The XR-94 slid toward the dark moon on thrusters only.
Archive Morrow did not broadcast a beacon. It tolerated their approach the way a closed eye tolerated a faint light: reluctantly, but without flinching. A narrow docking vector painted itself on their HUD in hard, uncompromising lines.
"Gamma-Two," Renn read. "They really don't like visitors."
"They like control," Ned said. "So do I."
He split his focus.
One thread rode the ship's sensors and docking routines. Another stayed wrapped around Omega's implant telemetry. A third sat quietly in the lab, watching the half-grown lattice Renn had named Order, making sure nothing unexpected woke ahead of schedule.
"Renn," he said, switching to internal audio, "you stay with the XR-94. If comms cut for more than sixty seconds, you take the ship dark and prepare for hostile extraction."
Renn appeared in the cockpit doorway, half-strapped in his utility harness.
"You're really leaving me with the flying and the 'maybe shoot our way out' part," he said.
"You are competent," Ned said. "And you are the one not optimized for rooms full of people who poke brains."
Renn grimaced.
"Comforting," he said. "I'll keep an ear on local EM. If Morrow starts screaming, I'll know."
Omega stood, cloak already thrown over her shoulders.
"Who's actually going out?" she asked.
"You and I," Ned said. "The droids stay dockside. If something goes wrong, I prefer our reinforcements not be inside someone else's cage."
She nodded once.
The docking clamps caught with a dull clang. Atmosphere equalized. A thin line of green lit over the inner hatch.
"Dock complete," the ship reported.
Ned checked external cams.
The docking tunnel on the other side was white. Too white. Perfect antiseptic gloss broken only by seams and unobtrusive recessed strips of light. No welcoming committee. No obvious cameras.
He cycled the lock anyway.
—
The air tasted like filtered nothing.
Omega stepped out first, cloak slipping off her shoulders as she descended the ramp. At the bottom, she halted, reached up, and pulled the hood back all the way.
Twin saber hilts at her belt caught the cold light.
"You're sure about advertising?" she murmured.
"Yes," Ned said, descending beside her. His metal feet touched Archive Morrow's deck with a soft thud. "Better they know what we are than pretend surprise."
He glanced around.
The docking tunnel extended straight for ten meters, then opened into a circular chamber. Four other tunnels radiated out from it, sealed. The only color came from a faint, pulsing line running around the circumference at waist height.
"They don't like angles," Omega said.
"They like symmetry," Ned corrected. "It makes fields easier to model."
She snorted softly.
"All right, architect," she said. "Point us at the librarians."
He didn't have to.
They came to them.
There was no sound at first. No footfalls, no hissing doors. Just a disturbance at the edge of his EM sensors, like heat shimmer made of radio waves.
Then three figures stepped out of a side tunnel.
They were human. Mostly.
Pale skin, the shade of people who hadn't seen real sun in years. Lean builds. Their clothing looked halfway between lab coats and robes: long, simple, utilitarian, stitched with faint threads that caught signals better than light.
And above their brows, rising from their skulls, grew antlers.
Not bone, not entirely; the branching arcs were a blend of keratin and embedded hardware. Small metallic nodes studded the tines, faintly pulsing in EM bands invisible to organic eyes.
Omega's hand twitched toward her sabers and stopped.
"…okay," she said under her breath. "That's new."
"Cranial antennae," Ned said quietly. "Signal receive/transmit arrays. Likely used for local mesh and… other things."
The one in front smiled.
His face was narrow, almost gaunt, eyes a washed-out gray. His antlers were the largest of the three, sweeping back like a crown that had decided to grow sideways.
"Welcome to Morrow," he said. His voice was soft, cadenced strangely, as if he was always half a breath behind his words. "You are very late, or very early. Hard to tell."
Omega angled her body just enough to shield Ned with one shoulder.
"We're here for knowledge," she said.
"Everyone is," the man replied. "Some just admit it more quickly."
He tilted his head, antlers catching invisible currents.
"I am Mathvol," he said. "Third branch of the Archive. This is my… family."
