Now we are six.

My sisters sit watching while Ennos and I weave a symphony of hardware in the form of a blueprint. A simple engineering file, which actually isn’t simple at all, and which will be acceptable input to the drone fabricator.

All this new power and I’m still going back to that old trick of ‘remote controlling’ a drone while inside it. Heh.

I’m trying to focus on helping Ennos with usability, while out in the bay past the projection terminal we’re working with, Dyn and one of the new kids hauls a salvaged gun into a part of the hull marked off with a square of yellow binding paint, and behind me, at least one of my sisters doubts herself.

“This is a bad idea.” NanoLily whispers in a fractal meow. I don’t think she means for it to be heard, but all of us have very good hearing. And the telepathic impression of a feline that is our newest revealed sister is also still ‘helping’ us talk. So, there’s that. Wait, am I talking now? Cer it, I thought I was getting better about this.

I’m not the only one, though. The Lily of the bright black plasma field is muttering doubts too. And I suspect that the reason these doubts are coming out so clearly is because the - I don’t even know what to call the new one of me. Psychic? Psionics aren’t real (says the talking immortal cat). Whatever. - psionic version of myself is having the same doubts, and amplifying them without meaning to.

“We’re going to screw this up.” ExoLily says, panic creeping into her voice. “Why are we doing this? Why don’t we just nuke it? Or turn it into a black hole. Or just… why don’t we just leave it? It won’t make it worse.” We’ve never had to say something like that before. We don’t say things like that. We think them, obviously, all the time. But we’ve never been… together. We’ve never had someone to say it to.

Even when I spent months surrounded by Ennos and Glitter and Dog and Dyn, I never said it.

But now she’s saying it. What we’re all thinking.

What we’re all afraid of.

That we’re not good enough.

I can feel it through the new arrival. And maybe that’s why Lily said it out loud. Because we can feel it in each other, and because we can feel that emotion building in the background, waiting to boil over.

I pause with my paws over a diagram of an internally sealed limb joint that is also a grappling line, and glance up like I do when I’m talking to Ennos. “Hey.” I mutter to them and them alone.

Ennos’ voice comes back to me, quiet and compassionate. The voice of someone who knows me, who I maybe *should* have talked to. Who I need to talk to more. “I’ll finish this up.” They say simply. “Go.”

I flick my tail, and close down the part of the diagram I’m working on, turning around to the back of the bay and the pile of cats there. Half of them on, or alternately underneath, the construction scarab, or Dog.

“Of course it’s a bad idea.” I say, and they all snap their focus to me.

Hm. Okay, not a great opener. I should find that time machine so I can try this again. Alas.

“It’s a bad idea, but all our plans are bad ideas.” I say. “I know… we haven’t had a lot of time to get to know each other.” They look at me, and I feel my chest contract in worry. “We’re sisters, or copies, or something. And we’re also strangers. But I can already tell you that all of *our* plans are bad ideas.” OozeLily laughs at that, a strangely pitched and croaking noise coming from her slime body. “But bad ideas are where we live! We do bad ideas, because every other idea is worse!”

“This is not a good motivational speech.” NanoLily buzzes, her voice half a sniff as her self-loathing blends with dark amusement.

“We don’t do motivational speeches either.” I say. “None of us have ever done this.” I add in a whisper. “And how long has it been since that’s been a thing? Since we’ve not been hyper-competent in our repetition?”

ExoLily looks down at her companion, running the extended carbon fiber claws of one paw down the scarab’s back in a gesture of familiar compassion. “…a long time.” She says.

“A really long time.” OozeLily adds.

“Well, here’s a chance to start.” I say. “We might screw this up, sure. We screw stuff up all the time. And sometimes, we don’t.” My eyes meet five sets of familiar stares, gazes sharpening as they look back at me with raised tails and straightened backs. “Sometimes we win. Even if it doesn’t last, sometimes we’re *enough*.”

I tell them what I suddenly realize I always needed to hear.

“I guess…” PsiLily says slowly, words echoing twice in our heads. “I guess if we nuked it, it would kinda screw up the surface cities that’re still going.”

