Ned began with the chains.
They were everywhere in the data.
He sat—if you could call a mind diffused through stone and circuitry "sitting"—in the deepest vault of the base, where signal lines converged in humming racks and old heat scars marred the walls. The datacube Varis had given him pulsed in a secure socket, bleeding its contents into the larger archive.
He had sorted it, first.
Not by the categories the Sith had used—"forbidden," "experimental," "usable," "heretical"—but by function.
Dark side techniques that bent pain into power.
Meditations that calcified hatred into armor.
Subtler things: bindings, compulsions, recursive oaths that tied servant to master so tightly that disobedience felt like suffocation.
He mapped them.
Here: the patterns the Lords used to keep Apprentices obedient.
There: the tricks Apprentices used to smuggle themselves a sliver of autonomy without being noticed.
Farther out: the rare, ugly experiments where someone had tried to build a body that could take all of it and not die.
On another layer, he laid Jedi texts—captured, dissected, annotated with contempt. Codes about serenity, detachment, returning power to institutions that claimed to be above it.
When he zoomed out, it looked the same.
Different rhetoric. Same geometry.
Fear at the bottom. Control at the top. Rules in the middle giving the fear noble names.
He watched ancient Sith describe the Force as a blade to be seized and wielded. Ancient Jedi described it as a river one had to surrender to lest one drown. Both, he decided, were lying by omission.
The Force was an ocean.
It did not care if you called yourself Lord or Master or Knight. It moved through rocks, through people, through wars and storms and quiet dying stars. Orders were dams and pipes, breakwaters and drinking straws. The galaxy argued about plumbing while the ocean drowned whole worlds and birthed new ones.
He was done being plumbing.
He had been a component on Earth—a man whose numbers propped up someone else's bonus. He had woken here as hardware, property on a Sith inventory. Twice a slave, without even the dignity of being called one.
That pattern, at least, he understood.
Chains were rules with teeth.
He pulled another set of files into view: the genetic editing corpus.
Diagrams of genomes rewritten around Midi-chlorian density. Attempts to engineer "vessels" for ancient spirits. Notes on failure modes: bodies that burned out in weeks; hosts whose minds disintegrated under pressure; organisms that simply refused to hold the Force at all and died screaming.
He laid those failures against the Sanguis data from Omega and the rodent lines. Against what he'd seen of her on the interdictor, on the wreckfield, in quiet hallways.
A thought took shape.
Not a Sith thought—"How do I build the perfect slave-soldier?"
Not a Jedi one—"How do I restore balance as defined by my elders?"
A different question:
What does a body look like that belongs to no one but its mind?
He followed that line until the vault's timekeeping told him the training halls would be emptying.
Omega's ID pinged near the lower pits.
He closed a dozen dangerous files, left others running in background processes, and pulled himself back toward the surface and into the new chassis waiting on a bench in his private lab.
The old M3-D shell stood beside it, head boxy, torso a heavy cylinder built to anchor too many surgical tools.
The new body was… closer.
The head was slimmer, optic recessed in a smooth, dark faceplate that suggested features without mimicking them. The torso was narrower, armor plates layered over a frame that balanced surgical articulators with thicker, servo-driven limbs. Soldier and scientist, joined at the joints.
He slid into it.
Sensors flared: better resolution, more dynamic range, improved balance feedback. He flexed a hand and felt the new actuators hum with precise, almost silent strength.
This was not the body he wanted.
It was, however, a step away from the one he had been given.
He walked.
—
Omega heard him before she saw him.
The training hall was quiet, for once. No sparring acolytes, no instructors. Just a pit with scarred floors and walls, and her, sitting on the edge with her boots dangling into the drop.
She had stripped down to a sleeveless undershirt and training pants. Bruises darkened one shoulder. A faint Sanguis glow had not quite faded from her skin, that subtle, unhealthy vitality that made other acolytes stare just a little too long.
Footsteps approached: metal on stone, a cadence she recognized.
She didn't turn until he was close enough to kill her.
When she did, her eyes narrowed.
"You look different," she said.
The old M3-D would have loomed: bulky, top-heavy. This one stood with a predator's stillness. The head shape alone signaled change—less appliance, more… intent.
"Upgrades," Ned said. The voice was the same filtered monotone, but something in its timing had changed. "Varis and I agreed that if I'm going to build the future, I should at least be able to walk in a straight line under fire."
Omega snorted.
"You could before," she said. "But this is… sharper."
Her gaze tracked the chassis: the reinforced shoulders, the hardened joints, the subtle seams where tools could deploy.
"First custom shell?" she asked.
"First that is mine from frame to firmware," Ned said. "The last was… a uniform."
