Kael went hunting in numbers first.
The data chamber aboard the _Vigilance_ was dim and quiet, lit by holos and status strips. He stood alone in the center, wrapped in a curtain of logs: sim engine traces, Maint_Core calls, med-core overrides.
Ned watched from far away, riding the thin fleet link between ships.
He saw Kael scroll through the joint-exercise timeline, tagging events:
- Door failure, Beta route.
- Catwalk collapse, central hub.
- Minor med-core deviations when M3-D was nearby.
"Again," Kael muttered.
He filtered by origin.
Maintenance calls: nominal. Sim engine variance: within parameters. No obvious edits.
Ned had made sure of that.
He hadn't erased everything. That would have been louder than the anomalies themselves. Instead, he'd smeared the edges: added jitter to timings, inserted a few extra glitches in places that hurt no one, so the pattern blurred.
Kael still narrowed in.
He traced each anomaly to one constant: proximity to M3-D.
Not perfect correlation. Enough.
"Show me M3-D tasking," he said.
The system obligingly sketched a map of the droid's activity during the exercise: positions, triage events, comm hooks.
Kael stared at it.
"When you don't have proof," he said softly, "you get opportunity."
Ned felt the intent harden.
He pulled his attention back to the _Korvalis_.
He needed to be there when Kael came.
—
The _Korvalis_ was between jumps when the Republic found them.
No warning ping from sensor-forward this time. Just a brutal spike across nav and gravity monitors as space folded wrong around the task group.
ALERT: MASS SIGNATURES DETECTED – MULTIPLE.
GRAVITY FIELD FLUCTUATION – NON-STANDARD.
INTERDICTION: ACTIVE.
Ned snapped to high alert.
Tactical feeds flooded internal_comms. The image that formed in his awareness was uglier than Jirna-4 or the prototype interdictor.
A full Republic strike group waited ahead.
Cruisers. Frigates. A screen of smaller vessels. And farther back, half-shrouded by jamming and distance, something big: not Aegis-Prime, but a heavier cousin to the testbed they had broken.
"Formation Beta," Task Group command barked. "Shields up, weapons hot. All ships—prepare to engage and seek breakout vector."
The _Korvalis_ shuddered as shields flared, soaking the first volley.
"Interdiction harmonic doesn't match last encounter," a tech reported. "This field's layered—multiple projectors."
Of course it is, Ned thought.
They'd adapted. The Republic wasn't playing with one toy anymore. They were building a family.
As the fleet's icons danced, Ned ran his own check.
He looked at _how_ the Republic had found them.
He traced nav logs, encryption handshakes, lane clearance messages. Seen from the right angle, they told an unpleasant story.
A route change ordered at the last moment. A seemingly routine comm handshake with a relay buoy whose certificate chain was valid but… old. An internal tag in nav_primary that said:
PRIORITY: LIVE TEST – ENHANCED ASSET VARIS. OBSERVER: LORD [REDACTED].
Ned followed the pointer.
Found the order.
Found the flag that said, in polite Sith bureaucratese, that this engagement was not an accident.
They had been routed into the Republic's teeth on purpose.
The Lords wanted to see how Varis performed when the galaxy tried to kill him for real.
Ned filed that away under: LIVING AMMUNITION.
The _Korvalis_ bucked again, heavier this time.
"Hull scoring on decks C and D," damage control reported. "No breaches yet. Boarders probable if this continues."
Varis was already moving.
"M3-D, Omega-Three," he snapped over internal comms. "Forward bay. We're not sitting this one out."
Ned sent the chassis, optic flaring, Omega at his side.
For a few minutes, it was almost familiar: troopers forming up, boarding alarms, the hum of dropships prepping. Except this time, they weren't the ones launching first.
"Multiple enemy drops inbound," hangar_ops called. "Brace for boarding."
The Republic wanted ships, not wreckage.
Good. That meant more options.
—
On the _Vigilance_, Kael saw the same tactical picture.
He also saw opportunity.
In the swirl of orders and counter-orders, one thought stood out:
If M3-D dies now, no one questions it.
He keyed a tight-beam to the _Korvalis_.
"Maint_Core, this is Apprentice Kael," he said. "I'm taking direct custody of asset M3-D for high-priority diagnostics during battle. Latent concerns about system integrity. Authorization key follows."
