The airlock hissed as it cycled. I mean, I assume it hissed. My suit was a lot of things, but I’d actually forgone high fidelity external audio feeds for the engineering suit. I’d needed the space to fit a backup control node inside the sealed cat shaped armor.

But it made Dyn nervous, so I assumed a hiss was happening.

Dyn had actually been the one to crack the airlock systems. I was going to just deploy one of my nanoblooms on it, but without Ennos’ encryption-shattering presence, it would have taken more time. And more importantly, more backup power. Which is when the young woman surprised me, carefully selecting a couple of the tools she’d brought along and kneeling down on Jom’s extended maintenance ramp while the fighter craft kept us in on perfectly synced vector so that she could pry open a panel and send a small electric pulse into it.

The emergency airlock protocol triggered instantly, and it began cycling to let us in. What impressed me most was that she knew to not go for the airlock control itself; those are always rigged to a hostile bureaucratic mess of interlocking problems on old corp ships like this. Instead, straight for the *actual* bypass that the corp-employees engineers put in and never told anyone about.

Except other engineers, obviously. I feel like I should make that clear. Engineers can keep a secret, if all non-engineers involved in the system are dead.

And also if the documentation is bad.

The documentation on these ships is really bad, let me tell you. I studied a number of blueprints and code copies that I got off an executive satellite I once salvaged, and the first time I actually tried to *board* one of these, like, a hundred and fifty years ago, it nearly killed me. Because all the notes, all the schematics, they’re all lies. Lies to their enemies, lies to their bosses, lies to their stockholders, just a big wad of deception all the way down. I had wanted to make some kind of joke that the only thing accurate was the shape, but *that didn’t turn out to be true either*, and the blueprints had claimed it was a ‘proprietary profile masking technology’, but it was actually just terrible construction.

I think what I’m getting at is, don’t trust corp engineers? Yeah, let’s go with that.

The airlock finished hissing, matching our pressure to the inside of the frigate, and Dyn and I prepared to move in.

For me, that meant bouncing back and forth between my front two paws, trying to get a feel for the mild updates I’d made to the control hood so that I could keep the suit as disconnected from the station as possible. I was just waiting, really, For Dyn, that meant leveling her weapon at the airlock and dropping into a braced stance, keeping her magnetized boots firmly sealed on two points of deckplate.

“Where the black did you even get a gun?” I asked over our link. Dyn didn’t answer me. Probably because she was too busy fiddling with her gun.

Actually come to think of it, she’d been picked up with basically nothing but a suit that only technically qualified as spaceworthy. Where did she get *any* of the twenty different tools hanging from rigging points on her exo?

I’d ask later. She probably wouldn’t answer that either.

The airlock finished opening, letting us into the frigate’s central chamber, and we got to see first hand why this ship was dead when it had minimal external damage.

Ancient corpses in crew suits, now nothing more than skeletons, lay strewn across the deck and in many cases slumped over consoles. The commandmind tank that sat at the back of the bridge was dry, all the water long since having leaked out of the hole in it and been processed by the remnants of the climate system, leaving just the husk of the massive dead crustacean inside. There were small splotches of battle damage, but not a whole lot else.

Except for the sleek, boxy black shape of a corporate mechanized warform sitting off to the side just behind the comms console.

It was powered down, having turned itself off to conserve power probably right after it put one of its impact spikes through the skull of the comms officer that it was still stabbing; an ancient moment of violence that had lasted for centuries.

“Don’t touch that.” “Null prodden ka.” Dyn and I spoke at the same time, before sharing a glance with each other.

I was starting to like Dyn. Which was fun. Maybe she’d feel the same after this.

We moved across the bridge, checking everything that had happened here. The whole internal design of this ship was *grey*, with just a corp logo on the internal doors and shoulder patches of the crew suits to bring any amount of color in. Solar-Krupp, read the company name.

Awkwardly moving a skeleton out of their chair with a crash of old bones, I hopped up to the chair and triggered the interface system for my suit. Without the suit, threading the adaptation cable into the proper slot would have been a nightmare, but here, my paws were a lot less limited and a lot more *covered in grav plates*, so I made it work.

Aaaaand nothing.

Because everything is turned off. Right.

“Backup power’s dead.” I sent over to Dyn, who just nodded. She’d been looking around the bridge while I got my connection set, and by the time she moved over, taking slow, deliberate steps to make sure both boots were on the deck as often as possible, she had a half dozen new objects attached to her rigging. Including another gun.

“Where do you keep finding those?” I asked, and got no answer. Just her pulling a thin roll of electrical cel out of a pouch on her ankle, peeling it open to a strip, and sticking it to the side of the console I was at.

I waited patiently as she got a slim metal rod, and a vibrational drill out, made a hole, and started prodding to try to connect the cel to an internal power supply.

For someone who was carrying around an infinitely higher percentage of guns than I was, Dyn was really being careful here.

My normal method for salvaging is… well, it hasn’t been *gentle*, I can tell you that.

