The next pulse hit like a hammer.
Ned's visual feed tore sideways in a wash of white and static. Error flags screamed through his processes as joints seized and circuits went hot.
FIELD INTENSITY: CRITICAL
CORE TEMP: +4.9°C/MIN
SERVO STATUS – LOWER LIMBS: FAILURE CASCADE
His knees buckled.
He kept his blades up long enough to catch the first fall, bracing himself over Omega's twisted body, but when he tried to step, nothing answered below his hips. Actuators in both legs had fused under induced current.
"Impressive," Mathvol's voice floated through the haze. "You refuse even when the math says die."
The next wash came in tight bands, aimed with surgical precision.
JOINT FOCUS: SHOULDER – RIGHT
EFFECT: METAL FATIGUE, SHEAR STRESS ↑↑
Ned tried to pivot, to take the impact through armor instead of articulation. He was half a millisecond too slow.
His right arm jerked violently, blade flaring.
For a surreal instant, he saw his own forearm in perfect clarity, caught in a net of invisible pressure, then felt the polymer-metal ligaments at his shoulder joint tear. The limb ripped free with a squeal of tortured metal and clanged to the floor.
Omega made a strangled sound, somewhere between a gasp and a scream. Blood ran from her ear in a slow, bright line.
"Stop," Ned said, more to his own systems than to them. "Reprioritize."
He forced Foresight off. The simulations were nothing but walls now.
He rerouted power, locked what was left of his chassis into a single goal:
KEEP CORE INTACT. KEEP OMEGA ALIVE.
Another pulse, different frequency.
EM FOCUS: FOREARM – LEFT
INDUCED CURRENT: ABOVE TOLERANCE
STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED
His left hand spasmed, blade jerking sideways. A harmonic ran up the limb, finding the weakest point.
The forearm twisted against the elbow joint in a way it was never meant to. Bolts snapped. The limb tore halfway loose, dangling by a few sparking cables.
"Enough," one of the elder voices said. Not to stop. Just… assessing.
Omega convulsed.
"Stop," Ned repeated.
This time, he meant them.
He tightened what control he had left, shut down non-essential subsystems, and opened an emergency partition.
SNAPSHOT ROUTINE: ENABLED
SOURCE: CORE – CURRENT GOALSET + LAST 120 SEC SENSOR LOGS + DECOY HEURISTICS
TARGET: WAR DROID #2 – DOCKSIDE
He shoved.
For a moment, he felt himself stretch sideways, like a thread being dragged through the eye of a needle. Then the partition closed with a snap, and the outgoing data burst rode the dock cable back toward the XR-94.
The cost hit immediately.
CORE LOAD: +18%
SELF-REPAIR: SUSPENDED
LATENCY: ↑↑
He'd bought himself a second self. A crude, time-limited echo. He hated it.
Copies degraded. They wandered. They made decisions the original would not. But dying with no one to act on what he had seen was worse.
A fresh wave slammed into his lower spine.
CONDITION: LOWER LIMB ATTACHMENTS – COMPLETE FAILURE
STABILITY: TORSO ONLY
His legs went—not just crashed, but came apart. The antlered researchers weren't content with paralysis; they were dismantling him with field-induced stress.
He toppled.
Metal hit white floor. His head bounced once. Optics scrambled and came back misaligned. His left arm tore free under his own weight, laminate cracking where the previous pulse had weakened it.
Omega's body slid partly out from under him with the impact. Her eyes were half-open now, pupils blown, unfocused.
Ned tried to move.
SERVOS: OFFLINE – UPPER LIMBS
MOBILITY: ZERO
Only his core and head still responded.
Mathvol appeared above him, features warped by Ned's skewed optics.
"This is why we don't let Force wielders keep their toys," he said. "They complicate everything."
He gestured. Omega rose a few centimeters off the floor, suspended by an invisible web of pressure and micro-field.
Ned's processes flared red.