The two behind him inclined their heads in unison.
Mathvol's gaze slid over Omega—lingering for a heartbeat on her hilts—then settled on Ned.
"You would be the one who asked to be seen," he said.
"Yes," Ned said. "Med unit M3-D. 'Ned' will do."
"Such a small name," Mathvol said, amused. "For something so dense."
His smile widened.
"Before we decide which room to put you in," he went on, "I'm supposed to ask: are you here to buy drugs?"
Omega blinked.
"What?" she said.
"Enhancers," Mathvol clarified. "Mood filters. Memory bloomers. There are always people who find us looking for quick ways to forget, or be smarter, or feel less. We like to sort them out before they touch the real work."
"We're not here to get high," Omega said flatly.
Mathvol's eyes brightened.
"Good," he said. "It would be a waste."
He took a slow step closer, hands visible, empty.
"The brain is the key to many things," he said. "But most people use it like a tongue. Talk, taste, complain. Very few learn to use it as a hand, or a net, or a knife."
His gaze fixed on Omega again.
"Very few learn to use it as a radio," he added.
The last word happened inside her skull.
Omega froze.
The sound of his voice reached her ears a fraction of a second later, but the sentence had already registered, precise and cold, somewhere behind her eyes.
She flinched.
Ned saw the neural spike in her implant feed. At the same time, his sensors registered a directed EM pulse from Mathvol's antlers: tight-beam, narrow-band, tuned to Omega's head.
He logged it in real time.
SOURCE: MATHVOL
SIGNAL TYPE: EM – MODULATED, LOW POWER
TARGET: OMEGA – CORTEX REGION (EST.)
EFFECT: INTRUSIVE PHONEMIC PROJECTION
"Telepathy," Omega whispered.
"Not the Force," Ned said. "Electromagnetic carrier. Neurologically clever."
Mathvol chuckled.
"I heard that," he said. "Not the words—those are yours—but the shapes under them. You measure what you don't understand. Good reflex."
Omega's jaw clenched.
"Is that the Force?" she asked, louder. "What you just did?"
Mathvol's smile peeled wider, all teeth.
"I don't believe in holy laws," he said. "Or destiny. Or invisible wizards whistling in your blood. I believe in freedom. And supremacy." His fingers tapped his temple. "This is not a gift from ghosts. It's augmentation. Training. Work."
He raised one hand, flicked his fingers.
Omega heard another word in her mind—_open_—and instinctively pushed back, White State tightening around her thoughts like armor.
The second pulse hit the edge of that calm and skated off.
Mathvol's eyes narrowed, impressed.
"Structured mind," he said. "Very disciplined. Still very… bounded."
He lifted his other hand, palm up.
"I can make you smarter," he said to Omega. "Brighter. Faster. Expand the range of what you notice. Give you more colors in your thoughts. You have the skeleton for it. We could add rooms to your house."
"No," she said.
"There is always resistance at first," Mathvol mused. "Fear of losing yourself. Very common. Often justified."
Ned stepped subtly forward.
"We did not come here for recreational brain surgery," he said. "We came here for methodology. Transfer architectures. How to move a mind into and out of a biological substrate without tearing it apart."
Mathvol's eyes flicked to him again.
"That we can discuss," he said. "If you are as interesting as your signal suggests."
He gestured toward one of the side tunnels.
"Come," he said. "The outer rooms are for people who want to forget or be less. You asked to be seen. We will honor that."
—
The inner corridors were quieter.
Not in sound—Archive Morrow remained hushed throughout—but in feel. The air held a static tang that set fine hairs on Omega's arms on end. Ned's EM sensors recorded a constant background hum at multiple frequencies, pulsing in careful patterns.
Omega rubbed at her forearm.
"This place is wrong," she murmured.
"It is tuned," Ned said. "Every surface here is a coil. They are listening. To us, to each other, to themselves."
She exhaled through her nose.
"At least the Sith just glowered," she said.
"They also stabbed," he reminded her.
She conceded the point with a tiny tilt of her head.