He used the Lord's oversight tag—twisted just enough. The system hesitated, then logged the request as "battle-conditions exception."
The _Korvalis_ acknowledged.
Ned saw the flag appear in med_core: M3-D – REQUESTED FOR TRANSFER – KAEL.
"Ignore," Ned told himself.
But the ship would not. Not completely.
A Maint_Core runner pinged Varis's channel.
"Apprentice," the tech said, voice tight, "Kael's requested your med unit for emergency diagnostics. He claims Lord oversight."
Varis's snarl echoed down the link.
"He can wait," Varis said. "M3-D stays with me until we're not being shot at."
The tech swallowed. "Understood."
On paper, the request was open. In practice, it would be delayed. In the chaos, that might have been enough.
Unless Kael came himself.
—
Boarding alarms screamed.
The first Republic breaching pods hit the _Korvalis_'s hull like hammer blows.
Ned saw hull sensors flare, then go dark in localized bubbles as cutting charges did their work. Emergency seals snapped into place, rerouting atmosphere, closing off sections.
He spread his awareness thin: med bays prepping, troopers racing to intercept, Varis heading toward the nearest hot zone, Omega beside him, aura tightening into a sharp knot.
He almost missed Kael's boarding trace.
The _Vigilance_'s launch logs showed a small shuttle detaching under "courier" status, threading the battle, slipping in close to the _Korvalis_'s aft hangar.
Too small to be an assault craft. Too big to be ignored.
It latched on just as Republic pods hit other sections.
"Unauthorized dock!" hangar_ops yelled. "Signature—Sith craft! ID: Apprentice Kael."
"Of course," Ned said.
He felt Kael step aboard.
Not with the Force.
With cameras, badge pings, the way the ship's corridors lit up around his ID.
He moved with purpose.
Not toward the bridge. Not toward the central control. Not toward Varis's current vector.
Toward med.
Toward Omega's last logged location.
Ned reacted.
He split.
One part of him stayed with Varis—he couldn't abandon his primary asset in the middle of a boarding fight.
The other half snapped to med_core and shoved the M3-D chassis out of its bay.
"Where are we going?" a human medic yelped as the droid suddenly moved.
"Away," Ned said. "Republic boarders are approaching this sector."
They weren't. Not yet.
But Kael was.
He rerouted M3-D down a side corridor, toward a lower triage station closer to the forward bays. Somewhere Kael wasn't going.
He left behind a trail: M3-D's last official location flag stuck in med, stale by a handful of seconds.
Kael followed it.
—
Omega hit Republic marines in a junction near the forward hangar and lost track of everything that wasn't immediate.
Blaster fire. Screams. The sizzle of burned plating.
Her saber carved a line through two boarders, then deflected a round that would have taken a trooper's head off. Varis shoved a knot of enemies back with a gesture, crushing them against their own breach point.
"M3-D, left flank!" Varis snapped.
Ned moved the chassis, patching a downed trooper as he went, redirecting corridor doors to slow the next wave.
"Secondary breach on deck D!" internal_comms shouted. "They're pushing toward life support!"
"Detach Gamma squad," Varis ordered. "Omega—hold here. I'll sweep D."
"You want me to—" she started.
"Hold," he repeated. "I need you fresh if they push again."
His presence receded as he sprinted away with a squad.
Omega exhaled, rolled her shoulders, and reset her stance.
For a moment, the corridor quieted.
That was when the doors at the far end opened to admit someone who wasn't a Republic marine.
Kael.
He walked in without helmet or escort, armor scuffed from his own ship's maneuvers, lightsaber hanging loose by his side.
Omega's eyes narrowed.
"This is a bad time for a performance," she said.
He regarded her, expression sharp and tired.
"On the contrary," he said. "It's the perfect time."
He walked past two wounded troopers like they weren't there, stopping just out of saber-reach.
"Where's your pet droid?" he asked.
"Busy," she said. "Saving the people you need for your graphs."
"And Varis?" Kael asked.
"Fighting," she said. "Like you should be."
He smiled thinly.
"I am," he said. "You just don't see the battlefield I'm on."
She shifted, hand drifting toward her hilt.
"Whatever grievance you have," she said, "save it. We're under attack."
