“The codecat wanted me to tell you they’re gonna be trying something with one of the living programs. Also. Why are you down here?” Dyn’s voice radiates through the small gap in the bulkhead that I’ve been wedged into for the better part of an hour.

I do not know how she knows I am down here, because I am inside a wall, with only a small layer of secondary alloy keeping me from the void of space, and she would have had to have gone through three internal airlocks, and two crew hazard warning projections, just to get to where she can stand and yell at me.

They sent Dyn, of all people. The least social person on the whole station. It’s pretty transparently a bid for more information, and I appreciate the relative subtlety, compared to, I dunno, sending Dog. Or trying to wedge Jom down here in the access tubes.

“They” is my sisters. Because they know I won’t tell them anything.

Now, we are nine. It seems poetic, but I can’t remember why. I think there was an old Chinese myth about something like this, but I don’t have time to cross reference my cultural archives.

Even our newest sister, an impression of a cat named Lily, locked in a feline shaped violently sliced moment of time, doesn’t quite know what I’m doing. She’s the oldest of us, now. She and Alice watched all eight timelines, all the way through. Thirty three hundred years, give or take. She didn’t have the same pressures as I did, most of the time, but she is… old.

And she got to spend all that time with our mom.

I still think of Alice that way. I don’t know why. I kind of know why. I’m over four hundred years old and I still want to go back to being a dumb kitten, sitting in her lap. I don’t need the world to make sense, I just want to eat a vat treat, be warm, and let the hours go by.

But I barely knew Alice, even if I can respect beyond words the dedication it would take someone to watch for thousands of years, looking for an opportunity. To give everything, not to try to survive, but to try to win.

I could barely last ten years before I started trying to fix things. I suck at it, but I still keep trying.

This new Lily has spent thousands of years getting to know Alice. Who she was, who she became, who she ended up at the end. I could ask so many questions.

But I’m down here instead, in the outer guts of the station.

I’m not jealous, to be clear. I’m glad one of us knew our mom so well.

But our mom never lived past a certain point in this timeline. In most of our timelines. Not that the other ones ever existed, anymore.

Time travel makes my head hurt. And that’s on top of cat-adapted painkillers, and one hell of an uplift program. I’m almost glad the time machine melted when Lily came through. Almost. It would have been nice to have had a backup plan.

What a stupid time machine. A one way bridge of information that requires the sacrifice of a whole timeline. I’m mad at it. I’m glad it melted. I should go melt it more.

The other Lily’s, my sisters who were already here, they don’t know what was passed on to me. Neither does the one who brought the message, really.

And I’m not telling them. I told them I won’t. Not can’t, not shouldn’t. Just won’t. I’ve been avoiding them.

So I guess they decided getting the least talkative human on the station to come chat with me while I was working was a good idea?

Oh right, Dyn is still hanging out there. “Sorry Dyn!” I call through the metal tube I’m in.

I hear her grunt in affirmation. And then a few seconds later, a grudging addition of information, “Good opportunity to clean my gun.”

Her gun is a paramaterial rifle that shoots bullets with exactly enough electromagnetic force to damage the target, unless the target is the inside of a hull keeping vacuum out. I made it myself, it’s a flagrant violation of causal physics, and I’m very proud of it.

It does not require cleaning. “Your gun doesn’t need cleaning!” I yowl back at her, trying not to yelp as the fur of one of my paws gets pinched in a small divot and nearly yanked out.

“My other gun.” Dyn clarifies. “One of them.” She further clarifies.

I’ve gotta ask. I keep forgetting, but I absolutely need to know before I lose the chance. “Where do you keep finding those?”

Dyn’s pause is almost as heavy as the feeling of open space on the other side of the hull plate. If open space could be a little sarcastic. “There’s a lot of stuff on this station.” She says.

I mean, that’s technically correct, I guess. I… guess when you go a couple hundred years without really seeing that much paw to paw combat, you can tend to stop thinking of guns as something worth picking up.

