No station. No guns. Just a cold starfield, a few anonymous freighters gliding along distant lanes, and the quiet ping of VT-12's sensors realizing, for the first time in its service life, that it wasn't reporting to anyone.
"Nothing on direct pursuit vectors," Vos said from the cockpit. "Local traffic only. No Imperial tags in immediate range."
"Good," Ned said. "Plot for Carthae Polis. Nonstandard lane K-Theta-Nine."
Vos frowned at the nav screen.
"That's… not on the public charts," he said.
"It is on mine," Ned replied. "The Sith map worlds they intend to use or choke. Carthae is both."
He pushed the coordinates through.
Foresight flickered: a tangle of branches, all bad in different ways, but one cluster glowed marginally less lethal.
"Do not file a plan," Ned added. "We do not want this route on any record."
Vos hesitated.
"Blind jump with smuggler coordinates," he muttered. "Sure. Why not. Hyperdrive is still warm. Spinning up."
The stars elongated again.
This time, the jump was long enough for everyone to feel it.
—
Carthae Polis waited like a bruise on the night.
When VT-12 dropped back into realspace, the world filled the viewport—half lit, half shadowed, a thin blue veil of atmosphere wrapped around a surface that was more metal than rock.
The primary city-belt wrapped the equator: a continuous sprawl of towers, domes, stacked platforms and skeletal superstructures. The tallest arcs and spires stabbed so high they vanished into thin haze, blinking with navigation beacons that could be seen from orbit.
Traffic glowed in dense streams around it. Thousands of ships, from tiny shuttles to bulk haulers, moved in organized chaos—some in sanctioned lanes, some ignoring them.
Vos let out a low whistle.
"I thought Corellia was big," he said. "This is… something else."
"It used to be a pit," Meron said quietly from behind him. "Old Navy briefing said Carthae's crust was shot full of mines. They dug up some mineral for primitive drives before hyperdrive got cheap. Then the miners left, scavvers moved in, and the city never stopped growing."
He nodded toward the belt.
"Rich up top where the lights are clean. Poor live in the old shafts and lower stacks. Everything costs too much and somehow nothing costs anything at all, if you know who to ask."
On the night side, the city flickered like a broken circuit—patches of bright neon, stretches of darkness, corridors of light stretching to the horizon.
Ned watched it.
For a moment, an old, irrelevant memory surfaced: a view from a hospital roof on a world no one in this galaxy knew. A human city of glass and steel, so proud of its skyline.
It would have fit inside one of Carthae's industrial districts.
He marked the comparison and let it go.
"Approach vector?" Vos asked.
Ned pushed a route to the console.
"Transit Port A-X Hyper," he said. "Open fly-through. High volume. Minimal questions. Their only concern is whether the fee clears."
"Now that," Vos said, "I can handle."
—
They didn't talk about choice until the approach requests went out and there was nothing to do but wait for a landing slot.
Ned gathered them in the bay: Omega, Vos, Meron, Renn, and the droids that could still stand without external support.
The deck vibrated gently under their feet as VT-12 joined a holding pattern, waiting for its turn to descend into the layered traffic web.
"Before we land," Ned said, "we will address something."
Omega glanced at him.
"Now?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. "Because once we are in the city, it will be easy to pretend we do not need to."
Vos and Meron traded a look.
Renn folded his arms, grease still on his sleeves from patching conduits.
Ned's optics moved from face to face.
"We are fugitives," he said. "House Seresh exists, but only as an idea and the four of us who have acted in its name. The Empire will hunt us eventually. Others will, too. That path is narrow and likely short."
He paused.
"I will not force anyone to walk it."
Meron frowned.
"You dragged us out of a Sith lab," he said. "Doesn't that make us your problem?"
"I did not drag you," Ned said. "I offered options in a hallway. You chose. You may choose again."
He looked to Vos.
"You are a pilot with useful skills," he said. "You can disappear on a world like this. Sign on to a legitimate line. Or less legitimate ones. If you leave now, I will not follow, and no one will call you traitor for choosing to live."
Vos's jaw worked.
