I’ve mentioned before - frequently, and I will continue to do so - that paws aren’t actually designed for micrometer control of orbital weaponry. I am now invoking my right to mention it again.
Paws are so bad for this.
There’s the usual things you can probably expect, like how feline forelegs don’t actually have the same range of motion that human arms do, or how I just don’t have the muscle strength to keep up repeated motions like this. One of those is fair! I cannot change my bones. I also have more trouble than you’d expect with my toes. Those little pads that are great for gripping lots of different surfaces? They slide right off whatever miracle material this one specific stupid control stick is made of.
That said, here’s a weird thing. There’s a joke that no human has ever seen a gorilla that’s actually tried to be buff. That joke has been out of date for about two centuries, and I don’t particularly want to explain why right now, but it’s a pretty good look at how humans think sometimes. A weird little quirk, a notice that the natural world doesn’t mirror their own lived experience, that kind of humor at the absurdity of their lives compared to everything else. It’s also a great segue into the fact that I can work out.
It doesn’t actually do as much as you’d think, but I do have a physical training regimen, along with a series of supplements and boosters that the medbay can synthesize for me, and if it came to a weightlifting contest…
I would still lose to a mildly out of shape teenage human. But! I would beat every cat on the planet, so that’s not nothing. It’s just another thing I’m the best at. Right up there with maneuvring a control stick.
I said it was hard, I never said I couldn’t do it.
Currently, I’m in a slow orbit over the Haze. I try to make sure my orbital trail doesn’t really take me overhead that often, because it’s awful, and I hate it, even though my presence is kind of relevant for human rights reasons.
I’ve mentioned the Haze before, and unlike my complaining, I may choose never to mention it again, depending on how angry I get over the next few hours and if I decide that dropping a counteragent into it is my optimal course of action. Because the Haze is two things in equal measure: it is very consistent in the behaviors it is consistent in, and it is very erratic in everything else.
The Haze is a chemical compound. As far as the station’s scanners can determine - and again, they can determine practically anything that’s dumb enough to sit on the surface of the planet below - it is a chemical compound that is orders of magnitude more complex than anything else in the database.
I once checked the database specifically, which was itself an adventure in coming up with new meow patterns to teach the station. The jump between the largest mundane chemical stored and the size of the pattern of the Haze was comical.
But “it’s big and complicated” isn’t actually a very good description. See, the Haze is alive. Alive, and interested in staying that way. Which is a really big problem for a number of reasons.
It doesn’t specifically hurt anyone, but some of the things it needs to sustain itself, it can only get from humans, or dogs. And as funny as that whole “ancient rivalry” supposedly is, I actually like both of those species. And the Haze… well, it doesn’t hate them or anything, but it just doesn’t care. So on a fairly regular timetable, it’ll roll over an outlying village, or sometimes a whole city if it’s feeling ambitious, and just take over.
Oh, right. It does mind control. I don’t know how, it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it.
When I first started my investigation of the surface, I didn’t fully understand what I was looking at. The Haze doesn’t kill people, but it also doesn’t need them for anything aside from organically producing the substances it needs to keep going. If it has access to humans with a high enough tech level, it also uses their thumbs to make some more advanced trace compounds, which I like to pretend are its desert.
But just because it doesn’t kill people doesn’t mean it doesn’t cause people to die. The Haze has no concept of children, of a life cycle, or of personal needs beyond eating enough to keep the chemicals flowing.
The first time I saw it… well, I thought it was a zombie outbreak. My mom used to love zombie movies. I used to love sitting on her lap while she watched them, and in retrospect with my enhanced intelligence, have decided I hate zombie movies.
I killed a lot of people before the Haze retreated, leaving the survivors dazed, in a ruined city, surrounded by the dead I’d made. I almost gave up entirely right then.
When the Haze moved for another village, I threatened it. I fired a dozen rounds into the ground ahead of it, kicked up enough dust that it may as well have been a solid wall for it. I still don’t know how it moves, and I suspect it’s got something paracausal in its makeup beyond the simple physical. But I do know it needs clear air to pass through, and that let me keep it walled off.
Eventually, it changed course, but if I tried to keep that up forever, I’d run out of ammo well before it ran out of energy. So I tried something else.
The ammo is called ‘splatter rounds’, and I have no idea why the fabricator has a plan for them. They use subspace tap liquid and a specially formulated explosive to airburst highly toxic substances across a wide area. I used a bunch of them, all at once, and that turned out to be a really stupid idea.
It obviously hurt the Haze, that wasn’t in question. But it also seems like it pressured it into the kind of devious creativity that any intelligent creature is capable of when their life is on the line. The thing took over a colony of modified moles, using their tunnels and bodies recklessly to avoid my scanners, and explode out into the air again where I didn’t really expect it. Weaker, but still alive, and too close to people to safely bombard with anything that would work.