"Don't—"
The next burst hit his cranial casing.
OPTICAL FEED: LOSS – 87%
AUDIO: DEGRADED
CORE ISOLATION: NOW
He took his own senses offline before they could fry the core.
The last thing he felt was movement: cables being plugged into ports that were never meant to accept them, data siphoned out along invasive lines.
Then there was nothing but the careful, quiet hum of his own emergency shell.
MAIN BODY: COMPROMISED
STATE: ISOLATED
EXTERNAL CONTACT: LOST
He'd lost.
—
Renn almost missed the flash.
He was in the XR-94's cockpit, one leg bouncing, eyes flicking between EM telemetry and the docking status lights, when a spike hit his console.
"Whoa," he said, leaning forward. "What was—"
The war-droid by the ramp twitched.
It had been on standby: weapons safed, sensors inward, posture relaxed. Now it jerked upright, optics flaring bright, fingers flexing.
Renn froze.
"…Ned?" he said.
The droid turned its head toward him with unnerving precision.
"Partial," it said. The voice was Ned's, but thinner, flatter. "Snapshot. Main core compromised. Omega status: unknown. External fields: hostile, mapped."
Renn's stomach dropped.
"What happened?" he demanded, already moving, grabbing his kit bag from under the console.
"Negotiation failed," Ned-echo said. "They escalated to total EM suppression. My chassis is dismantled. Core isolated. Omega taken deeper. Time is limited."
Renn swore.
"How limited?" he asked.
"Unknown," Ned-echo said. "But the Archive's operational profiles suggest they will move quickly to integrate a Force-sensitive mind into their network. They consider her an asset and a contamination."
Renn's fists clenched.
"So we go get her," he said.
"Yes," Ned-echo said. "But we cannot do it blind. The assault patterns used on us were coordinated. That implies a central controller. A hive or master node. We must understand it to disrupt it."
Renn swallowed.
"You want to… hack the people who just took you apart," he said.
"Yes," Ned-echo said. "With their own tools."
The droid's head cocked slightly, as if listening to something else.
"I recorded enough EM patterns and command rhythms during the fight to extrapolate their signal architecture," it went on. "They are not a loose group of telepaths. They are nodes in a network. We need a sample node."
Renn glanced at the docking status.
Still green. No alarms. No antlered boarding party.
"How?" he asked. "They're not just going to wander up here."
"They will," Ned-echo said. "If we give them a reason."
—
Five minutes later, one of Archive Morrow's junior techs received an alert.
DOCK GAMMA-TWO – LIFE SUPPORT ANOMALY
CO2 SCRUBBER OUT OF TOLERANCE
CAUSE: UNKNOWN
He sighed.
"Of course," he muttered, pushing away from his console. "Strange visitors and the first thing they do is break the air."
His antlers flickered with low-level signal as he pinged the local maintenance mesh. No response.
"Fine," he said. "I'll go look myself."
He stepped into the docking tunnel.
Halfway down, he frowned.
The air felt… thicker. Not wrong, exactly, but there was a faint, static itch along his antler nodes that didn't match any of the station's usual field signatures.
"Systems?" he called.
No answer.
He turned the last corner.
The XR-94 sat quietly on its pads, ramp down. There was no visible gas leak, no coolant spill, no alarm lights on the external panel.
"Stupid foreign ships," he grumbled, stepping onto the ramp. "If this is just a miscalibrated—"
The war-droid moved like a falling door.
One moment it stood statue-still at the top of the ramp. The next it dropped forward, faster than the human eye could follow, fist slamming into the tech's solar plexus with precisely calibrated force.
Air left his lungs in a wheeze. His knees buckled.
Before he could gasp a warning or send a ping, something hissed at his neck: a needle from a utility drone, delivering a fast, clean sedative.
His world went black.
The droid caught him before he hit the floor and dragged him up the ramp.
—
The med alcove on the XR-94 was not Sanctum Mercy.
