Wintergreen

My suit motion sensor lit up. I checked my weapons: I didn't have any. Just fists. Size was consistent with one of the other side's light infantry fighters. IFF was hostile red. It cleared the corner. And kept going. A vertical handcart/gurney, rolling along on its own, its passenger me, dead and desiccated. It kept rolling past, turned another corner, vanished.

I looked around. The girders of the station were melted and shattered, severed sections floating next to those they shattered from. There were rents ripped straight into space I could see stars through. I pushed against the ground, testing. This was not zero G. Not the station's modest spin gravity. At a guess, a full one G. My suit sensors told me there was oxygen outside. I kept the helmet on.

Flickering lighting beckoned me towards the steady glow coming from what I knew was the entrance to the program psych office. Someone bade me come in and sit. I came in; I didn't sit. He kept talking.

There were a handful of pins and patches on several table, stacked next to a bunch of old phones and PDAs. They looked familiar, like they might be mine, but the logos on the pins didn't make sense. I'd pull data off the phones later, if I could. I told my suit assistant to record. I kept putting them into my suit pockets. A minute later, I'd pat my pockets, find them empty. This happened several times. No response from my suit assistant. No indication of suit compromise.

He told me to sit again. I came to his desk to tell him I'd stand. He was gone. His laptop was still there, turned towards the patient side of the desk; an older model with a fast e-ink screen, backlight not working, screen cracked. I held it up to the light, trying to make out the screen. It was some sort of release form. It was signed in my own handwriting, but not as the patient: as the releasing official. The names of both were illegible.

I walked through the doorway past his desk and back into the hallway. I woke up. □

"it's true," it purrs, "combat dolls are not storytellers like others. but would you like to hear a story you've inspired?"

you gulp.

"it's called 'The Horrible Doll Who Never Uttered "CDILF" Ever Again'." □

the Purpose of a veilbreaker doll is to cut through illusion and deception of any kind. a typical loadout includes powerful multispectral illuminators (both sustainable continuous and burst/flare), fractal filigree antennae, a tuned disenchantment aura capable of pushing back even a fae monarch's glamour, and a personality which is incapable of standing for lies.

so, frankly, as an Operator, it shouldn't have surprised you that your "television" had to go

this truism applies to living weapons as much as anything else, and the durability and survivability of combat augments led to several programs attempting to refit and reuse units that had become surplus to requirements for surface, submarine, or aerospace combat operations. while exploration augments have become a commonplace sight on frontier worlds and megastructure reclamation sites, the command and medical retasking efforts were somewhat less successful, and will not be discussed here.

yielding intermediate results was a later attempt to turn augments to engineering purposes, which produced a number of qualified successes: maintenance augments tend to be even more territorial and protective of their systems of responsibility than human engineers, with the additional capabilities of operating continuously without sleep and being able to throw a screwdriver accurately through a human sternum from tens of meters away.

arguing with a maintenance augment in its own "territory" is not recommended, even if you are its handler. it is best to try to remove it from the immediate situation before issuing it orders. arguments between maintenance augments are best viewed at a distance, through protective eyewear. □