amalgam

She remembered the voice in her ear, so familiar and so scathing. So hateful where before it had been calm and steady. She remembered the flying beast, and a battle more intense than any she had remembered since waking up. She remembered the red rage of battle, being thrown in a room on her ship, and being unable to contain herself any longer.

She remembered lashing out at everything surrounding her. A crimson mist, and the searing pain. The faintness, the darkness, the silence.

Now, of course, she woke to light filtered through orange glass, a number of Corpus bioengineers standing above her. She remembered these men. These men, who made the Amalgams at the mandate of the enemy. She felt the rage course through her again, the furor, the urge to roar into the sky and make them pay for the Sentients’ crimes. Now they had held her captive. She, who would never stand for being captured, not for long.

But then, just like that, she felt the anger forcibly dampened, leaving her with the confusion of the situation and the fear of what might be happening. It left her clear-headed, and in that state of mind, she was able to better assess the situation.

These were Alad’s bioengineers, she knew that much. She had seen them before, behind the veil of Transference. And this, was one of the pods that normally was used to make Amalgams. The men stood over her, tapping on tablets and checking display monitors that showed vital signs in the Corpus language, something she couldn’t yet read. As they noticed her awake, they spoke in their strange tongue, a constructed language based around the most “profitable” letters of the old Orokin alphabet.

Looking to her left, past the scientists, she saw a piece of Sentient, held in the same capture device as the Conculysts she had found prior. However, this one was… strange. This didn’t resemble a piece of Hunhow at all, and she had fought many. Nor did it appear as one of the Mimics that she now knew were the drones of her once-beloved mother. This one was… unique. It felt almost as if it was watching her through the glowing ports upon its surface. She remembered that feeling, it was like being back on her ship, interacting with perhaps the only friendly Sentient she had ever met.

The bioengineers chattered a bit, then the glass keeping her inside slowly withdrew into the pod, and she slowly sat upright. Her whole body was sore and achey, all except for her right arm. She looked down at herself. For the most part, she was intact. No scars, no marks, nothing that wasn’t already there. Her clothes were gone, leaving her only with her boxer shorts and the binder she wore beneath her clothes to keep her developing body out of the way of combat.

She shuddered a bit at the idea that any of these men had seen below this, let alone Alad himself.

When she reached her right arm, she found a seam of scar tissue blending sharply into a metallic substance, of orange and sky blue. She could move it the same as normal, it seemed very flexible and mutable. Almost like the skin of a warframe, but it looked less like the forms that the helminth strain tended to take, and more like the general patterns of…

… of Sentient biology.

Following her arm downward, she first found the characteristic synovia, making up the bulk of her upper arm. Then, the hollow forms that looked as if they should have ruined her arm’s structural integrity, but held up possibly even better than her own flesh and blood arm used to. At the very end, mechanical-looking hand with five long, thin, clawed fingers, very similar to the flying beast she had fought before.

It didn’t make sense. How was she able to be amalgamized? She was a ‘void devil’. Would she even be able to use her powers anymore? Who was she a slave to now, and how had she been captured on her own ship?

Her mind went to the being they called Mischief. The only of the Sentients to achieve a form of Transference, be that through some special interfacing or through the wiles of the Void which rendered him sterile, he preferred to command their ship and interact with the world through the warframe called Volt. He hadn’t yet stabbed them in the back, and had provided crucial intel after the Lotus had abandoned them. It was unlikely that he would stab them in the back unless they found him and reprogrammed him, and they hadn’t yet. But he had grown reclusive since the abandonment.

… Had he done this?

She had never seen any pieces of his true body, but this arm didn’t match any of the pieces of the Sentients she knew of. And for that matter, what reason did he have to, apparently, save her life? She remembered the crimson mist where her arm once was. The searing pain. But she also remembered the fury and the hateful things she had said. So… why? And how had he convinced a self-interested piece of work like Alad V to do this? Was he doing the same things Natah was doing, when all he wanted now was to be a free man?

She scanned around the room. The bioengineers were taking notes on this Amalgam they were commissioned to make. She watched them carefully; it was unlikely they knew who and what she was, and they certainly didn’t know that she should never have been able to amalgamate this way, due to the power of the Void running through her. For all they knew, she was a lucky motherfucker from Fortuna. A Solaris, just about to begin her eternal labor, who had figured out how to circumvent Nef Anyo’s terrible debts and receive an experimental augment in exchange for the constant threat on her life. It was likely they didn’t care. Alad had given the order, and if he gave the order, they were required to follow, regardless of the subject.

Open hand. Close hand.

She could feel it. Just like her old arm, she had full feeling. Like nothing had even changed,

Open again, close again.

She never thought she would need to have legitimate dealings with the Corpus in her own skin. Her only dealings thus far had been beneath iron skin, with guns. The way they were calmly watching her, they couldn’t know. No one knew but the Quills and the twin queens. To anyone else, her and her fellows were silent golems bringing death to empires. But speaking with them, right now, was far better than being undressed. They didn’t need to know.

“… Gentlemen.” She began, with an even, civil tone. “Where are my clothes.”

“Miss, we were asked to keep you under close observation until-”

“Where. Are. My clothes. Observation or not, do not a single one of you feel uncouth looking at a half-naked teenager? I’m sure it would make the both of us feel better if you would let me put a shirt on.”

“Well yes but- your shirt, it’s-”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“In the… in the locker, over there.”

She stood up, and felt her joints pop like those of someone thrice her age. Yeah, that about summed it up, didn’t it. She crossed the lab and opened the locker, to find her clothing waiting inside. Most of it was remarkably clean for what she had come to believe had happened. Not more than a few spatters across the front of her vest. But her right sleeve? Dyed almost black with stiff, dried blood, and torn to ribbons, with bits of bone and drying flesh still clinging to it, as well as tiny fragments of the same strange material that her new arm was made of.