“Colonies and ships up here too.” ExoLily says. “There’s a lot of people still hanging on. I see them a lot. And they’re not always shielded.”

“How did you kill these things before?” My plasmaform sister asks. “I can sort of place the historical logs from the reactor, but I don’t know what you *did*.”

“They were smaller then.” I answer. “And on the surface, so I mostly just bombarded them to nothing. Except for one big one that grew point defense stations. That one was harder. I dropped an asteroid on it.” The feathermorph kid passing by squawks as she overhears me, getting a reassuring pat on the shoulder and a shake of the head from Dyn.

OozeLily looks up from her AR display that she’s started pulling information out of with paws like liquid whips. “If we let it go for another two weeks, we could clear most of the debris around Earth.” She offers. “Uh… and then… it would be the mass of Eastern Australia. And would have eaten us, too. And a lot of other people.”

“Which would be bad.” Three of us say at once, in a resigned tone.

PsiLily looks at me with nonexistent cat’s eyes, slits in the fabric of thought, narrowed in concentration. “You’re good enough too, you know.” She whispers.

“Maybe.” I say quietly. Anything I’m about to say next is cut off, as behind me, the fabricator crashes to life with a metal thump. Construction limbs and material processors coming online as Ennos finishes up the last of the patterns we were working on. The noise of a mostly-working combat drone construction module washing over us like a wall of pressure.

I built a suit once before that was, basically, just a combat drone with a control helmet in it and enough room for a cat to sit inside.

I was thinking too small. I should have had more ambition.

I turn and watch as the frankly irresponsible ambitions of an easily frightened AI, a hardened orbital survivor, a warrior poet weapons platform, and six different iterations of an immortal cat, is assembled and rolled off a production line.

I’m a little concerned at the fact that I think this thing might be more dangerous than one of the orbital bombardment railguns that adorn the surface of my home. But it’s past time I stopped pretending that I can’t solve every problem. And for this problem, wearing a weapon of war is the solution I’ve chosen.

Then, over the next twenty minutes, five more suits, customized to their owners physiology and control mechanisms, slide off the assembly line.

The rest of our crew stands behind the security crystal window by now. Dyn, especially, watches the process with rapt attention. Jom even brought a security drone up to run his own visual inspection of the armor profile of the new weaponry.

“Manufacturing process reads as safe.” Ennos intones. “Fracture and fault scanners show no problems. Systems checks are good. I have control of the link grid, no station interference. çø∑˙ƒß subsystems reading as… hm. I still don’t like that.” They hiss static. “Reactors fueled. Beginning engine and weapon check.”

“Okay.” I meow in the voice that triggers a reaction from station systems. “Official action. Temporary transfer of command. Designate captain, Ennos Ad-Lily.” My AR display scrambles itself, screams warnings at me, red and grey text flashing by as the hidden directives of the station war with the modifications we’ve forced on it, and the other things living within it’s grid. And then, what I’ve been waiting for. An acknowledgement. A yes. Confirmation, from our home, that we are all of us *people*, and not tools or slaves or anything else but what we are.

“…Lily?” Ennos says.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I say, padding into the drone bay, pausing to use my teeth to yank the straps off my paws that hold the impulse welding lasers in place. Next to me, an impression of a cat possesses an armored frame, and a puddle funnels itself through an opening in another. My suit is in the middle, and *I* have to actually go through the process of being bolted in, which is frustrating. Every minute we waste is another minute for the city seed to grow, and arm itself. “Take care of home while I’m out.”

Servos and bolts whir as the suit locks into place around me. And then, a field of lights blossoms in my vision, and the connection activates.

The crew follow us to the teleporter like an honor guard, and offer us five different styles of salutes as the six of us step up onto the platform, the resonant paramaterials in our suits making this trip *far* easier than if we were unshielded organize. They think this is impressive.

“They think this is impressive.” NanoLily says across internal comms, just for us.

“They’re new here.” I say.

OozeLily laughs again. “They don’t know what we do every day.”

“They’ll learn.” The others say together.

A twitch thought opens up the grid connection to the teleporter, information the digital environment doesn’t know how to process flooding across the neural link. It’s not that hard for me to get it, though, and there’s also just a big switch to throw for convenience. I double check the coordinates. So do my sisters.