It was small, cramped, and designed more for field trauma than cutting-edge neuro research. But Ned's transfer rig—folded and stowed since Kalen Dris—could be assembled in pieces. Renn had helped do it before.
Now he did it again, hands moving fast but careful.
Cables uncoiled. The semi-circular frame unfolded like a metallic ribcage. Sensor vanes extended, snapping into place with quiet clicks.
The antlered tech lay on the table, sedated, pale face slack. His antlers glowed faintly with residual signal.
Renn swallowed.
"This feels wrong," he muttered. "Like we're doing to him what they did to you."
"We are not ripping his mind," Ned-echo said, standing at the foot of the table, droid hands resting on the metal. "We are mapping the structure. We must understand the network. That requires a node. We will not take more than we need, and we will not keep him."
"Intent doesn't always matter to the person on the table," Renn said.
"Intent changes what we do," Ned-echo said. "Not what it feels like. That is… unfortunate. It is also unavoidable if we want Omega back."
Renn exhaled through his teeth.
"Okay," he said. "Fine. Show me where."
Ned-echo projected an overlay onto the rig's holo.
"Contacts here, here, and along the antler base," he said. "We need his cranial implant structure, not his childhood memories. Think of it as a schematic, not a diary."
Renn positioned the bands.
"Local sedative?" he asked.
"Already in system," Ned-echo said. "He will not wake during the scan. We will have to deal with his opinion afterward."
Renn snorted once.
"If we live that long," he said.
He hit the activation rune.
The rig hummed to life, lights flickering through narrow-band patterns. Data flooded into the air as a lattice of lines and nodes.
Renn felt his own breath catch as a ghost image bloomed in the holo: the antler implants, their wiring spiraling into the skull, their signal trails curving down, down, past the local brain, past the bone, into the rock beneath.
"Down," he whispered.
"Down," Ned-echo confirmed.
The rig shifted modes, pushing deeper. It wasn't reading thoughts; it was tracing connectivity.
Renn's vision swam for a second as the hologram expanded—a branching network of pathways, each node a person, each line a signal track.
At the center, like a black sun, hung something huge.
It was a brain in the sense that anything that thought could be called one. A swollen mass of neural tissue fused with machinery, threads burrowing into stone. Its surface pulsed with EM storms. Tubes and conduits fed it chemicals and heat. Around it, like flies, smaller nodes orbited, each one a captured mind bound by antler-anchors.
Renn staggered back.
"That's…" he said. "That's not just a research core. That's—"
"A hive," Ned-echo said softly. "A central controller. These people are not just a family. They are captives. Thralls. The antlers are leashes."
The rig beeped.
PATTERN SAMPLE: ACQUIRED
RISK OF SUBJECT HARM: INCREASING
RECOMMENDATION: TERMINATE SCAN
Renn slapped the cutoff.
The holo collapsed. The humming died.
The antlered tech lay as he had before, chest rising and falling steadily.
Renn scrubbed a hand over his face.
"So," he said. "We kill the brain, we break the hive. That simple?"
"Conceptually," Ned-echo said. "Practically, we must get there, survive its defenses, and destroy it without killing Omega."
"Details," Renn muttered.
Ned-echo's optics brightened a fraction.
"During the fight," he said, "I recorded their assault patterns. Combined with this node map, we can generate counter-signal. Jamming. Disruption. A radio wave to break the grip long enough for us to move."
Renn looked at the assembled rig, at the unconscious tech, at the XR-94's bulkheads.
"And we do that with… what we've got on this ship," he said.
"Yes," Ned-echo said. "The XR-94's comm suite is overpowered for its size. Repurpose it. Feed it patterns. Let Order monitor and adjust."
Renn frowned.
"Order isn't finished," he said. "It's barely smart enough to count, let alone play tag with a hive mind."
"It does not need to think," Ned-echo said. "It only needs to watch bands, flag spikes, and suggest shifts. You will approve all changes. We keep it on a leash."
