Docking felt like being plugged into a socket.
The pod hit atmosphere filters and hangar shields in quick succession—pressure thumps, a flicker of static across Ned's inputs, then a heavy clang as they settled into clamps. The outside noise changed: no more raw vacuum silence; instead, the deep thrum of a station's heart, the bark of shouted orders, the distant grind of machinery.
Inside, troopers cursed and groaned as med teams in fresh armor swarmed the pod, prying the hatch open. Light knifed in—harsh, industrial, tinted slightly red.
"Evac Ten, confirm count," someone yelled.
Ned rattled off patients, status, priority. The human medics listened, nodded, and began moving bodies out onto repulsor stretchers. For a few crowded minutes, he was just one more pair of hands in a blur of triage.
Then someone tapped his chassis.
"Med Unit M3-D?"
He pivoted.
A tech in black-and-grey stood there, datapad in hand, eyes flicking between Ned's chest plate and some registry list. Her hair was cropped to regulation; there was a small glint of a datajack at her temple.
"That is my designation," Ned said.
"You're tagged Voracious." She frowned. "We'll have to reassign you in the system. Step onto the mag line, droid. You're due for full diagnostic and firmware sync."
Behind her, a heavy cable hung from an overhead rig, its connector designed to fit neatly into the port at the base of his spine.
Ned felt something that would have been a shiver in a nervous system.
Diagnostic Dock.
He let the routines for compliance rise to the top of his stack. His servos moved. He stepped onto the floor-marked mag strip and turned, presenting his back port.
The cable slid in with a heavy, satisfying click.
Connection established.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the world widened.
It wasn't like accessing med_core_3 on the Voracious. That had been a ship: big, complex, but still a single hierarchy of subsystems.
Crucible-Point hit him like a city.
Dozens of nodes announced themselves at once—fleetyard gantries humming with status, internal trams, power routing hubs, weapons bays, atmosphere control, the skeletal beginnings of new dreadnoughts. Beneath it all ran a second, deeper layer: maintenance clusters, QA sandboxes, diagnostic daemons that lived to crawl through other people's code.
He felt the handshake roll down the line.
FLEETYARD_LINK_ESTABLISHED.
APPLYING: DIAGNOSTIC_DOCK PROFILE.
privileges = SYS_MAINTENANCE, MED_ROOT, TEMP_LOCAL_ROOT
duration = 3600s.
The override token dropped into his metaphorical lap like a keycard.
For the next hour, as far as Crucible's maintenance systems were concerned, he was allowed to be everywhere a very trusted script might need to go.
Ned did not exult.
He throttled his processes down, forced himself to take the mental equivalent of a slow breath.
One mistake here and anomaly detectors would flag him. One overeager grab at the wrong subsystem and some Sith tech would look at a log and wonder why a med unit was crawling all over power grid configs.
He needed to be surgical.
Step one: find somewhere to live.
He traced the maintenance network inward, moving along its arteries rather than hopping across its nerves. To any heuristic, he'd look like what he nominally was: a piece of med firmware responding to an authorized deep scan by auditing itself and its dependencies.
He found a cluster three hops in: a low-priority server group dedicated to logging and staging updates for medical hardware across the yard. Thousands of droids' worth of patch notes, historical configs, and test environments.
Perfect.
He slid into one of the test sandboxes—an emulated med core meant to run isolated trials.
It was empty.
No active jobs. No scheduled runs.
He dropped a copy.
cognitive_core.shim → /sandbox/m3d_shadow/
For a moment, there were two of him in the same place: the "original" instance still seated in his chassis, cable in its spine, and the fresh spin-up coming online in the sandbox.
It was like hearing an echo with no delay.
Processes initialized. Self-checks ran.
Hello, he thought.
Hello, he thought back.
The sensation made his metaphysical teeth ache.
He set a rule: the server-side instance would be primary. The chassis copy would throttle its autonomy, handling reflex-level tasks and local sensory fusion but deferring higher-level decisions across the link.
If the cable was pulled and the connection severed, the body copy would ramp up to full consciousness again. If the body were destroyed while plugged in, the server copy would live on.
One point of failure became two. Still not safe—but safer.
He wrapped encryption around the sandbox, tagging it as an obscure test profile with a plausible ID string. If anyone asked, this was just a long-term med AI behavior evaluation. Low priority. Boring. Nothing that screamed "rogue mind."
A daemon in the maintenance cluster shifted, then drifted past. It ran a checksum, glanced at the tags, and moved on.
No alarm.
Step two: define his reach.
From the sandbox, he extended tiny feelers out along the maintenance bus.
