Carthae Polis never slept.
From the XR-94's rented berth, the city spilled in all directions: towers like blades, hollowed asteroids welded into blocks, sky-lanes threading between them as constant streams of lights. The lower decks were a permanent dusk of exhaust and neon. Higher up, above the permanent haze, the rich towers glowed like embers.
Ned watched it through the viewport, torso clamped into a repair cradle, new limbs half-finished around him.
The cradle's arms moved with careful precision, slotting a bundle of fiber-mesh into the frame of his right thigh. Machinarium nano laced through it, knitting metal to composite.
"Test extension," Renn said, eyes on the diagnostic slate.
Ned flexed.
The new leg obeyed: smooth, with a fraction more torque than the old design, EM shielding layered around the major actuators.
"Acceptable," Ned said. "Left side."
They repeated the process.
These limbs were not pretty. The plating was mismatched—some dark, some a brighter steel—scavenged from three different salvage lots and one very offended Carthae mechanic. The proportions were bulkier, joints a little overbuilt.
That was the point.
The hive had taught him one lesson with brutal clarity: any field that could tear his limbs off was one he had to be able to walk out of.
"EM bleed?" he asked.
Renn flicked through readings.
"Down twenty percent from your last chassis," he said. "I'd like more, but we're limited by what they sell without setting off half the port's customs flags."
"It will do," Ned said.
The cradle rotated.
His new arms hung just above the old shoulder housings, waiting for the splice.
These, he'd spent more care on.
Segmented plating with interrupt lines to break resonant paths. Overlapping micro-shields around the shoulder and elbow motors. Hands with extra articulation in the fingers, built for delicate work as much as violence.
He watched as the cradle's tools snipped away the ragged remains of his previous connectors and slid the new shoulders into place. Locking pins clacked home. Nano filaments flowed, bridging metal and polymer.
Renn glanced up at him.
"You're sure you don't want cosmetic plating?" he asked. "We can make you look less like a walking scrapyard."
"Later," Ned said. "Function first. If we succeed, Asura will be aesthetically pleasing. This shell only has to survive."
Renn snorted.
"I'll paint flames on it when you're asleep," he muttered.
"Order," Ned said, ignoring that. "Status on limb diagnostics."
Order's voice came from the lab speaker, calm and clipped.
> NEW APPENDAGES: MOTOR FUNCTION – WITHIN TARGET
> EM HARDENING: FUNCTIONAL
> MAX TORQUE: +11.2% OVER PREVIOUS DESIGN
> RECOMMENDATION: FIELD TEST IN LOW-RISK ENVIRONMENT BEFORE COMBAT USE
"See?" Renn said. "Even the baby AI thinks you should go easy on it."
"It is not a baby," Ned said. "It is a calculator with good taste in frequencies."
Order did not comment.
The cradle disengaged with a hiss, lowering Ned onto his new feet.
He stood.
For a moment, he simply balanced, internal gyros recalibrating to the new mass distribution.
His first step was careful. The second less so. By the third, he was walking the length of the lab, shadowed by a flank droid and watched from the doorway by Omega.
She leaned against the bulkhead, arms folded, cloak off. Faint bruising still traced the line of her jaw. The antler-scars at her temples had already faded to pale, raised lines.
"How does it feel?" she asked.
"Stronger," Ned said. "More… spacious."
He flexed his hands.
The new fingers moved faster than the old. No phantom lag, no subtle glitch.
"Still cramped?" Omega asked.
"Yes," Ned said.
He tapped his own chest plate with one knuckle.
"The data module remains the same," he said. "No matter how big I make the limbs, my mind is still folded into this box. It is tolerable, but… not optimal."
Omega's gaze tracked the motion, lingering for a heartbeat over the squared-off vault beneath the plating.
"You'll get your divine shell," she said quietly. "Asura. One step at a time."
"Yes," Ned said. "One organ at a time."
He stopped in front of the holotable.
"Let us count them."
—
The holotable threw light into the dim lab: a floating schematic, not of a body, but of a plan.
Seven nodes, arranged in a loose spiral, each labeled in Ned's precise script.
NANO – MACHINARIUM
CARDIO – SANCTUM MERCY
NEURO – MORROW
OSSEOUS – ???
TISSUE PRINT – ???
REGEN – ???
IMMUNE/ENDO – ???
Renn leaned on the table's edge, eyes scanning the labels.
"You really like lists," he said.
