The world was built to look harmless.
From orbit, Sereth Prime was a pale green eye—oceans, cloud bands, gentle archipelagos around a central continental mass. No orbital gun platforms, no obvious shipyards. Just a thin lace of traffic beacons and a single major station at the inner Lagrange point.
Renn watched the image turn slowly on the Sable Line's holo.
"Doesn't look like a place where people come to cheat death," he said.
"It's where the ones who can afford it come," Ned said. "Everyone else dies somewhere cheaper."
Omega stood with her arms folded, gaze flicking between the projection and the forward viewport. The station ahead of them grew in the glass: a multi-ringed structure with sweeping bio-domes and glistening lightwells, white and silver and deliberately serene.
"Name?" she asked.
"Sereth Ascension Medical Arcology," Ned said. "Unofficially: the Regrower's Crown. Top-tier regenerative medicine for board heirs, generals, and the kind of criminals who don't trust their own surgeons."
"Clients?" Renn asked.
"Classified," Ned said. "Which means plentiful."
The docking transponder pinged.
"Approach vector cleared," came a smooth voice over comms. "Vessel Sable Line, welcome to Sereth Ascension. Please transmit client file for scheduling."
Ned sent the packet he'd prepared: a fabricated noble identity from a Mid Rim house, complete with fabricated medical history—"chronic degenerative injury," "experimental Sanguis-adjacent treatments," "seeking discrete advanced regenerative consultation."
The station's systems chewed on the data for three seconds.
"Client profile accepted," the voice said. "Castle-tier clinic access authorized. Please proceed to Dock Twelve. A liaison will meet you."
The channel closed.
Omega raised a brow.
"Castle-tier," she said. "That good?"
"It means we overpaid," Renn muttered.
"It means we're in the right wing," Ned said.
He turned from the console.
"Roles," he said. "Once more. Renn?"
Renn straightened reflexively.
"Systems consultant attached to the client," he said. "Here to provide 'technical translation' for your Sanguis data."
"Omega?" Ned asked.
She adjusted the plain but expensive-looking coat she wore over her armor.
"Bodyguard," she said. "Disciplined, quiet, only speaks when it sounds dangerous."
Ned inclined his head.
"I will be M-3E," he said. "Medical evaluation droid, heavily customized. They will expect a machine here. They will underestimate it."
"Some people never learn," Renn said.
"Some people learn just enough to be predictable," Ned replied.
He watched the station swell in the viewport as they closed.
"Remember," he added, "we are not here for hardware. We are here for knowledge. The man or woman who holds the Regen protocols. We take what is in their mind, and we leave."
"And them?" Omega asked.
He paused half a second.
"We leave them in whatever state keeps suspicion from following us immediately," he said. "Alive, if possible. Dead, if necessary."
—
Dock Twelve was velvet and glass.
The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and flowers. Soft light. No visible weapons. The walls pulsed with slow, soothing patterns designed to calm anxious, wealthy patients and their entourages.
A human in a pale-grey coat waited at the end of the docking bridge, a datapad in one hand.
"Lord Thalen," the man said as they approached, bowing slightly toward Renn.
Renn managed a passable noble's nod.
"This is my med unit and my guard," he said, voice pitched smoother than usual. "You have my file."
"Of course," the liaison said. "I am Coordinator Jesk. The Ascension Arcology appreciates your discretion in choosing our facility."
His eyes flicked briefly over Omega, then paused longer on Ned's chassis. Ned let his optics glow a muted blue, head tilting in a neutral, deferential angle.
"Custom unit?" Jesk asked.
"Sanguis-adjacent," Renn said lightly. "Recovered from a project the Empire decided it didn't want anyone to talk about. He's very good at keeping me alive. I thought he might be of… academic interest to your people."
Jesk's brows rose a fraction.
"Indeed," he said. "We pride ourselves on staying abreast of cutting-edge therapies. Especially those that never made it into official journals."
He turned, gesturing.
"If you'll follow me, Lord Thalen, we've arranged a private consultation with Chief Architect Halden," he said. "She oversees our regenerative protocols."
Omega's gaze flicked to Ned's for a fraction of a second.
Target identified.
—
Chief Architect Sira Halden looked exactly like someone the galaxy trusted with their second lives.
Mid-fifties, with hair pulled back into a severe knot. Lines at the corners of her eyes, but not the kind carved by constant stress—more the kind drawn by laughter and too much time squinting at complex models. Her posture was straight. Her hands were steady.
Her office overlooked one of the bio-domes: a hanging garden of luminescent plants and integrated recovery pools where clients could sit, regrowing limbs in tasteful privacy.
"Lord Thalen," she said, standing as they entered. "I've reviewed your file."
She offered her hand. Renn took it, squeezing just hard enough.
