Someone has tampered with my garden.

I mean, they didn’t steal anything. Or break anything. Or… anything bad actually.

What I should say here is that someone has improved my garden. Why they would do this, I do not know. Possibly because they have some ulterior motive to steal my precious produce.

“Ennos!” I command, in my best commander’s voice. “Open a case log! I have detective work to do!”

“Lily…” my friend sighs to me. “Your garden has been moved to a dedicated hydroponics system. It’s on deck nineteen, in one of the shielded segments, and it is doing much better now that it has more dedicated support mechanisms.” Ennos pauses. “I say ‘much better’, but it has only been six hours, so I suppose we’ll have to wait and see. But it is doing much better.”

I am aghast. “Ennos, I am aghast!” I exclaim. “Who has touched my precious lunch?”

“Tiska and Dyn, primarily.” Ennos replies without hesitation. “Lily, just go to the hydroponics and look at your garden, and stop being aghast.” The AI sounds distracted. I know this game Ennos, I know you’re not actually distracted. Your mind expands further with each grid node and processor segment you occupy. You cannot become distracted from me.

Wait, hang on.

“We don’t have a hydroponics bay.” I say with deep suspicion, considering doubling down on this investigation. “I vented it into space. For reasons.” They were good reasons.

“I’m sure they were. And we do now. Because Dyn and Tiska went and extracted roughly eight hundred kilos of various salvaged machinery from the orbital farm that you originally took your seed vault from. And then assembled it into one of the gap spaces on deck nineteen. And that is where your plants are. Now go look at it, because I need to focus.”

Alright, alright. I’m not always a horrible gremlin harassing my friend when they’re trying to get work done. I can calmly go look at wherever my dirt was absconded to.

Wait, no, hang on.

Dyn and who? I know Dyn, I don’t know the other name. I am about to ask Ennos, and may in fact already have asked Ennos without realizing it, but I decide that I can solve this one myself, because there’s a likely answer.

I open up the crew manifest in my AR display, and scan through it, still getting used to the modified system that reads my eye twitches to do what I want it to. It’s amazing, it doesn’t require me to get a full body workout to look at a menu, and it takes a while to get over a couple centuries of practice in one specific thing.

Ah, there. Tiska. She’s the feathermorph girl who stayed aboard when everyone else got teleported back to the surface. Sort of. She’s on shore leave right now.

On the surface. Exploring the growing city I’ve been keeping an eye on.

My heartbeat speeds up.

I could go down to the surface. I could set my paws on soil and feel organically filtered UV on my fur and breathe lightly radioactive air. I could leave the station.

I don’t realize what’s happened until I notice the pain. That every muscle in my body has tensed up as tight as they can wind, that my claws are out and ablating themselves on the metal of the deckplate. That my vision is swimming and my pulse is racing.

The surface. Earth. I could go there. It wouldn’t even be that hard.

But I am instead hyperventilating, finding myself pitching sideways, my flank impacting the wall before I slide down and make a mild effort to curl my legs in on myself.

I can’t breathe. I can’t think. My body is injuring itself from the strain, and I can feel it knitting damaged muscles back together. I can’t move past the suddenly uncaged panic. I could go to the surface. I should go to the surface. But I am terrified, beyond reason, beyond thinking.

So I lay in the slightly sloped corner where the wall meets the floor, and let go of everything, eyes staring without seeing at the far wall, the world rushing past in a hiss of white noise in my ears.

An indeterminate amount of time later, my sister finds me. A Lily in the shape of a thought without physical form, she settles around me like a drift field; never quite occupying the same space as my body, but causing something more than just a physical pressure all the same.

She doesn’t say anything, really. I guess she doesn’t need to. And I wouldn’t really be in a good place to listen even if she did.

Part of my mind - the detached, floaty, distant part, that’s just sort of divorced itself from the overwhelming wave of fear and catching-up stress - wonders if her body rejects her like this too. Wonders just how many times she’s been alone for this, like I always was. If her own tribulations were just as overwhelming as mine, or worse. If she has to sometimes live with laying unmoving on the… deck?

