Kitty Cat Kill Sat - Chapter 16

For the first time in a long while, I am in a hurry and it isn’t rushing toward a weapons console.

I have an AR window up next to my head with a countdown ticking away on it, because I work best under pressure and it is hard to lose focus when you have a bright red doomsday clock in the corner of your vision. I mean, I think it’s red. I *set* it to red. I can’t really tell it apart from, like, a dark purple, or maybe an orange? But somehow just knowing that it’s a bright red doomsday clock makes it feel more pressing.

There are six hours and change until Glitter crashes into the surface of the primary moon. She’s going to – Glitter presents as a woman, I’m not sure if this ever came up before? I feel like it should have come up before – she’s going to impact away from any of the near-surface tunnels of the underground cities, so that’s not an issue. But for once, my concern isn’t with the squishy organic lives below, but one of the machines overhead.

Because that impact is gonna kill her. Glitter isn’t in a fixed orbit; she’s moving *fast* compared to the surface, and while it’s not that big of a deal from a couple hundred miles overhead, it’s a bit like how it’s not a problem that a car goes sixty miles an hour, unless you lean out and try to pet the road with your bare hand.

“Standard recovery drone.” Ennos is speaking rapidly, showing off a rotating hologram of the schematic. “Magnetic clamps, high thrust to mass ratio, perfect for this. We have more than enough time to retrofit one with a new hydrogen engine, and send it to help.”

“This will not work.” Glitter says in smooth mutated-Chinese. “I have several hard mounted magnetic baffles across my hull.”

“Okay, what else do we have?” I ask Ennos as I slide around a corner, plowing through the hologram as the AR fails to reorient around me fast enough.

“Why?” The young AI sounds confused.

“Because Glitter is mag shielded. She just said that.” I meow back as I hop off a stack of storage crates that I have positioned so I can bop the pad that opens this particular between-decks door. “I can start the assembler building us engines, though!” I slow to a stalking walk as I call up a command for that, and punch in an order queue to one of the station factories. It takes slightly longer to give verbal orders to a few loader drones to go grab them when they’re done and deliver them to where they need to be, but it’ll happen faster than if I tried to haul one myself.

I am, like, one twentieth the mass of a single engine unit. No amount of practice with fine motor control or cat-focused exercise can get me to the point that I can deadlift an engine unit.

Probably.

I should look into… no! Giant red clock! Also Ennos asked me something.

“What was that?” I close down the screens I was using and start moving again, making good time through the station, even if my legs still hurt from going through that vent earlier.

“I asked how you *know* that. Can you understand her?”

“Can he not understand me?” Glitter seems almost amused. She’s *way* calmer than I would be if I were falling from the sky.

I don’t waste time or breath on a sigh. “Apparently not.” I tell Glitter. “Ennos, there’s a whole language database on the grid. I had to actually *practice*, you just have to load up the spreadsheet.”

There is a quiet so thick it almost blocks out the thrumming of machinery I can feel through the hull. “…I don’t want to.” Ennos says, sounding almost petulant.

“Do we get to know *why*?” I ask as I clear the threshold of the drone foundry, already tapping into local feeds and pulling up blueprints.

“There’s something in there!” Ennos says. “I can *feel* it, and I don’t want to be there! So… you can translate, and it’s fine.” I’ve never actually *heard* someone cross their arms and huff before, but the AI does a good job of it.

The clock has just crossed into the under six hour range. I do not have time for this. We will have this conversation later.

“Glitter, is there anything else that we should know about?”

“My own corrective thrusters are offline, so I will be unable to help. However, I have full control of my armaments now, and you will not need to worry about interception fire.” She says, still cooler under pressure than I am. “Ah. And many of my hull plates seem to have come loose.”

I’m under objectively less pressure right now, and I am obviously not cool. I am a small whirlwind of fur and orders to the station. “Alright.” I tell Ennos. “Harpoons are out, except as a last resort. Let’s figure this out.”

We put our heads together, and start running through options. It does not take long, because we do not have a long list.

“We could… attach a void beam to it?” I flop onto my side, staring up at the list of available options.

“*Why* is this station so well armed?!” Ennos demands. “But you don’t have a single transport shuttle?!”

I object to that. “We have a transport shuttle. It’s in the docking bay.”

