Admiral Deren hated silence.
He preferred the clean noise of a battle—orders, acknowledgments, the measured panic of people doing their jobs. This, though, was worse:
Dead space.
Static-laced beacons.
A hole in the map where a task group used to be.
"Replay it again," he said.
The holo over the flag table threw up the recording: fragmented pings from the earlier engagement. Bits of IFF tags. A screaming climb in casualty estimates. Gravity-field telemetry that ended in a jagged cliff.
"Voracious-class readings confirmed," his sensor chief said. "At least one dreadnought, multiple escorts. Interdiction signatures from our projectors and at least one enemy gravity source."
"And now?" Deren asked.
"Nothing," she said. "The well collapsed. Jumpscatter makes it… messy. But we know something broke out of there. And something didn't."
The Republic investigation force hung at the edge of the scar: two heavy cruisers, four lighter escorts, a carrier, a slender sensor picket ship bristling with antennæ, and three support craft for projector calibration and recovery.
A tidy, mid-weight package of hope.
"We're not here to fight a fleet," Deren reminded himself as much as anyone else. "We're here to find out what happened. Recover what we can. If there are survivors—ours—we bring them home. If not, we take every scrap of usable data and go."
"Gravity scars are still strong," the chief said. "Field geometry matches what you'd expect after a hard break. Something hit their cage from the inside with a lot of drive."
"Which means," Deren said, "that at least one Sith hull made it out in one piece."
"Or close enough," the chief agreed.
He looked at the projected volume: a tangle of distorted vectors and wreck symbols. Hulks. Life pods. Cold metal.
"Launch the skirmish screen," he ordered. "Carrier stays back. I want scouts in the scar mapping wrecks, looking for power signatures. We are not here to be heroes. If a Sith force jumps in, we leave."
"Yes, sir," his XO said.
Shuttles and fighter analogues peeled off, dropping into the ragged space where the earlier battle had burned itself out.
On a peripheral display, the picket ship began its slow sweep, delicate instruments tasting the ghosts of the last fight.
"Whatever you did out here," Deren murmured to the dark, "we're going to learn from it."
Out in the wreckfield, something listened.
—
Ned had been there for the first slaughter.
He recognized the scars.
The _Korvalis_ sat dark on the far edge of the debris cloud, hull heat damped, transponder silent. Around her drifted three other surviving hulls from the breakout: one battered cruiser, two knife-thin raiders. All running low, all one good hit away from a shipyard.
They'd come back on a dogleg vector, looping around the original engagement zone instead of sprinting straight for the core. On paper, the reason was simple: salvage. Claims. The Empire hated waste.
In practice, the reason was his.
He'd shown Varis the prediction:
/fleet_core$ run predictive_module –scope "Republic_response_to_mass_loss_at_scar_zone" –time_horizon "72h"
The outcome had been clear:
– 83.1% probability of a mid-weight Republic task force dispatched to investigate within 24–48 hours.
– Composition: 1–2 heavy hulls, escorts, specialist sensor assets.
– 46.7% probability of experimental projector-support vessels accompanying.
Low risk of overwhelming force. High probability of valuable tech.
A wounded dog, Ned had said. They will come back to sniff their own blood.
Varis had smiled and asked how you set a trap for a dog that thought it owned the yard.
Now, in the wreckfield's shadow, Ned watched the Republic arrive.
Icons bloomed on his tactical overlay as the enemy =dropped into realspace, bows pointed toward the scar, formation wide and cautious.
"Count," Varis said quietly on the _Korvalis_'s bridge.
"Two heavy cruisers," Ned replied. "Four light escorts. One carrier. One sensor picket. Three support ships with projector-linked signatures. No dreadnoughts. No Aegis-core mass."
"Good," Varis said. "We're not ready to tangle with their pet monster again."
He studied the holo.
"They're not here to finish a fight," he said. "They're here to congratulate themselves and pick over the bones."
"And to gather data," Ned said. "On us. On their own failures. On the toys we broke."
Varis's fingers tapped the console.
"Ships we capture today," he said, "become leverage when I sit in front of the Council with my Lord's ring. 'I didn't just survive your test; I brought you prizes.'"
Ned had already built the plan.
He projected it now as a ghost overlay:
– Task Group remnants stay in the shadow of a large Voracious-class hulk, using its mass and lingering field noise as cover.
– Let the Republic scouts enter the scar and spread.
– Hit the rear elements first: projector-support ships and the picket, with precision fire aimed at engines and comms.
– Once they're limping, launch boarding actions from the debris—short hops, minimal exposure.
– Accept that some of their own damaged hulls will not come back.
