I’m out of grade two groundstriker rounds.

This isn’t exactly a huge problem; they’re not hard to fabricate, and it was one of the things I’ve leaned on a lot over the centuries. One of the first things I figured out how to make the station produce, one of the first things I learned how to make use of, and one of the primary tools for stopping problems.

That last part is a euphemism. It means I shot a lot of things.

I’ve been low before, but never actually *out* since the first time that happened. Back during a three month period when there was a cluster of emergence events one after another, all of them springing up in a line leading from the asteroid belt, through the primary moon, and on toward Earth. Like some kind of aligned chain reaction, jumping from mining station to ruined battleship to colony dome, they just kept coming until one day they stopped. And I took them all out, one after another, until I had gotten so much artillery experience that I technically qualified as a Bombardier Third Class in the Geradstown Militia.

That was back when I used a railgun that had a lot more personality. That railgun is gone now, along with a few other bit of the station that were near it when a counterstrike hit.

The point is, I don’t run out of ammo that often. Technically, I still haven’t. But a lot of my bullets and shells and bolts and capsules and… rounds? Rounds sounds right, sure. A lot of them are built for one gun, and only one gun. It turns out a lot of people don’t like the idea of their guns being used by their enemies, or their allies without permission, or their business associates without payment. So, proprietary ammo.

It never works, as evidenced by the existence of the groundstriker railgun shell becoming standard issue over time. I’ve found the blueprint for that thing in fifty different ruined ships and stations. Because who wouldn’t want a self-adapting bullet? Especially as the slow apocalypse burns around you and civilization collapses, the appeal of being able to swap out scavenged railguns is pretty obvious.

And now I’m out of them.

I’m not gonna lie, there’s a moment of vulnerability, which I express in perfectly mature yowling at the station’s ceiling as I maturely compose myself. Before I remember that I actually have a dozen other different styles and modes of ammunition for this one specific gun model that I have bristling from the station like barrowbat quills, and it’s not that big of a deal.

But I still decide to put in the effort to fix the stockpile issue before another alarm sounds. I decide to stop wasting time sulking, and start moving, bounding off the walls in the hallway with the most strategic failing grav plates back and forth as I rocket toward the drone bay.

It’s an alarm day, in general. It’s frustrating. That frustration is compounded by some interpersonal issues. And I’m taking out that frustration on anything that looks like a bug monster, with railguns.

Ennos is mad at me. Kind of. They’re not *not* talking to me, exactly, but basically all I’ve heard from the AI for the last few days since we got back is cold status reports and technical updates.

I think… okay, I shouldn’t play dumb. I *know* why. Ennos didn’t like for a microsecond the implication that they should *run*. That the station, and our weird place in its convoluted and sometimes hostile systems, was something we should abandon. Even if it was altering their memories, even if evacuating would be safer, it didn’t matter.

Because Ennos caught on quick that Dyn and I had built a liferaft for an *AI*, and not for a cat, a human, or a dog. No matter how modified any of those last three things might be.

I had a lot of reasons, obviously. Like how the station is armed, outfitted, secure, and a whole bunch of other things that have to do with the sheer accretion of technology and equipment on it. And how I need all those things to keep doing what I do, saving people and killing problems. My reasons for not leaving aren’t really that I’m afraid to go, to be somewhere other than the home I’ve known my whole waking life. Or that I’m incapable of the engineering expertise to start over somewhere else.

But I can’t really deny that those reasons might exist.

And if there’s one thing Ennos doesn’t want, it’s to be left alone. Even if the alternative is sticking around in a place that keeps actively gaslighting them. And… at the end of the orbit, I can’t really say that I can dish out any blame for that. It’s not like I’m bounding off the walls to leave, after all.

I just wish I could have explained before Dyn and I spent a few days working on the ship. I hadn’t wanted to say anything within the station’s range of hearing, just because it’s *still* unclear to me what vector it uses to move its protocols and restrictions into new hardware.

Dyn is also mad at me. Though not because we just wasted a few days on a ship. We were talking - actually talking! - about what to do with it now, and I suggested keeping it on standby. She countered by saying that there’re a lot of people living in Sol’s orbit that could use that space for something. And… she’s right. I didn’t even disagree! I got halfway through going over a list of extra supplies we could stock it with before sending it to someone’s dock when Dyn started getting mad at me!