"They are useful," Ned said. "They prevent me from pretending we are further along than we are."
He lit the first three nodes.
"Machinarium gave us programmable nano that can operate safely inside a body," he said. "We learned how to enforce boundaries without letting it eat its host."
He highlighted the second.
"Sanctum Mercy taught us how far vessels and heart can be pushed," he continued. "Peak load, failure thresholds, how to design a circulatory system that does not rupture under stress."
The third node glowed a colder color.
"Archive Morrow demonstrated neural architectures with extraordinary resilience," he said. "It also demonstrated why we must be careful not to build a hive by accident. Those lessons are filed under 'never repeat.'"
Omega's mouth twisted.
"Good file to keep," she said.
"Yes," Ned said.
He tapped the fourth node.
"Next is bone," he said. "A framework strong enough to bear everything else."
Renn drummed fingers on the table.
"We talked about two options," he said. "The planet with the shock troops and implants, or the derelict lab in decaying orbit. You leaning one way?"
"Yes," Ned said. "The derelict."
Renn made a face.
"Of course you are," he muttered. "Why fight a dozen mercenary companies when you can dive a haunted ship."
Omega raised a brow.
"Haunted ship?" she asked.
"Not literally," Renn said. "Probably. There's an old Republic black lab in the files, designation 'Osteoforge.' Last logged coordinates put it in a decaying orbit around a gas dwarf out near the mid-rim shipping lanes. Supposedly they were developing skeletal reinforcement for zero-g shock troops."
"And then it went quiet," Ned said.
"Everything that's worth anything goes quiet eventually," Renn said. "Smugglers say the orbit is messed up—debris field, electromagnetic storms, all that. Also that the ship's sensors get weird when they get too close."
"Which means there is still power," Ned said. "Power means data. Samples. Possibly automated defenses, but those we can negotiate with."
Omega rolled one shoulder slowly, as if testing the last of the stiffness.
"I'd rather fight drones and broken gravity than a military with friends," she said. "Planet option sounds like a war we don't need yet."
"Agreed," Ned said.
He flicked the holo. A ghostly cylinder appeared above the fourth node: a rough, battered silhouette of a station wrapped around its own long axis.
"Target locked, then," Renn said. "Osteoforge."
Ned nodded.
"Bones," he said. "We go to the forge that tried to break them."
—
They lifted from Carthae Polis under a false registry and a lighter bank account.
Dock fees, berth rentals, black-market EM shielding, and a year's worth of refits had eaten through their credits. The hive's destruction had freed a moon's worth of slaves, but it had not paid well.
Renn grumbled about it as he checked their fuel status.
"So," he said, "after all this, we've got a ship that's half held together by spite, one freshly rebuilt droid, one traumatized ex-Sith, one mad scientist's apprentice, a baby AI, and…" He checked the balance. "…enough credits to not starve if we don't go back to Carthae's upper decks ever again."
Omega buckled herself into the co-pilot's seat.
"That's enough," she said. "We've had worse."
"Name one time," Renn said.
She considered.
"The base," she said. "When Varis still owned the horizon."
Renn opened his mouth, then closed it.
"Okay," he said. "Fair."
Ned settled into his habitual niche behind them, mag-locked to the deck where he could reach both the cockpit and the systems access.
"XR-94," he said. "Plot a course. Carthae Polis to mid-rim—gas dwarf coordinate cluster seven-three-alpha. Low-profile, minimal traffic lanes."
The ship acknowledged with a chime.
> COURSE GENERATED – CAUTION: FINAL APPROACH TO TARGET REQUIRES MANUAL ADJUSTMENT DUE TO INCOMPLETE NAV DATA
"Of course it does," Renn muttered.
"Order," Ned said. "Begin logging all background EM from this sector. Osteoforge may not like visitors. We will treat any anomalies as warnings, not surprises."
> ACKNOWLEDGED.
The XR-94 slid clear of the traffic lanes, engines flaring as it angled toward open space.
Carthae Polis shrank behind them: a tangle of light and shadow receding into the wider dark.
Omega watched it through the viewport until it was just another star.
"Feels weird," she said quietly. "Leaving a place where we're not wanted, but not hunted, either."
"You were watched," Ned said. "Not hunted. Yet."
"Comforting," she said dryly.
"It is," Ned said. "They see us as an odd cell in their organism. Not yet worth the work of excision."
"Yet," Renn repeated.