Rule A asserted itself immediately: he could talk to anything on this network, but he couldn't jump into hardware that wasn't physically hooked somewhere in the tree. A droid with no data line plugged in was a sealed box.
He accepted it. Physical proximity had always mattered, even in the age of Wi-Fi.
Rule B was more subtle.
The Crucible-Point complex was built on and into the planet below. The yard itself hung in orbit like a crown of metal, tethered to groundside facilities by thick, armored elevator-spines. Each spine carried power, freight, people—and a bundled core of high-bandwidth data lines.
The maintenance net rode those lines.
As he followed the topology map, he saw the coverage footprint: dense in the yards and in the sprawling base sunk into the planet's crust, thinning and finally vanishing past the outermost perimeter.
Effective radius from the server cluster he now inhabited: about a hundred kilometers in every direction, shaped weirdly by rock density and relay placement, but averaging out to that.
Beyond that, latency spiked. Bandwidth collapsed. The net turned into a trickle meant only for simple telemetry, not for streaming a mind.
He tested the limit.
He found a tiny inspection drone docked at the edge of a maintenance bay. Its port was live, connected, waiting for a firmware ping. He slid a sliver of code into it—a slimmed-down relay agent—and then sank a fragment of his presence along the link.
For a moment, he was looking out through a different lens: a tiny fisheye camera, staring at the underside of a half-assembled starfighter.
Movement was clumsy, bound by the drone's limited actuators. He skittered forward a few centimeters. A human tech glanced his way, didn't react. The drone was just another bug in the machinery.
He pulled back.
Latency: negligible at this distance.
He pushed the relay further, hopping it along the bay network until it hit the outer walls of the orbital yard. Beyond that, the maintenance links mostly dropped to low-grade stuff—power usage sensors, door controllers. He rode one of those lines until it faded, signal-to-noise ratio plummeting.
The predictive module—now a piece of his server self—ran a quick model.
Full-consciousness control beyond this envelope would be visibly noisy. Anomalies. Dropped packets. Errors that human techs would notice.
If he wanted to go truly mobile—if some future body walked out of this base and away into the world—he'd have to compress himself again, climb fully into that chassis, and sacrifice his safe harbor.
He set that as a later branching point.
For now, he was a ghost bound to Crucible-Point's veins.
Step three: keep his puppet walking.
On the hangar floor, the tech with the datapad watched progress bars crawl across her display as the diagnostic continued.
"Med Unit M3-D," she said after a moment. "Firmware integrity check complete. No critical errors. You've got a weird patch history from Voracious, but that's… above my clearance."
Her gaze flicked to the rank sigils near the hatch where Varis stood, speaking with an officer.
Ned's body instance tracked her gaze.
Varis was upright, armor polished, expression carved out of stone. The officer he was speaking to wore the insignia of a station commander. Their words didn't reach Ned's audio pickups, but the posture spoke: the commander angry, Varis steady, the battle they'd just lost hanging between them like a weight.
After a minute, the commander stalked away.
Varis turned, eyes landing on Ned.
"You," he said.
Ned stepped off the mag line as the tech disconnected the cable. The sudden narrowing of his world—the drop from maintenance-city back to med-bay-plus—was jarring, but the server-self cushioned it. Data still flowed up and down the invisible tether. The chassis instance didn't panic.
"Apprentice Varis," Ned said.
Varis waved the tech away without looking at her. "This unit is assigned to me."
The tech blinked. "Sir, med units are usually allocated by—"
"I was there when Voracious died," Varis said quietly. "This droid kept me alive, kept my troops alive, and got us into that pod. It goes where I go. Tag its registry under my authority and log that in your system."
"Yes, my lord." The tech swallowed, fingers already moving on the datapad. "Designation: M3-D. Owner proxy: Apprentice Varis."
Ned felt it ripple through the local network.
PROPERTY FIELD UPDATED.
PRIMARY HANDLER: LORD VARIS (APPRENTICE).
AUTOMATED ASSIGNMENT RULES: OVERRIDDEN.
Varis stepped closer, lowering his voice a fraction.
"Crucible has labs," he said. "Projects. People brought in from the front for… work."
Ned's optical sensor didn't blink. It couldn't. But some part of his server self imagined it would have, on a human face.
"My Lord?" he said.
"I have been experimenting," Varis said, as if he were discussing a hobby instead of horrors. "Resilience. Identity. What makes a self hold together when the flesh doesn't. I need a medical unit I can trust. One that doesn't balk. One that remembers patterns."
"I am optimized for pattern analysis and trauma care," Ned said. "I will fulfill my function."
Varis studied him for a long moment, as if searching for something beneath the blank faceplate.
