The printer room looked nothing like Vatfall.
The streets outside were rust and neon and dripping pipes. The clinic's front rooms were cramped and sticky, filled with coughing patients and cheap med-gels. But past three locked doors and a retinal scan, the air changed.
Cool. Dry. Filtered.
The floor was polished composite. The walls were smooth, lined with recessed consoles and sealed cabinets. The hum in the air was different too—higher, cleaner. Less like fans, more like instruments tuning.
The soldier walked ahead of them with the casual swagger of someone who knew exactly how much power the room represented.
He was tall and thick through the shoulders, his jacket cut just well enough to hide most of the armor plates underneath. Old scars climbed his neck. A flicker of implant light pulsed faintly behind one eye. His right hand never wandered far from the pistol at his hip.
"Stay close," he said over his shoulder. "Not because you'll get lost. Because if you touch anything without permission, the machines will kill you before I get the chance."
Omega's gaze moved over the room, sharp and assessing. Renn kept his hands in his pockets on purpose. Ned walked with his usual measured pace, optics sweeping the machinery.
There were six of the printers.
They stood like pillars in a half-circle, each one a cylinder of opaque composite banded with viewing slits. Within those horizontal windows, Ned saw faint movements: lattice projectors cycling, nozzle arrays shifting, fields adjusting in careful micro-responses. Tanks of biogel and nutrient solution ringed each unit, lines snaking into the pillars' guts.
Not street-vat junk. Not garage gear.
These were royal machines.
"The kings' line," the soldier said, catching Ned's attention and nodding toward the nearest pillar. "You won't see this grade advertised on the street. High throughput, low rejection rates, full organ and limb, high-fidelity backup bodies if you've got the license."
Renn whistled very softly.
"Pretty," he said.
"Expensive," the soldier corrected. "Each unit costs more than a full suit of Mandalorian beskar. And that's just the hardware. You want the codes, the tier-three recipes, the licensed gene-maps? That's another fortune."
The term hung for a moment. Beskar. The kind of legend you compared other legends to.
Ned stepped closer—not enough to trip any invisible perimeter, but close enough for his sensors to skim the field emissions.
He watched the printers' micro-fields shift as they held a layered scaffold in place. On one display, a liver appeared in cross-section, colored bands representing perfusion channels and structural supports. On another, a femur grew from a central rod outward, lattice by lattice.
Order whispered in his internal bus.
> FIELD STABILITY: HIGH
> LAYER RESOLUTION: SUB-MICRON
> ARCHITECTURE SCHEMAS: ENCRYPTED, LOCALIZED
"These are adequate," Ned said.
Renn glanced at him.
"Adequate?" he muttered. "You're hard to impress."
"They are more than adequate for our purposes," Ned amended. "If we can access their control stacks."
The soldier snorted.
"You won't," he said. "Not on your own. Black-box cores. Hardwired licenses. You try to crack one sideways, it bricks itself and alerts three corporate lawyers and five gun crews."
"We do not want to crack the box," Ned said. "We want to learn how it sings."
The soldier frowned.
"You want the… patterns?" he said slowly. "The recipes, the sequences. The how, not the thing?"
"Yes," Ned said. "We can build our own shells. Our own casings. What we lack is the accumulated expertise that keeps the flesh from collapsing into sludge."
The soldier shook his head, bemused.
"You're a weird droid," he said. "Most folks come in here begging for lungs and faces. You want firmware."
"Firmware is more valuable than faces," Ned said.
Omega's lips twitched under her hood.
The soldier looked between them, then shrugged.
"Boss said you talk big," he said. "Didn't say you were wrong."
He tapped the side of the nearest pillar, affectionately—as if it were a pet predator.
"These beauties print for royal houses, admirals, warlords, and yes… some kings," he said. "And for them, the price is more than beskar. You want their language, you better bring something that makes my boss rich or keeps him alive."
Ned inclined his head.
"We can make him both," he said. "Rich and alive."
"And how's that?" the soldier asked.
Ned outlined it, one layer at a time.
"Sanctum Mercy," he said. "A military triage station that tested heart and vessel designs far beyond standard loads. We have their stress data and corrective protocols."
