Bryce

“Hey, Thea? Would you mind explaining why a quarter of the station just depressurized?” I continued to type at the terminal while I ignored the sirens and flashing lights. Sections of the station were flashing red on my heads-up display, including the elevator that I needed to get back to the shuttle.

We were in an old Omni-Tech doll factory. It was supposed to have been shut down due to lack of funding. Turns out ‘lack of funding’ is corporate speak for ‘the dolls went crazy and killed everybody.’ The funny part was that Omni-Tech was still paying for the factory. So, ‘lack of funding’ wasn’t even remotely true.

You would think that once all the workers were killed by some sort of horrifying technical glitch, the company would stop paying to run the factory. But the truth was that things like this slipped through the cracks all the time. Somebody was still collecting a paycheck. And it was probably a pretty substantial one.

I was just hoping that it was a scientist trying to fund their private research and not some middle manager lining their pockets. Or even worse, somebody higher up who actually wanted murder dolls rampaging across the network. You never really knew with mega-corporations.

Thea’s face appeared in my heads-up-display to interrupt my musings. Something was definitely on fire behind her.

“Oh, hey Bryce, how’s it going? There’s nothing to worry about down here.” Thea flinched as something exploded. “On an unrelated note, you may want to speed things up over there.”

“You realize that this is a video call, right?” I asked.

Thea’s eyes went wide. “What was that? I couldn’t hear you. I think I’m going through a tunnel.” Thea turned to somebody off screen and whispered. “Softie, how do I turn off a video call?”

“Focus on the red x in the corner.” I heard Sora say, right before the call cut off.

I couldn’t help but smile. Mostly because of Thea’s antics, but also because I finally found the attribution file.

The file contained the ID of the head researcher, and hopefully, I’d be able to use that to locate them. Of course, there was no guarantee they were still alive. Most of the factory workers had been killed, but it was the only lead we had left.

I copied down the ID and the bank routing information for the funds that Omni-Tech had been sending. I figured that if we couldn’t find the researcher, then we could always use the extra income. Especially since I still hadn’t figured out how to use Rajak’s vault key.

“Just finished up here, and I’m heading to the shuttle. Are you two ready to go?” I sent the message into the feed for Thea and Sora.

“Yep! All good here.” Thea responded.

“Be careful on your way out,” Sora added. “Thea found the main storage and blew the doors open. Now there are hundreds of dolls crawling all over the station.”

“Okay wait, that makes me seem like the bad guy here.” Thea sounded indignant. “Softie dared me to do it, it’s their fault.”

I sighed. “Were you at least able to get the schematics before unleashing the cyborg-zombie apocalypse?”

“Yeah, we got the originals, and the modified versions they were testing,” Sora said. “We also set aside some of the manufacturing equipment.”

“Alright, I’ll see you soon.” I stood from the desk and walked to the center of the control room.

If I was going to have to deal with rabid dolls, then I sure as the hells was going to be ready for it. So, I cast a few support spells to protect myself, then followed that up with another spell that I had been playing with in my free time.

A semi-transparent green saber materialized in my right hand. The curved blade had a decent heft to it, despite being made of crystalized mana.

Rajak had given me the idea, and I thought I could improve on his design. At one point, the djinn had used 6 swords at once. I didn’t have 6 arms, which meant I couldn’t do that. But what I could do was shove a ton of mana into a single sword and concentrate it down into a mono-molecular edge. The result was a deadly blade that could cut through nearly anything that wasn’t enchanted.

Even if something was enchanted, then it was just a matter of overloading the enchantment with my own mana.

I really enjoyed the blade and had even downloaded several programs to help me fight with it. I wasn’t perfect, but I had gotten decently skilled. Besides, practicing with it was strangely meditative.

Feeling both armed and protected, I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.

Directly in front of me was the only other set of doors. They belonged to the elevator that would, under other circumstances, lead me to our shuttle docked two decks below.

However, the elevator shaft was no longer pressurized, which meant I couldn’t use it without an EVA suit. I would have to thank Thea for this little complication later.

Plotting my revenge kept a smile on my face as I pulled up the station schematics. I found what I was looking for, and counted my steps to a point that was about three meters from the control room doors.

Triple checking the schematics, I knelt down on the floor and tried to find any indication that this was the right spot. There wasn’t any, because why would there be? So, I took a deep breath, and stabbed through the floor. There wasn’t any sign of explosive decompression, so I continued cutting.

A rough circle cutout of the floor dropped to the level below with a loud bang. I followed it down and was met by the curious gazes of three dolls.

