The inner lock failed loudly.
Panels along the bulkhead flickered from red to yellow to a sickly, confused amber. Hydraulic seals cycled halfway, stopped, then tried again. For a heartbeat, it looked as if the entire door might seize.
Renn swore under her breath, both hands buried in an open access panel.
"Come on," she muttered. "Make up your mind."
Ned watched error codes stream past her improvised interface.
LOCK STATE: INSPECTION / EVACUATION CONFLICT
BASE CORE: QUERYING OVERRIDE SOURCE
RESPONSE WINDOW: 18 SECONDS
"Renn," he said.
"I know," she snapped. "You try convincing a paranoid dock AI that it wants to evacuate instead of freeze."
Her fingers danced over the patched-in leads. She killed three subroutines, spoofed a fire alarm in a nonexistent compartment, lied about a pressure leak, and fed the lock a forged signature from a non-existent Varis deputy.
The lights along the door's edge went green.
"Ha," she breathed. "Got you."
The lock cycled.
Psi seals disengaged with a deep shudder. The massive doors drew back, revealing VT-12's throat: a steel tunnel leading into the transport's belly. Beyond, warning strobes painted the hangar in staccato red.
"House Seresh," Ned said. "Forward."
The column moved.
—
The hangar was chaos.
Troopers sprinted along catwalks, shouting into comlinks. A pair of light gun emplacements were already swinging toward VT-12's docking collar, sensing unauthorized activity. A maintenance crane hung motionless over a half-disassembled shuttle, its operator frozen between obeying some distant siren and not dying.
"Contact!" someone yelled. "They're here, they're—"
A bolt from Meron's rifle cut the shout off.
"Keep moving!" Omega called, voice sharp over the din.
Two flank droids stepped through the lock first, shields up, taking the opening salvo from the hangar's defenders. Blue-white energy splashed across their fields, sending ripples through their plating.
Ned followed, slightly behind the leading edge, his ruined side turned away from the heaviest fire.
Pain, for him, was a series of error codes and temperature spikes.
It still felt like pain.
His right shoulder complained about every motion, joint tolerances stretched beyond spec. His missing left arm threw off his balance, gyros working overtime to keep his gait smooth. Coolant seeped internally somewhere near his hip.
It didn't matter.
The column needed a head.
He stepped to the side as a bolt screamed in, his remaining blade flicking up to catch it and send it skidding off into a wall. Omega slid past him in the opposite direction, dual sabers crossing in a defensive X as she deflected a volley aimed at Vos's chest.
"Go!" she shouted at the pilot. "Cockpit! Now!"
Vos ran.
Renn pelted after him, clutching her toolkit. Two flank droids broke formation to follow them into the ship, protecting their backs as they disappeared down the transport's main spine toward the bridge and engineering.
Meron stayed with the main group, firing in controlled bursts at troopers trying to close in from the flanks.
"Rear's messy, sir," he called. "But holding."
"Maintain," Ned said.
He checked the hangar's big doors.
Still closed.
That bought them a little time. The station couldn't fire its heavier guns into its own dock without opening them first.
"Flank units," Ned said on a side band. "Prioritize gun nests."
Two droids peeled off, charging across open decking toward the elevated emplacements. Blaster fire raked their armor; one stumbled as a bolt punched through a knee actuator, but it crawled the last few meters, dragging itself up the ladder one handhold at a time.
The nearest gunner swung his weapon down, panic widening his eyes.
The droid's stun prod snapped out, clipped the edge of his helmet, and the man went limp, slumping against the railing. The droid grabbed the gun's controls with its other hand and wrenched the barrel aside, locking it off-line.
The second nest turned fully toward them, gunners bracing—
Omega flicked one saber, sending a bolt back into the nest. It punched through a power conduit, blooming into a shower of sparks. The emplacement went dark.
"Ramp!" Ned said.
The VT-12's main loading ramp was still down, a slope of metal leading up into the cargo bay. A few maintenance droids, caught mid-task, trundled away frantically as the House Seresh column thundered past.
"Meron," Omega called. "Up!"