“Lily, there is no docking bay on the station schematics!”

I roll back to a semi-sifting position. “Really?” I ask. “Maybe it got lost at some point.”

“I find it a great wonder that you are still alive.” Glitter chimes in.

“Thank you!” I reply to her. “But I don’t think the shuttle would fit Glitter anyway, and it’s designed for surface trips, assuming it’s still even attached to the station. And also… I cannot fly a shuttle. And I don’t… want to… go into it again.” I think about it, but then let out a small mew. “I would though. If we need to.”

“What in the system is an electromagnetic netting deployment point?” Ennos sighs as they ask me for clarification of yet another poorly commented piece of information on the grid.

“Oh, it shreds electronics. Some kind of weird paramaterial. Not useful.” I check the clock. Five hours. “We’re running out of time. I’m going to start installing the high powered engines on the drones we have ready. Keep looking for things.”

Ennos does so, as I slide my forepaws into the loops of the welding laser and autotool that I have designed for makeshift use like this. It’s not as effective as actually being in my armored suit, but I’ve got centuries of practice at making due, and the engines are resilient enough that it’s not a problem. I keep an eye on my doomsday clock as I have the loader drones hold the engine unit in place while I secure it to the drone’s hull. It has to hold up to a *lot* of acceleration, after all.

“The schematics this station has on hand are absurd!” Ennos has been muttering for a while, which is a weird affectation for someone that probably can exactly measure the effort that speaking takes and wouldn’t do it subconsciously, but whatever. “There’s an entire file here for ammunition that doesn’t work!”

“Oh, that’s mine.” I say, and get ignored. Or maybe I just think it, and don’t want to interrupt his rambling. I’m busy, I actually can’t focus on several things at once like an AI can.

“The entire grid is divided in arbitrary ways! Sitting through this information was already going to take years, and now I’m trying to find specific things, right now! I don’t… I don’t know what to do!” Ennos actually sounds like they’re panicking, which is bad. The last thing I need is for my new AI friend to slip back into constant freaking out.

That’s my job.

So I do what I can to help.

I say something without thinking.

“Why don’t we just yank something we already have built out of the station, and use that?” I say, paw-deep in an engine assembly and trying to ignore the smell of my fur smoldering as the heat from my paw mounted laser starts to get a little too high.

“Lily!” Ennos is sounding even worse now. “I don’t know what the station can do! I’ve only got real access to three or four actual places, I can barely see inside the halls, half the time I’m just following you around via nanoswarm, and I have no concept for what we can do aside from ‘too much collateral damage’! I’ve been trying to learn for weeks, but there’s always some new disaster or something shooting at us, and I *do not see how this will help us rescue your friend!*”

“Okay, well, let’s make a list. You like lists, right?” I finish the weld and jerk my paw back before it actually catches fire. “We’ve got a bunch of extra railguns or mass drivers. Could we use those?”

“Not with these drones, no!”

“Alright, deep breath, or AI equivilent.” Cats cannot roll their eyes. I’ve tried. “What about some kind of tow ropes? Connected magnetic grapples. We don’t need to tag Glitter’s hull if we can make a net.”

“It would take more drones than we can outfit, if you keep going at that rate.” Ennos says. Calmer though; they’re doing math at high speeds, which I have learned calms the frantic AI down.

“What about attempting a safe landing?” The thought strikes me. “What would that take?”

The AI hums, thinking. Glitter’s voice, still connected to us via the subspace comms link, chimes in near me. “I would prefer not to be landed.” She says. “But if it is the only way…”

“We’d need to slow her down. A lot.“ Ennos cuts the weapons platform off. A number of AR windows showing orbital physics formula pop up near me. Which… I was pretty sure I’d set it so they couldn’t do that, but whatever. Now’s not the time. “We have ways of doing that. Simply using the drones as tugs, we could perhaps make it work if we begin launching now. But…”

“The interdiction field.” I say, snapping my head around toward the door. “Give me a path to where it is in the station.”

Ennos lights up a guidance beacon for me, but doesn’t stop talking. “It has a range of two thousand kilometers! That’s almost two hundred thousand too few!” They shout as I start running, letting my toolkit slip to the deck. “Lily, I know you can do math!”