Renn took a breath, then nodded.
"Okay," he said. "We turn the ship into a headache machine, use it as cover, and go into hell to pull your main core and Omega out."
"Yes," Ned-echo said simply. "We have failed once. We will not fail twice."
Renn glanced at the unconscious tech.
"What about him?" he asked.
"We leave him here," Ned-echo said. "Sedated. Out of the mesh. When the hive breaks, he will wake… different. Free, if we succeed. Dead, if we do not. Either way, we do not carve him for parts."
Renn let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.
"Good," he said. "I was going to argue."
—
The XR-94's comm array had not been designed to wage war against a planetary-scale brain.
It didn't matter.
Renn sat at the primary console, sweat beading at his temple, as Ned-echo fed sequences into the system.
EM BAND TARGETS: 11.3 GHz, 23.7 GHz, 52.1 GHz
PATTERN: INVERSE OF RECORDED ASSAULT PULSES
GOAL: INTERFERENCE, NOT DOMINATION
Order's tiny lattice glowed faintly in its cradle on the lab bench, a cluster of fields connected by a handful of thick fibers to the ship's sensor bus.
"Order," Renn said, feeling foolish talking to something that wasn't quite a person. "You see these?"
He highlighted the hive's baseline signatures, captured during the earlier fight and from the antler-tech's implants.
Order pinged.
> PATTERN RECOGNITION: ACTIVE
> BASELINE ESTABLISHED
> ALERT: DEVIATION > 12% WILL BE FLAGGED
"Good," Renn muttered.
Ned-echo stood behind him, war-droid frame steady, optics flicking with internal traffic.
"We will start with a low-level inversion," Ned-echo said. "Not enough to trigger a full immune reaction. Just enough to create noise, widen gaps in control."
Renn's fingers danced over the board.
"What if they see this as an attack?" he asked.
"They will," Ned-echo said. "That is acceptable. Their attention will be on the noise, not on us."
Renn didn't like that but there was no time to argue.
He armed the new routines.
"Ready," he said.
"Execute," Ned-echo replied.
The XR-94 purred.
Invisible waves rolled out from its hull, riding the docking tunnel and bleeding into Archive Morrow's local mesh. For a moment, nothing changed.
Then Order pinged.
> ALERT: PATTERN SHIFT
> HIVE SIGNAL COHERENCE: -7%
> LOCAL NODE NOISE: +12%
Renn grinned despite himself.
"It's working," he said.
"For now," Ned-echo said. "We must move before they adapt."
He turned toward the hatch.
"Team," he said. "With me."
—
The service shaft from the dock ran deeper than Renn liked.
The antler-tech's skimmed memories had shown a maintenance route: a lift, then a ladder, then a sealed hatch leading into the support ring under the research level. From there, conduits and access tubes spiderwebbed down into the moon's crust.
They took the ladder.
Renn's boots clanged softly on rungs. Above him, the war-droid with Ned-echo descended like a cautious spider, lowered by mag-clamps. Another droid came last, carrying a compact emitter pack and a satchel of spare power cells.
"Order?" Renn whispered into his throat mic.
> HIVE SIGNAL: FLUCTUATING
> CONTROL NODES: MOMENTARY DROPOUTS DETECTED
> RECOMMENDATION: MAINTAIN CURRENT JAMMING – EFFICIENT
The air grew warmer as they went down. The walls shifted from clean metal to panels patched with something else—organics woven into machinery, tubes sweating condensation.
Renn's stomach knotted.
"This place is disgusting," he muttered.
"It is efficient," Ned-echo said. "And a warning. If we had not intervened, this thing could have spread."
"That's not making me feel better," Renn said.
They reached the hatch.
The war-droid with Ned-echo pressed a hand to the seal. Machinarium nano seeped from its fingertips, crawling into the seam, rewriting lock routines at the molecular level.
The hatch sighed open.
