The last of the thirty fell with a hard, wet sound.
Omega's saber punched through the man's breastplate, white light bursting from his back. She twisted, stepped, and let him drop, already turning to catch a stray bolt on her other blade and flick it into the ceiling.
The corridor stank of ozone and scorched plast.
Ned's wrist emitters cycled down, heat sinking through his forearms. Half-melted rifles lay scattered across the floor, a few still hissing where his shots had slagged their power cores.
"Clear," Omega said, breathing hard.
"Locally," Ned replied. "Not for long."
The cradle on his back was a constant weight: Prime Chassis embryos, Asura_00, three more lines he'd grabbed on instinct. Each pod had its own little life-support hum, a layered murmur just below the range of human hearing.
"Renn," Omega said. "He should be—"
A side hatch banged open.
Renn stumbled through, flanked by two Seresh war droids. He clutched a small, shielded cylinder in one hand and a black chip case in the other. His armored vest was spattered with someone else's blood, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.
"Blue pod, data chip," he panted. "Your little echo got everything it wanted. They're losing their minds upstairs."
Order chimed in all three of their comms.
> BLUE WING SECURITY STATE: HIGH. GENERAL ALERT LEVEL: ESCALATING. MULTIPLE HIGH-THREAT UNITS DEPLOYED FROM INNER GARRISON. ANTICIPATED INTERCEPT POINTS: THREE. CLOSEST: MAIN TRANSFER ATRIUM, DISTANCE TWO HUNDRED METERS.
Renn winced.
"High-threat units," he said. "That sounds… specific."
"It should," Ned said. "They built them in case something like me ever went rogue."
He turned toward the atrium.
"Apparently they were right to worry."
—
They hit the atrium at a run.
It was a broad, circular space where half a dozen corridors met, with a high ceiling domed in translucent panels and an ornamental light sculpture hanging like a frozen explosion in the center. Platforms jutted from the walls at different levels, linked by slender bridges.
The far doors—leading to the outer lifts and, beyond them, the pads—stood closed.
Between them and that exit, a line of figures waited.
White armor, but not the simple plates of regular security. These were full exosuits: deep-cut pauldrons, overlapping plates along arms and legs, helmets with narrowed visors and raised crests. Dark channels ran through the armor like veins of shadowed metal.
Each carried a two-handed energy blade, tips resting on the floor.
Paladins.
Renn swore softly.
"You didn't say paladins," he muttered.
"I was hoping Foresight was wrong," Ned said. "It rarely is."
One stepped forward.
His armor carried a red sigil on the chest: a stylized embryo coil crossed by a sword.
"House Aurion property," he said, voice cold and filtered. "You are surrounded. Lay down your weapons. You will not be warned again."
Omega rolled her shoulders.
"Beskar matrix?" she murmured, eyes on the plates.
"Beskar-laced or something close," Ned said. "Target joints, visors, vents. Don't try to cut through the big pieces unless you enjoy disappointment."
"Noted."
The visor turned slightly, tracking her.
"You are a Force user," the paladin said. "Surrender and the House may keep you intact."
"Tempting," Omega said. "But no."
Her sabers snapped to life, twin bars of white light.
Paladin blades ignited in answer, thick blue-white beams snarling along their length. The atrium filled with the sound of heavy servos and humming power packs.
Ned felt the futures tighten.
Most branches ended right here.
"Renn," he said quietly. "Stay behind the droids. Survival over heroics, for the next sixty seconds."
"Since when do I—"
"Now," Ned said.
He stepped forward.
"Order," he added inwardly, "log every impact. Suit dynamics, servos, field bleed. All of it."
> LOGGING, Order replied. > ALSO: THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA.
"It's the only one we have," Ned said.
The paladins advanced.
—
They hit like a single organism.
Omega met the first with a low sweep, sabers crossing to catch his upward cleave. The impact was like colliding with a speeder engine; the force shuddered through her arms and legs, boots scoring the floor.
White State took the shock and spread it, turning it into motion instead of injury.
She pivoted, letting his blade slide past, then snapped one saber down and in at the elbow joint. Sparks flared as energy met composite; something important inside the suit's right arm blew.
The paladin staggered.