What does a psychic idea of a cat lay on, when they’re in distress?

I bet it’s comfier than a deck.

I am uncomfortable.

Slowly, laboriously, I pull myself back together. Start breathing normally again, uncurl my legs, let my muscles stop burning so much from straining. I still don’t get up, but I do open my mouth to let out a very soft mew. I don’t tap into my sister’s voice to say it, I’ve had a cat word for this feeling for a very, very long time.

“I don’t like this.”

“Yeah.” The resonance of a cat curled around me says sadly.

I take a few more minutes to realign the connections between my mind and body. “Thanks.” I say.

“Anytime.” Lily answers, pulling back from me and giving a strangely physical tug of assistance as I rise to my paws on stiff legs. “It must be nice to not have to be alone, but I won’t be upset; some day soon it’ll probably be my turn.” She echoes without meaning to. “Wanna go look at the hydroponics?” The words are directed at me this time.

“Do you actually eat?” I ask, omitting the obvious answer, which is yes, because of course it is.

I can almost see the ripple in the air of a feline shape raising an affronted paw to her chest. “Do I eat? Do I, eat?” She affects an arrogant voice. “I, who am beyond mortal reasoning, created to be a greater life form, protector of Sol, ancient and-“

“Wait hang on that’s my title.”

“Which one?”

“Most of them.”

“Well… we’re the same cat anyway.” She drops the bluster and walks beside me with a friendly bump against my flank.

We head to the hydroponics. She never does get around to answering my question, but that’s fine. I do the same thing with anything that sparks off feelings I can’t handle, so I don’t press.

They’ve gotten the garden set up really well. Including a small acceleration chamber, which they’re using to speed grow carrots. Carrots are the worst vegetable, but are unfortunately the most stable to use in a chamber like that. I’d ask how we’re affording the power costs for all this, but I don’t care.

I just sit among rows of growing vegetation, and smell something that isn’t processed air.

Why would I need to go to the surface, when I have this, here?

_____

An emergence event opens in the middle of a raft city. What used to be a coastal settlement and turned into a collection of tethered shipping and military vessels when the ice caps melted, the city is at worst unstable and at best a vibrant example of people thriving under hostile conditions.

And now there’s a hole in reality spitting out some kind of flying trapazoid things. They’re causing minimal damage, but they’re still causing damage, and they’re spreading out. It doesn’t take long analyzing their antics to see that they’re actively searching for something.

Two different people from the city alerted me. Or, alerted the station, anyway. Using oddly similar technology to how my little project settlement has been calling. While I look over AI-deflecting emergence data, Ennos turns to doing something Ennos is good at, and traces through hundreds of thousands of hours of collective surface sensor logs at a high speed.

And there it is. My settlement had a trade arrangement with a caravan that eventually made it to this city. In fact, it might be the same caravan that handed that feathermorph kid the comms spike that can reach my station in the first place. Really, it’s more likely than it isn’t; Ennos puts it at about 89%, which is really, really high, given the size of the planet.

It doesn’t really matter. We answer both of them, one of my sisters playing diplomat along with Glitter (we have relieved Dyn of comms officer duty, much to her unspoken joy) while the rest of us try to figure out how to kill a breach without sinking an entire city.

In the meantime, the crew with hands that have thumbs and other such useful digits get a practical crash course in how to use high amplitude pinpoint focused energy weapons. We have to make up a lot of stuff as we go, because, as I may have mentioned some time back, this station does not have a manual.

I tried writing one once, but I largely gave up, and also it would not matter one bit when my manual would say things like ‘use your teeth to manipulate the activation panel into a more convenient position’ or ‘try not to flick your tail too much near holographic interfaces’.

Actually that last one might apply to the feathermorph. And some of the humans. And Dog, but Dog wouldn’t read it anyway.