"Yet," Ned agreed.
He checked his internal timers.
Since their escape from Varis's base, almost three years had passed. Some of that in real time, some in the stretched non-time of hyperspace. Enough for the edge of the original escape horizon to blur into something else: not just running from, but running toward.
Toward Asura.
Toward a House that was more than three people and a frightened AI.
The XR-94's hyperdrive spun up, whining through its familiar rising note.
Omega closed her eyes, hands resting lightly on her knees.
"Going under," she murmured.
"White State?" Renn asked.
"Something like it," she said. "If I have to lie in a bunk while you and Ned argue about mass ratios, I might as well keep my head clean."
Ned watched the subtle shift in her vitals as she slid into her mental discipline. The spikes that had once defined her—surges of rage, crashes of guilt—were smoothed now, replaced by slow waves. The hive had tried to break her. Instead it had turned her caution into conviction.
"Order," he said. "Monitor Omega's neural field during jumps. I want long-term trends, not just spikes."
> LOGGING ENABLED.
Renn raised a brow.
"You expecting her to grow antlers?" he asked.
"No," Ned said. "I expect her to grow. I wish to ensure that growth is hers, not a residue of Morrow's architecture."
Omega's mouth twitched.
"If I start broadcasting radio," she said, eyes still closed, "I'll tell you."
"Do," Ned said. "It would save time."
The stars stretched.
Reality went thin and then unfamiliar, colors smearing into hyperspace's strange tunnel. The XR-94 shuddered once as it slipped through.
For a while, there was only the hum of systems and the soft whisper of air.
—
In hyperdrive, time became something you scheduled, not something you felt.
They had ten days on the first leg, then a vector adjustment in a remote refueling node, then another five-day jump.
Ned filled them.
The repair kit he'd had Renn cobble together from Carthae's salvage yards was crude compared to a proper fabrication bay, but it could print structural components and simple actuators. He used it relentlessly, running it to the edge of its tolerances.
Segment by segment, he disassembled the most damaged pieces of his shell and replaced them with smarter design.
He thickened the plates over his data vault, adding a lattice of energy-dissipating channels to redirect future EM assaults around instead of through.
He reworked his internal cabling, routing critical links through redundant paths.
He installed miniature isolation fields around sensitive clusters: not enough to stop a focused attack, but enough to buy milliseconds.
All the while, a quiet thread of his processes sat with the brain tissue samples from Archive Morrow, running sims.
He was not interested in their control patterns—the pathological insistence on owning minds. He was interested in how their neural lattices distributed stress.
He modeled Asura's future neural cortex as a lattice of intersecting waves, each carrying a piece of cognition. Then he stress-tested it, adding load until it cracked.
Each time it broke, he adjusted, drew another lesson from the hive tissue, and ran it again.
He did not notice when ten hours passed. Or twelve.
Renn did.
"You need downtime," Renn said at one point, leaning against the lab doorway. "Even you."
"I am not organic," Ned said without looking up.
"Yeah," Renn said. "You're worse. Organics at least pass out when they hit the wall. You'll just keep running hotter until something fries."
Ned paused.
He could feel the heat: not dangerous, not yet, but elevated. His internal coolant loops purred steadily, but they had limits.
He deliberately shifted a batch of simulations into low-priority queues and pinged Order.
"Monitor my core temperature," he said. "Flag if it rises more than one degree above current baseline."
> ACKNOWLEDGED.
Renn smirked.
"See?" he said. "You can learn."
"I learned," Ned said, "that if I burn out, you will be left alone with my notes and a goddess-in-training. That seems unkind."
Renn laughed.
"Fair," he said.
He hesitated in the doorway, then stepped closer.
"Ned," he said. "About Order."
Ned turned his optics toward him.
"Go on," he said.
"I know you've got a droid watching me while I work on it," Renn said. "I get it. Really. I would, too. But I want you to know I'm not going to try to make it… more. Not on my own."
"Explain 'more,'" Ned said.
"Curious," Renn said. "Self-directed. Like you. I get the temptation. To have something that can think while you're off in a different shell. But I also get why that's a bad idea."
He hooked a thumb at the brain samples.
"We've seen what happens when a mind that big doesn't have good boundaries," he said. "I don't want to build you a hive junior."
Ned watched him.
The flank droid in the corner watched him, too.
"Good," Ned said at last. "We agree. Order's role is narrow. Monitor. Alert. Assist. No long-term goals. No hidden branches."