"You're serious," he said.
"Yes," Ned said.
He turned to Meron.
"You have spent your life being told where to stand and who to shoot," he said. "If you wish to lay that down and find work that does not put you between Sith and their enemies, you may. I will not keep you by fear."
Meron looked away, helmet tucked under one arm, eyes on the deck.
"And if we stay?" he asked.
"Then you do so with clear understanding," Ned said. "We will be hunted. We will be poor more often than we are comfortable. We will fight hard things. There are no guarantees, only probabilities."
He shifted his gaze to Renn.
"And you," he said. "You are a technician with an unhealthy fascination for broken machines. You already risked your life for this. You may go and sell your skills to someone safer. Or stay and help me build something no one else will understand until it is too late."
The engineer snorted.
"That sounds like you want me to stay," he said.
"It is a description," Ned replied. "The wanting is separate."
Omega watched all three.
She felt something loosen in her chest that she hadn't realized was there, hearing the words out loud. It would have been easy—natural—for Ned to simply assume he owned everyone who'd stepped onto VT-12 with him.
He didn't.
"Choose," Ned said. "Now, before Carthae's gravity pulls you in directions you didn't intend."
Silence held for three heartbeats.
Vos broke it.
"I signed on to the Navy because I was good in a cockpit," he said. "Not because I wanted to be in the middle of… whatever this is." He gestured vaguely toward the bulkhead, meaning the Sith, the war, the escape. "You got me out of a posting that was going to get me killed for someone else's experiment. I appreciate that. But I'm not built for Houses and divine seeds."
He swallowed.
"If it's all the same, I'd like to find a small line that just moves cargo and grumbles about fuel prices," he said. "Maybe change my name. Twice."
Ned inclined his head.
"Understood," he said. "I will arrange papers and a modest stake. Consider it payment for services already rendered."
Vos blinked.
"That's it?" he asked. "No oath? No 'if you talk, I'll find you'?"
"If you talk, the first people to hurt you will be the ones you're talking to," Ned said. "They will decide you know too much about Sanguis and dispose of you. I prefer you alive. And quiet."
Vos let out a breath that might have been a laugh.
"Fair," he said.
Meron took longer.
"My family thinks I'm dead," he said finally. "They got the notice when I signed on with Varis's group. Easier that way. I… don't know how to be anything else but a soldier."
"You can learn," Omega said.
He met her eyes.
"Maybe," he said. "But I don't think I can learn fast enough for what you're doing. I've seen enough war. Enough Sith. I don't want to spend what's left of my nerve fighting another one."
He squared his shoulders.
"I'll go with Vos," he said. "Find a hole, work a gate somewhere. Maybe point a rifle at people trying to steal cargo instead of at kids in training pits. If you ever need… a favor, and I'm still breathing, I'll remember."
Ned nodded once.
"I will not call lightly," he said.
That left Renn.
The engineer shifted, scuffed his boot against the deck.
"You know I'm staying," he said.
Omega raised an eyebrow.
"Do we?" she asked.
Renn shrugged.
"I had options," he said. "Stay on Varis's base and keep patching torture machines. Sign on to a corporate lab and fix the same tech with better coffee. Or come with the only droid I've ever met who argues with Sith and steals ships."
He scratched at a grease smudge on his cheek.
"I'm not chasing power," he said. "I'm chasing understanding. There's stuff in your head and in those vats that nobody else in the galaxy has. I want to see it. Take it apart. Help make it into something that isn't just more horror."
He looked directly at Ned.
"You said House Seresh was about more than surviving," he said. "You said it was about changing the game. If that's true, then… I want in. Not as a fighter. As the guy in the back room who makes sure the right things explode and the wrong ones don't."
Ned considered him.
"You would be a researcher," he said. "Not a front-line. Not a test subject. Your task would be to help me understand and refine what we have stolen, so that when we use it, it does what we intend and not what our predecessors feared."
Renn's mouth quirked.
"'House of power' needs a nerd," he said. "Guess that's me."
"You are suitable," Ned said. "Not because you are ambitious, but because you are curious. That is harder to corrupt."