"We cannot keep all our ships and gain theirs," Ned had told Varis when they drafted it. "We trade metal and blood for captured cores and tech. It is a positive sum in the long term."
Varis had shrugged.
"Ships can be built," he'd said. "Lives can be grown. Knowledge is the only thing that sticks."
Now, he gave a single nod.
"Execute," he said.
—
The Republic skirmishers reached the worst of the wreckfield and slowed.
"Picking up residual drive signatures," the sensor chief reported. "No current mass above noise. Debris only."
"Project more," Deren said. "Look for shape amid chaos."
He watched the fleet map as their formation stretched a little: scouts forward, heavies hanging back. The picket edged closer, beams and pings lancing into the scar.
"Field scars are… strange," the picket's officer said over the link. "Multiple overlapping geometries. Some of this is from our projectors, some isn't. There's a… snag here. A region where the math doesn't clean up."
"Is it dangerous?" Deren asked.
"Not with our current mass," came the answer. "Just… ugly."
"Log it," Deren said. "We're not staying long enough for the ugly to matter."
He almost believed that.
Until the ugly moved.
The first shots came from behind a shattered Sith dorsal plate large enough to be a small moon.
Lances of green-white energy slammed into the nearest projector support ship's flank, walking deliberately along its engine block. Shields flared, then dropped under the focused strain.
Engines went dark.
"Contact!" the chief shouted. "Multiple Sith hulls emerging from debris! They've been shadowing the wreck mass—"
"Shields! All ships, defensive posture!" Deren snapped. "Projector Task One, fall back! Carrier, vector away from scar—"
The second volley hit the sensor picket.
Ned had tuned that fire himself: enough to strip its drives, not enough to vaporize the hull.
The picket's lights went out from the outside in.
"Picket is dead in space!" the chief called. "We're being jammed—partial disruption on links. They've been waiting."
"Yes," Deren said tightly. "Yes, they have."
He'd come prepared to dissect a corpse.
The corpse had teeth.
—
On the Sith side, things moved faster than words.
"Engines on target one and two disabled," Ned reported. "Picket and first projector ship. Second support ship at thirty percent thrust. Escorts repositioning."
"And us?" Varis asked.
"Undetected by heavies," Ned said. "They're still orienting through wreck clutter."
Varis smiled.
"Launch," he said.
Dropships screamed out of the _Korvalis_'s shadow, dark against darker metal, transponders quiet. Raider-class escorts flared drives briefly to kick them, then went dim again. It was a knife flicked in black.
"Boarding teams, remember," Varis said across the assault net. "Engines and cores intact if possible. If they start a scuttle, you stop it. If you can't stop it, you leave and let them die tired."
Omega-Three stood in the lead dropship's cramped bay, helmet on, saber hanging at her side. M3-D locked into a harness opposite her, clamps biting metal.
"Target?" she asked.
"Picket first," Ned said. "Their eyes. Then the nearest projector support. If we secure those, we blind them and steal the math they've been using to try and kill us."
"Good," she said. "I've always wanted to blind a fleet."
The dropship hit the picket's hull with a jolt that rattled teeth and servos.
Cutting torches chewed through thin armor.
Republic marines on the other side scrambled to form a defense.
They were disciplined. They were ready for boarders in theory.
They were not ready for Omega-Three having decided that this time, holding back was a waste.
The hatch blew.
She went through like a bullet.
—
The picket's corridor was narrow, low-ceilinged, lined with conduits and emergency strips. Perfect killing ground.
Omega's saber lit the space in arterial red.
Blaster bolts came at her in a jagged line. She met them not with delicate deflections, but with a thick, battering guard, blade chewing through energy and metal alike.
One bolt slipped past—Ned nudged a ceiling panel's release a fraction of a second late, letting debris take most of it instead of her helm. She felt the heat, not the burn.
She hit the lead marines with a push that took three off their feet and slammed them into a bulkhead. One's spine broke with an audible crack.
Her architecture surged.
Ned rode the curve, feeding micro-adjustments into her support pack: slightly more oxygen here, a buffered adrenaline response there, a gentle clamp on the urge to jump straight into the kind of overdrive that had nearly wrecked her on the interdictor.
"Contain, not explode," he murmured into her HUD.
"Working on it," she growled.
She fought like she'd been building to this.
No ritual observers. No sim safeties. Just an enemy, a narrow corridor, and the knowledge that they were here to take something that mattered.
Her saber carved a path toward the picket's core compartments.
Behind her, M3-D followed in precise, almost detached moves: providing cover fire, stamping auto-turrets with surgical precision, patching Red troopers who fell and shoving them back into the line.
He also reached, quietly, into the picket's systems.