She drove her other saber up under his armpit, where the plates had to flex. This time the blade sank, punching through the joint and into his chest cavity.
The suit collapsed.
"One," she said.
Nine.
Ned's emitters came up and spat coherent light.
He went for grips and neck rings first. Some shots splashed off armor, leaving glowing streaks where the beskar analogue diffused the energy. Others found seams: a blade's emitter tore apart, a visor blew inward, a vent coughed flame and smoke as something inside ruptured.
One paladin charged straight through the fire.
A Seresh war droid stepped into his path. The paladin's blade carved the droid's left arm and most of its torso away, but not before the droid's shoulder cannon discharged point-blank, tearing open his chest plate and flipping him backwards.
The droid dropped, systems sparking.
"Arms-Three, down," Order reported. "Remaining: Arms-One, Arms-Four."
"Keep them dancing," Ned said. "They're built to dominate, not improvise."
He hammered another's knee joint until the actuator failed. The suit buckled; Omega slipped in and finished him with a thrust under the chin.
Two.
The paladins adapted.
The next wave came in staggered timing, blades crossing, suits using micro-thrusters in boots and backs to shift vectors mid-charge. One vaulted up to the balcony, then dropped in a hard arc toward Ned, blade raised.
Ned rolled, servos shrieking as he forced his chassis past design tolerances. The blade clipped his right shoulder, shearing armor and scorching the plating over his upper arm.
Pain flags lit in his HUD.
He grabbed the paladin's forearm with his left hand, locked his elbow, and fired a beam into the wrist joint.
The hand exploded. The blade clattered away.
The paladin answered by slamming his helmet into Ned's faceplate.
Optics scrambled; his feed smeared.
"Renn!" Ned snapped.
A bolt punched through the paladin's visor from the side. The elite jerked and fell.
"Don't say I never listen," Renn said through gritted teeth.
Another armored shape broke from the line.
This one saw Renn, measured angles, and veered.
"No," Ned said.
He was already moving, but the damage in his shoulder slowed his reach.
Renn fired twice. One bolt splashed off the paladin's shoulder plate, the second went wide as the exosuit dipped.
The paladin closed in three strides.
His blade arced.
It hit Renn across the chest.
Armor, ribs, muscle—gone in a diagonal line from shoulder to opposite hip. Renn flew backward into a pillar, struck, and slid down, a broad smear of red marking his path.
Omega screamed, wordless rage, and turned her sabers into a storm, dropping another paladin with cuts to the knee and neck.
Ned slid to Renn's side.
The wound was a mortal textbook: open cavity, exposed lung, blood flooding faster than even an MD-3 chassis could evacuate.
Renn's eyes found him, unfocused.
"Doc," he rasped. "That… hurts."
Ned's processors stuttered.
He had given Renn Node Seven's serum once before—cautious, measured—after cracked ribs and a collapsed lung. It had worked. Too well, perhaps, but it had worked.
This cut was death.
"Order," Ned said. "Survival probability without intervention."
> CURRENT TRAJECTORY: FATAL IN LESS THAN ONE MINUTE, Order replied. > EVEN WITH MAXIMAL CARE: PROBABILITY OF LONG-TERM SURVIVAL UNDER THREE PERCENT.
"And with Node Seven," Ned said. "Double dose on a previously primed subject."
> OUTCOMES HIGHLY UNSTABLE, Order said. > APPROXIMATE: FIFTEEN PERCENT CHANCE OF CONTINUED BIOLOGICAL FUNCTION. SEVERE MORPHOLOGICAL DEVIATION LIKELY.
Renn coughed, blood bubbling.
"Do it," he whispered. "We… don't have time to argue with math."
"I don't know what it will make you," Ned said.
Renn's laugh was a broken thing.
"Never knew what I was anyway," he said. "Just… don't waste it."
A paladin's blade slammed into the floor a meter away, the shock jolting them. Omega's sabers flared, catching a follow-up swing.
Ned made the only choice that left any branch with Renn in it.
He grabbed the injector from his belt.
The fluid inside glowed faintly between blue and violet—Node Seven's refined regen serum, built on Immune/Endo knowledge, tested in sims and on minor wounds, never on someone this broken and already dosed.
He drove the injector into Renn's neck and hit the plunger.
