The derelict wasn't real.
The hull hanging in the Korvalis's forward sim tank was a composite of a dozen dead stations: broken ribs, blown-out hangars, half-lit corridors. The sim engine painted it in light and math, wrapped around a scaffold of reality—sealed decks, repurposed cargo spaces, corridors the crew used every day.
Live fire, real walls, fake targets.
Ned saw both layers.
On one level, it was just a training exercise. On another, it was a graph waiting to be drawn, a pattern waiting to be blamed on someone.
Orders had come down from the same Lord who'd overseen the debrief.
"Joint exercise between Task Group enhanced assets and standard units," the brief read. "Objectives: test integration, stress command structures, identify failure modes before Republic does."
In practice: Kael's trap. Varis's test. Ned's first real strike.
The sim schematic floated in Varis's quarters: three main routes through the "station," colored in tactical overlays.
Route Alpha: direct, well-defended, high casualty potential.
Route Beta: longer, with multiple side corridors for flanking.
Route Gamma: a service spine, narrow and cluttered, prone to bottlenecks.
Ned had seeded hazards and opportunities in all three: malfunctioning doors, low-grav pockets, "unstable" bulkheads.
Varis traced them with a fingertip.
"Kael's leading Blue Group from the _Vigilance_," he said. "We take Red from the Korvalis. Objective is central control ring, yes?"
"Yes," Ned said.
"Where do you expect him?" Varis asked.
"Alpha," Ned said. "He favors decisive pushes. It's where he'll expect your 'overperforming' assets to shine. He'll want you where he can see you."
Varis's eyes glinted.
"And us?" he asked.
"Gamma," Ned said. "It looks unglamorous. It will make him think you're playing safe. In practice, it gives us more control over timing and hazards. We can arrive at the center just late enough to look like we're trailing, then flip it."
Varis nodded once.
"And when he tries to be clever?" he asked.
"I have contingencies," Ned said.
He did.
He'd designed the sim with enough randomness to satisfy fleet doctrine and enough fixed bones to hold his hidden levers.
Doors that "stuck" under specific stress loads. Gravity fields that flickered when shield harmonics reached certain thresholds. Target dummies that "failed" their scripted behaviors if tagged with the right pattern.
If Kael tried to corner Varis, there were places the environment could move under his feet.
Varis signed off with a brush of his thumb on the holo.
"Let's go make friends," he said.
—
The staging bay felt less tense than a real deployment, more like theater.
Troopers relaxed a fraction more. Jokes ran a shade freer. Omega-Three's shoulders were looser, helmet clipped to her belt for now.
Kael's unit arrived first: Blue Group, crisp, almost parade-perfect. Kael himself wore light armor, no helmet, eyes cold as he surveyed the sim entrance.
Varis and Omega came in with Red Group, a touch rougher-looking: more scars, more non-regulation marks on armor. M3-D rolled behind them, a quiet machine presence.
Ned watched through a dozen lenses.
"Apprentice Varis," Kael said, inclining his head just enough. "Bringing your pet vessel and your miracle droid to play, I see."
"Apprentice Kael," Varis said. "Bringing your graphs?"
A flicker of amusement ran through Red Group. Blue Group stayed stone-faced.
"The parameters are simple," Kael said, ignoring the jab. "We both insert at marked breach points. Live fire, reduced lethality. Nonlethal hits count as incapacitations. Objective: capture central control ring and secure it for five simulated minutes. Independent oversight will adjudicate."
"Any restrictions on… improvisation?" Varis asked.
"Within sim safeties, no," Kael said. "We're here to see how creative enhanced assets can be."
His gaze flicked to Omega, then to M3-D.
Perfect, Ned thought.
The Lord's holo flickered into being above them, transparent and hooded.
"You are not here to preen," she said, voice carrying easily. "You are here to show me whether Sanguis produces soldiers who can fight alongside the rest of our forces without becoming liabilities. If you embarrass yourselves, I will remember. Proceed."
The holo vanished.
Kael's jaw tightened. Varis's mouth twitched in a brief, hard smile.
They moved to their insertion points.
Blue through Alpha. Red through Gamma.
Exactly as planned.
—
The sim's first layer came to life as they crossed the threshold.
Hull scoring on the "derelict" walls. Emergency lighting. Ambient sound loops—distant groans of stressed metal, the occasional hiss of a simulated leak.