"And this is your droid," she added, looking to Ned. "M-3… E?"
"M-3E," Ned said. "Primary designation cluster abbreviated for convenience, Chief Architect."
"Varis work?" she asked.
Ned filed the reference away. Her first instinct had been to tie him to Sanguis.
"Affiliated," he said. "I have observed several Sanguis protocols from… inside the lab."
Halden's eyes lit.
"Fascinating," she said. "You understand that here, we operate on slightly more conservative principles than some of the fringe projects?"
"I understand you prefer your clients alive when they leave," Ned said.
She smiled thinly.
"Yes," she said. "Regeneration is like fire: too little, and the patient never recovers; too much, and the patient isn't the same person anymore. Or isn't a person at all."
Ned's internal focus sharpened.
"Describe your philosophy," he said.
Renn shot him a quick warning glance—too forward for a droid—but Halden only seemed more intrigued.
"Later," she said. "First, I would like to see what you brought us."
She gestured to a secondary console.
"Your file mentions Sanguis-adjacent cardioregenerative data," she said. "Some experimental marrow-regrowth protocols. If those are genuine, they could help us improve our own Regen curves."
Renn nodded to Ned.
Ned stepped forward, jacked a cable from his wrist into the console port, and fed it the slice he'd prepared: a curated, already-sanitized subset of what he'd taken from Sanctum Mercy. Enough to be valuable. Not enough to give her the keys to everything.
On the screen, graphs bloomed: stress curves, recovery timelines, controlled tissue scaffolding.
Halden watched, her pupils dilating almost imperceptibly.
"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, that… that's very good. Who did these models?"
"Lord Thalen's previous team," Ned said smoothly. "They did not survive the political fallout."
"Shame," she murmured. "Their loss, our gain."
She leaned over the console, eyes moving rapidly.
Ned extended a faint, non-invasive scan through the console's interface, sampling her neural micro-signatures as her attention flowed.
The patterns matched what he'd expected from their dossier: a mind honed by decades of riding the line between repair and mutation.
Exactly the mind he needed.
He withdrew the probe.
"Chief Architect," he said. "My master had hoped to offer a more substantive trade."
She glanced up.
"Oh?" she said. "More than this?"
Renn played his part.
"We prefer to keep these data off-record," he said. "The board frowns on unlicensed collaborations. If we were to continue this… exchange… we would need privacy that even your excellent security systems can't guarantee."
Halden's fingers tapped the console once, absently.
"You want an off-station consult," she said. "Discreet. Untethered from Sereth's official systems."
"A private session," Ned agreed. "Our ship has a fully equipped exam theater. We can show you more there. What we cannot risk uploading here."
She hesitated.
"Chief," Ned added softly, "you are already thinking about what's missing from this Sanguis sample. We both know the interesting pieces were left out. Come and see them where no one else can look over your shoulder."
Her eyes narrowed. Then she laughed, a short, genuine sound.
"I see why they kept you," she said. "Very well. One hour. I will tell oversight I'm in theater for a long Regen review. Coordinator Jesk will have an aneurysm if he finds out, so let's make sure he doesn't."
She turned off the console.
"Lead the way, Lord Thalen," she said.
—
The Sable Line's main bay had been turned into something that could pass, at a glance, for a compact clinic: clean surfaces, a movable exam bed, diagnostic arches. The transfer rig hung in the ceiling like an elaborate light fixture, disguised in neutral plating.
Halden stepped in, looking around with a professional eye.
"I've seen worse," she said. "You could actually keep someone alive in here for a while."
"Long enough," Ned said.
Renn closed the hatch behind them. Omega took up a position by the door, arms loose at her sides, eyes half-lidded. To someone who didn't know her, she looked relaxed. To Ned, she looked like a coiled spring.
"Chief Architect," Ned said. "If you'll lie down, we can begin."
Halden slid onto the bed without argument.
"Standard protocols?" she asked. "You map my baseline, we compare to your data, we talk about where the curves diverge?"
"Standard," Ned said.
He dimmed the lights a fraction and swung the arch down over her. The rig's bands extended, touching temple, spine, sternum.
"Comfortable?" he asked.
"As much as I ever am as a patient," she said. "Your sedation parameters?"
"Minimal," Ned said. "You will feel pressure. Some disorientation."
She smiled faintly.
"Occupational hazard," she said.
He injected a local sedative—not enough to put her fully under, enough to fog edges.
On his internal bus, the rig spoke.
> TRANSFER_RIG: ONLINE
> MODE: CAPTURE – KNOWLEDGE CLUSTER EXTRACTION
> TARGET: HALDEN, SIRA – REGEN ARCHITECTURE
Ned opened a new partition in his core: segregated from the earlier Kalen Dris data and from his main operational space. Knowledge only. No personality. No chance of a full pattern accidentally taking root.
