Kitty Cat Kill Sat - Chapter 38

Chapter 38

It is cherry day!

I am so stupidly excited, I barely register the frustration of having to manually guide a small flurry of micromissiles to take out a macromissile that’s trying to kill the spy satellite that’s still following the station around.

That spy satellite is growing on me. It’s almost slapstick comedy in how it tries – and really, really fails – to infiltrate the station with baffler code, or camouflage itself behind debris that’s a completely different material makeup. And also I’m using it as part of the expanding communications net that I’ve been working on for the last century, so myeh. No one gets to shoot it down.

What’s not growing on me is how many macromissiles I’ve had to shoot down lately. This is the third one this week. I think something woke up a factory somewhere, and they’re just getting fired off on a timer now. Either that or a volley from an old war is finally looping back around on an off kilter orbit and crossing the plane of Earth and it’s debris swarm.

Whatever it is, I wish they weren’t so stupidly huge. They don’t even have explosive payloads, except for the fuel cells. Just an engine and enough mass to demolish a fortified station on impact.

And now there’s one less of them.

I run a check on ammo stockpiles. Which requires a weird trick.

This trick is one of those few things where it doesn’t matter if I can talk or not, it’s just as dumb either way. See, the way the station shares information is erratic, and also unpredictable, and while it technically knows everything and knows I’m allowed to know everything, it sometimes requires weird hoops be jumped through to get specific answers.

In this case, the hoop is, I *suspect*, just a trick to get me to do a small chore.

Any check on a weapon’s ammo stockpile returns the available number of projectiles for that weapon. Like, specifically the one that you’re using, wired into, connected with, whatever.

Unless you properly retract, disarm, and stand down the weapon. Then it shows the total stock across the station.

I can’t prove it, exactly, but I am *almost certain* this is something that only started happening in the last two hundred years or so, after the station got sick of me letting bombardment rails stay loosely deployed for months at a time.

We’re low on micromissiles.

Sometimes, replenishing my stockpiles is very, very easy. A flick of the paw, and materials get transferred to the machines that turn them from raw resources into slightly less raw bullets. I understand the process involves a lot more melting, shaping, pressing, molding, and treating than I made it sound, but it’s all handled by equipment that’s basically impossible for me to replicate on an individual level anyway, so while I *do* understand an alarming amount of it, I’m not gonna go into the details of why I know individual metal galvanization temperatures.

Sometimes, though, it’s not so easy. Not that I have to make stuff myself, oh, heck no. Really the only thing I ever have to assemble by paw is the chainbreaker node, and then the process of installing it in a custom missile also has to happen by hand. I’ve got two of those in reserve, and I don’t have the mental focus to make more for at *least* a few more crises. But that’s an exception. There’s a lot of stuff that’s complex to *make the station produce*, I guess I should say.

Like micromissiles. Though the problem there is more administrative than anything else. Because they’re classified as anti-ground-personnel weaponry for some reason, I need to get specific authorization from an ethics committee to manufacture more. But since there isn’t one of those, I just have to wait for the timer to run out, and the default judgement of ‘go ahead’ to come back.

I don’t use these a lot, because I always forget to queue up making more, and then they run out and I just… look, I’m bad at forming good habits, okay?

So I figure I can get it started, and go get lunch. Delicious lunch. I queue up several thousand, and get informed that there isn’t enough uranium to make that many.

“Ennos!” I call in a familiar tone. “Are you busy?” I haven’t seen one of their drones around all day.

My AI friend replies after a short pause. “I have found a nest of pseudo-organic code.” They say quietly through the station’s audio system around me, as if afraid they’ll spook something. “I am not busy.”

“Weren’t you looking for coordinates or something?” I ask, distracted.

“I found those yesterday. They are pinned to your AR display so you cannot forget them.

Is *that* what that is. I had forgotten to ask. I decide not to tell Ennos that, and instead focus on my immedient problem.

Actually, no, hang on.

“Pseudo-organic code? Sorry, did you say nest?” I ask.

Ennos murmurs quietly. “I will gradually increase the size of the AR window until you cannot help but notice it.” They cruelly threaten me. “And yes. I do not know why they are here, but they appear to be rapidly growing to meet the total processing capacity of the grid node they occupy. So I am observing.”

“What are they… processing?”

“Unclear.” Ennos tells me. “Though it seems they are reading telemetry data, and producing files based off that. I do not know why. Was there something you needed?”

Ah, the universal voice of someone who’s busy. I know that sentence well.

“Oh, just wondering where all the uranium went.”

“One month ago you ordered a radiation scrub of deck 26-II, due to unusual levels of contamination. The bots the station assigned to the task noted a source of radiation that was not properly logged as cargo and ejected it from the station.”

“My uranium!”

“Your uranium is currently in orbit over Cascadia, moving at twice our velocity.” Ennos dryly informs me. “It is no longer your uranium.”

But… I need to make missiles. I can’t even start the nonexistent ethics commission until I have the materials. “But missiles…” I pitifully mewl.

“It sounds like you will need to find some uranium.” Ennos says. “Good luck. I have a nest to observe.”

Ennos has *no* concern for the sudden drought of missiles around this station.

Okay, this is fine. I’ll go to lunch, divert power to the long range high-sensitivity emissions scanner, and see if I can find any stockpiles still in orbit that I can send Jom to grab.

Have I mentioned that it is cherry day?

