The catwalk groaned under Kai Vexis's weight, its rusted bolts protesting three decades of neglect. He balanced on his haunches, magnetized gauntlets gripping the rail as his eyes swept the maze of decay below. The Undercroft sprawled endlessly in every direction a graveyard of twisted metal and flickering signs, where the desperate came to disappear and the forgotten came to die.
The package pressed against his ribs, warm despite the chill seeping through his jacket. Whatever lay inside that innocuous metal shell had cost someone serious credit. Enough to clear his slate with the Iron Syndicate, maybe even enough to buy passage off this rust bucket of a station. If he lived long enough to collect.
His wrist display pulsed amber. Two minutes, thirty-seven seconds.
The coordinates burned in his memory: sublevel C-7, grid marker Tau-9. Simple enough, except Tau-9 housed a derelict data shrine, its entrance choked with bioluminescent vines that hadn't grown there naturally. Nothing in the Undercroft grew naturally anymore.
Kai shifted his weight, bones creaking in protest. Forty-three years of running packages through the station's bowels had taught him to trust his instincts, and right now every instinct screamed wrong. The client's credits had transferred clean, no flags or traces, but the job stank of setup. Anonymous contacts always did.
Below him, something skittered through the shadows between the processing units. Kai caught a glimpse of too many legs moving too fast, then nothing. He exhaled slowly, watching his breath fog in the recycled air. The things that lived down here had stopped being entirely human years ago. The lucky ones had chosen their modifications.
One minute, forty-nine seconds.
The shrine squatted between two massive coolant pipes, its original purpose lost beneath layers of jury-rigged modifications. Corporate logos flickered across its surface Nexus Systems, Helix Dynamics, others worn too smooth to read. The bioluminescent vines pulsed in rhythm with some unseen heartbeat, casting sickly green shadows across the narrow maintenance corridor.
Kai dropped from the catwalk, his boots ringing against the grated floor. The sound echoed strangely here, as if the walls themselves were listening. He approached the shrine's entrance, noting the way the vines seemed to track his movement. Definitely not natural.
The package beeped.
Kai froze. The client had said nothing about timers, nothing about activation sequences. His fingers found the seam along the package's edge, peeling back a strip of synthetic tape. Beneath it, something that made his blood turn to ice water.
Biomech circuitry. Living wires that pulsed like arteries, their surfaces slick with synthetic blood. He'd seen tech like this before, in Syndicate torture chambers and black-market chop shops. The kind of modifications that required fresh neural tissue to function.
The shrine's entrance split open with a wet sound, like tearing meat.
Kai stumbled backward as the vines retracted, revealing an interior that belonged in a fever dream. The walls writhed with flesh-metal hybrid growths, their surfaces studded with blinking neural interfaces. Cables thick as his arm snaked across the ceiling, disappearing into organic ports that oozed clear fluid.
"Punctual as always, Runner."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, transmitted through bone conduction speakers hidden in the walls. A figure emerged from the shrine's depths, his movements too smooth, too precise. Half his face had been replaced with a jagged interface that cast harsh blue light across his remaining human features. A name tag hung crooked on his stained lab coat: Dr. M. Sylas Biointegration Specialist.
"Director Veyne extends his compliments," Sylas continued, his words carrying an electronic undertone. "Though I suspect you won't be in a position to appreciate them much longer."
The package detonated.
Not fire something worse. Pure energy erupted from the device, blue-white light that seemed to burn through reality itself. The shockwave caught Kai mid-dive, slamming him against a support beam with bone-rattling force. His vision whited out, ears ringing, the taste of copper flooding his mouth.
When the world came back into focus, his left arm was on fire.
Not burning. Changing.
Kai ripped off his glove with shaking fingers, watching in horror as his skin rippled like disturbed water. Veins of electric blue spread up his forearm, branching and dividing in patterns that hurt to look at directly. The flesh beneath began to part, revealing not bone and muscle but something far stranger.
Filaments emerged from the wounds hair-thin threads of living metal that tasted the air like serpents' tongues before retracting into his skin. Where they touched, his flesh sealed itself, leaving behind raised patterns that pulsed with their own light. A shattered hourglass, its fragments scattered across his forearm in sharp, angular lines.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Sylas approached with the measured gait of a man who had forgotten what fear meant. "The Biomech Virus. Forty years of development, countless test subjects, and you get to be the first successful integration."
Kai's vision flickered. For one impossible moment, he saw through someone else's eyes a vast industrial complex stretching to the horizon, filled with assembly lines that produced nothing human. Row upon row of biotanks containing half-formed abominations, their surfaces clouded with amniotic fluid. And a voice, cold as vacuum, cutting through the chaos: "The virus is the catalyst. Locate the Fragments. Begin the Protocol."
The vision shattered, leaving him gasping on the blood-slicked floor.
"The memories will come faster now," Sylas observed clinically. "The previous subjects couldn't handle the integration. Psychological breakdown, typically within the first hour. But you... you're different. Stronger."