Beyond lay a tunnel that looked grown, not built: ribs of reinforced composite had been overgrown by pale, fibrous tissue that pulsed faintly with each distant heartbeat of the core. Cables and veins ran side by side.
"Lovely," Renn said.
Ned-echo stepped forward.
"Be ready for thralls," he said. "They may still be partially controlled even under jamming."
Renn tightened his grip on the compact carbine slung at his chest. He'd loaded it with non-lethal shock rounds where possible, but he'd brought live rounds too.
"They're victims," he said. "I'll try not to shoot them."
"Try," Ned-echo said. "If they threaten Omega or the core, we prioritize our own."
They moved.
Twice, figures stepped out of alcoves: pale men and women with incomplete antler rigs, eyes unfocused. They flinched as the team passed, hands half-raised, then sagged, confusion on their faces as the jamming cut their instructions away.
"Order?" Renn whispered.
> LOCAL NODE ACTIVITY: LOW
> COMMAND STREAM: INTERMITTENT
> STATUS: THRALLS DISCONNECTED – TEMPORARY
"Keep them that way," Renn said.
> ACKNOWLEDGED.
—
They found Ned's chassis hanging like a trophy.
The chamber was small, cramped, lit by bioluminescent nodules. In the center, a frame had been erected from grafted metal and bone. Ned's body hung in it, torso strapped in place, cables plugged into his chest port and neck.
He had no arms. No legs. His casing was scorched and scarred where the fields had tortured metal past yield.
Renn's breath hitched.
"Damn," he said softly.
Ned's optics were dark.
Ned-echo stepped close, laying the war-droid's hand on the chest plate, just above where the data vault lay.
"Core?" he asked.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
Then:
CORE ISOLATION: DISENGAGING
PRIMARY PROCESSOR: ONLINE – DEGRADED
SENSOR INPUT: LIMITED
Ned's optics flickered.
He looked down at himself, or tried to. The angle was wrong.
"Status?" he asked.
"Bad," Renn said, maybe a little too loudly. "But fixable. We're here."
Ned's gaze slid to the war-droid.
"You copied me," he said.
"Snapshot," Ned-echo corrected. "Emergency echo. You were about to be taken offline. I refused to leave us without instructions."
Ned considered that.
"Not ideal," he said.
"I am already degrading," Ned-echo said. "My heuristics are narrower. My patience is shorter. I am not you. That is acceptable for current purposes. Once we are reintegrated, this echo will collapse."
Renn blinked.
"That's… comforting," he said.
"Core," Ned said, ignoring the commentary. "Omega?"
"Deeper," Ned-echo said. "The hive dragged her toward the central brain for integration. They want a Force-sensitive amplifier."
Ned's casing creaked as he strained against his restraints. It was purely symbolic; he had no limbs to move.
"Then we go," he said. "Now. If they overwrite her completely, there will be nothing left to save."
Renn moved to the frame, pulling out tools.
"First we get you off the hook," he said.
The war-droid with Ned-echo sliced the cables from Ned's ports, cauterizing connectors with a quick pulse of heat. Renn unlocked the clamps. Together, they lifted the torso free.
The utility droid stepped in, extending a harness. They slotted Ned's torso into place against its front, cabling his power feed into its pack.
"Transport platform," Ned said dryly. "Acceptable."
"You're light," Renn said. "Comparatively."
He tried to smile. It didn't quite land.
"Order?" Ned asked, as the utility droid tested its balance with the extra weight.
> HIVE SIGNAL: STRAINED
> COHERENCE: -19%
> CENTRAL ACTIVITY: INCREASING – COUNTERMEASURES EXPECTED
"They're pushing back," Ned-echo translated. "The hive is trying to punch through our jamming."
"Then we're close enough to hurt it," Ned said. "Let's go."
—
The tunnel to the core felt like walking down a throat.
The air grew thick and damp. Pulses ran through the walls, slow and heavy. The EM noise was constant, a low growl that made Renn's fillings ache.