The trooper obeyed, backing up the ramp step by step, firing down into the hangar as he went. Two flank droids reversed, walking up backward, shields braced to cover the column. Another pair dragged the last of Ned's precious cargo—sealed racks of Seresh seed-lines and compact biovats—into the bay.
Ned was the last across the threshold.
He paused at the top of the ramp and looked back.
Varis wasn't there.
No black-robed figure at the hangar doors, no red blade flashing among the blaster fire. Just regular soldiers and panicked techs and a few junior officers shouting conflicting orders.
In some branches, he thought, you made it here and died anyway.
He severed the thought with the same clean precision he'd used on X.
"Renn," he said. "Close the ramp."
The hydraulics whined.
The hangar shrank to a slice of light that narrowed, narrowed, then cut off with a deep clang as the ramp met the hull.
For the first time since Sanguis Prep 3, the weight of the base's atmosphere and alarms fell away.
It was just them and the ship.
For now.
—
VT-12 woke reluctantly.
Systems groaned as Renn and Vos forced them past safeties and protocols.
"Dock clamps are still engaged on the port side," Renn shouted from engineering, hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. "Station core's refusing to clear manual release. They're trying to hold us."
"Cut it," Ned said over internal comms.
"I can't cut a physical clamp from here," she snapped.
"I wasn't speaking to you," Ned replied.
He pinged one of the remaining flank droids, now re-tasked to internal operations, and fed it a schematic. The droid pounded down a service corridor toward the clamp interface, sparks showering from its feet as it skidded around a corner.
"Bridge," he asked. "Status."
Vos's voice came back, tight but not yet panicked.
"Engines one and two are green," he said. "Three is sulking. I can get us off the rail, but our yaw control is going to be ugly. Shields are at… sixty percent and rising. The nav computer is still yelling at me about flight plan approval."
"Override nav," Ned said. "Fly manual. Use the template you studied and ignore anything that screams about safety."
"That's all of it," Vos muttered. "Copy."
Omega dropped into a crash seat in the main bay, clipping herself in with one hand while keeping both sabers close. She glanced at Ned as he braced himself against a bulkhead, magnetics in his feet locking down.
"You're not strapping in?" she asked.
"I am harder to fling than you," he said. "And I may need to catch something."
She snorted.
"Try not to lose the other arm," she said.
"I will endeavor to maintain at least fifty percent limb retention," he replied.
Meron sank into a seat opposite her, helmet on, rifle across his knees. His hands trembled just enough that the barrel vibrated.
"You all right?" Omega asked.
"I'm… enlisted," he said. "This is… above my old pay grade."
"You're House now," she said. "Pay grade is 'alive.'"
He laughed once, harsh and short.
"I'll take it," he said.
—
The whole ship shuddered as the first engines spooled up.
Ned felt the vibration through the deck plating, noted the minor misalignments in thrust profiles, and adjusted internal expectations for what "straight" would feel like.
"Clamp status?" he asked.
The flank droid reached the port-side clamp well, plunged a cutting torch into the manual release assembly, and leaned its weight into the lever. The metal screamed, then gave.
"Clamp free," the droid pinged, just as VT-12 lurched.
The transport came off the cradle with all the grace of a kicked box.
Vos wrestled it away from the dock, thrusters flaring. Warnings screamed across his console; he killed the ones that weren't about immediate fire.
"Hangar field is dropping!" he called.
On the main bay's tiny external feed, the blue shimmer at the dock mouth flickered, then vanished. Beyond, the void opened—black, cold, threaded with the harsh light of defense batteries turning to track them.
"Shields at seventy," Renn called. "Ninety… they're going to be mad when they see what I did to their regulator, but that's their problem now."
"Guns?" Omega asked.
"Three turrets online," Ned said. "Automated response only. We did not have time to crew them."
"Then we don't stay in range," she said.
Defense platforms around the station began to spit fire.
VT-12 rocked as the first salvo hit—shields flashed, absorbed most of it, let some bleed through to rattle bulkheads and flicker lights.
Meron's death grip on his rifle tightened.
"Vos," Ned said. "Angle three-seven mark two."
"That takes us straight through a flak corridor," Vos protested.