He raised a hand before the soldier could respond.
"Machinarium," he continued. "A nanoforge world with programmable swarms that can rebuild and monitor tissue from the inside. We have their control pathways, minus their worst flaws."
A brief pause.
"Osteoforge," he said. "A lab whose entire existence was devoted to reinforcing skeletons beyond what most armor can protect. We have their lattices."
He let the list hang.
"We can give your boss a generation of soldiers," Ned said. "Not just hard to kill, but hard to break. Give him these three, and his elites can survive hits that would pulp normal troops. He will not buy that with credits on any open market."
The soldier's expression had shifted partway through.
This time, when he spoke, there was less bravado.
"You'd just… give that up?" he asked. "Stuff people died to make?"
"Nothing is 'just,'" Ned said. "We trade. We supply him with tools that make him untouchable on the ground. In return, he supplies us with tools that make us untouchable in flesh."
Renn glanced at Omega.
"He's not wrong," Renn murmured. "You weaponize his soldiers; he gives us Asura's meat hooks and wiring diagrams."
Omega's jaw tightened, but she said nothing.
The soldier scratched his jaw, thinking.
"If any of that is real," he said, "Boss will want it. But I don't say yes to things like that. I carry guns, not contracts."
"Then carry this," Ned said, transmitting a tight bundle of non-critical data—a taste. Enough to prove he wasn't bluffing, not enough to hand anyone a full blueprint.
The soldier's implant flickered as the packet hit his system. His eyes widened slightly.
"That's… a lot of numbers," he said.
"It is," Ned said. "More where that came from."
The soldier took half a step back, gaze flicking to the printers, then back to Ned.
"I need to talk to him," he said. "You wait. You leave this room by the door you came in and nowhere else."
"Understood," Ned said.
The soldier turned and keyed the exit.
On their way out, he looked back once.
"You're not joking," he said. "That's the part that scares me."
—
Two days.
They stretched and blurred at the same time.
Vatfall had a way of eating your sense of hours. The rain never stopped. The sky never changed. The lights were always on somewhere.
They spent the first few hours in motion, doing what Ned always did when the future was uncertain: he watched.
He watched the flows of traffic—who came and went from which towers, which clinics had a steady line versus those that didn't. He watched the street-level organ hawkers and the armored couriers that slipped through alleys with insulated crates.
He watched how often his own face turned up on passive scans.
Order monitored the background spectrum.
> THREAT LEVEL (LOCAL): STABLE
> ACTIVE TRACKING OF XR-94 TRANSPONDER: 0
> ACTIVE TRACKING OF KNOWN SERESH BIOSIGNS: 0
That was good. It would not last.
In the XR-94's cramped mess, the three of them sat around the table while rain drummed on the hull.
Omega had her hood down for once, dark hair damp from a recent walk. She turned a cup of bitter caf between her hands.
"You trust this?" she asked. "Offering that much data?"
"We offered a taste," Ned said. "Not the full meal."
Renn tapped the table.
"Still a lot," he said. "You spoon-feed a man like that and he'll start wondering how much more you're hiding."
"Yes," Ned said.
He did not pretend otherwise.
"Then why?" Omega pressed.
Ned watched the condensation run down Omega's cup.
"Time," he said.
"Explain," she said.
He laid it out like an equation.
"If we walk away from Virellon now," he said, "we can find another world with printers. Another black lab. Another set of recipes."
"But?" Renn prompted.
"But we will pay in years," Ned said. "Slow, iterative experiments. Failures. Partial printer rigs built from scraps. For each mistake, another delay. Ten years. Fifteen. More."
Omega's fingers tightened on the cup.
"And in those years?" she asked.
"In those years," Ned said, "Varis's successors grow. The Republic and Empire harden. Foresight shows multiple branches where something finds us before Asura is finished. Sometimes Sith. Sometimes Republic Intelligence. Sometimes… something else."
He didn't name the something else. The masked acolyte in the pit corridors. The quiet eyes.
Omega stared at the table.
"Years," she repeated softly.
"Yes," Ned said. "Years we might not have."
Renn leaned back.
"And if we stay?" he asked. "If we play ball with Mafia Boy?"