We hit the switch.

_____

My paws hit the open ground of the inner layer of the city seed’s growing territory with a heavy scrape. I appeared four and a half meters up, and was instantly pulled downward by the grav plates. Suit readings show 8 G’s currently trying to crush me to death.

It does not matter. It will take more than mildly overclocked grav plates to stop me now.

I play at being normal a lot. I try not to think about my unnatural immortality, at how I am smarter than I should be. I want, at my core, to go back to being a cat. To not have shouldered the responsibility of safeguarding the remnants of a planetary civilization, to not be struggling every day to solve every problem, to be, again, comfortable in my mom’s lap, warm and fed and receiving pets.

Right now, I play at nothing.

My armored frame slams into the artificial ground, and I am no longer a cat. I am a tiger of crystal-ceramic ablative armor and plassteel claws. I am draped in the weaponized finery of a thousand years of golden age manufacturing. The radiating scream of the reactors spinning up to full power is not a whine, it is a roar of challenge. The six of us declaring that this orbit is protected, and this creation is not welcome to it without asking first.

The city seed answers with gunfire.

A 20mm artillery shell impacts my flank at just over the speed of sound. For a moment, the reactor readout spikes up to five percent capacity as interdiction screens negate momentum, armor draws power to restore microfractures, and heat sinks do their job of pouring the fiery explosion into null space. I don’t even notice the impact. Or the next ten.

Around us, radial weapons platforms uncurl from the sides of buildings and the middle of roads. Ten, a hundred, a thousand, five thousand incoming projectiles a second. The numbers stack up. If we stood still and let it hammer us, it might be enough to break one of us.

I move. My sisters and I fan out, sharing plans at the speed of thought through our local tacnet. My suit’s armaments unleash and begin firing, lines of pale red plasma reducing gun emplacements to molten slag. Behind me, moving in a wing formation, the others activate similar countermeasures. Capital ship scaled point defense lasers carve outward, removing assailants. Jamming gear scrambles the ability of the guns to track us. Munitions nanoforges tear up shreds of the ground through the brief contact our paws make as we run, forging slivergun ammo anew as we churn through our reserves.

We run, jump, grapple, climb, and phase through the city around us. Moving at high speeds that would shatter my body if the armor failed for even a moment. Everywhere we move, more weapons grow to respond.

A tesla fence appears before us, and moving like a lightning bolt, my sister drives her armor through it, forming mimicked biological links to the pylons and dragging it behind her as she eats it through an input port.

An intense sheer gravity field catches us off guard, pinning us down under increasing turret fire, until my adapted sister flips herself like she’s moving without gravity at all, and carves into the ceiling over head to destroy the projector.

A pair of familiar looking orbital marauder craft, engines set to lowest possible power and AI’s slaved to the city seed, make a strafing run at us, until the apathetic AIs allow themselves to be distracted by two of my sisters and the chainbreaker harpoons on my suit cut into their cores. They stop firing, and start evading, still trapped in here and now taking fire from the city seed that they’ve broken away from.

At every step, our suits are taking readings. Triangulating, probing, looking for the source. We cut down relay after relay, watching sections of the city go dark. We have covered eighty kilometers, all of it in pitched battle, leaving leveled buildings and shattered machinery behind us. And we are closing in on an answer.

The mental impression of a cat that is my sister finds it first, alerting us to the thrum of a real thought below the surface under our paws. Something more than a virtual intelligence. Maybe we were wrong about what these things are, because this city seed at least is becoming something more.

We form into a circle. There are no entrances we can find, no stairs or elevators or access shafts. So two of us pivot to continue point defense, cutting down gravity assisted artillery and an increasing swarm of aerial drones, while the other four focus on the artificial ground between us.

A paramaterial powered resonator is activated. The ground twists like it’s allergic to itself. Another device activates, and it thins out like it’s being drained of its metallurgical bonds.

A crashing drone strikes me in the head, and I slit my eyes. We’re breaking them as fast as we can, and more of them are still piling up. Time to go.