"Hold," he said.
Renn arched.
At first, it looked like victory: bleeding slowed, torn tissue knitting, lung sealing, bone fragments dissolving and re-forming.
Then the curves blew past the target range.
Cell division went vertical. Immune and endocrine signals tangled, firing in childhood patterns instead of adult ones. Bones didn't just mend—they softened, their structure rewriting to some embryonic blueprint.
Renn screamed.
His torso convulsed, the gash tearing, sealing, tearing again. Armor cracked and fell away as his body sluiced out of it. Limbs drew in, proportions warping.
He shrank.
Vertebrae compressed, ribs curled inward, face collapsing into rounder, less-defined lines. Muscle slid under skin like something alive on its own.
In seconds, the adult man was gone.
What remained was a child-sized bundle of raw flesh and half-formed bone, skin too loose in places and too tight in others. Fingers flexed helplessly, nails soft and pale. The eyes were still Renn's—wide, dark, terrified—in a face that hadn't decided what age it wanted to be.
"Doc," he whimpered, voice high and wet. "What… did you… do…"
Ned froze.
"No," he said.
The word scraped.
"No. No. No."
This is my fault.
He scooped Renn up, arms trembling. Servo metrics said the load was light; sensor noise said everything was heavy.
"Order," he bit out. "Sedate him. Minimal dose."
A micro-needle hissed against Renn's neck. His new body shuddered, then slackened, breath still ragged but slower.
Alive.
Broken.
Omega's shout cut through the noise.
"Ned!"
He turned.
The paladins were tightening the ring.
They'd lost three. Seven remained. Arms-One and Arms-Four had taken hits; Armor readings showed they were one bad exchange from losing another droid.
Rage rose.
Not wild, not random. Focused.
He didn't push it away.
He compressed it.
"Order," he said. "You have vit-core root credentials patterned on my Asura tag."
> LIMITED, Order said. > SUFFICIENT FOR AUTHORIZED MAINTENANCE IN CERTAIN CHANNELS.
"Use them," Ned said. "Find the planetary shield grid. Defense nets."
> LINKS TRACED THROUGH DEFENSE COORDINATION LAYER, Order said. > ACCESS RESISTANT BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE.
"Good," Ned said.
He lifted his head.
The atrium lights flickered as he pushed his awareness outward—past the stone and glass, past the tower, into the Heliox network map Order rendered: nodes, lines, arcs of force encasing the planet.
Balanced systems.
Every balance had a failure mode.
"Translate my mood into commands," he said.
"Uh," Renn mumbled against his chest, dazed. "That… sounds… unhealthy…"
"It's figurative," Ned said. "Mostly."
He walked into channels never meant to accept hands like his: maintenance pipes, emergency routines, load-balancing daemons. Using vit-core's signatures, he told the shield grid a story about an overload, a drill, a necessary redistribution.
Order turned fury into numbers.
> DIVERTING POWER FROM SEGMENTS FIVE THROUGH NINE, it said. > INDUCING FEEDBACK IN COUPLING NODES. PROJECTED OVERLOAD IN TWELVE SECONDS.
"Make it eight," Ned said.
> AUDITORS WOULD HATE YOU, Order said. > TUNING.
The atrium lights surged to full, painful brilliance.
Paladin visors darkened in reflex. Ned slipped a pulse of garbage into the same channel—enough to blind HUDs with static and false target markers for a crucial heartbeat.
"Now!" he shouted.
Omega moved.
—
She was almost empty.
White State held her mind in a narrow channel, breath by breath, step by step. Below it, anger boiled—the hive, the experiments, Renn convulsing in Ned's arms, the paladins' calm, professional cruelty.
A blade came at her head.
She twisted, parried, felt the impact jar through her bones. Her muscles screamed. White armor flashed; she cut low at a knee, high at a neck, always searching for the cracks.
They recovered from the flare fast.
Suit systems compensated; HUDs cleared.
One paladin launched forward, blade angling in a deceptively simple cut.
She brought both sabers up to block.
Too slow.
The blade smashed through her guard and bit into her left side.
For a moment there was no pain, just force—an immense, irresistible shove. Then heat. Then absence.
Her left arm came off at the shoulder in a spray of red and molten plast, spinning away. Her saber tumbled with it, hissing as it skidded across the floor.
