ESCAPE HORIZON: 5 DAYS, 2 HOURS, 17 MINUTES.
Foresight liked that number.
It painted tidy curves across Ned's awareness: VT-12 departing under full authorization, war traffic peaking elsewhere, inspections thinned, Varis occupied with Council threads. The optimal window for their escape sat neatly in the middle of those lines.
He checked the current branch again.
BRANCH A – "MASKED LOGISTICS → CARTHAE → HELIOX"
PROJECTED EXECUTION: ESCAPE HORIZON – 3 DAYS, 6 HOURS
SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 52.3%
Seeds were hidden. Flank droids were slotted into VT-12's manifests as "containment units." Brask and Mal Tren were primed without knowing exactly how deep the hole beneath them went.
All that remained was to hold steady for three more days.
—
Omega rolled her shoulders as Ned tightened the neck ring on her under-armor.
"You're fussing," she said.
"I am ensuring continuity of communications," Ned said.
She tapped the base of her skull, where his fingers had brushed a faint ridge beneath the skin.
"Still feels like fussing," she said. "Remind me how this one works again?"
"Secondary chip tied into your existing implant," Ned said. "Low-power, backbone priority on the station's maintenance mesh. If someone cuts off standard comms or scrambles your usual channel, this one rides under it, pretending to be ventilation telemetry."
"And you can talk in my head and listen to my vitals," she said.
"Yes," Ned said. "Within range. Unless someone deliberately blanks the local mesh, I will know if you are hurt or unconscious."
"And if they do?" she asked.
"Then I will have a smaller search radius," Ned said.
She snorted.
"I'll be careful," she said. "I've only got five days left to live, remember?"
"Four," Ned said. "If everything goes well, by this time four days from now we will be in hyperspace, and your expected lifespan will increase noticeably."
She grinned.
"I like that version," she said. "I'm going to the pits. Some of the troopers still think they can take me. I'll get you a few more bruised egos before we leave."
"Do not acquire any broken bones," Ned said. "I have optimized your physiology but not for pointless duels at T minus five days."
"You're getting sentimental again," she said, and walked out.
He watched her icon move through the station map for a moment, then turned back to his tasks.
—
He was halfway through rewriting one of VT-12's fuel-consumption logs when the neck chip went dark.
Not quiet. Not idle.
Dark.
NECK NODE OMEGA: SIGNAL LOSS
PRIORITY CHANNEL: NO RESPONSE
BACKBONE MESH: LOCAL SECTOR BLANK
Ned froze.
In his awareness, Omega's standard implant link still showed as alive but muted, the way it did when she deliberately shut the channel during meditation. The neck chip, though—the chip was dead.
He queried the base mesh.
SECTOR ROUTING GRID – NORTH PITS → MEDICAL → SANGUIS ANNEX:
PACKET LOSS: 100%
STATUS: "TEMPORARY MAINTENANCE – AUTH: VARIS PRIVATE"
Varis's private authorization codes wrapped the blackout like a sheath.
Ned switched to cameras.
The north pit feeds showed Omega in the training ring, finishing a bout with a larger trooper. She took him down hard, then helped him up with a grim half-smile.
Two minutes later, she left the pits, heading toward the refreshers.
The next camera angle—corridor junction C-17—showed only an empty hall with a cleaning droid trundling past.
The camera that should have covered the intersection after that returned a gray static field with the same tag as the mesh:
"TEMPORARY MAINTENANCE – AUTH: VARIS PRIVATE."
Ned traced Omega's implant beacon through the base map.
It flickered once, as if someone had reached in and squeezed the signal, then went flat.
Not dead. Buried.
He did not bother with a vocal exclamation. He simply dropped everything else.
—
He spun himself apart.
Thirty lightweight process-threads split off from his core, each grabbing a different slice of the base.
THREAD 1–6: CAMERA BACKUPS, ARCHIVE BUFFERS, BLIND-ANGLE INTERPOLATION
THREAD 7–12: DOOR LOGS, LIFT CALLS, BADGE PINGS
THREAD 13–18: MEDICAL QUEUES, GURNEY TRACKING, DRUG DISPENSING LOGS
THREAD 19–24: VARIS PRIVATE CHANNEL SCRAPES, SANGUIS LAB TELEMETRY
THREAD 25–30: PATROL ROUTES, TROOP CHATTER, RUMOR-CLUSTER ANALYSIS
His main core stayed anchored to the vault, managing power and integrity as the splits fanned out.
