannot teach. I am forbidden.” He says in that flat tone that indicates running against his brainwashing wall. Then, in a more open voice, he adds, “The points we can reach are designated somehow. There is a trade house on the surface that sells the cores they use. Perhaps you could buy one from them?”

*That* is useful information. Glitter gets some more details out of him.

By the end of the conversation, we know roughly three things. One is that he can’t ditch his ‘owners’ and take a job with us, or he’d suicide within a month or so. I’m pretty sure I could fix that. He’s not. I am absolutely going to kill some people over this.

Two is that Europa still receives automated shipments of ore and organics from Earth; there’s a whole trade house that maintains a few processing sites to make sure the Last Ship doesn’t *stop* running. In exchange, Runners dispatched to Europa bring back what amount to trinkets still manufactured by the descendants of the colonists there. Pure nanocanisters, stabilizer injections, field manipulators, the kinds of things that could make someone a warlord, a king, or just incredibly wealthy on the landscape of Earth. But nowhere near the output the colony used to be capable of. Just a handful of treasures every few months, hotly contested.

Jek Em has made six runs. That’s more than most Runners ever survive. The landing sites can get kind of chaotic.

Three is that the landing sites are artificial. Probably some kind of transmitter that sends out a starport-flagged IFF. I *want* to say we could make our own. So I’m going to. We can probably make our own.

My sister and I excuse ourselves from the conversation, letting Glitter do what she enjoys most while we go off to start pointing a thousand scanner arrays at the points where shuttles are landing, to see if we can spoof whatever signal they’re reading.

_____

My sisters and I have a small meeting in the exo lab that I’ve continued to turn into a nap zone. Now that I have more control over a lot of things, getting some softer couches produced by one of the onboard factories was surprisingly easy. Still more complex than ordering the construction of my main forms of ammo, but only because I spent six months streamlining that as much as possible once.

“Do we care?” Lily asks. To clarify, this is the Lily who is a biologically augmented survivor, who lives on the exterior of the hull. Mostly. She’s currently curled up half inside of the Lily who is a living plasma field, because she says it’s warm. Her semi-organic tank sized scarab construction unit friend is parked in the corner of one of the observation windows, with Dog laying on top of it, apparently smug about being able to perch on a friction-resistant curved surface.

“I care about a lot of things.” The Lily who is a self-arranging nanoswarm says. “But I got distracted by Lily’s line of thought. What do we possibly or possibly not care about?”

“That there’s four of us.” Lily says with an exasperated huff. Wait, was that a sigh? Voidstuff, *everyone* gets to sigh except me! “That we’re all the same. Except not? How come only you get to be a normal cat, and I have to be…” She trails off, before adding, without meaning to, “Different? Broken? Whatever this is, where I don’t get to sleep or eat or breathe properly, and nothing feels right. That. No, that’s depressing. I’ll add that bit later. If it’s important.” She actually trails off, as my sisters and I pretend politely we didn’t hear that part.

“While we’re pretending politely we didn’t hear that part,” Lily’s tone crackles with charged air, even though she doesn’t need to actually use that tone when speaking with our shared projected voices, “I think we should start looking for ways to fix ourselves.”

I chime in sleepily. “Also I resent being called normal.” I say. “My internal organs reform out of basically nothing every time I get shot. That’s not normal.”

“How often is she getting shot?” NanoLily asks herself. “I never get shot. But I guess I haven’t had a body as often. And I guess there was that one breacher missile that hit me that one time. That’s like being shot.”

“I get shot fairly often.” I tell her. “Also I don’t care how many of us there are.” I add, but am quick to continue with, “But I agree we should get Lily a better body. And Lily too, if she wants it?”

“I’m mostly fine.” Lily says, her energy outline oscillating with the vibration of her voice. “I can technically taste things better than when I was a cat, so I get to eat sweet things, and that’s nice.”

Three different Lilys say at the same time, “We should grow more sweet things.”

“Can we focus?” Lily sounds exasperated with us. Which is basically being exasperated with herself, which isn’t good for your mental health. I’d know! “None of us remember being copied or anything like that. Our memories are shared up to the same… moment.” She *actually* trails off, and we all go silent. “That has to mean something, right?”

“It probably does,” I agree, “but what are we supposed to do about it? I wouldn’t even know where to start looking.”

“But we could start looking.” Lily says, her pseudo-fur folding on itself over and over in a thoughtful set of rectangular patterns. The process tickles, where she’s draped over my hind legs. “We have… time, now. We have help. We have each other!”

Lily looks thoughtful, the triple layer of vacuum sealed membranes around her eyes twitching as her hyper-reactive pupils dart around the room, looking between each of us, and also the handful of AR panes she has open. “We do.” She says. “And also, because of Lily, we have more comprehensive grid access. And… help.” That last part is said quieter, like she isn’t fully prepared to trust our new friends just yet. “I’m not.” She adds. “But they are helping. And the five of us can… maybe…”

“Maybe stop burying ourselves in our work, and actually confront what we are?” Lily says with a vibrational hum of electricity, the soft words coming out with a strain of self-loathing that I’m intimately familiar with.

“Yeah.” I say quietly. “That. And then… also, sorry, five?”

“In the vent overhead. She might be stuck.” The overadapted Lily says. “Can you not hear that? She’s *very* loud.”

We all strain. Or, well, I do. I don’t think the other two exactly hear sound the same way, but they still perk up.

The moment stretches out.

One of us starts to say “Are you sure…” when there is a definite *thunk* from overhead. Followed by a rattling around one of the ventilation ports, which is itself accompanied by an amount of concern from me. That vent isn’t an open port, it’s a paramaterial constructed sealed panel; a remnant of this room’s time as a laboratory that studied things that absolutely *could not* be allowed to get out. I start to push myself up try to figure out how I’m going to get it open, when something drops through it anyway.

Well, drips through, I suppose. A thin line of black fluid, speckled with white dots, oozing threateningly through the outline of the vent, before spilling down to land on one of my brand new couches in a messy puddle of what is obviously a *very* viscous inky liquid. The flow of it picks up, as the first few drips hit, and then it cascades down like a floodgate has been let loose, before abruptly stopping.

“My couch!” I hiss out.

“Sorry!” The puddle meows back in a stickily pronounced cat-word. And then, not content to obey the laws of physics, the puddle of oozing liquid pulls itself back together, flowing up like its melting in reverse, until it takes on a more defined shape. Which is, naturally, a very familiar one. The hints of white in the liquid even forming the right patterns on my form’s feet as another sister remakes herself in front of us. “I found you, though!” She exclaims. “I wasn’t dreaming!”

“Well, you were.” Two of us say at the same time. “Just, also something else.” Another one finishes.

I listen to my sisters start to go off on a tangent again, and find myself purring.

Of course I’m curious. How could I not be?

But right now? Warm and together? it’s hard to *care*.