Most of their organic parts were already beginning to decay, which caused their cybernetic frame to show through rotted flesh. It was disgusting.

Even in the best of times, dolls were distinctly inhuman. They lived in a perpetual uncanny valley that I had always found really creepy, but the way these three charged at me was monstrous.

The one in the lead was compensating for a broken leg by running on its three remaining limbs, and it leapt at me from nearly four meters away.

I hadn’t been expecting the doll to be able to close the distance that quickly, and could only sidestep the attack because of my spell-enhanced reflexes.

My first impulse was to cut into the doll as it moved past me, but I was forced to duck under the attack of another doll. It was using one of its otherwise useless arms as a makeshift weapon.

I came out of the ducked dodge with a retaliatory swipe towards the doll’s mid-section, cutting it cleanly in two, and kicking the still moving torso towards the last doll.

With those two thoroughly distracted, I spun towards the tri-pedal doll just in time to catch it mid-charge. I slashed downwards, removing the doll’s head, before stomping on its body and bringing it to a full stop.

By this time, the other two dolls had recovered. Okay, the last doll had recovered. The first one was still just a torso with one working arm. But the way it was crawling towards me was very menacing.

This last doll standing was the only one fully intact, and it seemed a lot more cautious than the other two. I held my sword out between the two of us as I circled away from its crawling friend.

“I’m not here to kill you,” I said. The doll tilted its head. It seemed unexpectedly intelligent, so I continued with my explanation. “I’ll defend myself, but I need to get to my shuttle on the deck below. If you let me go, I won’t have to kill you.”

The doll took a step forward, placing its foot on the head of the one still crawling towards me and stepping down hard to crush its skull. It then looked at me and nodded before backing away slowly.

I returned a cautious nod as I pulled up the station schematics and found the next spot for me to drop through. The doll watched impassively while I cut a hole through the floor. It raised a hand and waved as I finished.

I mimicked the gesture before dropping to the lower deck.

We had docked the shuttle at one of the auxiliary airlocks on the far side of the station, which meant it was still a fair distance from where I dropped through.

Thankfully, I didn’t run into any more of the dolls, but the long walk meant that Thea and Sora were already waiting for me on a pair of cargo crates outside of the airlock by the time I got there.

“Hey, captain,” Sora greeted. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yeah, I found the attribution file ,” I said. “We shouldn’t have too much of an issue tracking down the head of research, assuming they’re still alive.”

“Are they really going to be able to create a new body for Esme?” Thea asked.

I shrugged as I approached the airlock and opened it.

We didn’t have a large shuttle. It had enough seating for 4 people and a modest cargo area. Transporting the two crates that Thea and Sora had set aside was going to be a tight fit.

“Honestly, there’s no way to know.” I called back as I boarded the shuttle. “At the very least, the schematics and equipment are a step in the right direction.”

~~~~

Eight hours later and I was sitting at the terminal in the captain’s quarters with nothing more than a name, Dr. Phaylex. I didn’t even have a way to contact the doctor. There wasn’t even a gender or species listed for them

The lack of information made an unfortunate amount of sense. Dr. Phaylex had been involved in a nearly silent lawsuit against Omni-tech a couple of months before the factory went silent. They had settled the lawsuit out of court, and Dr. Phaylex left to work for Legion. After that, they just disappeared.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what happened. Phaylex found a problem with the dolls, tried to take Omni-tech to court about it, and wasn’t happy with the results. They probably settled, then sabotaged the factory after securing protection from Legion.

Legion was the largest private military company in the network, and the obvious choice to fund Dr. Phaylex’s research. Hells, they would have been my first choice in trying to find Esme a new body if it weren’t for the fact that they had ongoing protection contracts with nearly every mega-corporation. Including EVI corp, who had a sizable bounty out for my capture.

What made Legion such an obvious choice was the fact that they almost exclusively employed powerful necromancers to fill their ranks. It wasn’t uncommon for a Legion policing force to consist of fewer than a dozen living people controlling thousands of undead.

The company was in constant need of more and stronger corpses to animate. Artificial bodies would be a major opportunity for them.

Of course, right now, the ‘why’ mattered a lot less than the ‘where’ or even the ‘who.’ I still had a few Legion contacts from my days as New Eden’s executive, but I wasn’t sure if I could trust them or if they’d be willing to talk to me.

Even if they would talk to me, then what were the chances that they’d put me in contact with somebody under their protection? I didn’t think the odds were all that great.

The situation was a bit of a nightmare, but I was running out of options.