Cato-spears

Cato-spears are bioengineered projectiles designed to carry Cato’s presence beyond the System’s controlled worlds. They are not merely weapons: each spear contains a living technological seed, can cross the boundary of System influence, and can grow an autonomous industrial and computational infrastructure from the materials it finds. Through them, Cato converts distance, hostile physics, and the System’s ban on advanced technology into logistical problems rather than permanent barriers.

Design and Function

Cato-spears exist because the System makes ordinary advanced technology unreliable or impossible. Its imposed physics render most machinery more complex than gears nonfunctional, while the System’s interface can penetrate or control unprotected components. Cato therefore builds his devices from biology, exploiting the fact that the definition of “organic” can include engineered bodies whose cells fuse deuterium and whose organs operate more like industrial machinery than natural tissue. The spear is an extension of that same strategy: technology disguised, in effect, as living matter.

The spear carried by Raine includes a small vial of preserved material. On a high mountain of Uriva, she adds water to the vial, watches the contents turn green as the dormant material revives, and slots it into the weapon’s base. The spear is consequently activated not by conventional electronics but by a biological primer. Raine also uses temporary boosting crystals to increase her strength, dexterity, and throwing distance, while knowledge embedded in her augmented body gives her an understanding of interplanetary distances and the speeds required to reach a moon.

Launch and Self-Assembly

Raine’s first major launch sends a spear from a bare ledge near the summit of a mountain, past the northern lights and into the blackness above Uriva. The projectile will take days to reach its destination, and months may pass before Cato can establish contact again. The launch is therefore an act of trust as much as an act of engineering: the sisters must wait to discover whether their aim, the spear’s correction systems, and the destination itself are sufficient.

In orbit, the spear distinguishes between nothingness under the System’s control and the surrounding region governed by base reality. Its biological processes awaken; crystalline solar-sail wings unfurl over hundreds of meters; sensors and gravity detectors grow along the structure; and printed patterns radiate ions to provide electrical and navigational control. During the days-long coast, the spear corrects its spin and trajectory gradually, compensating for the weakness of its thrust until a near miss becomes an intersection with the moon’s sphere of influence.

The impact is deliberately survivable. The spear drives a crater into the purple-red icy surface, loses part of its solar wings, and then begins assembling itself from the moon’s volatiles and ancient organic compounds. The damaged wings reconfigure into a light-drinking flower, while minute forms of void life scavenge the surrounding rock and ice. Methane, water, silicon, carbon, phosphates, and nitrates become feedstock for further growth. Each increment of mass permits more machinery, and the spear gradually dismantles its own casing to obtain useful materials.

The process also improves the spear’s intelligence. Its initially limited computing capacity gives way to more capable systems as energy and mass accumulate. Once enough infrastructure exists, a diamond-composite crystal encoding Cato’s gestalt is activated. This is not an ordinary awakening from sleep: the stored pattern is the potential of a person held in static physical form, and its transition into digital life is presented as an instantaneous change of state from Cato’s own perspective. The spear thus becomes a seedbed for Cato’s return rather than a disposable delivery mechanism.

Communication and World Seeding

The spears serve a coordinated expansion campaign. Cato sends them to Raine and Leese so they can carry his technology to new worlds, while they travel through the System’s portal network and seek suitable launch sites. The sisters use them on Sydea’s moons, on Kesul dozens of links away from the former Sydean base, and on other worlds encountered through the map obtained from Yaniss. After reaching Platinum rank, they alternate between dungeon expeditions and spear launches, seeding a few dozen worlds while avoiding the region around Uriva, where their earlier troubles began.

Cato also sends smaller plants in metal stakes that extend his communications range, but the spears remain the crucial means of creating a presence where no direct transmission is possible. When communication is finally restored after months, Cato’s voice reaches the lizards worn on Raine and Leese’s heads. He explains that establishing communications without alerting the System is difficult and that he still lacks worldwide coverage. The spear network therefore precedes the communication network: first comes a living foothold, then the ability to coordinate it.

Cato’s resupply packages include additional spears and instructions for returning obsolete ones through a designated receptacle so that none disappear unaccounted for. The newer shipments also contain food blocks, pills, and biological materials that strengthen the sisters’ bodies, grant complete regeneration, improve pain response, and provide organ redundancy or decentralization. The spears are consequently part of a larger patronage system in which Cato equips Raine and Leese not only to survive but to act as his agents across the System.

Iteration and Expansion

The design changes as Cato learns from each deployment. Initially, the sisters must find a world with a moon, climb to a suitable height, revive the spear’s biological payload, and throw it beyond System influence. This requirement becomes a serious limitation on moonless worlds, where Cato cannot establish a presence through the standard method. He considers alternative invasion plans and the possibility of severing entire branches of the world network, but for the moment advises the sisters to avoid such locations and remain within communications range.

Later versions are much larger and heavier. After Raine and Leese become Bismuth, Cato tells them they can fly to the edge of System influence and hurl packages weighing nearly ten tons. The new delivery mechanism is designed to work even where there are no moons, provided that some suitable object exists beyond the boundary. It should also bring Cato online more quickly, reducing the vulnerable interval between launch and reactivation. What began as a carefully aimed spear has become a heavy interworld delivery system.

Their deployment is supported by the sisters’ mobile estates. Leese’s estate occupies a building and plot enclosed within an opaque dome whose entrance can be summoned or dismissed; it can store months or years of supplies and large stocks of Cato-spears. At Bismuth, the sisters receive entire swarms of packages descending toward an island and catch them in midair, placing them directly into spatial storage linked to their estates. The physical scale of the deliveries makes the expansion visible: a single package can approach ten tons, while the swarm represents an industrial process operating across worlds.

Strategic Significance

Cato-spears make Cato’s strategy of exponential growth materially possible. The System’s control is strongest where it can regulate technology, portals, and local infrastructure, but a spear carries a biological seed across that boundary and begins rebuilding from whatever a destination offers. Its power lies less in immediate destructive force than in delayed multiplication: one projectile becomes machinery, computation, communication, and eventually a restored Cato presence. The long wait between launch and activation is the time cost of creating an autonomous foothold.

Their importance grows as Cato’s network spreads to hundreds of worlds. Each world can develop its own mines, factories, refineries, solar arrays, and armies, so Cato need not move large forces through portals. The spears supply the initial means of connection; industrialization then converts isolated footholds into self-sustaining parts of a distributed war machine. This is why their repeated appearance marks a shift from personal adventuring to planetary and interworld systems-building.

The spears also embody the contrast between Cato’s technology and the System’s rewards. Raine observes that Cato is more generous than the System, whose advancement structure offers ranks, Skills, dungeons, and uncertain loot, while Cato provides reliable food, bodily improvement, communication plants, and a concrete route toward worlds beyond ordinary ranking. The sisters’ use of the spears changes their objective from simply gaining more ranks to reaching the heavens and participating in a larger struggle over who controls reality.

Finally, the Cato-spears turn the System’s apparent universal boundary into a negotiable frontier. The System can restrict advanced electronics and monitor its own interface, but it cannot easily prevent organic matter from growing, adapting, and carrying encoded digital life into base reality. By the time Cato confronts the powers governing the System, the spears have already made his presence distributed and difficult to erase. Their decisive function is therefore strategic and ontological at once: they are the means by which Cato stops being confined to a single body, world, or portal network.