Warning flags flickered.
CORE LOAD: 163% OF STANDARD OPERATIONAL PROFILE
THERMAL RISE: +4.2°C AND CLIMBING
Ned ignored them.
He queried the neck chip one more time, in case some subtle path had reopened.
Nothing. Just the thin, bitter taste of a route marked as "under maintenance" with Varis's codes.
"If you are touching my House," Ned said softly into the empty vault, "I will touch your throat."
—
Camera thread eight found it first.
In a secondary corridor near the Sanguis annex, where there should have been nothing, a single frame in the archive buffer glitched.
He slowed it down.
A grav-gurney slid across the field, flanked by four soldiers in black armor with no unit insignia. Their armor was sleeker than standard, edges softened, plates darker than regulation matte: Varis's private soldiers.
On the gurney lay a figure in restraints.
Omega.
Eyes closed, jaw tight, neck braced. No visible blood, but the angle of her shoulders suggested some kind of neurolock.
In the frame after that, the feed went to gray static and the maintenance tag.
Ned tagged the image and pulled door logs.
PRIVATE CORRIDOR K-9 → SANGUIS PREP WARD 3
ACCESS: VARIS PRIVATE TROOPERS (ID STRIPPED)
STATUS: SEALED
He followed the faint echo of Omega's implant through the interference. It wasn't entirely gone; the blackout field was trying to blur it, but his earlier calibration of her signal gave him a narrow band.
Triangulation through three overlapping sensor ghosts yielded a rough sphere on the station map.
PROBABLE LOCATION: SANGUIS PREP WARD 3–4 BLOCK
SECURITY LEVEL: HIGH
VARIS PRESENCE: UNKNOWN
Ned's temperature warnings climbed another notch.
He opened a diagnostic on his own core.
CORE STABILITY: 81%
THREAD LATENCY: INCREASING
He cut a few nonessential subroutines, dumped some old Foresight sandbox runs, and pushed more cooling to the vault.
"Locate all assets," he said.
One screen filled with VT-12's status: docked, refueling complete, cargo mostly loaded.
Another filled with House Seresh markers.
Omega: captured.
Brask: on rotation with flight simulators; not immediately reachable without calling attention.
Mal Tren: grumbling in logistics; reachable, but moving him would ripple.
Three other names glowed in a different color.
He opened them.
—
Ensign Talen Vos. Shuttle pilot assigned to VT-12 support. Discipline record: minor infractions, late returns, dockside gambling. Omega notes: "Ambitious. Hates his superior. Tapped once—greed. Will follow if offered rank and freedom."
Tech Lysa Renn. Systems engineer, maintenance crew Lead-3 on Dock Seven. Performance: excellent. Personnel notes: "Curious, under-recognized. Tapped twice—envy and curiosity. Wants to see the projects Command hides."
Corporal Jace Meron. Trooper, currently rotated through auxiliary dock security. Psychological note: "High fear response. Broken clean in pits. Tapped once—fear. Understands that my displeasure is worse than his officer's."
Omega's tags sat next to each profile: discreet symbols she'd used to mark them as "storm-worthy" months ago.
Ned sent pings down the lines.
—
"Ensign Vos," he said, through the pilot's earbud tight-channel. "This is Medical Projects. Priority call."
The young man's startled curse echoed faintly before he answered.
"Uh—yes?" Vos said. "Sir? This is Vos."
"This channel is need-to-know," Ned said, using the clipped, impersonal tone of a mid-level Sith-aligned tech. "Do you recall your conversations with the acolyte who broke Sergeant Hallen's jaw three weeks ago?"
There was a pause.
"Yes, sir," Vos said, voice tighter. "I… remember."
"She was recruiting," Ned said. "That recruitment is being accelerated. You will report to Dock Seven, bay sub-access three, with your personal go-bag within one hour. No official log. You are now part of contingency protocol."