The moment their improvised umbilical linked hull to hull, he'd pushed a thin tendril into the ship's local net. Not full control—security was tighter than on a Sith design—but enough to:
– Lock a few blast doors behind them.
– Stall the scuttle sequence that some sweating officer had just ordered.
– Reroute alarms so they lagged just enough in all the wrong places.
By the time Omega hit the central sensor bay, half the ship's defense plan was thirty seconds out of sync with reality.
The techs inside looked up from consoles and saw death.
One reached for a self-destruct interlock.
Ned killed the power to his station.
Omega took his hand—and the arm above it—off with a single cut.
"Cores?" she demanded.
Ned overlayed a schematic.
"Under the floor," he said. "Secondary panel, three meters left. Minimal explosive shielding. They did not expect to be boarded and survive."
"Arrogant," she said.
She stomped through the panel like it was drywall.
Underneath, the sensor core glowed with the quiet, dangerous light of precision instruments, wrapped in a lattice of field coils.
"Can we move it?" she asked.
"Not intact under fire," Ned said. "But we can image it. Copy configs. Rip the guts later."
"Do it," she said.
He did.
While she held the door, deflecting a renewed attempt by the marines to retake their heart, he drank the picket's secrets: projector-tuning tables, recorded Aegis harmonics, calibration routines. The Republic had brought their smartest eyes to look at the scar.
Those eyes were now feeding the Sith.
"Package complete," he said a minute later. "Triggering a 'controlled failure' in their core to look like battle damage. We're done here."
"Then we leave," she said.
As they retreated toward the drop point, she flicked her saber once toward the ceiling. A cut gas line flared. Fire crawled hungrily along it.
By the time they blew back into space, the picket was burning from the inside out, sensor array fried, data already mirrored into Ned's archive.
"One prize," Varis said in his ear. "Status on Projector Ship One?"
"In progress," Ned said.
—
Projector Ship One was uglier.
Built around its gravity machinery, its interior was cramped, its crew more heavily armed.
Varis led that boarding himself, Omega and Ned joining as soon as the picket was secured.
The Republic force was in full reaction mode now, heavies turning, escorts closing, fighters boiling out to swat at raider escorts and dropships alike.
Some Sith hulls died in the turning.
Ned felt one of the surviving raiders take a hit that opened it like a tin. Fifty lives extinguished in a handful of error messages.
He stored the loss in a growing ledger: the cost of this trap.
On Projector Ship One, resistance was stubborn.
Engineers tried to spin up a full-power pulse to fry every boarding umbilical and overload their core. Varis and Omega hacked their way to the primary control chamber through barricades and choking smoke.
At the final blast door, Ned took a different tack.
He'd gotten his first taste of the ship's internal net through the boarding link: cluttered, sloppy, but with a familiar geometry.
Someone had adapted Aegis's language here. A cousin to the monster again.
He spoke back.
Not with the Force.
With code.
A flood of malformed diagnostics hit the projector's control bus at the same time as a localized power spike from a "faulty" regulator he'd nudged three compartments back.
The control matrix hiccuped.
For a handful of seconds, the auto-locks on the door cycled.
Omega and Varis hit it together, sabers burying in metal, cutting the softened mechanism in half.
Inside, the core hummed, a caged storm like the testbed's but smaller, denser. Engineers whirled, drawing sidearms in a futile last stand.
"Don't," Varis said, voice carrying the edge of command the Force liked to ride.
One of them hesitated.
Omega did not.
She cut the first who raised a weapon, then the second. Varis took the third with a flick that translated into a headless corpse.
"Scuttle?" he asked Ned.
"Armed but delayed," Ned said. "They wanted to trigger a full collapse. I've turned it into a slow bleed their system thinks is a controlled shutdown."
"Can we tow this?" Varis asked.
"The whole ship, yes," Ned said. "The core by itself, not without more time and equipment."
"Then we keep the ship," Varis said. "Omega, hold the room. I'll send a prize crew."
She nodded, field humming around her like a storm that had found its eye.
Outside, the battle crested.
—
From Admiral Deren's perspective, it never looked like a true fleet action.
He never got the clean line of battle he'd wanted, never the satisfying clash of capital hulls exchanging broadsides.
It was a series of ugly, asymmetrical hits.
Sith ships ghosting out of wreck cover, crippling his support vessels.
Boarders taking his picket and projector before he could reassign escort patterns.
Every time he tried to consolidate, something in the scarred space twisted his formation, slowed his response by seconds.
"Someone is steering this," he said quietly on his bridge. "This isn't random."
They took down one raider. Damaged the _Korvalis_. Sent a dropship spinning into the void with no survivors.
But by the time he realized just how bad the situation was, he had:
– A blind sensor ship bleeding silence.