Does Dyn have a tail? I never actually checked and I feel like it would be rude to ask now. Which isn’t going to stop me, obviously, I’ll just have to do it later.

After we solve this problem.

The solution, strangely, comes in the form of just doing what we’re doing. For the first time in a long time, I’m not really *involved* in solving the problem. My apprentice gunners keep picking off the things flowing out of the breach and scanning the surrounding area for their target, while on the surface, a team of human and chardis marines haul a depth charge into place and detonate it close enough to the core of the event to shut it down.

I mostly hear about this as it is happening from Glitter, who is running multiple conversations at once while also aiding with the layering. This city has experience dealing with undersea breaches in their territory; apparently, having stolen the design for their depth charges from a salvaged projectile I once used fifty years ago on something I don’t remember.

They remember, though. They remember that their city has survived, when it maybe shouldn’t have. They remember that nearby large scale threats die fiery deaths before having the chance to come kill their children and break their hulls.

They remember me. And I only know them as a statistical anomaly for an area where oceanic emergence events don’t seem to ever make it to my notice.

The city is called Brakarr. I hope I’ll remember that. But I crystallize it just to be safe. And they’re safe. Would have been safe without us, but the intervention saved lives anyway. All that’s left now is the cleanup, and the hazardous job of safely harvesting and identifying the spray of paramaterials around the detonation site.

_____

I am trying to get a cloning vat online, and it’s not going well.

My crew has eight non-cat-non-Dyn organics on it now. A couple of the rescues rotated out, choosing to try to make a new life in Brakarr or in… the other city. The one I’ve been protecting. The one I don’t remember the name of, or even know if it has a name.

The new ones joining us were a surprise, though. I didn’t really… I don’t know. I don’t feel like my job is anything worth wanting to do. I only do it because if I don’t, no one else can.

But I suppose that’s not true anymore, is it?

They could do it. I could transfer command, and just go take a five year long nap. I literally could do that, if I calibrate a vivification pod correctly. Or if I use the extension chamber, which I have recently learned is still on the station for some reason. I could have sworn it got chewed up by vulcan cannon fire when I was using a certain segment of the station as ablative armor against a void crusade a while back. But I guess not.

That’s not the point though. The point is I could take a break. Take a rest. A rest I’m sure I’ve earned.

And yet… it feels wrong. I don’t feel like I should. Not just shouldn’t rest, but shouldn’t let go of my control of the station; what little control I have, anyway. Though that control grows every day as Ennos cuts through cybernetic security and Dyn leads engineering teams and my sisters and I pass on the knowledge of centuries to those who can use it better than we ever could.

Maybe I’m being stubborn. Maybe I’m just terrified of giving up command. Or of losing what little home I have.

Of losing my last tether to my mom.

I know there’s something more here. Dyn thought the strange shifts in space and feeling of being watched would go away once my psionic sister pulled herself together, but that’s not ever what it was that’s been watching over us. Ennos thought the same thing about the station’s grid, but they were wrong too.

My mom is still here, somehow. Keeping me safe. And I can’t leave now.

I’ve been dreaming again. More and more lately, the dreams come through with less grey and more of my sisters. There’s more of us on this station, though we haven’t found them yet.

No, I can’t leave. And I can’t risk giving up command until I’ve seen the end of it. I don’t know what that means, but I know Alice trusts me, and I will not fail her.

A wave of coyrofluid washes over me as I fail to tighten a bolt properly, and I remember that I am supposed to be working on a cloning vat, not getting lost in my own thoughts.

“This,” I say slowly, “is disgusting. I can taste it. Oh void, why can I taste it?” Had I known I could have eaten this stuff, even when I was on an all-ration-paste diet, I do not think I would have. Maybe once every five years I would have sniffed it, and then run. Just to be sure. Oh no, it’s leaking into between my toes, oh no. No, this was a mistake. I should have done this with a fully sealed engineering suit. Outside of the station.

