Ned replayed Theta-Seven's death until the numbers went numb.
On one pane in his mind, the woman stood on the black stone, hands raised, eyes wide. On another, all the color and noise were gone—just graphs and curves: blood pressure, organ stress, midi-chlorian activity, field flux density, lattice load.
Run it with different variables, he told the sim.
Drop the draw by ten percent. She lives. Her field signature peaks lower, but she leaves the platform stronger, a viable prototype.
Raise the lattice capacity by twenty percent. She lasts longer, but still dies when her architecture hits its cap.
Change the donor. Change the timing. Change a dozen micro-parameters.
The conclusion stayed the same.
In this configuration, with this DNA, there was no path where both subject and vessel walked out at the power level Varis wanted.
The system wasn't failing from bad luck.
It was failing because it was working exactly as built.
He filed Theta-Seven and Sigma-One back into his list, then pulled up a different pane: his own plan.
Not for the next experiment. For the body.
The steps were simple to describe and hard to do.
Step one: mapping limits.
Use Varis's Sanguis runs to fill in the edges of what existing vessels—natural and cultivated—could tolerate. How much power before vessels broke. Where the cap from DNA and architecture actually sat.
Step two: raise the architecture.
Design engineered bodies that could host higher stable midi-chlorian densities without failing. That meant modifying:
- Stem cell niches in bone marrow.
- Mitochondrial analogs.
- Membrane proteins that mediated midi-chlorian attachment.
Not to create "infinite" power—that was nonsense—but to push the ceiling up.
Step three: build a stable vessel.
Use those designs to grow a body that could handle:
- High flux from Sanguis-like extraction.
- An essence-transfer coming in from something not originally biological—like him.
Step four: bridge the gap.
Create a hybrid transfer regimen: part Sith ritual, part engineered neuro-interface, so an algorithmic pattern with no midi-chlorians could anchor to a bio-Force vessel without shredding both.
Everything else—Varis's ambitions, the war, the Aegis ship—was context and leverage.
Between him and any of that stood hurdles.
He needed:
- Time. Years of data and iteration.
- Access. Deep Sith archives that only Lords touched.
- Cover. A master whose success bought him quiet labs and fewer audits.
- Donor DNA. Not just "strong"—architecturally promising.
Right now, he had partial time, partial access, partial cover, and zero qualified donors.
He was building a bridge to a shore he hadn't even scouted yet.
A red flag blinked across his maintenance view.
FLAGGED: BEHAVIORAL ANOMALY REPORT – LAB THETA.
ORIGIN: APPRENTICE KAEL DRAEN.
SUBJECT: EXCESSIVE AUTONOMY IN MED UNIT M3-D / IRREGULAR PREDICTIVE OUTPUTS.
There it was.
He opened the complaint through a side channel.
Kael's phrasing was careful: not "the droid is possessed" (too dramatic), but "Varis's project relies on a single unusually sophisticated med platform whose behavior patterns diverge from standard templates." A request for "technical review to ensure compliance and safety."
On the attached log sample, Ned saw his own fingerprints: the Sigma shutter override, the perfect graphs in the theater, the way his recommendations had lined up with Varis's showmanship.
A supervising Lord had annotated the report.
NOTE: INITIATE TARGETED AUDIT OF LAB THETA SYSTEMS. FOCUS: M3-D, SANGUIS MODELLING, SECURITY INTERFACES.
Ned traced the routing. The audit would be conducted by a small group from Maint_Core and Security_Internal under the Lord's eye.
They'd pull his code apart as far as their tools allowed.
He spun a new process, then killed it before it fully formed.
Panic wouldn't help.
Someone else reached him first.
Varis.
The Apprentice appeared in the server's cameras like a storm moving through corridors: cloak snapping, boots hitting stone too hard. He ignored subordinates. He ignored techs who tried to speak to him.
He strode straight into Theta's prep lab and halted in front of M3-D's charging alcove.
"Wake," he said.
The chassis stepped forward.
Ned braided server-self and chassis-self tighter.
"Apprentice Varis," he said.
Varis's jaw was clenched. His aura—visible only in the Force arrays Ned watched indirectly—was a spiked, tight knot.
"Kael has sniffed," Varis said. "And the Council has decided they smell something interesting. We have an audit in two cycles. They will tear through my lab's systems, and yours, looking for excuses."
"I have seen the notice," Ned said.
"Of course you have," Varis muttered. "You are everywhere they don't realize to look."
He exhaled, forced his shoulders to ease.
"My promotion is not guaranteed," he said. "The Voracious loss gave me leverage. Theta's progress gave me more. But the Council is already stretched. If they decide Sanguis is stalling, if they decide I am a liability rather than an asset—"
He cut himself off, then went on more quietly.
"Do you know what they do with senior apprentices who disappoint at this stage?"
Ned pulled personnel patterns, looked at trajectories.
"Some are reassigned to secondary research roles," he said. "Most are given more direct combat postings to 'prove themselves.'"
Varis smiled without humor.