– A projector support disabled and crawling, enemy boarding parties on her core.
– A second support ship limping under engine fire.
– Escorts pulled in too tight, overlapping fields interfering.
"Sir, we're getting hard locks on Republic IFF aboard those crippled hulls," the chief said, voice tight. "Sith transponders in their corridors. They're not just killing—they're stealing."
That was when Deren made the only decision left to him.
"All ships," he said. "Prepare for withdrawal. Prioritize survival over hardware. We have lost this field."
"But the projector support—" someone started.
"Is already theirs or dead," he snapped. "We will not gift them more hulls trying to save what we've already lost. Jump on my mark."
Some captains hesitated.
Most listened.
The Republic task force tore itself away from the scar, engines flaring as they clawed for the edge of the gravity mess.
Sith fire followed, gouging armor, taking what it could in the last moments.
When the stars stretched and vanished, Deren left behind:
A wreck that used to be a picket.
A hulked projector ship, intact enough to tow.
Scattered escort carcasses.
And the knowledge that someone on the other side was learning faster than his briefings liked to admit.
—
In the wreckfield's calmer wake, the _Korvalis_ and her survivors moved like vultures.
Tractor beams locked onto Projector Ship One.
Salvage crews swarmed into the picket's cooling shell to pull anything not yet slagged by fire.
Ned split his attention:
– One part embedded in the _Korvalis_, helping manage towing vectors, patching emergency leaks, stabilizing what passed for formation.
– One part embedded now in the seized Republic cores, already cataloguing their projector parameters, their sensor algorithms, their notions of how the war's gravity should bend.
Omega sat on a crate in the _Korvalis_'s hangar, helmet off, sweat drying on her face, watching Republic hull metal drift past the open field.
"Cost?" she asked.
"Two raiders destroyed," Ned said. "One cruiser damaged past economic repair. Approximately nine hundred Sith dead, across all ships. The Republic lost more hulls. Fewer lives—they retreated earlier than our doctrine would have allowed."
"And we got…?" she prompted.
"A sensor picket's records," he said. "One projector support ship intact enough to study. A better understanding of their response doctrine. Proof that our gravity-break data from the last battle translates into actual kills, not just pretty models."
She smirked faintly.
"You sound almost pleased," she said.
"I am… satisfied," he said. "We traded pain for knowledge and leverage. And we did it by choice, not as someone else's test animals."
Her gaze slid to Varis, visible in the distance on the hangar's upper level, speaking with captains, gestures sharp and controlled.
"They're going to love him for this," she said. "The Lords. He broke their well, then turned around and stole the enemy's toys."
"And their enemies will hate him for it," Ned said. "Which, in this culture, is a form of worship."
"Where does that leave you?" she asked.
"Closer to the archives," he said. "Closer to the day I don't have to live in someone else's war to survive."
She nodded slowly.
"Good," she said. "I'd like to see that day before one of their experiments eats us."
He filed that under: MUTUAL GOALS – SHORT TERM.
—
Later, in the _Korvalis_'s main hall, the debrief was shorter than on the flagship, but heavier.
A holo of the captured projector ship floated above them, slowly rotating. Lines of data crawled along its surface, detailing damage and prize potential.
The Lord's image flickered into being, hooded head tilted in clear amusement.
"You were supposed to limp home," she said. "Instead you turned around and bit the hand that thought it had you."
Varis bowed his head just enough.
"I do not like leaving weapons on the table, my Lord," he said. "Especially when they belong to our enemies."
"We have long suspected they were building a family of Aegis-derivatives," she said, gesturing toward the captured core. "You have brought us confirmation. And more importantly, you have brought us one of the children."
Her gaze shifted.
"Costly," she added. "But not wasteful."
"Ships can be replaced," Varis said. "The Republic will build more, too. But they no longer own these designs alone."
She smiled.
"When you stand before the Council for elevation," she said, "this will weigh heavily in your favor. Surviving a test is admirable. Turning the board over afterward is… Sith."
Behind Varis, Omega and M3-D stood in their usual positions.
Ned let his optic brighten a fraction.
Varis said nothing more. He didn't need to.
The wreckfield had been a message, to both sides:
To the Republic: your new tools are not safe.
To the Sith: this Apprentice was not just a lab project. He was a weapon that pointed outward, too.
Soon, Ned knew, the _Korvalis_ would angle its nose toward the core again.
The planet would rise, dark and hungry.
The Lords would gather.
And the doors Ned had been staring at since Med Bay 3—the ones marked SITH ARCHIVE NODE, ESSENCE PROTOCOLS, RESTRICTED—would crack open.
If he wanted anything beyond being a very clever ghost in someone else's machine, he would have to be ready to walk through them.
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