The anticipation has been burning away stress like scraps of cloth over the reactor core. Not that I ever actually did that, as far as anyone can prove.

The berries have just started to come in, small clusters of them growing on the thin vines of their flourishing host plants. The tiny, dark orange spheres are *very* sour before they ripen properly, which is a powerful experience all on its own. I’m looking forward to seeing what the galley can do with the actual sweetened ripe produce.

Before anyone corrects me, I *know* they’re not ‘real’ cherries. My knowledge of the history of dendrology here has a few gaps filled in by my more practical paws-on experience digging through orbital corporate record storage. The short story is, trees are hard to grow, and cherry flavoring is surprisingly hard to synthesize. Genetic engineering takes the yolk, and before you know it, it’s been a millennium, and your artificial fruit has survived past the original template.

Ask me, real quick, if I care that I’m not getting a historically authentic cherry experience.

Ask. Go on.

You fool. You easily baited wriggling. You absolutely magnificent engineering risk. You *know* I do not care. Why did you ask?

It’s hard to get angry or frustrated about a lot of things when I’m looking forward to my first dessert in my life, is what I’m saying. I even spent an hour in the vivification pod today, to make extra sure my taste buds are working as unintended.

Compared to what’s waiting for me upstairs, whether or not I can get a permit to make missiles seems kind of petty, if we’re being honest.

I kind of assume this is how everyone operates, really. Which also explains why all the more stable and pacifistic surface polities are the ones with good farms. Maybe I should save the extra seeds and start bombarding the planet with crops? Maybe that would help?

Okay, I thought that sarcastically, but maybe that actually would help.

I’ve tried this before, with tools and archived knowledge, and it just caused problems. Or got shot down, like almost everything does. Maybe turning some places into green zones with food sources will be different. Assuming the seeds can survive those G-forces.

This is a lot more mental work than I wanted to do before lunch.

I allow myself to put that on a future to-do list, and start crawling through air vents and maintenance shafts to drop the ten decks needed to get to my lunch faster.

Three minutes and one small mishap with an intake fan later, I slide myself across the deck plate in front of the small auxiliary cafeteria where I’ve consumed a dozen lifetimes worth of ration paste. The dog is already here, wagging tail going a parsec a second as he excitedly growls and chomps at the cloud of cleaner nanos that surround me like a halo after my aforementioned mishap.

Glitter is also here, in the form of a pair of camera drones that light up as I come near.

“Lily!” She sounds excited. Which she *should* be. It is, after all, cherry day. I am happy she’s excited too, and become more excited with her. “I have good news.” The satellite says.

“Yes.” I agree, ears standing straight up on my head. “It is cherry day.”

“I… what?” Glitter pauses. “No, I’m sorry, I’m sure this is important. I can interrupt you later.”

“I’m mostly joking.” I tell her as I enter the galley. “What’s the news?”

The news, as Glitter spells it out in a more long winded form, basically boils down to her getting bored and wanting to do more. And so, as everything on this station seems to go when any of us want to do anything, she exploited a small loophole.

The station won’t let anyone who isn’t properly assigned access the comms stations, for basically any reason. And AI don’t count, because the station is racist, and I hate it.

But it turns out, most communications aren’t subspace links, and actually have to travel through space. And while the station alerts me – loudly – to anything that it decides is an ‘emergency’, there’s a *lot* of outside chatter that I just don’t have time to look at.

Glitter, though, isn’t *on the station*. She can listen to whatever she wants. And, as she has decided to do, there’s no rule stopping her from listening to everything she can, and sorting it out to report to me.

Apparently, Glitter has decided I need a secretary.

Personally, I thought she was already busy enough what with the shared responsibility of melting hostile surface targets. But I guess Glitter doesn’t need to worry about that awful feeling when one of her extended claws catches on the firing trigger and pulls out of her paw just a little too much and then it hurts all day. So maybe it’s easier for her. It’s probably easier for her.

I sit upright in a chair that I’ll never grow enough to fill out properly, waiting for my lunch dessert, while Glitter tells me about her attempts to start cataloguing everyone out here with us in the space close around Earth.

It’s a nice afternoon.

My dessert is too sweet, overwhelming my technologically enhanced sense of taste. The lack of other ingredients aside from berries and nutritionally balanced hydrocarbon ration make the small collection of fruit tarts the galley serves me neither tart, nor particularly fruity either.

It’s still something different. Four hundred years of this, and finally, I have food. Real food. All I needed was enough help from my friends to take the pressure off, start a garden, carefully cultivate a number of different crops, not let a corporate war mimic satellite vent them into space, and then harvest the fruits of my labor.

Easy. So easy.

I enjoy my tiny tarts. I share one with the dog, who doesn’t seem to appreciate it the way I do, but still makes it vanish with a toothy chomp.

Our orbit takes us over an ocean. Due to current circumstances and some light maneuvering to avoid an active wrath field, we’ll be over this ocean for about six hours, with nothing but water underneath me.

It’s a perfect time for a nap.

Stomach full, problems solved, I settle into my dog shaped pillow. Reflected light from all three moons lines up through the windows of the exolab, this lower deck still undamaged after all I’ve been through.

I close my eyes, and allow the feeling of a warm hand on my fur to lull me to sleep.

The dog ruins the moment by trying to eat whatever is petting me. Loudly, and vigorously.

“Don’t be rude.” I mutter from the indentation in the couch where the hound has vacated the area to dash off down one of the hallways.