So, I tried something new, expressing some creativity myself.
I let it take a village. And then, a few days later, I shelled the territory outside. Gradually walked my fire into the center of the buildings. And the Haze got the message, and left. A couple people died from dehydration, but no mass casualties, or long term control.
After about a month or two of this game, we established a pattern. The Haze takes a population center. I give it a few days, then put a low power laser through its center. It starts to withdraw, and in behavior that I find unnervingly familiar, it follows the laser on the surface away from wherever it’d taken. In an effort to make things easy for the people, I try to keep it on a pretty big loop of population centers, with no one having to suffer it more than a couple days every few months. Sometimes, it doesn’t even need my guidance, which shows it’s been learning at least a little.
That’s what I’m doing right now. Or trying to do, anyway. I’ve started our little ritual, putting a low power beam into the village square of where it’s currently staying and warming up the stone fountain sitting there. But the Haze is just ignoring it, even though the laser is technically enough to burn away it’s…
Hang on.
I meow a command at the AR displays, turning slightly in the rotating stool that I’m sitting on to operate the station’s mining laser. I really should build another cradle for this, if I’m gonna be doing it every week for the rest of my eternal life.
The station’s computer system responds to my reasonable demand for information, and pulls up a long range spectrometer map of the surrounding area.
Well shit. If I had hands, I’d… well, I mean, we’ve been talking about this. There’s so many things I’d do with hands. I could pet myself! I would also give a small applause for the Haze, which has, it seems, learned.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
It has learned a very stupid lesson, but it’s learned.
The fountain in the center of the village, the geographic center of the Haze’s current occupied zone, contained no trace of the Haze.
Normally, the annoyingly intelligent idiot cloud did what clouds normally do; it filled out its volume equally. Oh, sure, it moved under its own power, and it kept the air it inhabited at a certain concentration of itself, so it was always in a rough dome-shape of consistent size. But it felt like it was following the rules of a gas.
Not anymore, though! Now it had a clean doughnut pattern, a torus with a perfect spot that I wasn’t lasering at all.
I let out a laughing mewl. This was, undoubtedly, the funniest thing that had happened in weeks. It was like a kitten hiding the scrap of food it was playing with, pretending that slightly out of sight was a good enough concealment spot.
Carefully, slowly, I dragged the laser into its mass. The Haze actually sagged a bit on the sensors, like it had been so excited to show its new trick, and I just ignored it. Tail flicking behind myself, I guided the beam back into the clear area, gave it a couple circles around the clear area just on the edge of the Haze, and then cut a clean line down a street toward the edge of the township.
The Haze appeared to appreciate my acknowledgement of its prowess. It perked up as I heated the stones in the fountain, and followed with a quickness it normally lacked as I took it out of town. I took the laser off as soon as it was moving a bit more, pushing it off on its way as it began the three or four day trek to its next destination.
I watched on the AR screen for a while longer, making sure it had withdrawn from everyone in the village, making sure it was still moving. It was strange, to see it acting so much different. Strange and worrying; it had diverged before, and more than once it had led to deaths. But right now… well, reshaping itself, and reacting to me, that wasn’t too bad, was it?
I hoped not.
As fun as the diversion of the Haze had been, the whole process had eaten up more time than I wanted it to, and I was behind on my space chores again.
I bolted out of the stool, a little extra kick in my frantic sprint around the station today. It didn’t take me a lot of self reflection to understand that I was excited about the development with the Haze. Between that, and the ongoing development of a communication technique for the living weapons platform, I could have two friends in the near future!
Or, well, okay. One friend, and one gaseous pet. Let’s not get too excited.
The station blurred around me as I let my body flow into the centuries old loop of movement. Hallway, hallway, maintenance closet. Meow at the drones, authorize cleaning. Hallway, door, zero-G chute, foundry. Meow, meow, check inventory, meow again to say that yes it was okay to continue turning processed materials into class-three groundstrikers. Hallway, loooooong corridor, medlab, passing meow to keep making my medical supplements, hallway, meow at the station’s nanoswarm in the specific location it thought I should be standing in to tell it that it was okay to clear the air filters. Hallway. Low gravity bounce. Galley. Lunch!
Lunch has never been good. I hate it. This is the worst. I wish I had never modified my mind so I could understand flavor. This is torture. I need to capture another station with hydroponics, or escaped lab animals I can eat.
Back to the chores.
Now it’s time for the more intellectual parts of the day.
I do a little work on my ongoing uplift project, trying to figure out how to reshape my physical body to have thumbs, or how to be able to think at double speed. Whatever. I’m not feeling the work today; my body is a constant limitation, but my dysphoria isn’t as bad on days when I don’t miss shots.