Maybe I should start sorting the armories. Probably don’t have time though.

“Worrying.” I say instead. I am deflecting, because the station isn’t the only thing with effective stealth shielding, and I have no intention of giving Dyn more information. “Anyway, I’m installing these anchor points, to try to make this part of the station less rattley when the engines fire. Because, you know, the engines are just fifteen different ships I’ve glued into the hull and the station wasn’t supposed to move that way.”

Wait, that’s not deflecting at all! My treasonous voice is working against me.

I briefly wonder if my psychic imprint of a sister actually can compel me to speak. She is, after all, the source of all our ‘voices’. But while I know she can change the words sometimes to her own, I don’t think she can actually make me say anything.

Probably.

Maybe? Look, life has gotten weird.

“Need some help?” Dyn asks simply.

“I…” I do? Kind of. I mean, I don’t need help. I haven’t needed help for a long time. But it would be handy to have hands in play. But also, I don’t particularly want Dyn harvesting information off me. “Have it handled.” I lie. Mostly. “Mostly.”

“You know there’s a lot of old stories about cats being good liars.” Dyn comments. “I mean, I knew most stories were fiction, but wow.”

Okay, I’m being sassed by Dyn. Things have clearly gotten dire. “What happened to the girl who was afraid to talk to me?” I demand, projected ethereal voice echoing up the metal tube I’m in.

I can almost hear Dyn scowling at me. “You mean when you got me kicked out of my home, and I wasn’t talking to outsiders?” She sarcastically snipes at me.

“Exactly!”

“It’s been almost a year. Am I still an outsider?” She asks.

Oh.

It’s been almost a year?

I’ve lost track of time. Which I guess happens, as stuff keeps moving. I’ve got a lot to do, and not much time to do it in, and every time I check the clock it’s next week. Which hasn’t really been much of a problem, up until…

“You just reminded me that I still need to get you into a vivification pod before…”

“What, before I burnout?” Dyn snorts, and I realize her voice is echoing different. I glance up to see her sliding down the tube I’m in, realizing her form is a lot slimmer than I remember, even with all the tools hanging off her rigging. She perches next to me, and braces her palms against the anchor mount I’m working on, holding it steady while I get the weld right. “I’m fine.”

She’s not fine. She’s… what, eighty, ninety years old? Humans aren’t built to live engineer lives that long. Certainly not if they’re living on ancient, barely maintained space habitats, with what cannot be proper nutrition. For… for most of their lives. Not now. To be clear, I mean Dyn’s old home, not… this… station. This specific ancient barely maintained poor-nutrition station.

This is mostly just proving that I need to get her body restored.

“New cybernetics.” I offer. “Replacement organs. Get rid of all those scars, maybe. Keep you alive for another fifty years?”

Dyn grunts. “Don’t need it.”

Don’t need what, Dyn?! A functioning body?! “Yes you do!” I protest. “You’re dying, and you don’t have to be! Get in the stupid pod, and enjoy feeling like you don’t have two different cancers at the same time. I’m honestly shocked you’re even alive at all!”

We move on to the next anchor, working like professionals even as we scrap like kittens. Dyn deflects, inexpertly, and I have to come to terms with the fact that despite being the worst at diplomacy, I’m still better than her. “Why are we shoring this area up anyway?” She asks, perhaps remembering her initial mission my sisters sent her on.

“I dunno, let’s say… there’s an old Free Mars frigate that’s gonna impact us in a couple months, and it’s easier to shift the station on an axis than to blow it up.” I answer.

Dyn raises her eyebrows as her deflection somehow works. “Really?”

“Technically yes.” I answer, with a fancy and powerful cat term for ‘not quite lying’. I haven’t had to use that one in a long time, but I find that it dusts off alright. “Also don’t change the subject.”