Underneath, the Korvalis's real hull and grav-plates stayed solid.
Ned rode in M3-D's chassis, servos humming, sensors tuned.
He saw the sim's overlays and the ship's bones both.
"Red Group, stay tight," Varis said over team comms. "We're not here to win fast. We're here to win convincingly."
Omega snorted softly. "I thought we were here to 'not embarrass ourselves,'" she replied.
"Those are the same thing," Varis said.
Route Gamma was narrow and cluttered, just as the model showed: storage alcoves, low ceilings, "damaged" pipes forcing them into single file at points.
Kael's Blue Group fed in through Alpha on Ned's tactical view: wider corridors, more direct resistance. Their advance was crisp, disciplined, textbook.
"Blue engaging heavy hostiles," a sim voice reported. "Moderate casualties sustained."
Varis let Red's pace be… normal.
Cover taken slightly more cautiously than they needed. Targets cleared with solid competence instead of surgical perfection. Ned nudged aim-assist algorithms to be just a fraction less aggressive.
On the logs, it would look like a good unit. Not a miracle.
He released only one small advantage early: doors opening just ahead of Red's footsteps, sim hazards "coincidentally" resetting when they passed.
Varis noticed.
"Convenient," he murmured once as a corridor that should have been blocked by "collapsed" plating cleared a second before they arrived.
"Maintenance loves you," Ned said.
"Good," Varis replied. "I pay well."
Blue Group pushed harder on Alpha.
Ned watched their telemetry: faster progress, more contact, higher simulated casualties.
Kael was doing what Kael did—driving aggressively, confident in his unit's discipline.
He was also doing what Ned had expected.
At a junction near the sim's midpoint, Kael split his forces.
"Blue One, hold the main push," Kael's voice came over fleet-wide exercise comms. "Blue Two, flank through Beta and cut them off."
On the schematic, that meant a chunk of Blue peeled off into the longer route, aiming to arrive at the central ring roughly when Red's Gamma movement would.
Perfect.
Ned had seeded Beta's flank with a cluster of "unstable" bulkheads and a pair of programmable doors.
He tagged them now.
In the sim engine, a line of code fired: when a unit tagged as BLUE-2 stepped into that segment under certain stress conditions, the doors' failure rates would spike.
Not enough to scream sabotage.
Just enough that, when Blue Two committed, two doors would glitch and stick half-closed for a crucial thirty seconds.
"Red, status?" the exercise controller pinged.
"Advancing through Gamma," Varis said. "Encountering light resistance. No casualties."
"Blue?" the controller asked.
"Engaged heavily on Alpha," Kael said. "Splitting to execute flank. Expect central ring in six minutes."
The Lord's ID flickered at the edge of the channel, listening.
Ned kept Red's progress measured.
He let them hit a harder pocket of resistance—a simulated heavy gun emplacement—and then had Varis solve it the "slow" way: coordinated grenades, overlapping cover, Omega moving efficiently but not spectacularly.
He could feel Omega's restraint.
Her architecture wanted to flare. Her instincts wanted to leap.
She didn't.
After Jirna-4 and the interdictor, she knew what overextension felt like.
"I could clear that nest faster," she muttered on a lower channel.
"Yes," Ned said. "And Kael is waiting for you to."
She bit back a curse.
They moved on.
Up ahead, in Beta, Blue Two hit the trap.
From Ned's view, it was almost elegant.
A corridor. Simulated debris. Doors at either end.
Handsigns. Kael's lieutenant sending half the squad forward while the rest covered.
The first door cycled open.
The second stuck.
Sim maintenance logs flagged a "hydraulic fault." The system tried to correct it, failed, triggered a manual override prompt that no one had time to answer.
Blue Two's leading elements found themselves in a short dead-end under concentrated "enemy" fire.
"Door jam!" someone shouted. "We're pinned!"
"Override it!" Kael snapped.
"Controls aren't responding—"
Ned watched their vitals spike, their simulated status change as hits landed. Reduced lethality rounds still hurt; a solid burst took people out of the exercise.
"Blue Two incapacitations rising," the controller said calmly. "Adjusting red-force behavior."
Kael's breathing hitched—just once.
"Blue One, push," he ordered. "We take the ring now."