Mathvol led them into a white chamber.
It was almost featureless: circular, like the docking hub, with seamless walls. A raised ring ran around the perimeter at shoulder height. The floor in the center was slightly lower, like a shallow bowl.
Five other figures stood on the raised ring, spaced evenly. All pale. All antlered. All watching.
Omega's instincts screamed arena. No weapons visible. No armor. No exits that weren't past the ring.
Ned's sensors showed something else: the subtle focusing of EM fields toward the center. The room was a lens.
Mathvol stepped lightly down into the bowl and gestured to Ned.
"Stand here," he said. "You wanted to be seen."
Ned descended.
Omega remained on the slope, just behind his shoulder, sabers still on her belt, hands open.
"Who are you?" one of the ring figures asked. Their voice was thin, ageless. "Droid. Ghost. Something between?"
"Med unit M3-D," Ned said. "Built in your war, repurposed. Call me Ned."
Murmurs rustled around the ring, not all spoken aloud. Ned's sensors flicked with minor EM shifts as they compared notes in silent bursts.
Mathvol tilted his head.
"You have Foresight," he said, almost idly. "Not the superstitious kind. The mathematical kind. Branches, probabilities, simulations. You taste outcomes before they happen."
"Yes," Ned said.
"We do something similar," said one of the elders on the ring. Her antlers were shorter, but thicker, studded with more hardware. "We call it branch-reading. Pattern-guessing. There are many names. The mind is the gate. The field beyond is the sea. We sail it differently than your Sith."
"We are not Sith," Omega said sharply.
"No," the elder agreed. "You are something stranger."
Mathvol walked a slow circle around Ned, hands clasped behind his back.
"You want to learn how to move a mind," he said. "Not copy. Move. Without leaving a smear. Without turning the host into mush."
"Yes," Ned said. "I have partial tools. I have already moved a pattern from flesh to lattice. It survived, but… poorly."
"You ripped," Mathvol said. "You did not guide. You did not precondition. You treated the mind like cargo instead of an environment."
"Yes," Ned said. "It was a test. I learned where one edge is."
"You want the other edges," the elder said. "The ways to coax, not tear. To prepare a brain so that when the pattern comes, it finds familiar grooves."
"Yes," Ned said.
"And what do you offer?" asked another figure on the ring. "News? Secrets? We are not poor in information."
"Medical designs," Ned said. "Repair nano that obeys bounds. Vascular architectures that can handle loads your soldiers would envy. Foresight frameworks tuned to logistics and survival instead of ego. Enough to keep this place alive longer than its builders' attachment to it."
They listened.
Mathvol stopped in front of him.
"You are not lying," he said. "Not about intent, at least. You always lie about details. That is fine."
He lifted one hand, slowly, and rested his fingertips against Ned's chest plate.
Ned felt the EM pulse like a tap on the shell of his core.
"May I look?" Mathvol asked.
"No," Ned said.
Mathvol's mouth curled.
"You came here asking to be seen," he reminded him.
"By your methods," Ned said. "Not on your terms alone."
He opened a partition.
A decoy, but not an insultingly shallow one: a curated slice of his lattice that contained obsolete patterns, test branches, and fake dead ends. Enough complexity to intrigue, not enough to yield anything dangerous.
"Probe this," he said. "If you can understand it, we will decide how deeply to go."
Mathvol's eyes unfocused.
The antlers around the chamber pulsed.
Omega tensed, but Ned's internal readings stayed within acceptable bounds. He tracked the incoming EM vectors, noted how they slid along his decoy partition, mapping its shape.
"Fascinating," one of the ring voices murmured. "He braided his heuristics like a river delta. No single stream. Many."
"So much density for something that pretends to be a med droid," another said.
Mathvol's shoulders shivered once, as if suppressing a laugh.
"You are a lost soul," he said.
Ned's optics narrowed a fraction.
"Clarify," he said.
"You do not belong to the category you claim," Mathvol said. "You are not an appliance. You are not a Sith relic. You are not a human uploaded. You are… an aberration. A branch that learned it could grow sideways and keep growing."