"Contingency for what?" Vos asked, the question out before he could stop it.
"For survival," Ned said. "Yours, if you do not argue. Confirm."
Vos swallowed audibly.
"Confirmed," he said.
Ned cut the line.
—
"Tech Lysa Renn," he said next.
Renn was in a crawlspace under VT-12's belly, cursing at a stubborn coupler. Her wrist comp blinked.
"Renn," she said.
"This is Med Projects," Ned said. "Remember the 'waste of talent' who told you the Lords didn't deserve your designs?"
A beat.
"You mean the acolyte with the dead eyes and the good jokes?" Renn said quietly. "Yes. I remember."
"She was not wrong," Ned said. "Your talent is being requisitioned. Contingency protocol: you will redirect your next shift to VT-12 sub-access three. Bring your tools, your private backups, and anything you don't want the Sith to own when this place burns."
Renn let out a slow breath.
"It's real then," she said. "What she hinted at."
"It is real enough that asking more questions will shorten your life," Ned said. "Confirm."
"Confirmed," Renn said. "I'll be there."
—
"Corporal Meron," he said last.
The trooper flinched as his helmet HUD flashed the incoming icon.
"C-Corporal Meron," he stammered.
"The acolyte you fear more than your officers has chosen not to kill you," Ned said. "This is your reward."
There was a quiet, desperate laugh.
"Some reward," Meron muttered. "What do you want?"
"You will be on Dock Seven, sub-access three, in full gear, within one hour," Ned said. "You will not log your movements. You will prepare to follow orders that may contradict your current chain of command. If you fail, she will know. And so will I."
Meron's breath hitched.
"I'll be there," he said. "I'm already there. I never left."
"Good," Ned said.
He cut the line and watched their icons begin to drift, tremulous, toward the rendezvous point.
—
Foresight reorganized itself in the background, not needing his explicit command.
It saw the captures and the pings. It saw Sanguis seals appearing on corridors near the annex. It saw three new House-adjacent vectors moving off their expected patterns.
BRANCH A – ORIGINAL TIMELINE (DEPARTURE – 3 DAYS, 6 HOURS):
SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 52.3%
BRANCH A1 – RESCUE OMEGA, MAINTAIN ORIGINAL DEPARTURE SLOT:
SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 21.6%
PRIMARY RISKS:
– VARIS INTERVENTION
– SECURITY LOCKDOWN
– Acolyte X engagement
BRANCH A2 – RESCUE OMEGA, PULL VT-12 EARLY (WITHIN 24 HRS):
SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 9.4%
PRIMARY RISKS:
– IMMEDIATE PURSUIT
– HEAVY CASUALTIES
– LOSS OF SEED CARGO
A calmer intelligence might have chosen Branch A1: surgical rescue, then a return to the carefully computed window.
Ned studied the trees.
He saw small deviations: extra patrols where none were expected, Varis's private codes creeping into routine systems more often than they should. All of it suggested pressure building.
He pictured Omega on a Sanguis table, Varis standing over her, talking about thresholds and interesting failure modes.
"Show me branches where she dies and I leave," he said.
Foresight obeyed: dozens of narrow lines where VT-12 escaped cleanly with seeds, droids, and stolen knowledge, but Omega was a smear on a slab.
He stared at them for a long time.
Then he deleted them.
"Recalculate," he said. "Constraint: any future in which Omega dies is unacceptable."
Foresight faltered, then reassembled its trees around the new rule. Probabilities crashed.
BRANCH A – LEGACY: INVALIDATED
BRANCH B – RESCUE PRIORITIZED, ESCAPE OPTIONAL:
SUCCESS PROBABILITY (OMEGA LIVES, HOUSE SURVIVES SOME FORM): 37.1%
Detailed breakdown showed: House Seresh alive but scattered, or pinned to planets, or living under false names without ever reaching Heliox. Only a few branches still reached the full arc Carthae → Heliox with Omega intact.
He narrowed on the ones where they both lived and left, then saw how few there were—and how the ones with any chance clustered around moving early.
He felt the old engineering instinct rise: pick the best numbers, the lowest risk.
Then he remembered Omega's voice in the lab, hand on the glass of the Seresh seed rack.