Again, I’m gonna go against my personal instincts and not be dumb here. She got mad when I mentioned the vivification pods, and the idea of adding one to the ship.

The worn and hardened woman who has found herself in my den doesn’t talk about her life or her people much. I know she’s an engineer, I know she has a similar level of exhaustion that I do, and I know her culture of origin annoyed me with their secrecy. And now, I can add to that list of things the fact that I know that 80% of the deaths among Dyn’s people - I still don’t know their names, she’s real cagey about that - are from advanced forms of cancer and radiation exposure.

There’s a lot of cosmic radiation out there. And there’s even more localized, non-cosmic radiation, when your home station runs off an old Kalakov reactor that only gets maintenance done when someone’s close enough to dead anyway that their organs slowly melting won’t kill them faster than whatever else they have going on.

Dyn’s home sounds kinda awful. I suggested sending them the refurbished corvette, along with a vivification pod. You know, for all the cancer. But that just made her angrier, for some reason. She stormed off, and spend the next two hours pacing a lower deck hall that actually had enough functioning grav plates that she could really stomp around, yelling about how much she hated all of them and they didn’t deserve anything good.

Er… to be clear, she was yelling to Glitter, who had a few camera drones in the area. Dyn wasn’t just yelling at the bulkheads.

Oh! Glitter isn’t mad at me! I think! Neither is Jom! That’s kind of a positive.

The industrial repeater is mad at me, though. Or… okay, they don’t get “mad” exactly. But the system finalized its design for a piece of room decor, chewed through a material stock at an absurd rate, churned out the hundred copies I’d asked for, and delivered them via a near-crippled package drone earlier today.

They’re cool. Kind of a metal flower sort of thing, designed to look like the internals of a binding-type cybernetic limb being unfolded. It’s not exactly expressive of any emotion, but it’s a cool little symbol that might actually be fun to have in someone’s crew quarters. Glitter’s distributed a bunch of them, but I’m saving one to give to Dyn later, when she’s less yelly.

The industrial repeater is already bored, though. Which is… *worrying*. Asking it questions is kind of hard, too. The AI has been unshackled already, but that was never really the problem with the personas that run these things. It’s just… it wants to make stuff. A lot.

I set it to doing a refit and rebuild of its own package drones. It sends me a materials invoice, and I, in turn, dispatch Jom and a pair of cutter drones to turn the nearest chunk of low velocity scrap metal into something useful.

There, I’ve made one person happy today.

Then I remember why I actually came down to the drone bay and start butting my head against the console I just deployed the cutter drones from. Right, bullets. Okay, that’s fine. I’ll manage that later.

It’s been a long couple days. I’m very tired, I haven’t slept much.

I’ve been too busy looking over the station’s internal sensor logs.

It’s kind of weird, you know? All those years of using the security scans and electrical maps and a dozen other devices and patterns to look over the interior of the station, and I never put it together. Mostly because every time I’m looking for something, it’s either a hull breach or a power surge or an invading killbot. Or, alternately, I’m trying to figure out the best path to a gun or something. I’m not really taking the time to casually look at patterns.

Now, though, I can see the gaps. Sort of. It’s not just that there’s spots the sensors don’t reach, it’s that the station is actively working to obfuscate *where* the blind spots are. I can’t even tell exactly where it doesn’t want me to go, and I’m sure that if I tried, it’d pull some other trick. I wonder, how many times have I accidentally gotten close, only to be forced to respond to a false alarm, or encountered a sealed door?

I already miss my sister.

I knew her for less than a few days, but now that I’ve met her, now that I *know*, it hurts a lot more to try to go back to normal.

She was me. Not just like me, but me, through and through. And she said something that’s stuck with me. That there’s places she can’t go, places she can’t feel. And now that I’m looking, I can see it too; the station keeping me in my own private isolation from… myself, I guess.

The cleaner nanoswarm swirls around my paws, and my tail droops, because I know it’s not her. She’s not *here* right now.