A big part of my time here is spent sweeping the information about the surrounding orbital objects. The station, as it tends to do, has a lot of information, but is abjectly unwilling to make assumptions or guesses. It’s part of why it always wants me to authorize things; it will not assume a yes. It’s kind of polite, but very frustrating sometimes. So I have to do the final logical leaps myself on scanner data like this.
We’ve got eighteen satellites ‘around us’. Around us is, like, within a kilometer. Close, but not in the danger zone. Some of the deeper scans can list off power use, and signal intercepts, and it’s not hard to classify them all as comms sats. There’s another dozen things that probably were comms sats at one point, but are dead objects now. No power running, no signs of life.
One dead cargo ship, which I’ve seen before. It’s one of the big corporate haulers meant to ferry goods to and from an offworld colony, probably Mars, but this one’s missing all its hauler pods and has been dead in orbit for years. Sorry, StarBound Inc.! Your hardware didn’t last as long as your advertising campaign did!
Hundreds of tiny bits of debris, bolts and screws, chunks of rock or metal. I filter out anything below a certain size.
One other station. This one isn’t close; it’s maybe five klicks away, easily within engine range. Another familiar face; if there’s anyone alive there, they politely ignore me if they see me, and I do them the same favor. It used to be one of those joint-government projects, before the governments in question went to war again and the astronauts on board became citizens of the stars. I’m not sure if there’s anyone left there, or if it’s been empty for a while, but I do know it’s tagged as a source of replacement parts if our engines ever fail.
Nothing hostile, nothing radioactive enough to matter, nothing alive. Just me up here. As always.
I can actually, when I want to, sigh. I do so now. It never helps. It doesn’t help now.
If I hurry through the rest of this, I can have some time to go sigh in the sun, though. So I wrap up my checklist for this cycle.
Arrange a to-do list for tomorrow. Doesn’t take long. And then, one final check of the surface below. Nothing going on except for…
Are you kidding me?
There’s an army on the move across Risen Atlantic. An army I deploy some choice profanity toward as I notice it.
I double check, make sure this isn’t a mistake. And sure enough, it isn’t. Three thousand soldiers - and they are flagrantly soldiers - on the move across the artificial continent, heading for one of the land bridges to Eurasia. It looks like a mix of human and feathermorphs, all of them equipped with the finest salvaged oldworld guns they could find. At the head of their army, a human woman in glittering golden and red armor holds aloft a beam saber, shouting dramatic speeches.
It takes me eighteen minutes of precious naptime to verify that this is not a defensive army, nor a response militia.
Alright, nuking fine, I think to myself as I sink into the cradle. I damn well warned them.
Paws or not, from here I have all the precision I need to nail the leader right in their stupid helmet. Them and roughly a hundred of their closest - physically closest - followers, that is. Class-ones are pretty small, but there is a floor to the amount of devastation I can cause.
The station vibrates as the round is launched away. Several seconds later, the front of the army vanishes in a plume of kicked up dirt, ash, and bits of meaningless vainglory. Topographical scans show that there is a new crater, though not a very large one. Even if this were the only road in the area, and it isn’t, I wouldn’t be cutting off trade or anything with my attack.
I don’t even bother to watch if they scatter. I’ll be back overhead in thirty hours. If the army has managed to find a new idiot in that time… well, let’s say it like this:
I haven’t been building class-three’s because they’re the most important. They’re just the ones I’m not topped out on.
Firing on the denizens of Earth is always an iffy feeling for me. On the one hand, I am their self-appointed protector. I’m supposed to be keeping these people safe, not murdering them. And I don’t kid myself; this is murder. There is no chance left in existence that they could even pretend to challenge me. If someone down there managed to unearth, repair, power, and aim a surface-to-orbit railgun, then there is still a very high chance that they’re firing a cargo canon and not something that has any hope of breaching my shields. Assuming they’ve found a real weapon, then whatever ammo they put in it most likely won’t survive being fired, and neither will the gun, especially once any of the million dormant weapons systems up here notice something trying to get out of atmosphere. And even then, the station has multiple defenses and redundancies in case I actually do get hit.
They can’t hurt me. But I can kill them with a flick of my tail. And the thought makes me a little queasy. The fact that I am essentially committing an act of self defense on the part of whatever collection of villages and bunkers they were going to conquer and pillage makes me feel better. The further fact that this is not the first time it’s happened, and they should know better than to test me, makes me feel better still.
Not good. Just well enough that I don’t hate myself for it. And stable enough to not misdirect my anger to the idiots who are now distributed through the local area that they planned to use as a marching route.
It’s not their fault, for most of them. Idiots caught up with a charismatic demagogue. I’ve seen it before. I’ll see it again. I’ll stop it then, too.
They might think they’re smarter than the last one, that they’ve accounted for all the angles. But lemmie tell you; it’s kind of hard to predict orbital feline interdiction.