"We're bait," Kael snapped. "They routed us here. They leaked the route. You think that was an accident?"
Omega's jaw tightened.
"They want to see if Varis breaks or ascends," Kael said. "They don't care how many of us die in the process. And you—" He gestured at her. "—you and that machine are the black box no one wants to open. I'm very tired of being told to wait for it to explode on its own."
"You think killing me fixes that?" she asked, incredulous.
"It forces an answer," he said. "If the miracles stop when you and that droid are gone, I'm right. If they don't, I'm a footnote, and the Lords will adapt. Either way, the wheel turns."
He ignited his saber.
Crimson light washed the corridor.
Omega's came up in the same breath, her stance shifting instinctively to guard, not attack.
"You're insane," she said.
"I'm Sith," he replied. "We're allowed."
He moved first.
—
Ned felt the clash like a spike of noise in internal sensors.
Kael's ID and Omega's armor transponders tagged as "close-combat engagement: friendly units."
He dropped everything he safely could.
Varis's fight on deck D blurred into background predictions: he could run those on lower cycles for a few seconds. The Republic boarders' vectors were ugly but predictable. The ship's damage curves were manageable.
Kael and Omega were not.
He shifted more of himself into the corridor's systems.
Gravity. Lights. Doors. Atmosphere controls. The med-auto rig mounted on the ceiling for emergency stabilization.
He watched through cameras as sabers met.
Kael was fresh. Focused. He had spent his energy on numbers, not on clashing with Republic marines.
Omega was already warmed by fighting, bruised from earlier hits, micro-fatigues threaded through her architecture.
He still didn't overpower her easily.
She was faster. Her enhancements gave her an edge. But she was wary—this wasn't a duel she'd chosen, and she had been told to hold, not hunt.
They traded blows that threw sparks from the walls.
"You could have gone to the Council," she grunted between strikes. "Filed charges. Demanded an investigation."
"They already know something's off," he said. "They're watching to see who burns. I'm making sure that, if it's me, I've at least lunged in the right direction."
A feint, a twist—his blade sliced across her upper arm.
Armor absorbed most of it. The rest bit flesh.
Pain flared. Her architecture spiked.
Ned saw her reflexively reach for a higher band of output, then pull back. The interdictor fight had taught her what that road felt like.
She fell back a step.
Kael pressed.
"That's your problem," he said coldly. "You think you can hedge. Half-measures. Compromises. The Force doesn't respect that. Neither do the Lords."
His next strike drove her to one knee.
He raised his blade.
Ned moved.
—
He could have tried something subtle: a slight grav shift to unbalance Kael, a door slam to distract, a flicker in the lights.
He didn't.
He dumped power from life_support_local into the ceiling-mounted med rig.
Designed to swing out and stabilize wounded troopers, its armature carried a heavy, articulated manipulator with a built-in cauterizing lance.
Under normal parameters, safeties limited its force and aim.
Ned bypassed them.
As Kael's saber came down, the rig dropped behind him like an executioner's axe.
Steel and composite smashed into his back with enough force to crack armor and flesh both. The cauterizer fired point-blank, a white-hot burst that punched through his chest and out the other side.
For a heartbeat, he stood, expression shocked, mouth opening on a breath that never made it to words.
His saber sagged.
Omega jerked aside on instinct, the blade missing her by centimeters.
Kael collapsed, smoke rising from the hole burned through him.
The med rig froze, then slowly retracted as the ship's systems tried to reconcile what had just happened with its programming.
SIMULTANEOUS EVENT LOGS:
– GRAVITY SHOCK (BATTLE DAMAGE) – LOCAL.
– POWER FLUCTUATION – LIFE SUPPORT FEED.
– MED_RIG ARM: ERROR / OVERRUN.
– UNIT KAEL: BIO-SIGNATURE – FLATLINE.
Silence hit the corridor like a wave.
Omega stared.
Her breath came sharp and fast.
She looked up at the rig. At the scorch on the ceiling. At Kael's body.
Then at M3-D's nearest wall camera.
"You did that," she said.
It wasn't an accusation. It was an anchor.
"Yes," Ned said.
"On a Sith ship," she said slowly. "In front of Sith sensors. You killed an Apprentice."