She staggered.
White State tried to wash the pain out.
She didn't let it.
She held onto it like she'd grabbed a live cable. Rage and discipline coiled together, not fighting, but reinforcing.
All ten remaining paladins closed, blades raised.
No, she thought.
She reached—not for calm, not for madness, but for the thin, bright line of purpose she'd seen in Ned when he'd chosen to become more than a med-droid.
Stop them.
Protect them.
Get out.
The air thickened.
Paladins slowed.
Servos whined, overclocking as suits fought an invisible hand. Boots skidded, their weight gone strange.
For a heartbeat, every exosuit in reach was pinned—bodies caught mid-stride, arms held in the beginnings of a swing they couldn't complete.
Omega lifted her remaining saber.
It felt weightless.
She moved.
To Ned's sensors, her path was chaotic: a stuttering line of light, footwork sloppy from blood loss, torso weaving.
To the Force, it was a solved equation.
Her saber hit joints and seams with unerring precision—knees, elbows, neck rings, vent slits. Armor split. Systems sparked. Suit cores went dark.
One paladin's blade dropped as his arm severed at the elbow. Another's helmet spun away, head still inside. A third dropped to his knees as both ankles failed, only to have her saber take his head a moment later.
White armor fell like broken statues.
Red light traced arcs through them.
The last paladin tried to bring his blade down through her skull.
She caught it on her saber, teeth gritted, muscles shrieking.
"Not… today," she said.
The invisible pressure around him spiked.
His back servos snapped. He folded in on himself, joints locked, and toppled.
Her saber went through his visor as he fell.
Then it was over.
The atrium rang with the clatter of cooling armor.
Omega swayed in the center of a ring of fallen knights, saber guttering.
Her knees buckled.
Ned was there, shifting Renn's small, twisted form to one arm and catching her with the other.
Her remaining hand hooked weakly into his chest plating, fingers smearing blood.
"That was… new," she mumbled.
"Yes," Ned said. "Please don't make it a hobby."
She laughed once, then coughed, red flecks on her lips.
"You're… carrying a lot," she said. "Embryos. Renn. Me. Overachiever."
"Someone has to compensate for the universe," he said.
Her gaze flicked down.
"My arm," she said. "Gone?"
He glanced at the cauterized stump, already wrapped in a quick-seal trauma field.
"Yes," he said. "We will discuss replacements later. Preferably when no one is trying to kill us."
"Good," she whispered. "Never liked that one anyway."
Her eyes slid shut.
"Arms-One, Arms-Four," Ned said.
The two remaining droids stepped up, armor scorched, optics flickering.
"Arms-One, take Renn," Ned ordered, transferring the small, half-formed body into the droid's arms. "Gentle. If you drop him, I will turn you into kitchen appliances."
The droid's hands adjusted, cradling Renn with surprising care.
"Arms-Four, on point. Clear path to pad. Non-lethal if they listen. Not if they don't."
He hitched Omega higher against his chest, embryo cradle grinding against his back.
"Order," he said. "Status on the grid."
> FEEDBACK BUILDING, Order replied. > FIRST NODES APPROACHING CRITICAL. SUGGEST DEPARTING BEFORE MEMORABLE FIREWORKS COMMENCE.
"We're aiming for memorable," Ned said. "Just not from the inside."
—
They ran.
Order turned cameras aside, swapped corridor IDs in security tables, convinced squads of Aurion troopers that the intruders were in entirely different wings. The few they did actually meet were stunned by Arms-Four or flicked into walls by brief, irritable gestures from Omega, who was half-conscious but still dangerous.
The tower shuddered once, a deep, distant boom rolling up from below.
"That'll be the first shield node," Ned said. "Overload."
"Overkill," Omega muttered against his chest.
"There is no overkill anymore," Ned said. "There is only 'too late' and 'still alive.' I prefer the second."
The lift to the pad level opened on an empty corridor.
Order had lied convincingly to a lot of very worried people.
> YOUR PAD IS FLAGGED 'UNDER REPAIR,' it said. > MOST RESPONSE UNITS HAVE BEEN REDIRECTED TO DOCKING RING THREE. WE ARE, AS THEY SAY, STEPPING THROUGH RAINDROPS.