"Then we condense time," Ned said. "We take a decade of tissue-print learning in a handful of months. We pay in risk instead of waiting. In… favors."
"People," Omega said flatly. "We pay in people."
Ned met her eyes.
"We have always paid in people," he said. "The question is whether we choose which ones."
Silence stretched.
Renn rubbed his face.
"I hate this planet," he said.
"That is rational," Ned said.
The first day passed with no word.
On the second, Ned felt the net tighten.
Dock control pinged them for confirmation of their stay. Renn bought them another day with the last of their safe credits and a thin excuse about "unexpected parts delays." The attendant from the pad squinted at them like they were a problem just beginning to sprout.
"You're running a tab," they said. "Don't be here when it comes due."
"We won't," Ned said.
He meant it.
He just didn't know yet whether they would leave in one piece.
That evening, as the artificial day-cycle dimmed the upper lights to something like dusk, the door chime sounded.
The soldier stood outside, rain beading and running off his coat.
"Boss will see you," he said. "Now."
—
The elevator rose higher than Ned expected.
Vatfall, from below, looked like an endless stack of mid-rise towers and pipes. From above, he saw that the mid-rises were just understory. There were levels built on levels, platforms resting on older platforms, some supported by great pillars, others simply anchored to whatever structural bones they could find.
They rose past the first ceiling of smog and into a slightly clearer band. The lights here were whiter. The signs smaller, more discreet.
The elevator doors opened onto a different world.
Carpets. Real ones. Walls in deep, muted colors instead of stained metal. Art—a series of holo-sculptures showing anatomies twisted into abstract shapes. A faint scent of something floral chasing the chemical tang.
Omega's lips thinned.
"People live like this on top of that?" she murmured.
"Always," Renn said under his breath. "Somewhere."
The soldier led them down a corridor that curved slowly around the tower's rim, then stopped at a double door guarded by two more heavies in suit jackets that failed to disguise their armor.
"Here," he said. "Behave."
He keyed the panel.
The doors whispered open.
The room beyond was part office, part throne, part observation deck.
One wall was glass, looking out over the neon and haze. From up here, Vatfall was almost pretty—colors blending into a shifting ocean of light, rain falling in sheets that caught and refracted glow.
Opposite the glass was a long, low table scattered with datapads, bottles, and a few half-finished plates of food. A couch and several chairs framed it.
He stood by the glass.
Younger than Ned expected.
Human male, early twenties, maybe twenty-five at most. Dark hair swept back, eyes sharp and too calm for the surroundings. He wore a shirt that probably cost more than the XR-94's last hull patch and boots that had walked in places like this long enough to look at home.
Two thin bands of metal circled his throat: fashion, but also probably an interface.
He turned as they entered.
"I've met a lot of droids," he said. "Not many that get invited up here."
His gaze slid over Omega and Renn, noting them, cataloging. Then it settled on Ned.
"Especially not… you," he said.
Omega shifted subtly closer to Ned's shoulder. Renn felt the hair on his arms prickling.
Ned inclined his head.
"You paid to find me," he said.
The man smiled.
"Some," he said. "Information isn't cheap on a world like this. Especially when it's about someone who keeps leaving ghosts in security logs and half-finished rumors in databrokers' files."
He picked up a datapad from the table and flicked it on, glancing through.
"Medical unit M3-D," he recited. "Attached to Project Sanguis under Lord Varis. Lost with station assets. Sightings: Machinarium salvage port. Carthae Polis dock records under four different shell companies. Rumors of a 'talking med-droid' buying things he shouldn't understand."
He dropped the pad back onto the table.
"And now," he said, "standing in my printer room, offering me toys that people would sell their grandmothers for."
He smiled again, sharper this time.
"You must forgive me if I got… curious."
Renn exhaled very quietly.
Ned did not move.
"Curiosity is healthy," he said. "Up to a point."
"Oh, I passed that point a long time ago," the man said lightly. "But it keeps me alive."
He gestured to the seating area.
"Sit," he said. "Drink, if you trust my hospitality. I'm told you have things I want. And you want things that aren't supposed to leave this city."
Ned did not sit. Droids didn't have to. Omega and Renn took the edge of the couch, both remaining coiled even as they tried to look relaxed.