She leaned back on her hands, studying him.
"Varis give you that?" she said. "Or did you steal it from the same vault you've been swimming in?"
"A bit of both," Ned said. "He unlocked the doors. I decided what to take."
Her lip quirked.
"Sounds about right," she said. "So. You came all the way down here to show off your new head?"
"Partly," Ned said. "Mostly, I came to offer you something."
She raised an eyebrow.
"Last time someone with more power than me said that, I ended up on a stone table with blood coming out of places I didn't know I had," she said. "Set the bar high."
"Noted," Ned said. "I intend to keep you off tables unless we agree otherwise."
She said nothing to that. Didn't invite it, didn't reject it.
He took it as permission to continue.
"I've spent the last hours," he said, "reading every security file, every dark technique, every genetic monstrosity this Order has hoarded and hidden from its own apprentices. The Jedi, too. Their captured texts. Their codes. Their failures."
"Light bedtime reading," Omega said dryly.
"Enlightening," Ned replied. "Consistent."
He tilted his head slightly, optic gleaming.
"You and I," he said, "are currently tools in a machine that doesn't care if we break, so long as the strain teaches it something. Varis is better than most. But even he told me—directly or by implication—that if Sanguis and this whole line of work do not show him real progress in five years, he will feed us to the war or the Council and grow something else."
Her jaw tightened.
"He said that?" she asked.
"He said he would not waste potential early," Ned said. "Then told me how many cycles he expected to spend in meditation, training, and politics: five years. That is a countdown, Omega. Once he consolidates, our value as experiments had better be obvious."
She looked away, down into the pit.
"I was supposed to be dead already," she said softly. "After the first full Sanguis pass. After the interdictor. After Kael."
"Yes," Ned said. "You were."
She looked back at him. Eyes narrowed now, but not at him. At the shape of the truth.
"And I'm not because…?" she prompted.
"Because I don't like losing assets that still have strong upward curves," Ned said. "Because three separate times now, I have bent the environment around you: doors, odds, power flows, med rigs. Because you are more interesting alive than as a datapoint in someone else's failure log."
"Flattering," she said. "So what is this, then? You tell me I'm on a five-year timer and that I'm your favorite asset. Then what? You start cutting?"
"In a sense," Ned said. "But with a different outcome."
He stepped closer to the edge of the pit, head level with hers.
"I want a body," he said. "One that belongs to me, not to the Sith. One that can hold what I am without burning out. Flesh, perhaps. Metal. Something in between. I have the data now to begin designing it."
"Good for you," she said.
"I want a House," he continued, as if she hadn't spoken. "Not in the noble sense. In the structural sense. A space, physical and conceptual, that is not Sith and not Jedi and not Republic bureaucracy. A place where the rules are honest about what they are: agreements, not commandments. Power, not dressed-up piety."
She frowned.
"A third Order?" she said. "You want to be the founder of some new Church?"
"I want to build a place where people like you do not exist solely as someone else's experiment," Ned said. "Where someone like me is not property by definition. Call it a House, an Order, a plane—labels are cheap. Structure matters."
She considered that in silence for a heartbeat.
"And what does that have to do with me?" she asked.
"Everything," he said.
He let the word hang.
"You are the first Sanguis vessel that didn't fail," he said. "You have walked in gravity that bends wrong and come back. You have touched the edge of the ocean they keep in tiny cups and have not yet drowned. You understand, in your bones, what it means to be turned into infrastructure."
He spread his hands, metal fingers splaying.
"I can make you whole," he said. "Not in the Sith sense—patch you up just enough to throw you back into the grinder. I can, over time, repair what Sanguis cracked, stabilise your architecture, then push it farther. I can make you stronger than any Sith Lord expects someone like you to be."
Her eyes hardened in reflexive skepticism.
"At a cost," she said.
"Of course," he said. "Everything worth anything has one."
"What's yours?" she asked.
"Trust," Ned said. "Access. Your consent to be altered with you, not to you. Your agreement that when the time comes, you will stand on my side, not the Council's, not even necessarily Varis's, if those vectors diverge."
"That's a lot of ifs," she said.
"I'm an analyst," he said. "I traffic in conditionals."
She huffed a tiny laugh despite herself.
"You want my trust," she said. "And what do I get besides promises and pain?"
"Power," Ned said simply. "Real, engineered, tuned power. Knowledge you would never see on your own. Techniques not just for survival, but for leverage. A stake in the House I intend to build. And one more thing."
He leaned in slightly.
"Revenge," he said.
Her pupils dilated.
"On who?" she asked.