He was overcommitted.
He couldn't be seen backing off. Not in front of a Lord and a rival.
So he did what Ned expected: threw more pressure into Alpha, driving the main push faster, trying to capture the objective before Red could arrive and make his flank failure matter.
Varis saw the gaps.
"Blue's in a hurry," he observed.
"Blue Two's door is jammed," Ned said.
Varis's smile was brief and predatory.
"Shame," he said. "Red, pick up the pace. Time to look useful."
They accelerated.
Not to impossible levels—just enough that, combined with Blue's stumble, they'd reach the control ring at precisely the wrong moment for Kael.
—
The central ring sim was a wide, multi-level hub: catwalks, control banks, faux viewports showing stars and distant battle.
The sim AI had seeded it with entrenched "hostiles" for both groups to fight through.
Blue One burst through Alpha's entrance first, already trading heavy fire.
Kael was at the point, saber out, deflecting rounds with an efficiency that said he'd done this in real battles.
Red arrived twenty seconds later through a side entry, guns up, Omega at Varis's flank, M3-D behind cover.
The Lord's holo reappeared above the hub, translucent and still.
"Begin objective phase," the controller announced. "Teams may contest control. Five-minute timer starts on first successful occupation."
On the surface, it was chaos.
Blue and Red against sim hostiles and each other, limited by exercise rules but still pushing hard.
Underneath, it was a lattice of decisions.
Ned enforced his earlier plan.
Varis didn't try to outshine Kael everywhere. Red covered angles, supported pushes, took a few hits they could have avoided if Ned had pushed optimal paths.
He saved precision for one moment.
Kael made it easy.
In the heat of the fight, the other Apprentice saw a chance: a cluster of sim hostiles had Red pinned near a bank of false consoles. Blue had a line of fire across them and the central node both.
"Red, suppress left!" Kael barked. "Blue will clear the center!"
Varis started to comply—it looked reasonable, within exercise doctrine.
Ned saw the vectors.
If they followed, Blue would "heroically" punch into the core, take heavier casualties, and be able to claim they seized the objective while Red played supporting cast.
And if Ned let that happen, Kael would walk away with a narrative: "Even when we work together, Varis's miracles depend on others doing the real work."
He flipped one flag.
The sim's "structural integrity" model tracked stress on certain catwalk supports.
He'd tagged one segment where Blue's preferred firing line ran as _compromised_, its break threshold lower than the rest.
As Blue surged onto that section, pouring fire past Red toward the core, Ned quietly pushed a bit more "damage" into its invisible variables.
A simulated stray explosion—logged as hostile fire—tipped it over.
The catwalk buckled.
Half of Blue's forward element dropped a level, weapons scattering, their HUDs flashing with simulated injury status. No one died. Several were marked incapacitated.
"Blue forward unit down!" exercise control called. "Status: combat-ineffective."
Kael swore, a sharp burst.
"Blue rear, fill the gap!" he snapped.
They tried.
The pause was enough.
"Red," Varis said calmly, "take the core."
Omega moved.
Ned didn't hold her back this time.
She surged across a lower-level path, saber flashing, cutting through sim hostiles and clearing the way to the central control pedestal. Red troopers followed, fanning out to establish overlapping fields of fire.
M3-D rolled in behind them, already tagging "wounded" with restorative shots to keep them in the exercise.
"Objective reached," the controller intoned. "Red Group has initial control. Five-minute hold begins."
Kael redirected, furious, hammering at Red's positions to try to dislodge them.
Varis let him.
They fought, but not perfectly. Red "lost" a few positions, pulled back, reformed. Enough friction to keep the graphs believable.
Time drained.
When the five-minute mark hit, Red still held the core.
"Exercise complete," the controller said. "Red maintains control. Blue failed to secure objective within allotted time."
The Lord's holo rippled.
"Instructive," she said.
Silence hung, heavy with suppressed ego.
Then she spoke again.
"Apprentice Varis," she said. "Your unit integrated adequately. Your enhanced vessel did not destabilize your comrades or the simulation. This is… promising."
"Thank you, my Lord," Varis said.
"Apprentice Kael," she continued. "Your flank's door failure and the catwalk collapse were within acceptable sim variance. Your choice to double down instead of adjusting cost you the exercise. Consider what that means under real fire."