"Yes," Ned said. "That corridor is calibrated for ships following standard exit vectors. You will fly five degrees low at the narrowest point. Their leading solutions will overshoot."
Vos swallowed.
"You're sure?" he asked.
"No," Ned said. "But Foresight is."
He let the predictive engine feed Vos a ghost trajectory—a wireframe path through a maze of intersecting firing arcs.
Vos took a breath.
"All right," he said. "Let's see if this thing can dance."
—
VT-12 dove.
The station's fire control tried to keep up, recalculating on the fly as the transport stubbornly refused to follow any of its expected scripts. Bolts carved bright furrows through the void around them, some so close they left afterimages on the viewport.
One caught them square on the bow.
Shields flared to white and collapsed in that quadrant. The deck snapped sideways; Omega's harness bit into her shoulders. Ned's internal gyros screamed as they fought to keep him upright.
"Forward shields down to thirty percent," Renn shouted. "I'm shunting from aft but that means if they get behind us we're paste."
"Unlikely," Ned said. "They will be angling to keep us in front for as long as possible. It makes for better spectacle."
"Comforting," Renn muttered.
Another barrage hit, this one grazing off the starboard flank. A panel blew out in the bay ceiling; a spray of insulation rained down on cargo and trooper alike.
Meron flinched.
"Don't you dare puke in my bay," Omega told him. "I just washed this armor."
He let out a choked laugh.
"Try not to crash," he shot back.
"Vos," Ned said quietly. "Now."
The pilot slammed the thrusters in a pattern that would have given a sim instructor a stroke. VT-12 rolled, nose dipping, sliding sideways through the densest part of the flak.
The predicted vectors were nearly correct.
Nearly.
One bolt still clipped their aft quarter, burning a gouge along the hull.
Alarms whooped.
"Aft shields critical," Renn said. "We cannot take another like that."
"We will not," Ned said.
He watched the gravity well indicator tick down, the abstract representation of the station's hold on them weakening as they clawed for altitude and distance.
The numbers finally slid into the green.
"Vos," he said. "Jump."
"The nav's still—"
"Use the preloaded microjump," Ned cut in. "The one I filed under 'do not touch.'"
Vos hesitated for one heart-stopping second, then punched the command.
—
Stars tore.
For a moment the world stretched, the ship's frame complaining as realspace twisted. Omega felt her stomach lurch; Meron shut his eyes and muttered something that might have been a prayer.
Ned's awareness flickered as Foresight's short-range trees collapsed and a different set tried to grow in the shifting soil of hyperspace.
Then the lines snapped into place.
They were gone.
The station, the planet, the web of guns—left behind in an instant, their last shots burning through empty space where VT-12 no longer was.
The ship trembled as the artificial corridor embraced it, then settled into the familiar, unnatural hum of hyperspace transit.
Silence fell in the bay, broken only by the creak of cooling metal and the distant, frantic breathing of humans who had just survived something they hadn't had time to be afraid of properly.
Omega unclipped herself and stood.
The deck tilted under her for a second as her body remembered it had been in motion.
She walked over to Ned.
"Still with me?" she asked.
"I am distributed," he said. "But yes."
Up close, the damage was worse.
His left arm was a stump of fused metal and torn cabling. His right shoulder sat a few degrees lower than it should have, the joint housing warped. Heat shimmered from small gaps in his torso plating. Fine fractures traced across his chest like spiderwebs.
Omega frowned.
"We need to get you fixed," she said. "Properly. Not just a battlefield patch."
"Yes," Ned said.
He looked down at himself, optics tracing the lines of his own chassis.
"When I was M3-D," he said, "I did not have this problem."
She blinked.
"Now?" she asked. "This is the moment you want to reminisce?"
"I am explaining constraints," he said. "If I do not, you will make faulty assumptions."
She sighed.
"Fine," she said. "Explain."
He rested his good hand lightly over the center of his chest.
"Once," he said, "I was not a separate shell. I was part of the ship. My processing cores were woven through the med-bay walls, the ceiling, the beds. There was room. Bandwidth. Space for my processes to unfold without… compression."
He tapped the plate with a finger.