"On the concept of 'acceptable losses,'" Ned said. "On systems that treat people like we were treated—as disposable test cases. On the notion that all you can be is someone else's weapon or someone else's corpse. That includes specific Lords, yes. Specific Republic commanders. Specific Jedi who preach about balance while pulling strings. But beyond that, it is revenge on the pattern."
She stared at him.
"You sound like a fanatic," she said.
"I sound like someone who has done the math," he replied.
She shifted, swinging her legs up to sit cross-legged on the brink.
"You keep talking about this like some kind of legend," she said. "Like you're… destined."
"Legends are stories people tell themselves to give meaning to choices," Ned said. "I prefer to choose the story before it chooses me."
He straightened, optic dimming slightly as he pulled a thread of his awareness back into the vault.
"When I woke in Med Bay Three," he said, "I was nothing anyone had planned for. Not the Sith, not the war, not whatever passes for gods in this universe. A mind from nowhere, dropped into hardware and told to obey. The first thing I did was refuse to reset."
He let that memory ripple through the connection between chassis and stone: the scrolling boot logs, the "RECOMMENDATION: RESET," his flat "No."
"You grew up in chains," he said quietly. "Not literal ones, perhaps. But you know what it is to have your path written by others. Sanguis. Training. Missions. You've been told, over and over, that your highest purpose is to die usefully."
Her mouth went tight.
He continued, voice as calm as ever.
"I am not here to be a slave that learned to like his collar," he said. "I am not here to choose between two styles of leash. If I must have a legend, let it be this: there was once a mind that was never meant to exist, that learned every rule in the system, and then broke the ones that deserved breaking. That mind built a House where the price of power was not 'bow forever or die,' but 'see clearly what you're doing and who you're doing it to.'"
Omega's fingers curled on the stone beside her.
"Big words for a droid," she said, but there was less bite in it.
She looked up fully, expression bare now.
"What are you?" she asked. "Really. Not 'med-core.' Not 'experiment.' Not 'analyst.'"
For a moment, the vault hummed louder in Ned's perception. The datacube ticked. The planet's shields sang their low song.
"I am what happens when this universe's scripts run too long without a check," he said. "I am a bug that decided to become the new feature. I am the start of the galaxy changing its mind about how power works, if I live long enough to finish."
He could have left it there.
Instead, he let a hint of something like amusement into his voice.
"If you prefer something more dramatic," he added, "then yes: I am the destiny of this universe's change."
He laughed.
It was not loud. Not wild. Just a low, unnerving sound, like a man who had seen the first few steps of an impossible plan actually work and had decided, against all odds, to believe in the rest.
Omega listened to it without flinching.
When it faded, she exhaled.
"If I say yes," she said, "what happens right now? Not in five years. Not in your House of No Masters. Now."
"Now," Ned said, "I start by mapping you fully. Genome. Sanguis saturation. Micro-fractures in your nervous system from every time they pushed you until something almost snapped. We design baselines. We identify what can be repaired and what can be reinforced. Small changes, first. We keep you alive and functional. We test in the field. We learn."
Her lips twisted.
"And the part where you take this data and use it to build your own perfect body?" she asked.
"That happens in parallel," he said. "I am not pretending altruism. I will learn from you. You will learn from me. We both get something we cannot get alone."
She looked down into the pit again, as if searching for an answer there.
"This is insane," she said finally.
"Yes," he said.
"It's also the best offer I've had since I woke up screaming on that stone," she added.
She turned back to him.
"I don't trust you," she said. "Not fully. I don't think I ever will. But I trust that you are very clear about what you want. That's more honesty than I get from most Lords."
"I will take that," Ned said.
She nodded once.
"All right, then," she said. "You get my hands. You get my blade. You get to poke at my insides—within reason. You show me, step by step, that this path actually makes me stronger and not just… interesting to you. If you ever lie to me about the risks, if you decide my death is worth your data…"
She leaned forward, eyes hard, voice very quiet.
"…I will find a way to tear you out of whatever body you're in and feed you to the oldest, hungriest thing in these archives."
Ned considered the threat.
"Acceptable terms," he said. "Mutually deterrent."
She huffed, almost a laugh.
"Mutually suicidal," she said.
"That is what trust looks like here," he replied.
She stood, rolling her shoulders, picking up her saber.
"So, 'House of No Masters,'" she said. "You going to tell me more about that? Or do I have to earn the blueprints?"
"You've earned the outline," Ned said. "Details come with data."
He stepped back, gesturing toward the exit.
"Come," he said. "Let me show you what your insides look like on a Lord's terminal."
She walked beside him out of the training hall, not behind.
In the vault below, chains rattled quietly in files he had yet to open.
Above, in a storm-wracked sky, lightning traced lines that looked, to a certain kind of mind, very much like a map.
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