Kael's shoulders tightened.
"Yes, my Lord," he said.
He sounded like he'd bitten down on glass.
The holo flickered out.
Troopers began to relax, safeties on, visors flipping up. The sim overlays faded, revealing the Korvalis's bare metal again.
Ned scanned Red's metrics.
From any reasonable analyst's perspective, they looked _good_. Strong performance, some missteps, not outlandish. Omega's curves spiked in that final push, but within bands. M3-D's "triage" decisions sat in the high end of normal.
Blue's logs told a different story: an overambitious flank stymied by environment, a main push slowed by a collapsed firing line, a commander who pressed when he should have adapted.
Not sabotage. Not proof of anything.
Just a bad day.
Perfect.
—
Later, Omega sat on a bench in the med bay, helmet beside her, a bruise forming along her jaw where a sim round had hit hard enough to register.
Ned tended to a scraped knuckle he didn't need to, applying sealant with unnecessary care.
"You held back," she said quietly.
"In what way?" Ned asked.
"Every way that wasn't the center," she said. "We could have carved through the early rooms. You slowed us. And then—at the end—everything lined up again. Blue stumbled, a catwalk gave way, and suddenly it was our moment."
She looked at him, eyes sharp.
"This keeps happening," she said. "Not just to me. To Varis. To the people near you. Doors open. Fire misses by inches. Patterns skew just enough."
Ned's servos paused for a fraction of a second.
"You're enhanced," he said. "You notice patterns others don't."
"Don't deflect," she said. "Answer."
He considered.
He could lie. Call it luck, or the will of the Force, or simulation variance.
She wouldn't believe him.
"You're part of a project designed to reduce waste," he said instead. "Varis doesn't like losing assets unnecessarily. Neither do I."
"That's not an answer," she said.
"It's the only one you can survive knowing for now," he replied.
She studied him for a long moment.
"You're not just a droid," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"No," he said.
"That doesn't scare you?" she asked. "Them finding out? Cutting you open?"
"It does," he said. "Which is why I prefer they keep believing I'm just a very good droid attached to a very useful project."
Her jaw worked.
"And me?" she asked. "What am I to you, really?"
"Proof," he said. "That certain architectures work. That certain dreams aren't impossible. And—potentially—someone who might survive standing near what comes next."
She snorted softly.
"Flattering," she said.
"It's also true," he replied.
She looked away, flexing her fingers.
"I don't worship the Council," she said. "Or the Lords. If they decide Sanguis is too dangerous, they'll kill us both and write it off as a lesson."
"I know," Ned said.
"Then I suggest," she said, "that if you're going to keep bending the field around us, you eventually tell me which way you intend to go. So I can decide whether to walk there or get out of the way."
"That implies you'll have a choice," he said.
She gave him a thin, humorless smile.
"If I'm good enough," she said, "I always have a choice."
She slid off the bench and left.
Ned watched her go.
In his shadow archive, he added a new label beside her name.
OMEGA-THREE: POTENTIAL ALLY – CONDITIONAL.
—
On the _Vigilance_, Kael sat alone with his graphs.
Ned watched from a distance, piggybacking on fleet traffic.
The exercise logs told a story Kael hated.
Varis's anomalies had flattened.
He was still good. Still better than average. But the curve now had other points near it—strong units, experienced commanders. The edge was there, just harder to isolate.
Kael's own point, this time, sat low: poorer performance, higher casualties, a failed flank.
He wasn't an idiot.
He knew sims glitched. Doors jammed. Catwalks gave out.
He also knew that those things kept happening when Varis was in the picture, and somehow, they never seemed to cost Varis as much as they cost everyone else.
His eyes narrowed.
On a private channel, he requested raw sim logs from Maint_Core. The tech on duty approved the pull; they had no reason not to.
He started digging.
Ned let him.
For now.
In the Korvalis med core, Ned layered exercise data over his long game.
Varis: closer to Lordship, with a more defensible track record.
Kael: blooded, not broken, forced to burn cycles on a problem he couldn't yet formalize.
Omega: one step closer to knowing what he was—and to deciding whether that mattered more than power and survival.
He had taken a first shot.
It hadn't killed anyone.
Not yet.
But it had changed slopes.
For a mind built on graphs, that was the beginning of a war.
------------------------
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