"Keep the drops off our heads," Ned said.
—
The Ladon waited where they'd left it: scarred hull, ramp down, engines humming at idle. Two droids on guard brought weapons up, then stood down as IFF tags pinged.
"Arms-Two, Arms-Five, aboard," Ned ordered. "Prepare for immediate launch."
They pounded up the ramp.
On the bridge, he set Omega gently in the co-pilot's chair, strapping her in one-handed. Arms-One carried Renn to the medbay; Order spun up auto-care routines, alarms ready to ping Ned if vitals dipped.
He didn't reach for Node Seven again.
Old medtech would have to suffice.
"Clamp the stump," he told Order, eyes on Omega's missing arm. "Minimal regen. No cascades. I've done enough damage today."
> ACKNOWLEDGED, Order said. > SETTING PARAMETERS: 'TRY NOT TO MAKE IT WORSE.'
Ned dropped into the pilot's seat.
"Do we still have a sky?" he asked.
> FOR THE NEXT THIRTY SECONDS, PROBABLY, Order said.
"Then let's share it."
The Ladon rose on screaming thrusters, pitching toward the open slice of atmosphere.
Heliox sprawled beneath them: towers, bridges, glass veins connecting labs and towers. Above it, arcs of light traced the shield grid—normally invisible, now glowing as the system struggled.
One node flared.
Then another.
Then a whole chain.
From orbit, it would have looked like a spiderweb catching fire, patterns of white and blue cracking along the planet's skin. From here, it was a sky coming apart—lines of force snapping, flinging broken energy into clouds, into towers, into unlucky ships.
Segments of the net turned hostile, firing at anything that moved, mistaking friends for intruders as Ned's garbage packets poisoned their target lists.
House Aurion ships clawed upward, blind and panicked.
"Thread us through that," Ned said.
> PLOTTING RECKLESS TRAJECTORY, Order replied. > RECOMMENDED MANTRA: 'WE PROBABLY DESERVE TO DIE, BUT LET'S NOT.'
They dove for a gap where two nodes had just blown, a jagged hole in the shell. Stray bolts licked at the Ladon's shields, making the hull glow. One arc grazed the bow; relays blew, lights flickered.
"Hold together," Ned told the ship. "I still need you."
The gap rushed up.
They punched through.
The stars opened like a door finally kicked off its hinges.
Behind them, Heliox burned in slow motion: shield nodes flaring and collapsing, towers going dark, defense craft spinning in confusion. Somewhere down there, vit-core was screaming in machine tones, counting losses, tracking one pattern it had tagged as ASURA_00 slipping off-world with stolen seeds.
On the bridge, the noise fell away.
Omega lay pale in the co-pilot's chair, one arm gone, White State bled out into simple unconsciousness. Renn, in a medbay cradle, was alive but wrong-sized, body rewinding along a curve no one had meant to draw. Half of Ned's "arms" were gone, reduced to wreckage on a world that would never forgive them.
He felt the weight of the cradle on his back.
Prime Chassis. Asura_00. Blue Miracle protocols. Vit-core code.
Chains, broken and repurposed.
For the first time since Sanguis, there was no one between him and his own future but distance, fuel, and time.
"Set course," he said quietly. "Deep mid-rim. Backwater. Somewhere no one cares about until it's too late."
> COORDINATES READY, Order said. > HYPERLANE SOLUTION CALCULATED. EXIT POINT: FORGOTTEN ROCK. MINING STATION DEFUNCT. POPULATION: NEGLIGIBLE.
"Perfect," Ned said.
He looked once more at the ragged line of fire encircling Heliox in the distance, at the sparks where shield nodes died.
"That's what freedom looks like," he said to no one in particular. "Ugly. Loud. Too expensive."
He thought of all he'd lost in the last few hours: droids, data he hadn't had time to copy, a man reshaped into something helpless, Omega's arm.
Then he thought of what rode on his back and in his memory: the seeds of a body not yet built, a House not yet born.
"Jump," he said.
The stars stretched, twisted, and vanished.
Heliox and its burning sky fell away behind them, a wound in the galaxy and a reminder carved into Ned's core: freedom had a price, and he had only just started paying it.
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