It confirmed her suspicions – she had somehow detonated her own arm in a blind rage.

But it was a pleasure to dress back into her outfit either way. The synovia and bulky shoulder of her new appendage didn’t quite fit into her old sleeve, but she accommodated by tearing the sleeve off, wholesale, and tossing it into a nearby stream of free-flowing plasma, where it was instantly obliterated harmlessly.

She sat back on the bed she had woken on, and began to lace her thigh-high workboots. “So, must be a shock to you. Getting the call and not getting the order to completely overtake your fellow crewmen’s brains in a gruesome manner you would never wish on anyone, huh.”

The bioengineer was taken aback. “I- wh-”

“Yeah Alad’s kinda like that, huh. It’s like the Zanuka days all over again with the horrifying experiments on living specimens, except this time he’s being held at gunpoint by things that literally everyone thought were extinct. Well, better than being infested I guess. Even he thought that shit blows.”

“How do you know any of this?!”

“Oh, you know, grapevine, solar rail spotters, pirate radio. Call it a hobby. Turns out when a man starts shooting up MOAs with modified infestation, people tend to notice when those MOAs show up in their colonies. And psh, finding a warframe to poke? Huge news all over the system as soon as others found the empty tomb. Pissed off a lot of Grineer meatheads, that’s for sure. As for those other things? I used to run delivery for Venus before this. You know, carting shit back and forth between the Solaris and other outposts? It’s a lowkey job, nothing that requires any terribly expensive augments… you know, for whatever ‘cheap’ quantifies under ol’ Neffy. I was making a delivery, and it turns out he’s got the damn things running patrol lookin’ for Tenno.”

“If you’re from Fortuna, why don’t you sound like them?”

“Easy, wasn’t born there. Grew up on Phobos. Contentious territory between you lot and the meatheads that wanna wipe everyone out. Can’t claim racial superiority when you look like ground meat, if you ask me, but what do I know.” That’s right, give ‘em the act. “Anyway, you wanna tell me how I got here? Last thing I remember I got caught by a squadron while I was doing a favor for an old pal in Cetus. Woke up here.”

“Well… from what we know, the Overseer was commissioned by a very rich, affluent young man, who brought you here alongside a young woman. They provided us a piece of a Sentient to work with, with the orders that we were only to perform Amalgamation on the missing appendage, and nothing more. We aren’t to turn down a request for such a high price. Profit above all else.”

Aha, that was the bitch. Jack and Anya, of course. They must be freaking out about now. Got the crazy bastard at both gunpoint and bankpoint. “Oh yeah! That’d be my sister and my boyfriend. She’s the medic for my little delivery crew and him? Think he’s the son of someone high up on the food chain. Took a liking to me after a few drop-offs and who am I to complain? Girl’s gotta profit, right? You got an in on where they might be?”

“They should still be with the Overseer.”

“Any chance I could get directions?”

“Miss, the Overseer’s laboratory is restricted access-”

“I can pay you once I get back to my ship.”

“… At the center of this Gas City. We were asked to keep you close, for the clients’ comfort. But be careful. I doubt the… thing, outside, or the things watching us, will take kindly to an Amalgam we weren’t commanded to make.”

“Oh, so Alad’s gotten himself in trouble again, eh?”

“We thought the Sentients were mere myth, or at best, weapons to be used against the Betrayers. They would be deployed alongside the Zanuka project. But then that was destroyed, and the Overseer grew curious about the scourge of the infestation. He vanished, and the next we heard of him, his life was saved by them… twice over. He wished to return that favor by not invoking their ire again. But then, he was approached by what he believed to be an old business partner, and asked if he might wish to regain his place on the Board of Directors… when he said yes, and the deal was given, he was appalled. But it turned out it wasn’t his old partner at all. Now he is enslaved, to the very Sentients we underestimated.”

“That’s rough stuff. That explain the big ugly moth tearing shit up outside?”

“It’s… insurance. It was bold of your associates to come here now.”

“They ain’t nothing if not bold, least when it comes to this.”

“It will be dangerous. Those mimics are everywhere...”

“Please, I’m not scared of some Sentient. You ever arm-wrestle a Tenno and win? I have. Big metal freak wasn’t nothing. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll alert the Overseer that you’re awake and on your way. You’ve been given full clearance.”

“Thanks. And tell my new buddy here not to worry, either.”

The door, made of distinctly Sentient material, slowly opened at her touch without even having to blast it open, and she made her exit into the metallic hallways of the Gas City where Alad V hid. When she was finally out of sight of the bioengineers, she reflexively cloaked beneath the power of the Void. It tingled her new arm a bit, but it spoke miles about the retention of her powers.

It stoked the fires of her rage to remember that mocking voice. The union of two fleshes, with the weaknesses of neither. A taunt, referring to the Amalgams. They worked to undo their inborn weakness, but the Amalgams sacrificed their adaptive nature in exchange. It made her want to blow the entire city to shit.

...but again, something jolted her, soothing her rage. She blinked a little bit, for she’d had a flash of vision in the moment of the jolt. Something, floating in the depths of space. Almost like a ship, but it might have also been nothing. It was probably nothing.

With her level head, suddenly it made sense. She was now considered an Amalgam. The union of two fleshes, with the weaknesses of neither.

But she was also alone, without even a warframe to hide behind. And to hear that engineer tell it, Natah’s eyes were everywhere.

This might be the most dangerous mission yet, and it wasn’t even one she asked for.