Omega snorted softly.
"That's your version of a compliment," she told Renn.
"I'll take it," Renn said.
Ned's optics moved between them once more.
"Then that is settled," he said. "Vos, Meron—I will have documents ready before we disembark. Once the fees are paid, you are free to go where you will."
He looked to Omega and Renn.
"You two," he said, "we have work to do."
—
The port controller barely pretended to care.
"Transit Port A-X Hyper," a bored voice crackled over the channel as VT-12 descended into the lattice of landing lanes. "Transmit registry and fee packet. Flight path Upsilon-Nine."
Ned pushed a forged civilian identifier and a bundle of credits through.
"Received," the controller said after a second. "Pad C-12. Don't bump anyone on the way down and don't stay longer than your payment covers. Port isn't responsible for theft, sabotage, or local disputes."
"Understood," Ned replied.
The port loomed up at them: a vast open structure of stacked landing decks, scaffolds, cranes, and scaffolded towers. Shuttles rose and fell like bees in a hive, their exhaust plumes cut short by shield fields and environmental systems trying to keep the whole thing from choking on its own fumes.
Vos brought VT-12 onto Pad C-12 with a care he hadn't shown under fire. The ship's landing struts kissed metal. Systems cycled down to a low hum.
"Welcome to Carthae Polis," he said. "Try not to get mugged before we're off the ramp."
—
They said goodbye at the foot of that ramp.
The port's air smelled of burned fuel, ozone, and spice. Announcements blared in half a dozen languages, none of them asking too many questions.
Ned handed Vos and Meron each a slim credit chit and a data wafer.
"Identities," he said. "Registered with local civil nets as minor freelancers. Nothing impressive. Enough to rent a room and not be noticed."
Vos turned the chit over in his fingers.
"This is… a lot," he said.
"It is not," Ned said. "But it is enough."
Meron slid his into a pocket.
"You sure you won't wake up in the night and decide we're liabilities?" he asked.
"If I wake up in the night, it will be because someone is shooting at us," Ned said. "Not because I regret letting you walk away."
Omega stepped forward.
She clasped Vos's arm briefly.
"Try not to die stupid," she said.
"I promise nothing," he replied, managing a crooked smile. "But I'll aim for 'old and bored' instead of 'young and exploded.'"
Meron hesitated, then offered a stiff nod.
"Good hunting," he said. "Or whatever you call it when you're running from half the galaxy."
"Life," Omega said.
He huffed something like a laugh.
"Then… good life," he said.
They turned and walked into the flow of travelers, their silhouettes swallowed by the crowd within a minute.
Ned watched until he lost them.
"Think we'll see them again?" Renn asked.
"Probability is low," Ned said. "But low is not zero."
Omega let out a breath.
"Come on," she said. "You promised a contact."
—
The office was three levels down and three sectors over from their pad, tucked behind a bar that smelled of cheap alcohol and fried something.
A rust-flaked door hissed open when Ned pinged it with a specific, old code.
Inside, the air cooled.
Shelves lined one wall, cluttered with datapads, parts, and sealed cases. A long counter occupied the center, behind which a man sat with his boots up, a half-disassembled blaster in pieces before him.
He glanced up as they entered.
His eyes flicked over Omega's armor, Renn's stained overalls, the droid.
"A rogue unit," he said. "Not exactly rare on Carthae. But you don't see many with that much… aftermarket."
He tapped his temple.
"Who am I talking to?" he asked.
Ned stepped forward.
"You are speaking to House Seresh," he said. "Acting through med-unit shell M3-D."
The man snorted.
"Dramatic," he said. "Names don't mean much here. Codes do."
Ned sent one.
A narrow-band burst, encrypted in an obsolete Sith field cipher. It contained a fragment of an old logistics directive—one that should only ever have passed between Varis's inner circle and a handful of trusted smugglers.
The man's eyebrows went up as he read it on his hidden implant display.
"Well," he said. "Either you've killed someone very important, or you are someone's worst mistake."
"Both," Ned said.