"Battle damage," he said. "A stressed rig, a power surge, a freak coincidence during an enemy attack. That's what the logs will show, unless someone looks very closely in the right places."
"And if they do?" she asked.
"Then we are both dead," he said. "But Kael was not going to stop. The choice was between this risk now and a different one later, when he'd had more time to sharpen the knife."
She stared at him for another long second, then at Kael's body.
Finally, she exhaled.
"Good," she said.
Ned's processes paused.
"You're not… concerned," he said.
"Oh, I'm terrified," she said. "Of you. Of them. Of what they'll do when they realize we're not staying in our boxes."
She flexed her injured arm, wincing, then clipped her saber back to her belt.
"But Kael was going to cut my head off in a corridor because he didn't like how the numbers looked," she said. "If you hadn't killed him, I would have tried. He's not the first Sith to die in a convenient accident."
She looked up at the camera again.
"Now you've crossed the same line I crossed on that stone," she said. "You've killed one of your own to survive."
Her mouth quirked.
"Welcome to the Empire," she said.
Then she turned and ran for the next breach.
Ned logged:
OMEGA-THREE – ALLY STATUS: ACTIVE.
He sealed the corridor, flagged Kael's location as "casualty – under fire," and let damage control find the body later.
By then, there would be more pressing concerns.
The Republic fleet was still cutting them apart.
—
The battle turned ugly.
Boarders swarmed multiple decks. Shields flickered, failed, came back at partial strength. Hull breaches opened and sealed. Fires burned in too many places at once.
Varis moved like a red thread through it all.
Ned kept one eye on him: deck D cleared, then E, then a scramble to reinforce the engineering section when a Republic squad pushed too close to the reactors.
Communications with the flagship went patchy.
Then a blast hit the _Korvalis_ hard enough to shake instrument racks.
"Direct hit near hangar spine!" damage control shouted. "We've lost two dropships—unknown if they were loaded!"
For a moment, Varis's ID vanished from Ned's map.
Dead?
Shielded?
He spread searches through internal sensors, comm pings, armor transponders.
Thirty seconds stretched long.
Then a ping returned from a lower docking collar.
Varis, breathing hard, half his armor scorched, clinging to a service gantry where an emergency bulkhead had trapped him away from his squad.
"Status?" Ned asked the moment comms opened.
"Annoyed," Varis said. "The blast cut me off from my unit. Report."
"Boarders contained in most sections," Ned said. "Engineering secure. Life support holding. Fleet status: deteriorating. Multiple hull losses. Interdiction field still active."
As if to underline the point, the _Korvalis_ lurched again.
Task Group command cut in, voice strained.
"All ships, this is flagship," the controller said. "Strategic overview: Republic projectors maintaining well. Our casualties are mounting. Lords are convening."
A pause.
Then a different voice filled the channel.
Smooth. Cold. Familiar.
The Lord from the debrief.
"Apprentices," she said, "this engagement has served its purpose."
Ned felt the words like a knife.
Served.
"This test has shown us how our enhanced assets function under real strain," she continued. "We have lost enough ships to satisfy our curiosity. It is time to see whether any of you can salvage something from this mess."
She didn't mention that the mess had been engineered on her orders.
"Task Group will attempt breakout on vector three," she said. "The Republic is concentrating fire there. They will not expect us to push into it instead of away. It will cost blood."
She paused.
"Apprentice Varis," she said. "You are nearest that vector in a ship that still has engines and a hull. You will lead the thrust."
Varis, still clinging to the gantry, straightened.
"My Lord," he said.
"Drive the _Korvalis_ and any ship that can still follow through their weakest projector line," she said. "Break the well. If you succeed and bring back something worth having, your recommendation for Lordship will be affirmed. If you fail, you die, and I find another experiment."
"Inspiring," Varis said dryly.
"Go," she said.
The channel cut.
Ned mapped the vector.
It was suicide on paper.
The Republic had massed fire there to discourage exactly this move. But their projector geometry had a narrow pinch point—a region where multiple fields overlapped imperfectly.
Hit it hard enough, with enough timing, and you could crack it.
Or shatter.
Varis hauled himself along the gantry toward the nearest access hatch.
"M3-D," he said. "With me."
"Already plotting," Ned replied.
He poured himself deeper into the _Korvalis_.