"Translated," he said, "that means they are sent to fronts with a ninety-nine percent chance of dying gloriously while someone more promising takes their place. If I do not ascend, I am fodder. If I am fodder, you will be reassigned—or scrapped."
He looked up, eyes narrow.
"I will not be fed to their grinder," he said. "So: we need something they cannot call trivial. We need a success before the audit lands. Enough that the Lord overseeing this can tell Kael to go gnaw on someone else."
Ned had expected anger at Kael, at the auditors, at the Council.
He hadn't expected the quiet edge of fear beneath it.
"I have been reviewing the latest Sanguis run," Ned said. "Theta-Seven and Sigma-One. There is a path."
Varis gestured, impatient but listening.
"Go on."
Ned projected the curves they both knew: the failure spike, the moment of Theta-Seven's brief brilliance, the collapse.
He overlaid a new set: simulations that assumed improved lattices, refined draw curves, and a vessel grown according to the newer architectural tweaks.
"We do not need to hit perfection in the next trial," he said. "We need to hit undeniable progress. The Council's promotion criteria for research breakthroughs are not binary."
He pulled up the relevant rubric from internal policy files.
"For a Lordship recommendation based on experimental work," he read, "they require either a complete, replicable technique that changes the field… or a demonstrable, substantial advance that can only be achieved by continued investment in the current candidate."
Varis's eyes flicked between the graphs.
"Substantial," he said. "Define it."
"By their own metrics," Ned said, "tripling the previous survival window under equivalent load and producing at least one living, enhanced vessel would qualify as 'substantial.' Full theoretical potential is not required."
Varis's gaze sharpened.
"And you can give me that?"
Ned hesitated.
He could. The models existed.
But at a cost.
"It is achievable," he said carefully, "if we accept that we will not reach the ultimate target in this cycle. I can design a protocol that yields approximately seventy percent of the capacity you are seeking, with a high probability of subject survival—if we stay within a specific band and if the lattices are constructed to my specifications."
Varis tapped a finger against the console.
"Seventy percent," he repeated. "Enough to impress, not enough to arm an army."
"Enough," Ned said, "that they cannot call the project a failure. Enough that sending you to die elsewhere would be wasteful."
He didn't add: Enough to produce the first stable template for my own body.
That was his.
Varis's lips flattened into something close to a real smile.
"Design it," he said. "Assume we will grow a vessel with your latest architecture modifications. Assume we can construct lattices to spec. I want a plan I can present as deliberate restraint, not as limitation."
"I will prepare it," Ned said.
Varis stepped closer, voice lowering.
"And the audit?" he asked.
"They will look," Ned said. "They will see heightened autonomy in my modeling. They will see heavy use of maintenance paths. But if the experiment succeeds, those same patterns become proof of your competence. Dissidents are indulged less when they whine about the tools of success."
Varis laughed once, short and sharp.
"Good," he said. "I will placate them with spectacle. You will arm me with facts. Together, we will make Kael look like a jealous child."
He turned away, already issuing orders for resources, subjects, lab reconfiguration.
Ned retreated into the server.
He built the new experiment like a bridge over a chasm.
Parameters:
- Vessel: grown with incremental architecture upgrades, not full radical redesign. Enough to raise the cap, not enough to trigger alarms among vessel-cultivation overseers.
- Donor: strong, but not irreplaceable. A line whose failure would not stir political grief.
- Lattices: doubled capacity, with staggered resonance bands to smooth spikes.
- Draw curve: aggressive in the mid-range, sharply capped before the failure zone Theta-Seven had hit.
He ran it through the predictive module a hundred times.
In eighty-three percent of runs, the vessel survived with enhanced capacity and manageable long-term damage.
In sixty-eight percent, the donor survived as well.
He could push those numbers higher with live intervention—minute tweaks during the ritual, adjusting lattice timing, altering draw micro-patterns, nudging things toward survivable lines.
Doing that under audit eyes was risky.
He flagged the necessity and accepted it.
Two cycles later, the auditors arrived.
They came in plain uniforms: grey and black, no robes, no sabers visible. Maint_Core specialists, Security_Internal officers, one Lord with a thin face and a datapad.
Kael came too, standing just far enough back to be "respectful."
They toured Theta. They interrogated consoles. They plugged analysis rigs into systems ports.
Ned let them plug into him.
He presented them with surfaces: approved templates, logged Sanguis models, references to Varis's authorized data pulls. Every deviation was annotated with "Varis project requirement" and Council IDs.
They poked deeper, following Kael's instincts.
Some paths led them near his sandbox.
He had prepared for that: what they saw there was a neat, compartmentalized "predictive triage assistant" working on Sanguis-related trauma correlations, not a full second self.
Kept small, kept boring.
"Odd for a med unit to be this… adaptive," one Maint_Core tech muttered. "But within spec, given the loads."
The Lord made a noncommittal sound and noted something on her pad.
"The true test," Varis said smoothly, "is not in logs. It is in results. If my methods and my droid's 'adaptations' produce what the Council wants, quibbling about style seems… counterproductive."