Kai pushed himself upright, fighting waves of nausea. "What did you do to me?"
"Gave you purpose." Sylas gestured toward the writhing walls. "The station is dying, Runner. Has been for decades. Nexus Spire bleeds it dry while the Undercroft festers in its own waste. But Director Veyne has a vision a new evolution. One that doesn't require the old weaknesses."
The sound of boots on metal echoed through the corridor. Heavy, synchronized footfalls that meant Iron Legion enforcement squads. Kai's handler hadn't just sold him out they'd gift-wrapped him with a bow.
"I'd run if I were you," Sylas suggested with mock sympathy. "Though I suspect you won't get far."
Kai didn't make it fifty meters.
The Scrapjack dropped from an overhead maintenance shaft, its impact crater spider-webbing the floor plates. Seven feet of corporate ingenuity wrapped in chrome and malice, built for one purpose: turning soft targets into statistical casualties. Its optical sensors fixed on Kai with predatory focus as razor-edged limbs unfolded from its torso.
Standard Iron Legion hardware. Kai had outrun dozens of them over the years, knew their capabilities, their limitations. This time was different. This time he had nowhere to run.
The machine lunged with hydraulic precision, claws designed to shear through reinforced plating. Kai threw himself sideways, feeling displaced air ruffle his hair as the talons punched through the wall behind him. The Scrapjack wrenched itself free in a shower of sparks, already pivoting for a second strike.
Kai's infected arm moved without conscious thought.
His hand shot out, fingers wrapping around the machine's wrist joint with impossible strength. The moment flesh met metal, the virus erupted. Blue fire raced along the Scrapjack's limbs, its optical sensors strobing in electronic panic. Warning klaxons screamed from its vox-caster as its systems began to fail.
But it wasn't failing. It was changing.
The machine's chrome plating peeled away like molting skin, revealing the complex mechanisms beneath. Servo-motors twisted into new configurations. Hydraulic lines rerouted themselves through impossible geometries. The Scrapjack's death-scream became something else entirely a sound of rebirth.
Light exploded between them, searing Kai's retinas white. When vision returned, he stood alone in the corridor, his left arm encased in something that defied description. Part weapon, part organism, the appendage crackled with barely contained energy. Flexible as flesh, deadly as lightning a plasma whip that responded to his thoughts as naturally as his original limb.
The Scrapjack was gone. Not destroyed absorbed. Integrated. He could feel its memories swimming in the back of his mind, tactical subroutines and targeting protocols mixing with his own thoughts.
"This isn't happening," he whispered, watching energy play across his transformed flesh. "This can't be happening."
But the approaching footsteps said otherwise.
The Undercroft had become a war zone. Emergency klaxons wailed from every speaker as security bulkheads slammed shut, sealing off access routes with pneumatic finality. Searchlights carved through the perpetual gloom, seeking any trace of the runner who had somehow survived the impossible.
Kai pressed himself against a coolant pipe, feeling its vibrations through his spine as the recycling systems struggled to process the contaminated air. His reflection in the pipe's polished surface showed a stranger someone whose left arm writhed with alien circuitry, whose eyes now carried flecks of electric blue.
More memories surfaced unbidden. The factory from his vision expanded in his mind's eye, revealing production schedules and shipping manifests. Thousands of units. Tens of thousands. All bearing Director Veyne's authorization codes. All destined for worlds whose names meant nothing to him but everything to the voice that whispered in newly installed neural pathways.
The Protocol wasn't just a project. It was an invasion.
Searchlight beams swept past his hiding spot, accompanied by the heavy tread of enforcement squads. He counted at least three units thirty soldiers armed with pulse rifles and neural disruptors. Standard containment doctrine for biomech contamination: kill everything, sterilize the area, file the paperwork posthumously.
Kai clenched his transformed fist, watching energy dance between his fingers. The plasma whip responded to his emotions, growing brighter as anger replaced fear. Veyne had used him, infected him, turned him into a weapon for reasons he barely understood. But the virus had given him something in return power enough to fight back.
He could run. Find a cargo hauler bound for the outer rim, disappear into the black between stars. Let the station burn while he built a new life somewhere else. The smart play.
But the memories wouldn't let him. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw those production lines. Felt the cold satisfaction of the voice that commanded them. Heard the screams of the test subjects who hadn't been strong enough to survive integration.
How many others would Veyne sacrifice to perfect his process?
Kai stepped out of the shadows, his plasma whip uncoiling in a crackling display of force. The nearest searchlight found him immediately, its beam turning his transformed flesh into a constellation of light and shadow.
"This is Iron Legion Command," a voice boomed from overhead speakers. "Remain stationary. Do not resist."
Kai looked up at the security cameras, knowing Veyne was watching from his tower high above. Let him watch. Let him see what his virus had created.
"Come and get me," Kai whispered, and leaped into the neon-stained darkness.
Behind him, the Undercroft burned with the light of a new kind of war.