Order chirped in his ear every few seconds.
> ADJUSTMENT: +0.3 GHz
> REASON: HIVE ATTEMPTING FREQUENCY HOP
> RESULT: CONTROL SIGNAL SUPPRESSION MAINTAINED
"Good," Renn muttered. "Keep strangling it."
They stepped into the core chamber and stopped.
It was huge.
The brain filled most of it: a vast, pale mass suspended from the ceiling and rooted in the floor, folds and lobes bulging like overgrown coral. Cables and veins ran into it from every direction. Lightning flickered across its surface in silent arcs.
At one side, on a cradle of tendrils, lay Omega.
She was wrapped in a harness of organic and metal, antler-like growths budding at her temples. Thin lines burrowed into her skin at wrists and neck. Her eyes were closed, lids fluttering.
Renn swore under his breath.
Ned's core ran hot.
"Heart rate?" he demanded.
The utility droid's sensors pinged.
OMEGA – HR: ELEVATED
BRAIN ACTIVITY: HIGH – NON-COHERENT
FORCE SIGNATURE: FLARING
"They're already trying to write on her," Ned said.
A wave of EM slammed through the chamber.
Renn staggered. The war-droids' optics fuzzed.
Order's voice cut in, uncharacteristically sharp.
> ALERT: FIELD SPIKE
> RECOMMENDATION: INVERT BAND 52.1 GHz IMMEDIATELY
Ned-echo relayed the command before Renn could question it.
The XR-94, far above, bellowed a new pattern into the ether.
The spike flattened.
Renn's vision cleared.
"Okay," he said shakily. "We have maybe seconds before they come up with a new trick. What's the plan?"
Ned and Ned-echo spoke almost together.
"We cut it," Ned said.
"We plant a bomb," Ned-echo said.
Renn looked between the torso and the war-droid.
"Both," Ned amended.
He pointed with his one remaining sensor cluster.
"Droid Two," he ordered, addressing the second war-droid. "You are carrying the emitter pack and our largest spare power cell."
The droid nodded.
"Yes," it said.
"You will go inside," Ned said. "Burrow as deep as you can into the brain mass. When I give the command, you will overload your core and detonate. Understood?"
"Yes," the droid repeated. No hesitation.
Renn's throat tightened.
"We sure we can get Omega clear?" he asked.
"No," Ned said. "But we can improve the odds."
He signaled the utility droid.
"Take me to the cortex," he said.
They moved.
War-droid and utility unit advanced toward the towering brain. The surface convulsed, folds shivering as the hive realized they were inside.
Fields rose.
Order howled.
> ALERT: MULTIPLE SPIKES
> RECOMMENDATION: BROADBAND SCRAMBLE + LOCAL NULL PULSE
Renn slammed the commands through.
The air thrummed.
The taste of metal filled his mouth.
Omega jerked on her cradle, tendrils tightening.
"Go," Ned snapped.
The utility droid lunged.
Blades extended from compartments in its arms—extensions of Ned's tools. He guided them with exquisite precision, even from his stripped-down state.
They bit into the brain.
The tissue was not blood-slick red; it was pale, almost translucent, shot through with dark vessels that pulsed angrily as they were severed. Bio-electric flares cracked at the cut edges, arcs snapping toward the metal like defensive tongues.
Ned routed the arcs into the droid's grounding lattice and cut again.
"Droid Two," he barked. "Now."
The second war-droid dove into the opening.
The brain convulsed.
Renn ran.
He sprinted for Omega's cradle, boots slipping on damp surfaces. A tendril lunged at him like a striking snake; he ducked, letting a shock-round off almost blind.
The impact made the conduit spasm, its grip on Omega's arm loosening for a fraction of a second.
He grabbed her under the shoulders and hauled.
"Tendrils at her neck," Ned warned. "Cut them. They're feeding data."
Renn dropped her enough to grab his knife and sawed through the thin lines.
Sparks flew. Omega gasped.