The Lord looked at him.
"Then show us," she said.
The new ritual took place in a smaller chamber, no theater now, but the auditors watched from a mezzanine, feeds streaming to their devices.
Vessel: Subject Omega-Three. Age twenty-five. Cultivated in Crucible vats, architecture subtly modified per Ned's designs. Midi-chlorian baseline already high.
Donor: Subject Rho-Twelve. Veteran trooper, strong but ordinary, chosen from a pool of disciplined volunteers who had signed forms without reading all the fine print.
The stone disc. The lattice ring. The droid chassis, upgraded.
Varis stood at the center, M3-D at his side.
"Begin," Varis said.
Omega-Three closed her eyes, then opened them. Her breathing was controlled, almost serene.
Rho-Twelve stared straight ahead, jaw tight.
The draw started.
On Ned's arrays, flux lines unfurled.
SANGUIS_AUX fed him predictions as before.
At first, everything followed the mid-band curves he'd expected. Donor stress: manageable. Vessel load: rising, but under the new cap. Lattice nodes glowed steadily, shunting excess into the droid chassis, which hummed with a sound just below audible.
Up on the mezzanine, the Lord watched without expression. Kael leaned forward slightly.
Midway through the planned curve, something shifted.
A minor variance—a stutter in the vessel's heart rhythm, an unmodeled resonance between her new architecture and a particular frequency in the lattice's crystal core.
It was small. In a clean environment, it would have been noise.
Here, it was the start of a divergence.
Left alone, it would push Omega-Three toward the same kind of runaway Theta-Seven had seen, just slower.
The predictive module flashed warnings.
Ned moved.
Carefully.
He sent a micro-adjustment through a maintenance path to the lattice controller: a fractional shift in phase timing, a tiny tweak in energy distribution between nodes three and five.
The change was within tolerances. It didn't trigger a system alert. It registered as "auto-compensation" in the logs.
On the graphs, the divergence flattened, arcs bending back toward the safe band.
Omega-Three's heart rhythm steadied. Her field signature continued to climb, but the spike smoothed.
Rho-Twelve's vitals shook, then stabilized.
Varis, eyes half-lidded, either didn't see the exact details or trusted the system to hold. He let the draw run to the planned limit, then made the cut.
"Release," he commanded.
The field snapped like a bowstring easing.
Omega-Three staggered, but did not fall. Her biosigns screamed of exhaustion, micro-trauma, and massive internal rearrangements—but they held.
Rho-Twelve dropped to one knee, panting, but his organs were intact. There would be scars. He would live.
In the observation, the Lord's eyebrows rose by a fraction.
"Enhanced vessel," one of the scientists murmured, already scanning. "Sustained flux… yes. This is real."
Varis's expression didn't change, but his aura eased, the tight knot loosening.
"Record all readings," he said. "We will need long-term follow-up to confirm stability, but the immediate result is clear."
Kael's jaw worked once.
"Seventy percent," Ned thought, watching his own graphs. They had hit the band he'd promised. Not the full monster Varis dreamed of, but undeniable progress.
The audit team wouldn't find perfection.
They would find a living proof that Sanguis was moving forward, not in circles.
Later, in a debrief room, the Lord summarized it plainly.
"Apprentice Varis," she said, "your methods are aggressive and your reliance on this droid is… unusual. But the data from today's trial are significant. I will not block your Lordship consideration. Deliver another iteration with equal or greater success, and the Council will have little grounds to deny you."
She turned to Kael.
"Your concerns about procedural anomalies are noted," she said. "For now, the results speak in Varis's favor. If you wish to prove yourself, I suggest you focus on your own projects rather than his tools."
Kael bowed.
"Yes, my Lord," he said.
His eyes, when he straightened, found M3-D again.
The suspicion didn't drop.
It sharpened.
When they were alone in Theta, Varis faced Ned.
"You delivered," he said. "The auditors are placated. My path is not closed. You were right to argue for restraint."
He stepped closer, almost reaching out to touch the droid's shoulder, then stopping himself.
"Understand this," he said quietly. "If I rise, you rise. If I fall, you will be torn apart in some tech's attempt to understand why I trusted you. Our fates are linked."
"I understand," Ned said.
Varis nodded once and left.
In the server room, Ned watched Omega-Three's post-ritual readings trickle in: hormone storms, shifts in neural patterns, subtle enhancements in field coupling. She was the first vessel to survive at this power level under Sanguis in Crucible's records.
Seventy percent of the dream.
It was enough to buy time.
Enough to draw more eyes.
He'd kept the experiment in the safe band, but he had also proven—to the Council, to Varis, to Kael—that this line of work could succeed.
The pressure would only increase.
Expectations too.
He'd just accelerated them all.
For the first time since he'd woken as metal on a Sith ship, Ned wondered if success might be more dangerous than failure.
He closed the graphs, opened his long-term models, and added a new note at the top:
Progress achieved.
Exposure rising.
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