I don’t even really know where to start looking. I can’t ask Ennos or Glitter or Jom. I can’t exactly enlist the dog to help. Dyn… I still need to talk to her about establishing a command structure, and trying to at least a little bit change the automation restrictions. I can’t bother her with this, not now, when it’s right up there with my personal ghosts.

I suppose the station is more haunted than I thought.

I find myself wandering, wondering if maybe I should just let it go. Just give up, and go back to how thing were, to what I’m obviously being pushed toward. Or maybe just ‘allowed’ to do. But that doesn’t sit right with me. The thought bothers me continually though, as I catch up on some chores I’ve left undone. Recalibrating targeting systems on point defense guns and doing some basic spot welding on emergency air seals. It’s almost calming, easy work that I could do in my sleep if I needed to. I think I actually have done some of this in my sleep before, back when I was trying to see if hypnotic ideation worked on me. It didn’t really.

It’s easy, when I’m doing this, using my paws in ways they weren’t designed for, on tools that weren’t designed for paws in turn, to get lost in the work. To just fall into a cycle of frustration and triumph as I keep going down an eternal checklist. To think that it might not be so bad, to just let this be my life forever.

But I can’t do that, and I know it. I have to start searching somewhere. And I have some ideas. I decide to try setting up my own sensor network, and start looking through manufacturing plans for small energy beacons I can scatter around. Maybe get Jom to deploy some long range depth sweepers outside the station’s range of influence, to give me independent reports on our deck contents. Beyond that, if Dyn and I can actually set up a safe command structure, the Last Ship will be coming back in a week or so; maybe I can hire some people off it who will be less restricted than the rest of us to help out. I might have to offer hazard pay though.

And, as if summoned by me even thinking of trying to look for something, an alarm sounds.

And for a moment, I wonder if maybe I should just ignore it. Let the station try to stall me; I won’t play this game forever.

Of course, I’m too curious to not check. Because of course I am. Is this surprising? No. No, the surprising thing is that this isn’t a random incoming communication or a strange internal error. It’s Jom, sending a request for assistance, juking incoming beam weapon fire from a quartet of hunter killer drones as he rockets back toward the station.

I am *pretty* sure the station cannot trigger hidden ancient drone traps, just to distract me. Pretty sure.

Pretty sure?

It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. Because if it can, then the level of resistance I’m up against is more than I expected. And I cannot, *will not*, ignore this one.

Of course, when I’m already in one of the point defense gun targeting pods because I decided here was as good a place as any to curl up and start flipping through scanner schematics, the problem is a little lesser than it could be otherwise.

The pursuit drones do not have good tracking, which usually means they don’t have good scanners of their own, or bad processing time. Which makes it almost trivial to unleash a spread pattern suppression salvo that whips past Jom and takes out three of his assailants before the drones even register that something is firing at them. Sometimes, *sometimes*, the station feels safe to me, and when the overlapped stealth fields that roughly half our total power expenditure goes into make stuff like this easy, it’s certainly one of those times.

Jom pivots on an invisible axis, and shreds the remaining drone, letting the maser beam melt off some of his radiation ablative paint as he positions himself for the kill.

The alarm doesn’t shut off, it just changes tone. This time one to an air leak on a lower deck.

I set a repair routine for it; a task that would have used to take me an hour to do, but I can now just use acknowledged words to do in a minute. The repair bot sets off, and I get back to my search for an external scanner source. Twenty minutes later, when I start looking into using reactive code to search for security discrepancies, a dozen new alerts show up in my AR display, of mechanical failures across the station.

Alright. Enough of this.

“Hey Dyn.” I call across internal comms. It takes a minute, but she does eventually answer through the physical speak that she carries around with a terse word of acknowledgement. “I need your help with something big.”

I’m so tired. Physically, emotionally, and on a more philosophical level, I’m tired of letting the station get away with this. I don’t know if changing the command protocols will make the difference, and I don’t know if trusting Dyn is the right call. But I’m so, so, so tired of…

Of doing nothing. Of being afraid of changing anything.

My friends deserve a safe home. My sister deserves a safe home. *I* deserve a safe home.

I don’t want to be tired anymore.