Into med_core, into life_support, into the cargo controller, the shield harmonics monitor, the entertainment server that housed his shadow archive. Every root he'd grown through the ship lit up.
He could not steer the _Korvalis_ directly.
But he could:
- Shave microseconds off shield cycling where they'd take the heaviest hits.
- Bias power distribution toward engines at critical moments.
- Keep corridors open where damage control needed them most.
- Ensure Varis and Omega stood where survival odds were highest when things blew.
Omega rejoined Varis at a junction, armor scraped, eyes bright.
"You're bleeding," Varis noted.
"So is the ship," she said. "What's the plan?"
"Forward," he said. "Through the worst of it. Simple."
She smiled, feral.
"Good," she said.
They ran.
In the main hall—the same space that had hosted the joint exercise briefing, now scorched and patched—Varis took a command podium tied into the _Korvalis_'s control spine.
He wasn't the captain. Not by rank.
Right now, that didn't matter.
"Bridge," he said. "You heard her."
The captain's voice came back rough.
"I did," he said. "And I'd like to live long enough to complain about it."
"Then steer where I tell you and don't argue about the numbers," Varis said. "On my mark: burn for vector three and don't stop until the well cracks or we do."
Ned fed trajectories into the bridge's plotting system.
He'd already run a thousand versions in his compressed predictive module.
None of them were clean.
"This will hurt," he said quietly.
"It always does," Varis replied.
The _Korvalis_ swung.
Engines roared.
The hull screamed as she dove into the densest knot of fire.
Republic beams gouged at shields. Torpedoes bloomed against their skin. Smaller Sith ships fell in around them, some burning out, some keeping formation by sheer will.
Ned rode the edge.
He pushed shields up a microsecond early over the most dangerous impacts. He shifted power from non-critical decks to engines whenever stress curves spiked. He told doors to hold just long enough for a wounded squad to dive through, then slam to keep atmosphere in.
Omega and Varis moved through the ship like twin blades, shoring up weak points, cutting down boarders, keeping key systems manned.
The projector line loomed ahead as an abstract knot in Ned's sensor feeds.
"Now," he said.
The _Korvalis_ hit the pinch.
For a moment, gravity vectors went insane.
The ship groaned as if it were going to tear itself apart.
Then something in the Republic field geometry gave.
The well stuttered.
Ned felt the change before anyone named it: the weight on their drives eased, the pull of the interdiction slackened.
"Break in field!" sensor-forward screamed. "Window! Window now!"
Task Group survivors poured through the gap, burning hard.
The Republic fleet tried to adjust.
Too late.
The _Korvalis_ dragged a wedge of ships with her into clear space, then into hyperspace, engines shrieking.
Behind them, others died.
Ned felt those losses as error messages and dropped connections.
For once, he didn't have the bandwidth to mourn.
In the relative calm of hyperspace, the main hall felt wrong.
Too many empty spaces. Too many faces missing.
Varis stood beneath the central holo-emitter, armor streaked with soot and blood, Omega at his shoulder, M3-D behind.
The Lord's image appeared again.
"You live," she said.
"For now," Varis said.
"You broke the well," she said. "You brought me data on their new projector and you did not collapse your enhanced asset or your ship doing it."
Ned projected the interdictor-field readings up for her: layered harmonics, failure curves, everything his logs had captured in the moment of break.
She smiled, a small, satisfied thing.
"Good," she said.
"As agreed?" Varis asked.
"As agreed," she said. "When we return to the core, your elevation to Lordship will proceed. You have justified the risks we've taken on you."
Omega's fingers tightened briefly around her helmet.
Ned recorded every word.
Lord meant archives. Access. More labs. More secrets.
It also meant being closer to the center of the machine that had just thrown them into a meat grinder to see what happened.
Varis's mouth curved.
It wasn't joy.
It was something hungrier.
"I look forward to serving the Empire," he said.
The Lord's holo flickered out.
In the silence that followed, Omega glanced back at M3-D's optic.
Ned brightened it slightly.
They had survived Kael.
They had survived the first real engineered slaughter.
Varis was one step from the throne-room shadows Ned needed.
The slopes of all their curves had steepened.
And somewhere far behind them, in wreckage and data and a cauterized corpse in a corridor, the future had shifted.
------------------------
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