"I am told you own a significant portion of this planet's… real economy," Ned said.
"'Own' is a strong word," the man said. "Steward. Guide. Exploit. One third, roughly. Enough to matter. Not enough to be safe."
He poured himself a drink from a cut-glass decanter and didn't offer them any.
"Name is Kade Vire," he said. "My family has been making sure this world's veins keep pumping for three generations. Organs, tissues, printed limbs, bespoke bodies. If you've ever seen a planetary governor cheat death with a new heart, odds are my people got paid."
He raised his glass slightly in a mock toast.
"And you," he said, "are a ghost riding metal. A sentinel someone forgot to leash. I like that."
"You spent a lot to find that out," Ned said. "Why?"
Kade's eyes glittered.
"Because I'm about to go to war," he said simply.
Omega's fingers tightened on her knees.
"War with who?" she asked.
Kade shrugged.
"Everyone," he said. "Other families. Corporate oversight committees. Off-world interests that think Virellon would be more profitable if my section of it burned."
He took a drink.
"My grandfather built this third of the city," he said. "My father held it. Now they want to take it. I'm not inclined to let them. But war is expensive. So are soldiers. And the ones who live long enough to learn are the ones I hate losing most."
Ned watched him over the distance.
"You want my data for them," he said. "For your elites."
"For my future," Kade said. "You give me bones and hearts that don't break. Soldiers who can walk away from hits that kill lesser men. I push the odds in my favor."
He set the glass down.
"I had considered," he went on, "trying to hire you. As a war-machine. A battlefield coordinator. One mind like yours spread across half my network? We'd clean house in a month."
Renn tensed.
Omega's jaw clenched.
"But," Kade said, holding up a hand, "I'm not stupid. You're not the leashing type. Even if I managed to shackle you, you'd just take the chain and strangle me with it."
"Accurate," Ned said.
Kade laughed.
"I like honest machines," he said. "So. No leash. No long-term contract. Just a trade."
He walked closer, stopping a short distance away.
"You want my printers," he said. "Not just a run on them, but the way they think. The firmware. The recipes. The high-tier patterns that keep live flesh from turning into soup."
"Yes," Ned said.
"You want that," Kade repeated, "in a world where those patterns are worth more than some planets. Where megacorps kill for less and governments pretend they don't already own them."
"Yes," Ned said again.
Kade spread his hands.
"Then you know the price won't be credits," he said. "You don't have enough. And I don't want your money."
He picked up a second datapad and slid it across the table.
It stopped in front of Ned with a soft scrape.
"One gift of my courtesy," Kade said. "In exchange for one gift of yours."
Ned didn't pick the pad up. He accessed it with a short-range handshake instead, pulling its contents into a quarantined partition.
An image. Male, older, well-dressed in the understated way of people who understood power didn't need screaming logos. Face lined more by stress than age. Eyes sharp. No name attached.
Text: a set of times, places, routes. Security detail composition. Likely habits.
"Kill this man," Kade said.
Renn's throat worked.
Omega's eyes narrowed.
Ned's systems noted his own internal adjustments: coolant flow increasing, processing threads shifting priorities.
"Who is he?" Ned asked.
Kade's smile thinned.
"Someone who needs to die," he said. "That's all you need to know."
"You said you liked honest machines," Ned said. "I am more useful if I am informed."
Kade considered that.
"He is a board liaison," he conceded. "Off-world. Here to 'oversee' bio-licensing compliance. In reality, he is a knife the corporations are slipping under the table. With the right signatures, he can cut my third of this planet into pieces and sell them off legally. No matter how many soldiers I print, if he lives and signs the right papers, my war ends before it starts."
He met Ned's gaze.
"I cannot just shoot him in the street," Kade said. "That brings fleets. Investigations. But if he dies in a way that looks like… something else, something outside our little feud? That buys me years."
Renn exhaled slowly.
"So you want to blame it on, what, pirates?" he asked. "Random violence?"
"That's your problem to solve," Kade said. "Make it clean. Make it distant from me. Make it look like the chaos this galaxy generates on its own."
He spread his hands again.