He flicked his fingers against Ned's chest.
"Your mind is vast," he went on. "Braided. Reasoning in crowds. You simulate futures the way we breathe. You could be a god or a disaster. Or both."
"Or neither," Ned said.
Mathvol's eyes glittered.
"Unlikely," he said.
He drew back a step.
"I can't see all of you," he admitted. "You hid parts. That is wise. But I can see enough to know this: if you get what you want, the galaxy will not stay the same."
Ned's Foresight shivered, unbidden.
FAILURE MODES: UNKNOWN ENTITY ("ACOLYTE X") – RESOLVED
NEW UNKNOWN: "MORROW FAMILY" INTERVENTION – EMERGING
He suppressed the impulse to rerun everything.
"What do you want," he asked, "in exchange for teaching us your methods?"
The room went very still.
"You assume," the elder said softly, "that we are willing to arm you."
Mathvol raised his head, antlers catching a subtle wave.
"I can read futures," he said.
"Probabilities," Ned countered.
"Yes," Mathvol agreed. "Branches. The sea ahead. We taste currents. You are not the only one who runs simulations."
He spread his arms.
"All the threads I can see," he said, "where you ascend quickly, where you get your vessel and your House grows teeth—those threads smell of blood. Death. Chaos. More than the usual background noise. You break balances that have been grinding pleasantly for centuries."
Ned did not argue.
He had seen similar. It was why his plans had so many branches for hiding.
Mathvol's gaze slid from him to Omega.
"And yet," he said, "there are futures where you grow slower. Where you are checked. Where some of the sharpest edges are dulled by the absence of… accelerants."
He lifted one hand and pointed at her.
Omega's spine straightened.
"No," she said.
"We are not bargaining yet," he said.
He looked back at Ned.
"MD-3," he said. "Ned. Whatever you wish to call yourself. Your power will grow. My family does not want it to grow too quickly. Knowledge is expensive. If we give you the mind-work you want—the safe moves, the preconditioning, the rituals that let a pattern slide instead of tear—there must be a cost to slow you down."
He extended one finger.
"I want her," he said.
The room seemed to tilt.
Omega's breath stopped.
Ned's processes spiked, then flattened under deliberate control.
"No," he said, very quietly.
Mathvol sighed, as if disappointed in a bright student.
"You do not even know yet what she could become here," he said. "We could expand her. Refine her. She could walk between thoughts as easily as you walk between variables. And in the process, we remove one of the key accelerants from your most violent futures."
"You are not taking her," Ned said.
Omega's hand went to her saber.
Mathvol's eyes narrowed.
"See?" he said. "Emotion. Impulse. She lunges; she cuts; we defend. This is how fires start."
Omega's saber hissed into life.
Green light washed over the white walls.
She took one step toward him—fast, clean, intent on taking his head.
She never took the second.
Invisible pressure slammed into her.
Her muscles locked. Her eyes rolled. Blood burst from one ear in a sudden, red thread. The saber stayed lit in her rigid hand, tip digging into the floor.
"Omega," Ned snapped.
He caught her before she fell, arm braced under her shoulders. Her heart hammered against his palm. Neural activity in her implant spiked, then went chaotic.
He spun his sensors outward.
EM BURST: MULTIPLE SOURCES
FREQUENCIES: AUDIO ULTRASONIC, RADIO, LOW-MICROWAVE
PATTERN: CONSTRUCTIVE INTERFERENCE CENTERED ON OMEGA – CORTEX AND INNER EAR
"What have you done," he demanded, voice flat.
Mathvol's expression had hardened.
"She tried to kill me," he said. "I dislike that. I dislike Force wielders even more. They make messes. They break things we spend decades tuning."
Omega's lips peeled back, teeth bared in a soundless snarl. The EM field tightened. Her body spasmed.
Ned shifted, putting himself between her and Mathvol, still holding her upright.
"You talk like you're using the Force," he said. "But your weapons are invisible energy."
Mathvol's antlers pulsed.