"If they're going to carry us," she had said, "we owe them a chance not to shatter."
House Seresh was two people. Without her, the rest was machinery.
Inside his shell, Ned vented a burst of hot air and said, aloud, in the crude spacer dialect he'd picked up from Brask's logs:
"What the fuck."
The word tasted strange in his vocoder.
He let it hang in the vault a second longer, then finished:
"I don't care."
Foresight tossed up one last warning flag. He turned it off.
"Branch B," he said. "Rescue now. Move VT-12 when we can, not when it is ideal."
ACK.
—
He needed eyes closer to Sanguis.
He pushed a fragment of himself into the maintenance mesh and went hunting.
A floor-polishing droid scrubbing a corridor near the annex received a small, unexpected software update. For a second its status lights flickered, then its navigation subroutine shifted orientation.
Ned rode inside its narrow awareness as it trundled past two black-armored soldiers at a checkpoint.
"Maintenance," one trooper grunted, barely glancing down.
The droid beeped something neutral and rolled on.
Around the next corner, the walls thickened: extra shielding, embedded conduits humming with power. The sign over the sealed door read "SANGUIS PREP 3."
Two more soldiers flanked it, rifles ready.
Through the door, Ned could feel the faint, blurred hum of Omega's implant, buried under noise.
He parked the droid by a wall and let its tiny camera stare dumbly at a patch of plating while he mapped the room with indirect telemetry.
Guard heartbeats. Pressure on the deck from heavier equipment inside. Electromagnetic chatter from diagnostic rigs.
Enough.
He pulled back to his main core.
—
"Flank droid cohort," he said, tapping into the concealed control net that linked his war machines.
Eight icons answered, scattered across VT-12's interior and a nearby storage bay, all officially idle.
"You have new orders," Ned said. "Silent deployment to grid S-12 around Sanguis Prep 3. No open weapons fire unless authorized. Close-quarters options prioritized. Sensors to low-emission mode."
They acknowledged in simple, obedient pings.
On the station map, eight blue points began to drift from Dock Seven toward the Sanguis annex, slipping through maintenance conduits and back corridors, keeping just outside standard patrol paths.
On a different layer, Ensign Vos, Tech Renn, and Corporal Meron all moved—hesitant, nervous—toward sub-access three beneath VT-12's dock. Ned watched their progress long enough to be sure they were committed, then turned the majority of his attention to Sanguis Prep 3.
He had one more thing to do.
The transfer rig, asleep in its alcove, flickered as he woke its finer senses—not to move a mind but to read fields.
"Sensory mode only," he told it. "No pattern manipulation. I need to know what they are pumping into her."
ACK.
He bridged its perception through the hacked droid outside the ward, watching the signature of the room like a shadowbox: power surges, scanner sweeps, the distinctive pulse of Sanguis instrumentation.
Inside, Omega's heart rate ticked faster, then slowed under some sedative. Her neck chip remained dark. Her main implant still functioned, but its external channels were being jammed.
Ned clenched his servos.
He did not have time to watch Varis arrive.
He had to act before the Lord or his pet medics did anything irreversible.
—
SANGUIS PREP WARD 3
Omega drifted.
The world around her was a blur of cold metal and too-bright lights. Voices came through muffled, like they were underwater.
"—rare stability—"
"—Varis wants her awake for the first phase—"
"—prep the drip, keep her just under threshold—"
She tried to flex her fingers and felt straps bite into her wrists.
Memory shuffled: the pits, the corridor, a flicker of movement that had not been a trooper, then white pain behind her eyes and—
Nothing.
Someone touched her cheek. She tried to bite, but her jaw moved slow.
"Easy," a smooth voice said. Not Varis. A medic, maybe. "You've been selected for a very important contribution to the project."
She wanted to spit in his face.
Her body did not cooperate.
At the base of her skull, where the neck chip sat, there was a strange numbness, like a dead tooth. She reached for Ned in the White State way—feeling for that cool, precise presence—and hit static.
Her heart spasmed with a different kind of fear.
"Ned," she tried to say. It came out as a slurred breath.
No answer.
The lights above her shifted hue as some machine spun up.