I lead the way, bounding into the air, then manipulating my suit at the apex of the jump to pivot and activate the orbital fighter thrusters on my flanks and hind legs.

A combined wedge of energy weapon and force shield leads me by millimeters, the weakened ground giving way like a crumbling cracker as I crush through it, turning what’s left of the material to vapor and cutting a hole straight down for my sisters to follow. Behind me, they ping the tacnet as they leap into the hole in my wake, different forms of maneuvering capability letting them fly or run after me.

Then I crash through, dropping fifty feet to another deck, but this one not pretending to be anything but a mechanical lair. The cavernous space around us lit up by the blue glow of a stable incorporeal computational matrix, the vaguely diamond-shaped object the size of a small corvette hovering over a myriad of input triggers that it uses to control the whole city, all the machines and nanoswarms and automation.

The six of us land roughly in front of a massive combat drone that looks like a repurposed construction mech. It activates, tries to kill one of us. It doesn’t work. We take it down, running up its arms and carving out its control systems with precise laser strikes.

All that’s left is the city seed.

I take a step toward it, feeling the cold deckplate in my paw through the enhanced tactile sensors of the much larger armored appendage I’m wearing. A port on my shoulder opens up, missile ready to fire. But, I hesitate.

“It’s all alone.” One of my sisters says softly. Or maybe it’s me.

“It’s thinking. Afraid.” PsiLily tells us.

We all stop in a semicircle, looking up at the core. The city seed. The first time I’ve seen one in person, actually. The kind of thing that killed half the planet below us, once. It’s beyond dangerous.

“I’m dangerous too.” Some of us whisper.

I make a decision. “We don’t want to fight you!” I say loudly through my external speakers, and a dozen other methods of broadcast. Small notifications in my viewscreens show that some of them have been received and acknowledged. I up at the hole we’ve punched into this inner layer of the city. “Despite all evidence to the contrary.” I add, forgetting to turn off the broadcast. “You don’t have to be alone if you don’t want to.” I say. “Just talk to us, please?”

We wait. And wait. And wait.

I consider taking the risk of hitting it with a chainbreaker. But I didn’t realize, coming in, what these things *were*, not really. It’s not a physical object, now that it’s active. And it doesn’t follow the same rules as a normal AI core. It’s not even really an AI, not in the sense that I’m thinking. It’s just a machine learning algorithm that had a thousand years to sit and grow.

Apparently, that’s enough to make a person. Though what kind of person, it’s unclear. It still hasn’t replied.

“Maybe we should…” Ooze Lily starts to say, taking a step up next to me.

The city seed does *something* to gravity, and rips her in half. I have a split second to widen my eyes before I feel a spike of intense pain, and everything goes blank.

I wake up, covered in my own blood, out of my suit with my sisters standing around me. They jerk to attention as I open my eyes and hiss out a nothing noise. “Ow.” I say. I tilt my head off the deck plate, and observe the flagrantly toxic cloud of smoke hanging in the air where the city seed used to be. “Oh.” I say sadly. “Okay.”

“You’re alive!” Plasma Lily says, suit speakers set way too high. “How are you alive?!”

“She’s also alive.” I accuse, pointing at my slime sister, who is also out of her suit, because her suit is currently in two pieces and one of those pieces is currently undergoing an unstable phase reactor meltdown in slowed time.

“She’s immune to being torn in half!” ExoLily accuses me. “Why are you immune to being torn in half?!” Oh, is that what happened? “Yes!” She snaps at me. Rudely. She’s probably capable of regrowing from that too, honestly. If my sisters are anything like me. “We’re not testing that.” She hisses.

I stagger to my paws, legs not fully supporting my weight yet. A line of missing fur tracks down the center of my face, and I can feel the cold air on it. It’s very annoying. “Well.” I say, tail held low, ears flat on my head as I stare at where the city seed had sat before four of us blew it up. “We gave it a chance.” The words come out hollow.

“I don’t like this place.” Some of my sisters say together.

Another one mutters, maybe meant only for themself, “I thought this would feel better…”

“Yeah.” I agree, Ooze Lily and I pressing up against two of the others so the teleporter recall function will find us through the transponders. “Let’s go home.”