The young woman in a dying body sighs next to me, more emotion in it that I think I’ve heard from her before. Her hands still hold the anchor steady, but her voice is… tired. “I’m not getting in the pod, girl.” She says quietly, voice wavering but resolute. “I don’t even remember how old I am. I worked my whole life for my people, and they threw me away. I’m done.” She shifts overhead, and I make the final weld before we move on, her lagging behind me just a bit. “I did my job. I’m done.”

There’s a lot of things that bounce around my head. I could tell her that I’m older, and I’m still going. That I’m tired, and I’m still going. I could fight her head to head on any of the flare-level stupid things she just said.

But I’ve been hanging out with Glitter a lot lately, and I’ve gotten a much better idea of how to break someone’s arguments.

“You said it was only almost a year.” I say as I unfold the flexalloy anchor and move one end while Dyn mechanically braces the other in the proper spot. I’ve marked the spots already, it’s not supposed to be that impressive, but I legitimately don’t think she looked at the mark before she started moving.

“What?” The kid asks, confused.

“Since you started working for your people. You said you’d only been here almost a year. I was paying attention this time.” I’ve gotten better at paying attention. Sort of. My sister was trying to teach me some mindfulness exercises. It’s not working, I’m just constantly mindful of all the different things trying to kill us. Which, I mean, makes me empathize with Ennos a lot more.

“I…” Dyn stops talking, and the anchor slips just before I start the weld. I glance up, and she’s pushed herself against the back of the tube, hands not holding the anchor in place anymore, looking down at me with something between confusion and fear. “What?”

“Dyn, I may be awful at showing it, but you’ve been my people since the moment you set foot on this station.” I tell her softly. “Even when I didn’t trust you. Even if I wasn’t sure if you were one of the threats I‘d have to vent into space, like that one time a paperclipper got on board, or that one time a human who was a little too racist got on board, or that one time…” I could keep listing things. I don’t think I will. “You might’ve been a gamble, but you’ve always been welcome here. And… I don’t want you to go.”

What I don’t say is that I don’t know if I could handle that. I don’t know if I could take more people dying. Not like this, especially not like this, when the solution is right there and all Dyn has to do is take a vacation.

“You vented someone into space?” Dyn’s voice is scratchy as she takes exactly the wrong information away from that conversation.

Wow, that’s a question I don’t want to really answer! Let’s try anyway. “I’ve vented a lot of people into space.” I say. “Most of them awful people. Some of them just fools. They all died the same, though.”

The woman laughs. “Yeah, that happens.” She sucks in a rough breath. Silently moves back into position. We mechanically get back to work, but my heart’s even less in it now than it was before. “Give me some time.” She eventually says, as I’m welding the last anchor.

“Okay.” I say. “Just… don’t take too long.”

Dyn flips a tool out of her artificial hand, and flattens out an edge that shouldn’t be sticking up. “Why?” She asks. “You on some kind of deadline? Or am I?”

I flatten my ears and feel my tail droop without my control, a natural reaction to my terror over what’s coming up. “Yeah.” I whisper. “I’m waiting for something. Soon. Not sure what, but soon.”

She scoops me up and carries me on her shoulder as we glide out of the curved tube. Dyn opens her mouth to say something with a wry grin, probably going to compliment my perfect delivery of a spooky warning. Which is when an alarm sounds.

I tighten my claws through her work shirt, and Dyn jerks so hard she slams her head into the metal around us and pulls back trailing blood and inventing new swear words.

“Is that what you’re afraid of?!” Dyn demands. “Or was this just a stupid way to get me to hurt myself?!” She continues swearing.

I check my display. Check it against the timeline in my head that Second-Lily put there.

Dyn’s making jokes, but she shouldn’t.

We’re out of time.

I’m gonna have to adjust my plan.

“Command deck.” I meow out with cold determination. “Now.”

Dyn doesn’t hesitate to start running, and I start issuing commands, as the emergence event that just opened in our upper sensor array starts dropping invaders into my home.