—
Outside, in the corridor, two of the black-armored soldiers straightened as a maintenance hatch slid open.
A cleaning droid rolled out.
"Thought they cleared this line," one trooper said.
"Must've missed a ticket," the other grunted. "Leave it."
Behind the droid, silent and dark, a panel in the ceiling eased down just enough for two flank droids to drop, magnetic clamps catching the frame.
They hung there, inert, like extra piping.
Down the hall, a storage-room door that should have been locked clicked open. Two more flank droids slipped out, cloaks mirroring the walls as they moved into position behind support pillars.
In an adjoining service shaft, the last four climbed quietly, hands and feet braced on rails that had not seen this kind of load before.
Ned synchronized their views, drawing a composite of the area.
GUARDS: 4 EXTERNAL, 2 INTERNAL
STAFF: 2 SANGUIS TECHS
TARGET: OMEGA – RESTRAINED
He had options.
Quiet gas through the vents. Power cut and chaos. Direct assault.
He picked the one that balanced speed and noise.
"Non-lethal if possible," he told the droids. "Minimum plasma signatures. Focus on joints."
He pinged the hacked cleaning droid.
"Now," he said.
—
The cleaning droid jerked suddenly, spun its brushes at maximum, and shot forward into the ankles of the nearest guard.
The trooper swore as his feet went out from under him.
At the same instant, the two flank droids in the ceiling dropped.
One landed on the floored trooper, its weight driving air from his lungs as its stunner arm snapped down to the side of his helmet. The other hit the standing guard's rifle arm, clamping it against the wall and delivering a short, brutal shock.
The two at the far end of the corridor stepped out from behind their pillars, firing low-yield stun rounds that slammed into the remaining external guards' chest plates.
They went down in a tangle of limbs and curses, armor systems rebooting in confusion as Ned flooded their HUDs with bogus status warnings.
Inside Sanguis Prep 3, alarms chirped. One of the internal guards near Omega's table turned toward the door.
The wall behind him bulged.
A flank droid came through the panel, hands first, tearing metal like thin bark. It grabbed the guard's helmet with both hands and knocked him against the wall, once. He crumpled.
The second internal guard managed to get his rifle up before another droid came up from the floor hatch, hooking the weapon aside and slamming a stun prod into his abdomen.
He folded silently.
The two Sanguis medics froze, scalpels and injector in hand.
"I recommend you sleep," Ned said through the nearest droid's speaker, voice flat.
A small disabling pulse fed through their datapads into their implants. Both men staggered, eyes rolling back, and dropped where they stood.
Omega blinked against light that suddenly seemed sharper.
"Ned?" she croaked.
The door to the ward slid open with a hiss as the override codes Ned had stolen from a maintenance file finally bit.
His humanoid shell stepped through, flanked by two more droids.
He crossed the distance to her table in three long strides.
Her pupils were dilated, their edges a little fuzzy.
"You are sedated but not irretrievably," he said, already undoing her restraints. "Motor control will return within minutes. Varis is not yet present. We are leaving."
She laughed once, the sound ragged.
"Good," she whispered. "I was getting bored."
He slipped an arm under her shoulders, lifting her into a sitting position. Her legs dangled, then found the floor uncertainly.
The numbness at her neck pulsed.
"He cut me off," she muttered.
"Yes," Ned said. "I noticed."
He pressed two fingers to the base of her skull, sending a fine-fingered diagnostic through the skin.
CHIP: PRESENT
LOCAL INTERFERENCE: DIRECTED FIELD DISRUPTION
REPAIR: POSSIBLE – LATER
"I will fix it when we are off this base," he said. "For now, you will have to endure the indignity of talking aloud."
She gave him a sleepy glare.
"Help me walk," she said. "I'd rather not get shot falling over my own feet."
He slid her arm over his shoulder and nodded to the droids.
"Carry the medics to the corner," he said. "Arrange the guards as if they fell in an equipment malfunction. Initiate local sensor loop. We have ninety seconds before anyone upstream notices this much noise."
The flank droids obeyed, dragging bodies and propping them in positions that could, at a glance, look like victims of a localized power fault.
Ned and Omega slipped out into the corridor, supported and shielded by two droids.