When you’re limited in the detail of your actions, at least as far as high class things like “tool use” go, you tend to get a little more amenable to damaging the goods. A lot of my salvage operations tended to use more in the way of grapple lines and laser cutters, not a more gentle touch. Not that I don’t know how to be gentle, I’ve got some practice in it. But Dyn moves like she’s gutted a hundred ships like this without leaving a trace.

Wait, hang on. I’ve salvaged a couple ships like this that have been almost totally empty before. Maybe Dyn *has* done this a hundred times.

They could have at least left some of the ration bars.

“Nuke tonguing, tho.” Dyn says suddenly, and I look down at her. My display hasn’t changed, so she hasn’t gotten the console powered up. What does… wait, am I thinking out loud again? “Si, yeh.” She says curtly.

“Sorry.” I say, letting her focus. “Wait, so, the ration bars were bad?” That makes me feel *marginally* better.

“Trip sour.” She nods. I see her scowling inside her helmet, organic eye narrowed and mechanical eye spinning as she focuses through the small hole she’s made. “Yo!” Dyn exclaims as she pokes something, and the feed to my suit springs to life.

I have maybe ten seconds of time, before it either overloads or drains the cel, and it takes less than that to download basically everything on this local system. We don’t have the power to restore more stuff on this ship, so we’re starting with the logs and moving from there.

“Okay.” I start reading, resisting the urge to let out a mewling squeal as the cleaner nanos that have accompanied me in my suit flow to around my forehead, watching the same helmet display I’m reading off of.

I narrate to Dyn as I go over it, though I suspect the human is only half listening as she replaces her tools and goes back to going through the pouches on the suits of the skeletons around us.

It’s mostly just standard operating notes. This ship in particular was an orbital watcher craft, tasked with monitoring… really?

Another orbital watcher craft. Sweet void, there’s a whole chain of notes attached to this. I don’t follow it; I don’t care, and I also don’t want to learn that this was some corp era thing where somehow there’s just fifteen different companies with ships watching each other in a circle to make sure none of them are spying on each other. That sounds like a parable I don’t need in my life.

Basic logs about the state of the ship are easier to read. Minor repairs, database updates - they have a backup data storage for a number of different copyright legal cases, which is nice, because no one will ever miss that data when I wipe it - a few personnel notes, a medical log for the commandmind, all pretty standard stuff.

Toward the end, which I scroll down to rapidly so as to get a picture of the current state of the craft, the death of this ship comes into focus. They received and reviewed an incoming Polite War assault request.

And then, not wanting to lose their corp any points on the upcoming Regulation and Tariff Bid, said yes. The idiots.

I glance around the bridge. Nine bodies here, plus the commandmind, plus the twelve more that will be on shift rotation in crew quarters and below decks. Twenty one humans and one uplifted cybernetically augmented lobster, all dead, because a corporation didn’t want to pay slightly higher taxes.

If their headquarters still existed, I’d bombard them out of principle.

“Here we go.” I say finally, my meow cracking slightly as I shake off the omnipresent feeling of pointless death - a practice I’ve gotten really familiar with over the years. “The ship system got a Polite War takeover notice, but no one ever showed up to claim it. So the reactor underwent safe shutdown. We should be able to start it back up again without any actual issues, unless it’s taken a hit since then.”

Dyn makes a scoffing noise. She already knows I’m joking, but two hours later and a disassembly of a jammed engineering compartment door later, we’re looking at a zero point reactor that is *somehow*, against all odds, intact.

We double and triple check the casing anyway, because that’s what you do with a power supply that could turn you into quarks if you screw it up. But in the end, with my engineering nanos monitoring carefully, Dyn throws a series of hard point switches and begins the restart process.

Lights flicker back on. The life support hums to life next, sucking up the slow rousing of a power flow like a greedy desert.

Nothing explodes.

“This is perfect.” I mutter to Dyn. “We can reinforce the hull structure, add an extra ablative stealth coat, maybe a full baffler system, and assuming the databases hold, this’ll work great.”

“Mmh.” Dyn acknowledges me with a grunt, but is still frowning.

“Hey.” I mew at her, and she tilts her helmet in my direction. “Thank you. For your help here.”

“Eh. Null.” She waves it off with another grunt, eyes going back to the power system readouts.

But I don’t let up on it. “No, seriously.” I say. “I could have done this alone, but… I’m tired of being alone. And I’m tired of watching people get hurt. So thank you for helping. And… if you want me to stop bothering you, trying to talk, I will, okay?”

At that, Dyn looks over at me, and I can see her sigh inside her suit. “Yeh, nah.” She mutters. “Why?” She asks, almost to herself, the word coming across as unfamiliar with her spacer accent. “My home… threw me out.” She says. “Dark junk, null dat.” She clacks two metal fingers together, the clack resonating even through her suit. “Ye… you… you take a whole live can, just for a friend?” She rises from the crouch she’s been in while watching the zero point core connection to make sure it isn’t melting. “We can talk.” She intones the words like they’re something more important than a simple sentence.

“I…” I start to say, not sure where I’m going with this sentence.

I am, of course, interrupted. Which is *not* good, no matter how bad at socializing I am, and how convenient this out is.