“Not the *firing compartment* for it!” I yowl back. “The machinery! It doesn’t use power to operate, it’s fueled by some weird superspace tap thing! We can attach it to a drone and use that!”

The beacon changes. And so does Ennos’ demeanor. We have a plan now; panic is no longer on the table. Now it’s just about executing it to the best of our abilities.

I follow the light strip at high speed.

Four hours, twenty eight minutes.

It takes me almost an hour to safely remove the assembly, and convince a loader bot that they’re allowed to pick it up. In the meantime, Ennos gets the drone assembler to put together a custom heavy chassis to hold the thing.

Three hours, forty one minutes.

We’re going with the looped rope strategy. Once Glitter is slowed enough safely, we can slowly use the drones as tugs without ripping anything apart. This requires setting the foundry to produce some high-tensile cable. I do so. It gets to work. That’s the easy part.

Three hours, thirty nine minutes.

I realize, halfway through strapping the interdiction field generator to the insides of the heavy drone, that if this draws any automated defense attention, we’re gonna be in trouble. Ennos has already thought of that, because Ennos is paranoid. All four of the tug-drones are armed, and they’ve set up a subspace connection to control the interdiction field with enough finesse to shut down incoming attacks.

Three hours, five minutes.

My clock is wrong, I realize. There’s going to be a point where Glitter is beyond saving, but not dead yet. We just don’t know exactly when it is. She’s been singing softly for the last half hour, which I find very calming as I work. Every now and then she pauses to keep me updated on hull strikes from debris hitting her as her orbit takes her out of her previously clear path. She’s holding on. I work faster. I can work, it turns out, *very* fast when I’m motivated.

Two hours.

One engine left to install, the interdiction field is being tested. These drones don’t have grav plates; we just don’t have enough. There’s going to be so much work after this to replenish my stockpiles. But it’ll be worth it.

One hour, twenty two minutes.

There’s no fanfare. I assign Ennos full control of every drone as soon as they’re ready to go; custom hardware circumventing the station’s draconic organic-in-the-loop system. It occurs to me at this point that I’ve built an unshackled AI a small fleet of killbots. I don’t care. Ennos doesn’t seem to have noticed, and is more concerned with making concerned noises at every tiny piece of debris between here and the destination. The drones race away from the station, one by one, a thin line heading to do what they can as soon as possible.

One hour, one minute.

The heavy interdiction drone reaches Glitter, and at this point, the math for keeping them on matched vectors becomes so intense that Ennos stops talking entirely. They’re honed in on their task, while I’m zeroed in on getting this coil of still-warm tow cable loaded into the last drone.

Fifty two minutes.

I take control of all the other drones. It’s not that hard, I’m just pointing them toward the target and watching engine signatures for signs of any of the important parts falling out. I have nothing to do now but wait, watch, and listen to Glitter sing. She says true conversation can wait until she knows if she will be alive to remember it.

Forty five minutes.

One drone is dead. Engine failure from debris strike. Another one is damaged from an attempted shot coming from an old corvette that drifted nearby and still has functioning point defense. The rest are on target. I don’t know how accurate my clock is.

Forty one minutes.

Glitter has slowed enough that we can begin to move the tugs into position. She makes small noises of amusement as the cables wrap around her self, and the machines capable of moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light bump into her at a snail’s speed. If there was an atmosphere to carry the sound, it would be a cacaphony of screeching metal. There is not. I imagine it anyway, because I am an idiot.

Thirty two minutes.

Ennos runs the numbers, and I double check them. Glitter gives us permission to make our final attempt. She says she won’t say goodbye, as it would be bad luck. She keeps up her soft singing. For our fortune, she says.

Thirty minutes exactly.

I hit the trigger.

We engage the engines.

A hundred and eighty thousand miles away, a small cluster of bright hydrogen flames light off at low power. A woven net of cable pulls taut. A hull already damaged by a missile strike and a century of small impacts buckles, warps, and then holds together.

I sit proudly on the chair that wasn’t built for my species, watching the screens as the small blip that is Glitter and our drone fleet pull away from the moon. Back straight with satisfaction, I turn my head slightly, and bop the “stop clock” button.

Twenty five minutes to spare.

“So!” I say cheerfully. “Where would you like to be dropped off?”

Glitter laughs, and everything, for one of those rare moments, is alright.