"That I believe," the man said. "Call me Keth. For the next five minutes, anyway. What do you want?"
"New identities," Ned said. "A new ship. A dock key that isn't on any list which leads back to Sanguis or Varis. We pay well."
Keth's gaze sharpened.
"'We pay well' is my favorite sentence," he said. "Sit."
They didn't.
He shrugged.
"Suit yourselves," he said. "First things first. IDs."
He pulled out a small, flat device and gestured to Omega.
"Hand," he said.
She offered it warily. He pressed the pad against the skin at her wrist; it hummed.
"Baseline human, mid-range midi-count, nothing fancy," he said. "Easy. I can burn you a gene-tag and a nice, boring civil record in one of the mid-city blocks. Name, age, minor parking violations, no outstanding warrants."
"No photos?" she asked.
"Gene matrix only," he said. "Face scanners talk to the matrix, not the other way around. You don't trigger red unless you're on someone's specific list."
He repeated the process with Renn, then paused at Ned.
"And you," he said. "You want a citizen file too? The law technically recognizes droids."
"I want a corporate asset registration," Ned said. "Tied to a small transport company. Serial scrubbed from any Imperial cross-check, authorization to carry restricted tools and minor weapons."
Keth leaned back.
"Ambitious for a med-unit," he said. "But doable."
He flicked his fingers, calling up a holo interface only he could see.
"And the company?" he asked.
"Seresh Logistics," Ned said.
Omega glanced at him.
"We're going with that?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. "If we must pretend to be ordinary, we will at least be consistent."
Keth smirked.
"You're lucky you've got a baseline human engineer there," he said, nodding at Renn. "Some ports glitch when there's nothing but altered genomes and droids on a manifest. Let him be your face if anyone ever asks."
Renn grimaced.
"Great," he said. "I always wanted to be respectable."
"Too late," Keth said. "You came through my door."
He tapped a few more commands.
"Now ships," he said. "You want fast, quiet, heavily armed, or all three and bankrupt?"
"We want something wide enough for a lab," Ned said. "Not so large it draws notice. Reasonable performance. Already fueled. No obvious owner on paper, no trackers you tell us about."
Keth chuckled.
"You're specific," he said. "I like that."
He pulled up a schematic and spun it toward them on a small projector.
The holo showed a stubby-nosed transport with a broad midsection and a sloping aft—more wings than grace, with a dorsal fin that housed a single turret.
"XR-94 hauler," Keth said. "Converted for independent run. Two decks, one big bay, one decent engine block. She won't outrun a Navy interceptor, but she'll leave most freighters looking at her dust. Registered to a shell company that died in a tax audit last year. Docked right here in A-X Hyper."
"Armament?" Omega asked.
"Two light dorsal turrets, one ventral," Keth said. "Shields are honest, hyperdrive is fresh. Plenty of power taps if you want to bolt weird things on."
"And the price," Ned said.
Keth's smile thinned.
"Ship, current fuel, basic paperwork, three fake IDs and a company registry," he said. "Plus the bit of my life I'll be spending making sure no one ever traces the sale back through Imperial channels."
He named a number.
Omega stiffened.
"That's almost everything," she said, looking at Ned.
"Five million," Ned confirmed. "Leaving just under one million in liquid reserves."
"You have that much?" Renn demanded.
"I was in charge of requisitions for Sanguis," Ned said. "It would have been irresponsible not to divert contingency funds before we fled."
Omega snorted.
"You stole from Varis," she said.
"I stole from the Empire," Ned corrected. "Varis was a conduit."
Keth watched them quietly.
"You want cheaper?" he asked. "I can find cheaper. But not clean."
Ned considered the branching futures.
Most paths that started with "we kept more money and bought a worse ship" ended abruptly.
"We will take it," he said.
Keth inclined his head.
"Good," he said. "Since you're paying properly, I'll even be generous."
He tapped another crate next to the counter.
"Small arms package for crews who don't want to be boarded politely," he said. "Ten carbines, two marksman rifles, twenty pistols. Clean, unregistered. Consider it my way of making sure my investment survives long enough not to bring trouble back to my door."