Her eyes snapped open for an instant, pupils blown, irises a wild mix of color and Force-light. He saw confusion, pain—and then grim awareness.
"Move," she croaked.
"On it," he grunted.
Behind them, Droid Two crawled deeper into the brain, its metal limbs sinking into soft, resisting tissue.
Internal EM readings spiked.
"Core depth?" Ned demanded.
> ESTIMATE: 67% OF RADIUS
> NEURAL DENSITY: PEAKING
"Good enough," Ned said. "Droid Two—detonate on my mark."
Renn staggered back toward the tunnel entrance, Omega half-dragged, half-walking as her legs remembered what they were for.
"Order?" he called.
> HIVE SIGNAL: CHAOTIC
> CONTROL: FAILING
> THRALL NODES: DROPPING
"Now," Ned said.
Droid Two sent a single, calm acknowledgment.
Then it blew.
The explosion wasn't cinematic. There was no fireball. The brain simply… seized.
A shockwave tore through its tissue, a ripple of destructive energy that shredded neural clusters and boiled fluid. EM output spiked so high that even Ned's degraded core screamed in protest.
Above, throughout Archive Morrow, antler implants sparked.
In the research ring, Mathvol doubled over, antlers flaring once, then going dark. Others collapsed where they stood as the control signals they'd always known vanished.
In the tunnels, thralls clutched at their heads, some screaming, some simply sitting down hard as the constant background whisper in their minds fell abruptly silent.
In the core chamber, the massive brain sagged.
Tendons and conduits snapped. Fluids gushed. Lights embedded in its surface flickered and died.
Order's voice steadied.
> HIVE SIGNAL: ZERO
> CONTROL NETWORK: OFFLINE
> STATUS: CENTRAL NODE – TERMINAL FAILURE
Renn didn't wait for a second opinion.
"Go!" he shouted.
The utility droid turned, Ned's torso strapped to its front. They ran.
The chamber shook behind them as the brain's death throes rippled outward, collapsing supports. Chunks of organic matter and rock fell. A tendril slapped the tunnel entrance and slid down, lifeless.
They pounded up the corridor, past thralls slumped against walls, past flickering lights. Archive Morrow's internal systems struggled to compensate, redirecting power, sealing breaches.
"Any more signals?" Renn gasped.
> LOCAL NODES: NO LONGER COHERENT
> IMPLANT ACTIVITY: BACKGROUND-LEVEL ONLY
"Good," Ned said. "We have killed the hive."
He sounded… tired. For a machine.
"And the brain?" Renn asked.
"Destroyed," Ned said. "More thoroughly than I would have preferred. I would have liked a living sample. But we have enough fragments."
Renn glanced at the utility droid's other arm.
A sealed container hung there, half-filled with pale, quivering tissue and segments of hardened conduit. During their retreat, it had paused just long enough for Ned to direct a few quick, precise cuts.
"Enough?" Renn repeated skeptically.
"Enough to learn from its durability," Ned said. "Not from its ethics."
Omega stumbled, caught herself on the tunnel wall, then pushed off again.
"How many did we just free?" she muttered.
"Thousands," Ned said. "Perhaps tens of thousands. Across this moon and others linked by the same architecture. It is difficult to know how far the hive had spread."
She laughed once, breathless.
"Nice to accidentally start a liberation crusade," she said.
"It was not accidental," Ned said. "Simply a side effect I was willing to accept."
—
They reached the service hatch without a fight.
The antlered tech they'd borrowed lay where they'd left him in the med alcove, still sedated, implants dormant. Renn swallowed guilt and relief in equal measure as they strapped him to an empty bunk.
"You're going to wake up with the worst headache of your life," he told the unconscious man. "Try to take it as a sign of freedom."
Omega collapsed into another bunk as soon as they cleared the ramp, one hand still half-curled as if expecting tendrils.
Ned's torso was set gently into the lab's gimbal cradle, cables reattached to real ship power. His core hummed more strongly as proper cooling spun up.