Renn nodded.
"Then we're on the same page," he said. "I just… wanted to say it out loud. So when we're elbow-deep in organ printers and you're in your shiny divine shell, you don't start wondering if I'm going to flip any switches behind your back."
Ned considered that.
"Trust is a staircase," he said. "Not a switch. You have climbed several steps. You will never reach the ceiling. No one will. But the rise is noted."
Renn huffed a laugh.
"That's the most 'I trust you' you've ever said," he said.
"It is also the most accurate," Ned said.
Renn pushed off the frame.
"Good," he said. "I'll go make sure the baby calculator doesn't decide to start a religion."
Order pinged.
> RELIGION SUBROUTINES: NOT INSTALLED
Renn grinned.
"See?" he said. "Sense of humor."
"That was not humor," Order said. "It was a factual report."
"Terrifying," Renn said. "You're perfect."
—
Omega spent the first leg of the jump meditating.
Not continuously—she ate, slept, sparred with training drones in the cargo bay—but more than she would have months ago. The hive had left an imprint, not of reverence, but of revulsion. Having her mind pried at by engineered fields had made her fiercely protective of its boundaries.
She sat cross-legged on the cargo bay floor, sabers disassembled in front of her. Each piece hovered, drifting slowly around her like planets.
Her breathing was steady. White State held like a calm sea.
Ned watched from the hatch, silent.
He remembered the first time he'd seen her try this, back under Varis: the jagged edges, the anger simmering under every breath. Now her emotions rippled, but they did not spike. When a memory from the hive rose—images of antlers, pulses, an almost-overwrite—he saw her acknowledge it, then let it pass.
"You're staring," she said eventually, without opening her eyes.
"I am observing," Ned said. "There is a difference."
"Feels the same," she said.
He stepped into the bay, metal feet thudding softly.
"How does it feel?" he asked. "When you hold it this long."
"Like breathing," she said. "But more conscious. Sometimes my thoughts want to sprint. The State reminds them they can walk."
"Good," Ned said.
"You worried I'd crack after Morrow," she added.
"Yes," Ned said. "That experience could have broken you. It did not. It… layered you."
She opened one eye.
"Layered," she repeated. "That your way of saying 'scarred'?"
"Scarred tissue is often stronger," Ned said. "If it heals correctly."
Both eyes opened.
"You're sure this is healing?" she asked.
He considered.
"I am sure you are not running away from it," he said. "You are… integrating. That is as close to healing as anyone gets."
She snorted softly.
"For a droid, you're weirdly comforting sometimes," she said.
"It is unintentional," Ned said.
"All the best things are," she replied, letting her eyes close again.
The saber components spun.
—
They dropped out of hyperspace for the first time at a refueling node whose name was just a set of numbers and a reputation.
The station was a ring around a small, unremarkable star. Half its sections were dark, the others lit in sickly yellow. Tankers and tramp freighters clung to its outer docking arms like barnacles.
Fuel was expensive. Docking was worse.
They stayed just long enough to fill the reserves and bleed more credits into the local economy. Ned bought a spool of high-grade fiber for future limbs and a small, illegally overpowered sensor amp. Renn bought coffee that could strip paint. Omega bought a new cloak that didn't remind her of Varis.
Two jumps later, they came out into the thin light of a pale gas dwarf.
It hung below them like a smudged marble: swirls of white and faint blue, bands barely visible. Above it—small against the curve—orbited a cluster of debris: a ring of twisted metal, cold chunks tumbling, occasional flashes of dead solar panel.
"Osteoforge," Renn said quietly.
Ned magnified the view.
The central structure was still there.
A long cylinder, once straight, now bent in two places, sections missing. Sections of hull pocked by impacts. Antennae snapped or gone. But parts of it still glimmered faintly with power signatures.
A graveyard. And a vault.
"Osteoforge," Ned repeated.
The fourth node glowed in his internal map.
Nano. Heart. Brain. Now bone.
"Asura," he thought, not without a touch of hunger. "One step closer."
"Order," he said aloud. "Begin deep scan. EM bands, thermal, any anomalous fields. We assume this place is trying to kill us until it proves otherwise."
> SCANNING.
Omega stood behind his shoulder, arms folded, new cloak hanging in clean lines.
"Haunted ship," she murmured. "You were right."
Renn tightened his harness.
"Let's go steal its skeleton," he said.
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