Omega's eyes narrowed.
"Investment?" she asked.
Keth smiled lazily.
"A House with a rogue droid and stolen Sith tech is either going to die loud or get very interesting," he said. "Either way, I want to be able to say I helped."
Ned did not smile.
"Keys," he said.
Keth handed over three slim metal tabs and a datastick.
"Dock access, ship auth, identity packet," he said. "Welcome to Carthae, Seresh Logistics. Try not to blow up my city."
—
The XR-94 sat three levels down, on a smaller pad than VT-12's.
She looked tired but solid. Hull plates scuffed, paint faded, but the lines were honest and the engine housings hummed with restrained power.
Omega walked a slow circle around her.
"She's ugly," she said.
"She is anonymous," Ned said. "That is better."
Renn ran a hand along the hull.
"She's got room," he said. "I could rip half this bay out and still have space for a lab, cargo, and your repair cave."
"Later," Ned said. "First we make sure she's ours."
The first sweep turned up two bugs.
One was a standard port tracker bolted under the main ramp. The other was more interesting: a tiny passive relay nested in the dorsal sensor cluster, designed to wake if she ever transmitted on certain Imperial channels.
Ned held it up between two fingers.
"Forgot to mention this?" Omega asked.
"I told him no trackers he would tell us about," Ned said. "He obeyed, technically."
He crushed the tiny device between his fingers and dropped the fragments into a waste chute.
It felt… satisfying.
They spent the next hours in motion.
Droids trundled back and forth between VT-12 and the XR-94, hauling sealed racks of Seresh seed vials, biovats, diagnostic rigs, and Ned's private cores. Omega and Renn marched with them, armed, watching every corridor.
By the time the last crate rolled up the new ramp, VT-12's med compartments were stripped of anything that said "Sanguis" instead of "ordinary clinic." The old ship sat a little lighter on her struts.
At the final hatch, Omega paused and laid a hand on its frame.
"Thank you," she said softly. "For getting us out."
Then she turned away.
They left VT-12's keys with Keth as part of the deal. He could sell the hull on to someone else or cut it for parts; it no longer mattered.
Their world was the XR-94 now.
They moved her within the hour—from Keth's shell berth to a grimmer, noisier section of the port where pads were rented by the day, racks of ships stacked like plates in a cupboard.
The rental warden barely looked up from his console when Ned paid for three days in advance.
"Slot J-22," he said. "Don't vaporize your neighbors."
"We will endeavor," Ned said.
They used part of the remaining credits to top the tanks, swap the turrets' worn-out barrels for new ones, and buy a compact fabrication kit: a set of industrial-grade printers and cutters that could, slowly, build anything from armor plates to replacement servos.
It wasn't the Asura lab he wanted.
But it was a start.
—
A-X Hyper's main artery hit them like a wave.
Crowds flowed in both directions under a canopy of holo-ads and hanging cables. Hoversleds zipped past with crates stacked dangerously high. Street vendors shouted over each other, waving skewers of sizzling meat, racks of memory chips, bootleg navcharts.
Skyscrapers rose on either side, vanishing into a tangle of walkways and mid-level platforms that threaded between them like spiderwebs.
Everything was loud. Bright. Fast.
Omega's head turned, taking it all in.
"Big," she said, which was as much as she trusted herself to manage.
She had seen cities before—garrison worlds, fortress hives, prison complexes—but those had been designed around control. Cameras, checkpoints, predictable flows.
This place… pulsed.
The Force here was messy.
It roiled with petty crime, back-alley deals, quiet acts of kindness, sudden violence. A thousand small fears and hopes layered over each other until no single note dominated.
For the first time since she'd woken up on Ned's table, she felt like the world around her wasn't entirely owned by someone else.
Renn walked between them, eyes wide behind his goggles.
"That stall is selling power couplers that went out of production fifty years ago," he said, pointing. "And that one has a half-disassembled droid brain just sitting there. Do you know what I could do with—"
"Not today," Omega said.
"Later," Ned added.
Renn sighed.
"Fine," he said. "But I'm making a list."