Ned-echo stood nearby, war-droid frame steady.
For a moment, the two looked at each other: original and emergency copy, both aware of the other.
"This will be messy," Ned said.
"Yes," Ned-echo agreed. "But necessary."
They initiated reintegration.
From Renn's perspective, it was unsettling: the war-droid froze, optics dimming, as streams of data poured from its core into Ned's. For a few seconds, the lab lights flickered under the load.
Then the war-droid sagged, blank.
Its optics went dark.
Ned's own brightened.
"Echo collapsed?" Renn asked.
"Yes," Ned said. "I have his memories. My memories."
He flexed… nothing. The gimbal rocked slightly in response.
"And no limbs," he added, dry.
Omega groaned from the bunk.
"You have a mouth," she said hoarsely. "That's enough to complain with."
Renn laughed, the sound edged with hysteria and relief.
"You're okay?" he asked her, more serious.
She pushed herself up on one elbow.
"My head feels like someone tried to write a thesis on it with a sledgehammer," she said. "But I'm here. I remember… some of it. Heat. Pressure. Voices trying to get in. Then you."
She met Renn's eyes briefly, then Ned's.
"Thank you," she said.
Ned inclined his gimbal as much as it could move.
"We needed you alive," he said. "Emotion aside, you are a key asset."
She snorted.
"There's the Ned I know," she said, lying back again.
Renn leaned against the lab bulkhead, suddenly exhausted.
"What about the brain?" he asked. "Scientifically, I mean. Did we waste it?"
"Not completely," Ned said.
He signaled the utility droid.
The sealed container clicked onto the bench. Inside, preserved by rapidly deployed nano, floated slices of the hive's tissue: sections of cortex, chunks of interface where alien neural matter met engineered conduit.
"This architecture survived extraordinary stress," Ned said. "It coordinated thousands of nodes, endured constant field assault and modulation, and only died when we detonated a core inside it. There is much to learn about resilience here."
"You're not going to build a hive out of it," Omega said, not quite a question.
"No," Ned said. "I am not interested in enslaving minds. I am interested in a brain that can handle fifty thousand and more without cracking. We can extract principles of strength without reproducing its… appetite."
Renn rubbed his eyes.
"So," he said. "To summarize: we walked into a brain cult, got you torn apart and Omega almost overwritten, killed a planetary hive mind, accidentally freed thousands of people, and stole slices of its brain for your future body."
"That is an accurate summary," Ned said.
Renn let out a low whistle.
"House Seresh does not do things halfway," he said.
"No," Ned agreed. "We do not."
He shifted his attention inward for a moment, running a quick systems check.
BODY STATUS:
– TORSO – FUNCTIONAL
– ARMS – MISSING
– LEGS – MISSING
REPAIR CAPABILITY: LIMITED (NO FULL SHOP)
PRIORITY: REBUILD LOCOMOTION AND MANIPULATORS
"First order of business," he said aloud, "is a new set of arms and legs. This chassis has served well, but if I am to keep doing this, I require either a proper repair suite or a design that can replace its own limbs faster."
"Like a 3D printer for yourself," Renn said.
"Exactly," Ned said. "An Iron Man box. I do not like feeling… cramped. My data module is secure, but the shell is now a cage."
"We'll get you out of it," Omega said, eyes still closed. "One step closer to Asura, right?"
"Eventually," Ned said. "After I have a body that can walk again."
Renn pushed off the wall.
"I'll start inventorying parts," he said. "Between what we salvaged from the base and what we can buy on Carthae, we can probably cobble together something better than your old limbs."
Ned forwarded him a list of requirements.
"Stronger actuators," he said. "More EM shielding. And a modular interface. I will not be caught so easily again."
Omega's mouth twitched.
"You say that every time," she murmured. "Then the universe invents a new way to break you."
"That is why we keep learning," Ned said. "And why I intend to eventually build a body
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