Are the air processors even going to be enough to handle the smell?

I am saved from my torment by two of my sisters arriving, one of them an amorphous blob that mimics a cat shape pretty well but also mimics *my* cat shape in a way that lets her roll over my fur and slide away along the deck plate carrying the offending ‘fluid’ that was covering me inside a sealed pocket of ooze.

“Oh wow, this is really awful.” Lily says, even as the nanoswarm version of myself gets to work annihilating the scraps of matter in the air with a glittering dust that she shakes off her back. “Ugh. Why can *I* taste it? Oh, oh no. I’ve made a mistake.”

“I said the same thing.” I tell her, wiggling my hind legs so I can push myself slightly further under the vat so that my multitool can reach the clip I actually need to get to. “Thanks though!”

“You’re lucky we’re the same cat, or I’d be very mad at you!” She tells me.

“I’m mad at myself all the time, why are you special?” Nanolily asks as she finishes purifying the air and leans her wide triangular eyes down to look at what I’m doing. “Left.” She advises. Wrongly. I’m the engineer here, let me work. Though she’s right; I’m mad at myself all the time, why is this one Lily special?

“I got stuck in a therapeutic isolation tank for about twenty years once.” The half-collapsed cat shaped ball of slime says. “It wouldn’t let me out until I underwent a marginal rate of self improvement.”

“…Is it still around?” I ask.

“Do you have twenty years to spare?” She asks me with ears extended like vector points.

I blink up at the machine I’m working on. I suppose I don’t. “Yes.” I say.

“We can do some breathing exercises later.” She tells me. “Did you know I have to breathe?”

“You got ripped in half last month.” I remind her. I do not remind her that she got better, that would ruin the effect of the statement. “Also, why are you two here?”

“Ennos sent us. Said you were covered in slime.”

I attach the last wire I need to, and start trying to figure out how to extract myself from this prison of technology. “How’d you get here so fast? There’s no access vent near here.”

“Gravlift!” They say in unison. Which is worrying. The gravlifts don’t work. “Yeah, they don’t, but Ennos got the shafts online, so you can still dive down them if you don’t care about the impact at the end!” Nanolily says. “And I don’t, because my pain receptors don’t actually work properly anymore.” Oh, *that* sentence isn’t okay. We need to talk about that later. “Anyway, we were supposed to clean up before that stuff melted the sensors in the region. The fumes eat glass or something. So, what’re you up to?” She asks in a rush of rustling words.

She offered me engineering ‘advice’ without knowing what I was working on. I am mildly offended. But I answer anyway. “Cloning vat.” I say. “Partially because we need to grow Dyn some new parts before I get her into a vivification pod, and also partially because Luukri and Malom were being really sad the other day about not being able to have a kid, so I’ll offer them this as part of their pay when they end up leaving.”

“The whole thing?” Lily asks, pooling herself around and over the floor-to-ceiling glass tube. Why these things are always glass I’ve never understood.

“No, just the clone.” I roll my eyes. “The hard part was actually getting their genetic material to be compatible, since they’re different species. But the modification array is something I rewrote a loooong time ago, so I had some experience with it, and I just ended up selecting for desirable traits and making modifications to a basic biped template that’s not technically human, but should be genetically compatible with either species.”

“Dyn said the hard part was because they were both male.” OozeLily says, depositing the liquid she’s carrying into a sealed biohazard canister with a sigh of relief.

“Dyn doesn’t have fleshwarden certifications and eight years of paws on genetics experience.” I snort.

Everyone wants to give me advice on how to do my job today, I guess.

My sisters listen to me ramble about gene templating for a while longer, absorbing the information along with actual training nodes from our AR displays, as I work. We spend some quiet time together like that for almost an hour, until another alarm sounds.

And then we run, together, to face disaster.

Lily was right, though. If you don’t care about the impact at the end, the gravlift shaft is a really fast way to clear multiple decks at once.