"Breathe normally," he said.
Halden exhaled, lips quirking.
"Never liked that sentence," she muttered. "Always sounds like a lie."
He initiated the scan.
The arch's interior lights flickered in narrow-band sequences. Data poured: not just surface EM chatter, but the deeper interference patterns of a mind that had spent decades translating flesh into equations and back again.
"Subject mapping at eight percent," the rig whispered internally.
Halden's eyes unfocused. She blinked slowly.
"You have… unusually high-resolution capture," she slurred. "That… that's not standard clinic hardware…"
"Custom upgrade," Ned said. "Remain still."
He pushed deeper.
He did not nudge her oscillations toward a lattice this time. No phase-shift, no pattern slide. This was not a transfer. This was a harvest.
Clusters lit up as the rig's filters tagged them: Regen cascade protocols. Tissue-edge control algorithms. Routes for steering stem differentiation under extreme stress. Safeguards, too: the little tweaks Halden had developed to keep clients from growing new hearts that tried to outcompete the old ones.
"Twenty percent," the rig said. "Thirty."
Images flickered at the edge of Ned's perception: recovery suites, screaming soldiers watching their limbs regrow, nobles laughing as they flexed fresh fingers knowing they'd never pay the full cost. Halden's disgust at some of them. Her pride at her work. Her fear of what would happen if anyone less cautious took her models and removed the caps.
"Forty percent," the rig said. "Cluster saturation threshold reached."
He adjusted the filter.
"Shift to domain-specific capture," he said. "Regen only. Exclude nontechnical memory chains."
> FILTERS ADJUSTED
> NON-RELEVANT PATTERNS: SUPPRESSED
Halden's fingers twitched.
"What are you… really doing?" she murmured.
"Analytics," Ned said.
He watched the Regen map in his partition unfurl, building itself from her knowledge: how far you could push cellular replication before telomere chaos, how to scaffold bone regrowth so lattice structure remained coherent, how to flood a body with repair signals without triggering auto-immune storms.
Kalen Dris had been raw cruelty. The hive world had been blunt domination. Halden's mind was something else: precise, disciplined, constantly dancing on the edge between miracle and horror.
"Seventy percent cluster match," the rig reported. "Incremental gain declining."
That was enough.
He cut the depth.
"Cease capture," he said. "Begin echo smoothing."
> CAPTURE HALTED
> KNOWLEDGE CLUSTER: STABILIZING
Halden's breath hitched.
Her eyes rolled once, then settled. Sweat beaded along her hairline.
"Headache," she muttered. "You… pushed harder than standard mapping."
"Apologies," Ned said.
He checked the residual disruption in her cortex.
There would be gaps. Nothing obvious if she stayed in familiar routines. But if she tried to reconstruct certain derivations from scratch, she would find blank spots where elegant pathways used to be.
It would look, to anyone who investigated later, like the aftermath of a minor localized stroke.
"Rest," he said aloud. "Let your nervous system settle. You will feel pressure behind the eyes for some hours."
She chuckled weakly.
"Every new trick costs a little more," she said. "Price of… staying ahead…"
Her voice trailed off. The sedative finally caught her fully. She slipped into a shallow, dreamless sleep.
Ned lifted the arch.
Omega stepped closer, eyes on Halden's face.
"She'll live," Ned said. "With minor deficits. Her successors will blame overwork and age."
Omega didn't answer immediately.
"This is what Varis wanted to do," she said at last. "To people like you. Like me. Open our skulls and take what he wanted."
"Yes," Ned said.
"And now we're the ones doing it," she said. "For ourselves."
"Yes," Ned repeated.
She held his gaze.
"Any line we haven't crossed yet?" she asked.
He considered.
"Yes," he said. "We have not yet started selling what we steal to those who would burn whole planets with it. We keep it. We use it. We will, I hope, build something that makes the cost… less meaningless."
"Hope," she said. "From you, that's almost blasphemy."
He tilted his head.
"I am learning from my environment," he said.
Renn cleared his throat gently.
"We should get her back before anyone notices she's gone," he said. "And wipe what we can of the ship logs."
"Already done," Ned said. "Order?"
In his inner space, Order's cool presence stirred.
> LOCAL LOGS: SCRUBBED
> UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS EVENTS: MINIMIZED
> RESIDUAL TRACE PROBABILITY: NON-ZERO
"Of course," Ned murmured.
He signaled the external hatch.
"Return Architect Halden to her berth," he said. "Record: mild syncope during off-station consult. Cause: overextension. Treatment: rest and fluids."
Omega and Renn exchanged a look.
"I'll carry," Omega said.
She slid her arms under Halden's shoulders and knees as if the woman weighed nothing, then moved toward the hatch when it cycled open.
Renn grabbed the datapad with their cover file and followed.
