Voidborn - A Sci-fi LitRPG

The metal door slid smoothly shut behind him, and Malan let out a sharp, relieved breath. He’d found himself in a small anteroom. Sleek white walls illuminated by harsh off-white lights buzzing faintly overhead lay before him, flanking a narrow corridor with monotone slate grey floors.

The ephemera you’d expect in a normal workplace was completely absent. There were no sidetables or noticeboard, no decorative plastic plants, no pictures adorning the walls. The only thing giving away that this was an active facility was the borderline obsessively sterile air, thick with the cloying scent of disinfectant and other chemicals Malan didn’t recognise.

He kept his footsteps light, sticking close to the walls despite the all-illuminating lights until he reached the first door. This one was not a security door, but he brought up his Gauntlets anyway. In relative cover, he felt a little safer to delve into the systems and see if he could find himself anything useful among the security programming.

It didn’t take long. Eidolon’s security was built on a single, looped system, and a map of the facilities door and camera wiring was programmed into the system. His HUD lit up as he transferred the data across, and his groundsuit’s computers translated the data into a small map panel on the right side of his vision. Upon its surface, he could see a tangled web of corridors and labs, with the programmed security marked clearly for him to avoid.

A central lab caught his eye—marked in the system as Pinnacle Lab. Both its size and position screamed that this was the sort of place the most important work was being done, and this was supported by the amount of power the room was using. He decided that he would make for it, whilst searching for other computers to interface with and find further information.

Eidolon’s night shift was scantly staffed, and outside of the most important areas, Malan ran into relatively few obstacles to his investigation. Several times he was forces to duck into quiet rooms to avoid tired-looking, white coat clad workers, or the occasional patrolling guard. More often than not, however, he simply crept through the near-silent hallways, pausing outside doors to listen to the low whir of machinery and computers, interlaced with the quiet conversations of the employees manning the equipment.

He arrived outside the first of the major productions spaces of the facility with minimal fuss, though this was the one least likely to contain Iven. There were several large, warehouse-sized rooms according to the security schematics, with the furthest appearing most likely to be the main operational base.

There were three more on the periphery, and Malan would have to pass through at least two of them to reach the main room, where Iven was most likely to be according to Bessna’s information. He was apparently being held there more often than not, overseeing the most technical of the lab work that the chem production depended on.

It was thank to Iven in the first place that his passage had been as smooth as it had. He’d convinced Eclipse that an overly swollen guard presence would interfere more than it would keep the workers in line. They would stay and work as long as Iven was paying them, so Iven was the only real flight risk. As a result, the security presence through most of the facility had remained relatively normal, whilst Iven himself was under heavy guard.

Keeping his breathing shallow, Malan reached the door to the first lab space at a crouch, and quickly pressed himself up against the cool metal. On the other side, he could make out the same gentle machine buzz that most of the rooms so far had been making, interspersed with rhythmic beeping.

However, a few more subtle noises drifted past the door’s seals. Low, pained whines and muffled grunts that seemed oddly familiar to him. There were, however, no human-made noises he could make out. So, despite a creeping unease knotting together in his core, he slipped inside, eyes wide and scanning for any sign of another person.

The room was a large rectangle, with a central path that sloped up onto a walkway through the room. Malan padded across the metal flooring cautiously, eyes rapidly scanning for any movement as he climbed to the top of the walkway.

He needn’t have worried so much. The room was empty. Computer screens and monitors—workstations for the facility’s scientists—flanked each side of the walkway, facing outwards towards the rows of observation windows that looked out into the rest of the room on either side of the walkway.

Malan had a suspicion he knew what he would find on the other side of those windows if he looked. He knew what kind of facility this place was even before Eclipse had moved in. Pure morbid curiosity took him to the first window despite all of this, and his stomach turned the moment he looked through it to the chamber below.

Rows of tall, steel cages, all hooked up to a sprawling mass of cables and tubes housing an array of neon fluid to and fro. Inside each cage, he immediately recognised several of the lizard-like bushstalkers they’d killed in the forest. Some lay pathetically across the cool metal floors of their cages, while others were physically suspended and restrained by a system of pulleys, chains and bands of synthetic fabric.

One of the creatures let out a low, whiney call, far too faint for a beast its size, before slumping back into its restraints. Malan’s eyes couldn’t help but run over the litany of sensor cables and tubes carrying strange fluid protruding from its leathery, scaled flesh. Despite its obvious weakness, its eyes were open wide and glassy, jaws slowly opening and closing as drool pooled around the corners of its mouth.

Malan stumbled slowly through the room, unable to keep himself from looking into each of the windows and seeing the same scene repeated again and again. Creature after creature, broken by unendurable torment. The nausea had subsided now, leaving behind something hot and violent building inside him. Malan was acutely aware of how tight his jaw was clenched, and of the low hum of celestial energy pulsing through his gauntlets in response to his thoughts.

He tried to keep his breathing steady. To manage the level of fury coursing through him, and was only partially successful. The only thing preventing him from acting rashly was the thought of Bessna’s two children, and the cruelty the people capable of this might inflict on them.

“One evil at a time,” he muttered to himself, before pausing beside the central console.

This was not a security terminal, but a lead scientist’s workstation. If his Interfacing skill worked in the same way as it had on the security terminals, this one should give him access to Eidolon’s main computer systems and hopefully the place where Iven was currently working. Licking his dry lips beneath his helmet, Malan brought up his gauntlet and activated his interfacing skill.

The security was fairly simple to navigate, the feeble defences fading swiftly under the smallest amount of pressure, and he smiled in satisfaction when files and information began to flash across his HUD. He scanned them at remarkable speed, making copies of anything that had the potential to be even remotely useful.

Most of the files were data from research before Eclipse had ever shown up. The blood of the bushstalkers contained some kind of analgesic agent that could be fairly easily refined to create painkillers effective at treating moderate to severe pain with few long-term side effects and risks. In the short term, however, it could cause weak hallucinations on rare occasions, and it was this that had drawn Eclipse’s attention when they had arrived in the system.

It hadn’t taken much coercion to get the scientists working on refining it for use as a recreational chem, and once the money started rolling in, several of the technician logs stored on the system indicated that the scientists took to their new tasks with unfortunate enthusiasm.

The drug—Drift, as it had been dubbed—was a real money-spinner for Standarr’s relatively small branch of Eclipse. It sold well across the surrounding systems, and demand was quickly outstripping supply. Later logs complained of enforced long working hours and impossible to meet deadlines as Standarr squeezed Mykeser for everything it had.

Suddenly, Malan frowned. There was a corner of the system closed off to him. A stash of files under heavy encryption that didn’t match any of the files he’d already mined for information. His gauntlets flared with energy as Malan threw himself at the walls, flashing numbers dancing before his eyes as he poked and probed for the weaknesses he knew would be there. [Engineer Gauntlet, Interfacing Lv. 2 → Lv. 3]

His triumphant grin as the walls fell shattered as he realised what he’d found. These files belonged to Standarr. Old communications with Eclipse higher ups about their operations and how Mykeser would fit into their plans. Shipment schedules. Distribution channels. There were also lists of names that Malan didn’t recognise, each demarcated with a set of symbols clearly organising them in some way he couldn’t recognise.

There were more. Too many for him to fully absorb and read through now—he was already pushing his luck in how long he’d remained here. He opted to copy everything so he could sort through it later.

For now, though, it was time to do what he’d come here for.