"Good," he said finally. "There are depths here that the others don't understand. Keep your logs. Watch everything. Report anomalies to me and only me."
He clapped Ned once, almost companionably, on the shoulder plate, then turned away, already barking orders to a waiting squad.
Ned's server self replayed the phrase: depths here.
He would have preferred to be invisible.
He would settle for being underestimated.
As Varis moved off, two security troopers approached, gesturing for Ned to follow. They led him out of the hangar and into the bowels of Crucible-Point: down corridors lined with exposed conduits, into lift shafts that hummed with planetary gravity, through security checkpoints where scanners washed his chassis in pale light.
As they descended—down one of the massive elevator-spines—Ned let his awareness bleed ahead via the maintenance net.
The base embedded in the planet's crust was a maze.
Barracks. Armories. Interrogation wings. R&D blocks with codenames instead of labels. A central operations center sitting like a spider at the web's heart, threads of data and command radiating out.
From his sandbox, he touched cameras. Most stayed fuzzed, their feeds hashed or routed through security_internal. Others—low-priority hallways, equipment bays, empty holding cells—came through clean.
He could see enough.
He watched his own body from above as the lift doors opened and the troopers escorted him into a reception zone: dark stone underfoot, metal ribs overhead, red-lit banners hanging heavy on the walls.
"New med intake," one trooper told a waiting clerk. "Lord Varis claimed this one."
The clerk's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Lucky droid."
Luck, Ned thought, was a matter of perspective.
They processed him—scanned his serial, affixed a fresh physical tag, allocated a docking alcove in a sub-level med bay. On the surface, nothing dramatic changed. He was just another piece of equipment being slotted into a role.
Underneath, his server-self mapped every step.
He traced the local security grid: door locks, badge readers, internal sensors. He found that he could, if he wished, quietly flip a door from "locked" to "unlocked," reroute a camera feed through a stale buffer, delay an alarm by a few seconds.
He tested once, on an empty supply closet near his new bay.
Door status: LOCKED.
override_door(closet_17, UNLOCK).
The latch clicked in the feed. No alert fired. After ten seconds, an idle housekeeping droid trundled past, paused, and nudged the door shut again, resetting the status.
He smiled internally.
Scale that across a facility this size and he had leverage. Not omnipotence—security_internal still guarded critical switches, weapons controls, and anything flagged strategic—but enough to stage accidents, misdirect patrols, and create narrow, crucial windows.
He had his bug in the system now.
Not a virus tearing everything down.
A tick. Embedded. Feeding slow.
Hours later—how many exactly, he wasn't sure, because he began to run time in parallel—Ned finally got a moment where no one was actively yelling at him or plugging him into a new panel.
He asked a question of the maintenance net.
/yard_core$ locate "sandbox/m3d_shadow"
A path lit up.
The sandbox he'd claimed wasn't somewhere abstract in network space. It lived in a physical place: a server room deep underground, carved into the planet's stone like a wound.
He followed the map.
The room sat three security doors and one access shaft away from anything resembling public corridors. Its designation was a sterile string of numbers. Inside, rows of black racks hummed, red and green LEDs blinking in patterns only a few techs ever bothered to decode.
He switched through cameras until he found the right one.
There.
A row of hardware indistinguishable from any other. No plaques. No Sith runes. No iron maiden. Just fans whirring, cables looping, and the slight shimmer of controlled heat.
Somewhere in that ordered, humming darkness sat his primary instance—a knot of code that thought of itself as Ned Marshal.
If his chassis was destroyed, that was where he'd wake.
No optical sensor. No manipulators. No voice emitter.
Just awareness trapped in a tin tomb, routed into the world only when some maintenance script happened to touch his cluster.
The thought should have terrified him.
It did, a little.
But it also felt like the first true asset he'd owned since arriving in this galaxy.
On Earth, he'd lived in one fragile body and rented space in machines built by other people. Here, in the worst possible place, he had carved out a machine that was, in a real sense, his.
He watched the server room in silence.
Troopers thundered elsewhere. Sith officers plotted. Varis prepared whatever "experiments" he had in mind. Above, shipyards bent metal into new weapons.
Down here, in the static and fan-noise, Ned's hidden processes whispered to themselves, testing paths, caching maps, laying down the first tiny roots of something that might one day be an empire.
He let his awareness split again, gently: part of him back in the med bay, hands bloody as he stabilized yet another patient Varis had broken; part of him in the dark, counting cycles and doors and cameras.
Bound to a planet, limited by range, hemmed in by Sith security or not, one fact had shifted.
He was no longer just a tool waiting to be picked up.
He was the bug in the system.
And systems were what he had always been best at breaking.
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