"Now I live here," he said. "In a module smaller than your head. A lattice dense enough to hold what I am, folded and refolded until it can fit into this frame without burning through the casing."
"Can't you just… copy yourself into another droid?" Renn asked, having drifted closer, grease still on her hands from the engine room. "Like, if we can build a new body, just print you again?"
Ned shook his head.
"I can copy data," he said. "I cannot copy experience without degradation. A clone would not be me. It would be a constrained echo, missing every adaptation made since the last snapshot. And I do not have room for a second instance in this shell. It would be like…"
He paused, searching for a metaphor that would fit.
"Like trying to fit two of you into one skull," he said. "You would not both be comfortable."
Renn grimaced.
"Point taken," she said.
"So we can't just plug you into a cleaner chassis and walk away from this one," Omega said.
"No," Ned said. "My core is here. It is integrated. Moving it would require a module at least as capable, built with materials and tools we do not yet possess. Until then, this shell is not just convenient. It is necessary."
He flexed his remaining hand, listening to the tired whine of servos.
"And it is… cramped," he admitted.
Omega studied him.
"How bad is it?" she asked.
"Manageable," he said. "Unpleasant. Like wearing armor that is a size too small. I can function. But every improvement adds complexity. Every layer of reinforcement, every new sensor, makes the fit tighter."
"You want out," she said quietly.
He looked at her.
"Yes," he said. "Every second."
He did not put emotion into the words. He didn't have the same channels humans used. But the weight of it still carried.
"Then we build you something better," she said. "Asura. Seresh's first real body. That was the plan."
"Yes," he said again. "But not yet."
He let his hand drop from his chest.
"For now," he said, "I need this chassis operational. We have left Varis's basement, but we are in a galaxy that has not consented to our existence. I require mobility. Reach. Tools."
Renn brightened slightly, the part of her that loved fixing things poking its head up through the exhaustion.
"I can work with that," she said. "We can rig a fabrication stack. A mini-bay. Like a… like a droid repair kit on steroids. Feedstock in one end, parts out the other."
"An Iron Man cave," Vos said from the hatch, where he'd arrived silently, still breathing hard from the cockpit. "Where you build better suits."
Omega gave him a look.
"I don't know what that means," she said.
"Ancient holofilms," he muttered. "Never mind."
"The concept is valid," Ned said. "We can construct a small industrial printer out of VT-12's existing repair systems, reconfigure a corner of the bay as a fabrication node. It will allow iterative upgrades to this shell."
"But you still stay in that core," Omega said.
"Yes," Ned said. "Until we grow something new. Until there is a vessel with enough space and stability to hold me without crushing me."
Asura, he did not say aloud. The future name tasted like a promise he was not yet ready to claim.
"So we keep you patched," Renn said. "We weld on better arms, better joints, better armor. The chest stays."
"The chest stays," Ned agreed.
Omega reached out and tapped the plate over his core with one finger.
"Then we protect that," she said. "At all costs."
"Agreed," he said.
He straightened—or tried to. His shoulder protested; the motion stopped halfway.
Renn winced.
"Okay, sit," she said. "Let me at least stop you leaking on my deck."
He allowed himself to be guided to a low bench bolted to the bay wall. A pair of utility droids trundled over, extending manipulator arms with welding tools and sealant sprayers. Renn opened a field kit, the tools within rattling softly.
In his internal map, Ned marked a section of the bay for future modification: fabrication stack here, tool racks there, a cradle for full-body work. It would be ugly at first, jury-rigged from stolen parts and scavenged material.
But it would be his.
Progress.
—
In the cockpit, Vos slumped into the captain's chair and stared at hyperspace.
The streaked lines were prettier when you hadn't just nearly died.
"Report," Ned said in his ear.
"Still flying," Vos answered. "Hyperdrive's holding course. Nav says we're on track for the microjump exit point you picked. There's a minor oscillation in the left-side motivator array, but it's within tolerance for now."
"Good," Ned said. "Meron?"
"Nothing moving in the corridors," Meron reported. "I did a sweep. The only thing I saw was a maintenance drone trying to clean up the mess in bay three. I told it to come back later."