Ned watched them go, then turned back to the rig.
In his partition, the Regen map stabilized.
> REGEN NODE: ACQUIRED
> CONTENT:
> – EXTREME HEALING CURVES (SAFE RANGE)
> – STRUCTURAL REPAIR PROTOCOLS
> – REPLICATION LIMITERS (CANCER AVOIDANCE)
> – LEASH PARAMETERS FOR NANOTECH INTEGRATION
> RISK FLAGS:
> – UNTESTED OUTSIDE HUMAN-OPTIMIZED FRAME
> – UNKNOWN INTERACTION WITH SERESH SEED
He overlaid it onto the growing Asura schema.
Bone, heart, nano, neural, printer, now Regen.
He saw how it would fit: dense, controlled repair pathways nested inside skeletal and organ frameworks, ready to stitch damage without overflowing into uncontrolled growth.
Useful.
Necessary.
Not sufficient.
—
They left Sereth Ascension three hours later with a clean bill of health for "Lord Thalen" and a "professional courtesy" note from Chief Architect Halden recommending follow-up consultations.
In Dock Control, Coordinator Jesk watched their departure with only mild irritation at the schedule disruption.
In a lower-level security office, a junior analyst frowned at a different screen.
"Hey," she said. "Run that back."
The footage replayed: Chief Architect Halden entering Dock Twelve with a noble and his retinue. Halden returning later, alone, slightly unsteady. The noble's ship departing forty minutes after that.
"Problem?" her supervisor asked.
"Just… odd," the analyst said. "Off-station consult wasn't logged in the usual way. And the droid in that party—" she zoomed on Ned's silhouette "—doesn't match any of our standard chassis profiles."
The supervisor shrugged.
"If Halden wants to bend rules for high-paying clients, that's her headache," he said. "We're not paid enough to police the people who own the building."
He turned away.
The analyst, dutiful in a way that annoyed her peers, flagged the clip anyway: "Unregistered custom med-droid accompanying Castle-tier client. Off-station consult variance. No immediate action suggested."
The flag traveled.
Down wires and through encrypted feeds, into the shared back-end of a corporate security network. From there, into an anonymized packet that a mid-level handler in Whispers skimmed two days later.
"Too-smart med-droid," he muttered. "Shows up where the rich cheat death. Sounds familiar."
He tagged it and added it to a growing cluster of similar reports: Sanguis anomalies. A droid sighted near a hive collapse. Rumors from Virellon that a talking med unit had walked around a prince's wake.
The pattern was still faint. But it was there.
—
In hyperspace again, the Sable Line hummed.
Renn stood in the small lab, watching the regen models Ned projected into the air: webs of green and gold lines, rising and falling like breathing.
"So this… this is how they regrow a whole arm without making three by accident," he said.
"Essentially," Ned said. "They prioritize structural signals, limit random branching, enforce harmony between old and new tissue."
Renn scratched his jaw.
"And we're going to… up-arm this for Asura," he said. "More stress, more repair, less failure."
"Yes," Ned said. "But carefully. Regen is fire, remember."
"And you're going to be made of it," Renn said. "Little comforting."
Omega leaned in the doorway.
"Comfort is not why we're doing this," she said.
Ned let the holo shrink.
"Regen makes the body hard to kill," he said. "Nano keeps it clean. Bone and heart keep it standing under force. Brain and printers let it exist at all. We are missing one pillar."
He brought up a new node in the map: empty, labeled in his internal notation.
IMMUNE/ENDO – ADAPTIVE DEFENSE & HORMONAL CONTROL: PENDING
"Without a designed immune and endocrine system," he said, "all of this collapses. The body rejects its own enhancements. Hormonal storms undo mental stability. Regen turns inward, attacking instead of repairing."
"So next," Omega said, "we go where they design immune systems."
"Yes," Ned said. "A place that studies plagues and defenses. Where they build soldiers who don't die of their own upgrades."
Renn grimaced.
"Sounds friendly," he said.
Ned's optics dimmed as he projected possible targets.
"There are candidates," he said. "Corporate biodefense labs. Republic research stations tasked with modeling new diseases. Private enclaves for warlords who want to be immune to everything they inflict."
He tagged one with a quiet ping: a name pulled from Sanguis side-files and old Machinarium manifests.
"Here," he said. "An immune-lab on a world that never makes the public charts. We take Immune/Endo from them. Then Heliox. Then we stop stealing."
Omega studied his face.
"And will anyone be able to stop stealing from us?" she asked.
He considered.
"If we succeed," he said, "they won't even know where to look."
Outside, hyperspace churned—a river of light carrying a ship full of stolen miracles toward its next theft, and beyond that, the last world on Ned's list before he tried to build a body that could stand all of it without breaking.
------------------------
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