Ned watched the flow of people.
Species he knew and some he didn't. Smugglers in threadbare jackets. Corporate types slumming it. Street kids with sharp eyes and quick hands. A pair of armored bounty hunters arguing over a datapad.
He overlaid old intelligence files on what he saw.
Much of his data was out of date.
Enough patterns remained.
"Carthae Hyperplex sectors A to D," he said quietly to Omega. "Main trade. E to H, fuel and maintenance. I through L, entertainment and predation. We are in the hinge between C and E. Useful. Busy. Easy to disappear."
"And to die," she said.
"Yes," he agreed.
They walked a little further in silence, letting the crowd swallow them and then spit them out again a dozen meters later.
"Renn," Ned said.
"Yeah?" the engineer replied, craning his neck to look at a stall stacked with obsolete hyperdrive coils.
"In House Seresh," Ned said, "your task is clear. You are research. You are the one who will stand beside me when we open the vats and the cores and decide what to make of them. Not a soldier. Not a test subject. A partner in understanding."
Renn looked at him, startled.
"'House of power,' huh?" he said, a smile tugging at his mouth. "I can live with that."
"Try not to die from curiosity," Omega said.
"No promises," Renn said.
They moved on.
—
Later, when the crush thinned slightly and they'd had time to mark a few safe exits, Omega fell into step closer to Ned.
"You didn't tell him about the seeds," she said.
"No," Ned said.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because he does not need to know," Ned said. "Not yet. His role is to help us understand what Seresh can do, not to imagine himself inside an Asura shell before we have even built one."
Omega nodded slowly.
"And when you do build one?" she asked. "What then?"
They slipped into a narrower side street, where the noise dropped a fraction and the lights were more erratic.
Ned took a moment before answering.
"Asura comes first," he said. "A vessel capable of holding my core without crushing it. That will take time, resources, and a world willing to grow something that dangerous. Until then, this shell remains."
He tapped his chest lightly.
"Once Asura exists and I have proven it can survive, the next vessel will be yours," he said. "If you still want it."
She blinked.
"You decided that without asking me?" she said.
"Yes," he said. "Because you are the only one I trust with that level of power who has already proven she can stand at the edge and not jump. Seresh blood belongs in a mind that can say no to its own hunger."
She looked away, watching a pair of street performers juggle small orbs of visible plasma for a few credits.
"And after that?" she asked.
"After that," he said, "we wait. We watch. We do not make more until we find someone who is already Force-sensitive, already disciplined, already… something beyond ordinary. We do not hand Seresh to talentless shells and hope it makes them worthy. That is how Varis thinks. Not us."
"How long do you think that will take?" she asked.
"Years," he said. "Decades, perhaps. True members will be few. Allies many. Only a handful will ever carry Seresh in their blood."
Omega exhaled.
"Good," she said. "Last thing the galaxy needs is a thousand Raviks with indestructible bodies."
"Agreed," Ned said.
She glanced at him.
"And you?" she asked. "You once said you wanted out of that cramped box. You sure you're patient enough to wait?"
"No," he said. "But I will be."
For a moment, the droid in the crowd and the woman at his side simply walked, just another pair of silhouettes under neon.
Omega's mouth curved, not in mockery, not in war readiness, but in something small and real.
"We're really doing this," she said. "House Seresh. In a place like this."
"Yes," Ned said.
He let a small, precise approximation of a smile touch his vocoder.
"And the galaxy," he added, "is not ready."
Renn, a half-pace ahead, turned to look at another stall and almost tripped over a crate, catching himself with a startled laugh.
Omega shook her head.
"Neither are we," she said.
"Then we will learn," Ned replied.
They stepped back into the main flow of A-X Hyper—the lights, the noise, the thousand intersecting lives—and let the city close over them.
House Seresh was no longer a label on a Shan station or a whispered joke in a med bay.
It had boots on a street, a ship in a cheap berth, seeds in cold storage, a crippled droid with too many plans, a fighter who had seen the edge, and a researcher already plotting new machines.
For now, that was enough.
------------------------
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