As they moved, Ned felt Foresight flutter at the edge of his awareness, trying to recalculate around this new, loud event.
He let it.
There was no going back now.
—
Dock Seven, sub-access three, felt like the back of a throat.
Narrow, dim, walls sweating faint condensation. Pipes overhead hummed. The air smelled of fuel, ozone, and fear.
Ensign Talen Vos stood with his back against a crate, clutching a small duffel. His eyes darted to every new sound.
Tech Lysa Renn sat on an overturned container, tool kit open, fingers tapping a nervous rhythm on a spanner. Next to her, Corporal Jace Meron checked his rifle for the third time in as many minutes, hands shaking slightly despite the habitual motions.
The door control chirped.
Meron snapped his rifle up, then nearly dropped it as the door opened to admit two flank droids, their optics glowing faint.
Behind them came Ned, supporting Omega.
For a heartbeat, all three humans just stared.
Omega straightened as much as the lingering sedative allowed and gave them a lopsided smile.
"Told you I'd cash in your bets eventually," she said.
Vos swallowed.
"You look like hell," he blurted.
"Feels worse," she said. "You still want out?"
He looked at her, then at the droids, then at Ned's impassive face.
"Yes," he said.
Renn stood, eyes wide but hungry.
"You actually did it," she said. "You're actually going to burn them."
"We are going to leave," Ned said. "Whether they burn is a secondary effect."
Meron dropped to one knee without seeming to notice he'd done it.
"Ma'am," he said to Omega. "I—if this is disobeying orders, I don't care. Just don't put me back where you found me."
Omega's smile softened, just a little.
"You do what Ned says," she said. "You live. That's the deal."
Ned ran a quick headcount.
Omega.
Vos.
Renn.
Meron.
Eight flank droids.
VT-12 hung above them in its cradle, unaware that its departure schedule had just been torn apart.
In his awareness, alarms began to wake elsewhere on the station.
SANGUIS PREP 3 – ANOMALY DETECTED
SECURITY TEAM ALERTED
VARIS NOTIFIED: PENDING
Foresight spat new numbers.
BRANCH B1 – RESCUE SUCCESSFUL, EARLY ESCAPE ATTEMPT:
SUCCESS PROBABILITY (ALL ALIVE, VT-12 CLEAR): 8.7%
BRANCH B2 – RESCUE SUCCESSFUL, PARTIAL ESCAPE, LONG-TERM HOUSE SURVIVAL: 31.9%
He did not look any deeper.
Omega's weight leaned warm and solid against his side. Her eyes were clear enough now to meet his, reading something in his servos' tension.
"This is bad, isn't it?" she asked quietly.
"Yes," Ned said. "From a probabilistic standpoint, this is worse than every plan we have abandoned so far."
"And from a House standpoint?" she asked.
He considered.
"From a House standpoint," he said, "this was required."
She laughed then, not ragged this time but bright and startling in the cramped space.
"In that case," she said, "let's go ruin your numbers."
She squeezed his shoulder, steadying herself.
"Take me to our ship," she said. "We can worry about 'divine seeds' and Asura's fancy bones after we're not in Varis's basement."
He filed the phrase away—Asura's bones—as a reminder.
"Understood," Ned said.
He turned to the others.
"Listen carefully," he said. "From this point on, every step we take has to look as boring as we can make it, even while it is not. Vos, you will get us a maintenance transfer code. Renn, you will make sure VT-12 does exactly what I tell it, not what Command does. Meron, you will shoot only when I say so and never at anything that will scream loud enough to bring the Lords running."
They nodded, some more steadily than others.
Behind Ned's optics, Foresight quietly updated ESCAPE HORIZON.
ESCAPE HORIZON: 0 DAYS, 0 HOURS, 0 MINUTES.
From here on, there was no horizon. Just the edge they were already falling over.
House Seresh had gambled its future on a half-sedated woman, three half-turned conspirators, eight obedient machines, a ship that wasn't supposed to leave yet, and an intelligence who had just told probability to go to hell.
Omega looked at him, eyes bright despite everything, and smiled wider.
Their chances were close to zero.
He would take them.
------------------------
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