Especially when the out comes in the form of a Polite War killbot slicing through the rest of the door that Dyn and I had wedged open with a plasma cutter.

I scream something incoherent. Dyn shoots it. Like, repeatedly. Softmetal spikes and some kind of green flash erupting from the two different guns she has on her as she reacts like a veteran soldier, pouring violence down on the armored form.

The killbot doesn’t even flinch. Though it does turn toward her.

I see the strike coming, my reflexes giving me a tiny window to act. I don’t have a plan, I just have an impulse. And with nothing else to do, I interpose myself between Dyn and the spike coming her way.

It catches me in the chest, my leap having put me just in front of her head. My suit loses integrity rapidly, a breach registering in my displays, followed by a blossom of pain in my ribs and stomach. The killbot doesn’t look *surprised*, exactly, but I do like to think that murdering a surface pet species at least causes some consternation for the Polite War programming in its head.

I hit the floor at its base, Dyn having scrambled back from the thing to keep firing on it from behind the quartz loop of the zero point reactor, probably hoping it won’t blow the whole ship just to shoot her. The killbot steps around me, its hexapod legs vibrating the deck as it passes by.

I itch. And hurt. But also, I itch.

And in my vision, as the helmet readout flickers from a cut power line somewhere, one word forms itself as the cleaner swarm that tagged along with me writes itself in front of my eyes.

“Nanos.” It says. In large, glowing, all capital letters. A demand.

I mewl out a command to my suit, not being able to count on my body to stitch itself back together in time to help Dyn. I have one option here, if she’s going to live, and that’s to trust these things. This tiny little stowaway that waited until the station couldn’t see to talk to me. That, just maybe, is more on my side than I ever knew.

Engineering bloom. Full manual control unlocked. Nano engine online. Stabilizer field online. Coherence code unlocked.

“Get ‘em.” I yowl.

The cleaner swarm, or whatever was masquerading as it, flows off my fur like a line of ants. Through the suit’s channels, into the engineering nanobloom, into the now dangerously uninhibited nanotech core. My suit starts flashing a *lot* of warnings as an external force takes over the tool. I even get a message buried in the code that my suit is trying to broadcast a grey goo situation alert, along with a prayer for salvation. I jam that one.

The co-opted nanoswarm flows out like water, converting what it needs from the deck plate and local controls, building enough of itself to make a basic form. The killbot kicks through a stabilizer cord, and moves to spear Dyn, and I scream a Polite War authorization challenge at it. It turns, reacting to an ancient treaty I don’t have a stake in, and the distraction lasts just long enough for the nanoswarm to hit.

It’s built a roughly quadruped shape, and when it nails the killbot near its center mass of armored plates, stealth fields, and era-spanning batteries, it lands with it’s front two ‘legs’. Legs that morph into vibrational claws, then something else I don’t recognize, the nanoswarm burning power at an absurd rate as it tears into the killbot.

Not just tears into. Converts.

I’m watching in mild alarm and also laughing triumph as the swarm shreds the war machine, turning more and more of its outer plate into more nanobots to augment its structural mass. The nanoswarm dodges a plasma cutter that sweeps over it, *ducking* by flattening itself down to the surface of the bot before springing back like a non-Newtonian fluid and pouring more strikes into it. It converts more matter, coalesces a body of sorts, then a fifth limb out the back of the form. Then, the warform grabs it with a magnetic net, and flings the nanoswarm violently across the engineering deck.

It turns with a stuttering mechanical movement, plasma blade raised, ready to kill.

And Dyn shoots it again. Still not doing anything, but boy is Dyn not here to get stabbed without a fight.

I stagger to my feet, flesh knit back together. Limp forward toward the thing, turning my suit to wide band broadcast. I start yelling code commands at it, firing off attack code, looking for any kind of weakness to exploit. At one point, I hit upon something that makes it pause, but then it tries to laser me in half and I have to roll to the side, losing the edge of my suit’s paw in the process. The roll hurts a lot, I think some of my ribs are still broken.

But corp era killing machine or not, there’s only so much abuse something can take. I fling another command code at it, Dyn shoots it, and from the rear, I see the nanoswarm closing in. “Die!” Dyn and I scream together.

Then the nanoswarm screams it too. Plunging a clawed arm into the center mass of the machine, and ripping out its computer core.

The killbot drops inert. The nanoswarm eats a little more of what it wants from the thing, before stabilizing. From her hiding spot, Dyn rises up, breathing heavy and shaking as she stares at the form perched on the killbot’s frame, looking like fuzzy static made manifest. “Thanks… Lily?” She says slowly.

“No problem.” The nanoswarm and I say together in two languages.

We look at each other. It’s got a thin frame of a body, limbs with claws, a fifth limb that twists like a tail, and a vaguely familiar face made out of overlapping triangular nanoswarm panels. It’s wearing the body of a cat, almost as well as I do.

The nanoswarm shifts, and the form opens one green eye. It looks really familiar.

“Hey.” It says with a buzzing meow in perfect spoken Cat.

“Hey.” I tell myself.