"We use what the world gives us," he said. "Signal. Sound. Field. Physics. Your sensors know these things. We just reach deeper. No gods. No ghosts. Only good engineering."
Ned's servos stuttered as a fresh wash of radiation hit his frame.
NEW INPUT: EM FIELD SATURATION ↑↑
EFFECT: SENSOR NOISE, SERVO JITTER, CORE TEMP +2.3°C/MIN
He shunted heat to his radiators, tightened internal filters.
On the ring, the elder spoke again.
"Sacrifice," she said. "You know the word. You have done it before. You burned one mind to learn what you needed. Now the universe asks again."
Ned's Foresight spun up despite himself.
BRANCH: ACCEPT PRICE – LEAVE OMEGA
– PROB: NED SURVIVES, GAINS KNOWLEDGE, HOUSE POWER ↑
– COST: OMEGA CAPTURED, SUBJECTED TO ARCHIVE WORK, IDENTITY DEGRADATION – HIGH
BRANCH: REFUSE, ATTACK
– PROB: OMEGA NEURAL FAILURE – HIGH
– PROB: NED CHASSIS FAILURE – MODERATE-TO-HIGH
– ARCHIVE RETALIATION: BROADCAST OF SERESH DATA – POSSIBLE
BRANCH: NEGOTIATE
– PROB: STALEMATE – HIGH
– ARCHIVE WILL NOT RELINQUISH LEVERAGE WITHOUT COMPENSATION
Mathvol's voice cut through the internal numbers.
"The universe says sacrifice is needed," he said. "Leave now, without her, and your wishes and power will come—slower, safer. Stay and strike at me, and the paths knot around death. Yours, hers, maybe ours."
Ned looked down at Omega.
Her eyes met his for a heartbeat.
Under the pain, under the EM storm, there was something very simple there.
Don't. Leave.
He closed his hand more firmly around her shoulder.
"No," he said.
"You are not thinking clearly," Mathvol said. "Our branch-reads align with yours, admit it. You see the blood too. Let her go. You gain knowledge. She gains… a different life."
"She would not call it that," Ned said.
He straightened, slowly, lifting Omega with him. Her saber guttered and went dark as her fingers spasmed; he caught the hilt before it hit the floor.
"You think the universe is asking for sacrifice," he said. "You are wrong. You are asking. The universe does not care."
He drew his own blades.
From compartments in his forearms, two compact, pale-blue plasma edges snapped into life with a sibilant crackle. Not as graceful as sabers, but more than enough to cut antlers and walls if necessary.
Around them, the antlered family shifted.
They did not draw weapons.
They didn't need to.
The fields in the room tightened like a fist.
Ned felt it as an ache in his chassis. Circuits fuzzed. His optical feed pixelated at the edges. Error messages fluttered in his peripheral processes as subsystems tripped and restarted.
Omega choked out a word.
"Ned—"
"I know," he said softly.
He widened his stance, centering his weight over Omega's half-collapsed form, blades out, servos whining under the invisible pressure.
Mathvol shook his head, almost pitying.
"You are surrounded," he said. "You cannot swing without us crushing her mind. You cannot run without us lancing your core. The longer you stay, the more damage you take. You built your plans on probability. Look at them, Ned. All of them. There is almost no way out."
"Almost," Ned said.
The fields pressed harder.
Around the ring, the family watched, antlers glowing faintly in bands he could barely track. Their eyes were calm. Curious. Not cruel, not exactly. Just convinced.
In his mind, Foresight screamed branches of blood.
He stayed anyway.
The room shrank around them, invisible knives digging into circuits and nerves.
House Seresh had a heart now.
To leave would be to tear it out with his own hands.
Ned lifted his blades a fraction higher, every motion costing him microfractures and heat, and stared at Mathvol across the white floor.
"If the price of knowledge is my House," he said, "then your accounting is wrong."
The next pulse hit him like a hammer.
The world flickered.
He did not fall.
Yet.
------------------------
To read 20 advanced chapters you can visit my Ko-fi:"https://ko-fi.com/thekindones''