"In return," he said, "I give you access. Not one machine, not one recipe. I open the doors. My labs. My black copies. My stolen corporate firmware and all the tweaks my family has made in secret."
He tilted his head.
"You want to build gods," he said softly. "I can give you their clay."
Omega's hand twitched toward where her saber hung under her cloak.
"Why us?" she asked. "You could hire any number of killers."
Kade's eyes flickered to her.
"Yes," he said. "I could. I have. But assassins talk. They brag. They leave trails in places I can't erase. You… you are a ghost. You've slipped in and out of places that should have killed you. You erase your own footprints."
He nodded at Ned.
"And you," he said, "know how to make deaths look like accidents. I read your Sanguis file. 'Aneurysms.' 'Equipment failures.' 'Fatal post-operative complications.' You've been killing people quietly for a long time, machine."
Ned considered protesting. He didn't.
"You understand," Ned said slowly, "that if I do this, the board will not stop looking. They will dig."
Kade shrugged.
"They already dig," he said. "They send liaisons like him to sharpen their shovels. You can't make it worse. You can only choose where the blood lands."
Ned ran Foresight.
Branches spiraled outward from this room.
In some, he refused.
They left Virellon with what they had: basic printer schematics stolen from lower clinics, a handful of street-vat tricks. Asura's flesh became a long, slow grind. Fourteen years until he walked in that body. In nine of those branches, they died before that—caught between empires, tracked by Sith, crushed by something faceless and administrative.
In other branches, he accepted and failed.
The liaison lived. Kade died. The war went another way. Virellon fell to different hands; the printers went dark or moved off-world. The data he needed scattered into vaults deeper than he could reach.
In a smaller subset, he accepted and succeeded.
The liaison died in a way that looked like piracy, or rebel action, or random chaos. The board redirected its attention. Kade strengthened his hold. Ned gained deep access to Virellon's tissue libraries. Asura's timeline contracted—ten years, seven, five—still long, but survivable.
In every branch where he did nothing, one fact remained: time stretched. Time invited discovery. Discovery invited chains.
He thought of the data vault in his chest. Of the cramped feeling no amount of armoring could erase. Of limbs torn off by fields. Of Omega on a slab, almost overwritten. Of Renn building Order with careful hands and a droid always watching.
He thought of Asura.
The body that slept in numbers. The shell that would not fit in any cage Varis or Kade or a board liaison could imagine.
Kade watched him.
"You're calculating," he said. "I can almost hear it."
"Yes," Ned said.
He glanced at Omega.
Her eyes met his, unflinching.
"You know this is a line," she said quietly.
"Yes," Ned said. "But we crossed the edge of that line years ago. This is a particular point on it."
Her jaw worked.
"Will it get us there faster?" she asked. "To your body. To… freedom."
"Yes," Ned said.
Renn blew out a breath through his teeth.
"If we're going to be monsters," he said, "I'd rather be monsters who choose who to aim at."
Kade's smile returned, small and self-satisfied.
"So," he said. "Do we have an agreement?"
Ned looked back at him.
He saw the warlord-in-training, the prince of a corporate hell, the young man who owned too much and worried it would be taken. He saw another kind of Varis—refined, younger, less steeped in ritual, more in contracts—but cut from similar cloth.
All of them wanted power. All of them could be useful, for a time.
"Yes," Ned said.
The word was simple. The weight was not.
One small price, he thought. One human life for ten years of stolen work. A trade this galaxy makes every day without thinking.
He did not add what came next, in the quiet spaces between his processes.
And if this price buys Asura's first breath, nothing in this room will ever be able to charge me again.
"Good," Kade said, lifting his glass once more in a mock toast. "Then I'll have my people send you the schedule. Welcome to Virellon's game, ghost. Try not to lose."
Ned didn't raise a glass.
He raised a new file in his mind.
TARGET: BOARD LIAISON – ELIMINATE
REWARD: TISSUE PRINT NODE – FULL ACCESS
Outside, rain streaked down the glass, blurring the neon into long, bleeding lines.
Inside, Ned began to plan how to kill a man he had never met—and how to make the death look like the galaxy's chaos, not the quiet hand of House Seresh.
------------------------
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