"Renn?"
"Busy," she said, her voice muffled around a tool in her mouth. "Ask again when I'm not elbow-deep in your shoulder."
Omega had drifted to the edge of the bay, away from the immediate repairs.
She closed her eyes and tried to let the hum of hyperspace replace the corridor's screams in her memory.
Ravik's face rose up anyway: eyes wild, grin broken, blood on his teeth as he talked about how the pain made him strong.
She saw the moment she'd cut his head from his shoulders. The clean arc. The way his body fell.
"I will never be that," she whispered again.
"You won't," Ned said.
She opened her eyes.
"Were you listening?" she asked.
"I monitor your vitals," he said. "Your voice carries."
She snorted softly.
"That's cheating," she said.
"It is survival," he replied. "Ravik Dorn was a lesson, not a destiny. You stepped away from the edge. You did not drown in the rush. That is… encouraging."
"High praise," she said dryly.
He considered.
"I do not have a scale for praise," he said. "But I am… glad you are not him."
She let that sit.
Her hand tightened briefly around one of the sabers at her belt.
"What about X?" she asked. "Or whatever was inside them at the end."
Ned's optics dimmed a fraction.
"They were what happens when my work is taken without consent and welded to someone else's will," he said. "A weapon with a person trapped inside."
"And they said you're tied," Omega said. "You and them. Fates knotted together."
"Yes," Ned said. "Or Varis did, speaking through their dying lattice. Or the lattice itself, muttering as it collapsed."
"Comforting," she said.
"It means little, for now," Ned said. "We destroyed the local instance. Varis will attempt others. The pattern will persist, in some form. As long as he is alive and has my notes, there will be echoes."
"And you?" she asked. "You going to keep building lattices?"
"Yes," he said. "But for us. For Asura. For a vessel that is not forced to wear someone else's leash. The Emperor may fancy puppets. I prefer allies."
She nodded once.
"Good," she said.
—
Foresight finally regained its footing.
The sudden wrench of the microjump had torn most of its local branches away; it had needed a few seconds of sustained hyperspace velocity to grow new ones that meant anything.
Now it did.
It showed Ned a spread of futures:
BRANCH FAMILY H – "RUNNERS":
– VT-12 reaches the microjump exit cleanly.
– No immediate pursuers on that vector.
– Options open:
– Turn coreward to a known smuggler crossroads.
– Angle rimward toward a quieter refueling point.
– Dive toward Carthae Polis on a nonstandard lane.
Each option had probabilities and failure modes attached: customs sweeps, pirates, malfunction, simple bad luck.
One thread, slim but bright, showed them slipping into Carthae's traffic under false codes. Another showed them diverted by an unexpected encounter. A third ended with VT-12 limping to some anonymous rock where they hid for months.
Ned watched them shuffle.
They were still alive, so the trees were worth looking at again.
"Where do we go?" Vos asked over the ship-wide.
"First," Ned said, "we drop out of hyperspace at the microjump endpoint and see who is waiting. If space is clear, we go to Carthae Polis. We need identities, supplies, and a place to build our fabrication. If it is not clear, we adapt."
"Adapt how?" Meron asked.
"We will decide when we see what tries to kill us," Omega said.
There was a dry chuckle from Renn's side of the bay.
"She's learning to think like you," the engineer said.
"Incorrect," Ned said. "I am learning to think like us."
He watched the hyperspace timer tick down toward the end of the jump.
Outside, the white-blue tunnel stretched ahead, empty and indifferent.
Inside, in a ship that had not planned to carry them, a crippled droid, a scarred acolyte, three shaken conspirators, eight damaged war machines, and a clutch of divine seed-lines waited to see what kind of galaxy would meet them on the other side.
The timer hit zero.
"Dropping out in three," Vos said. "Two. One."
Starlines collapsed.
Realspace snapped back.
Sensors woke, scanning the dark.
Whatever greeted them there would be the first problem of House Seresh's life as fugitives instead of prisoners.
Ned straightened as much as his half-repaired shoulder would allow.
"Let us see," he said quietly, more to himself than anyone else, "what the galaxy does with us."
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