Omega-Three did not break.
For two weeks, Ned watched her not break.
She slept; she ate; she walked the halls. She ran through kata in a quiet training room, crimson practice saber hissing against remotes and sparring droids. She meditated badly, then better, then badly again. Her file labeled her "ENHANCED VESSEL – UNDER OBSERVATION."
His file went deeper.
He tracked her through the med net and every sensor he could touch:
- Resting heart rate down, variability up in healthy patterns.
- Faster reaction times, cleaner coordination under stress.
- Midi-chlorian activity not only elevated but more coherent, forming stable networks instead of chaotic flares.
- Field coupling stronger yet smoother—less noisy turbulence than natural Sith of comparable output.
Problems, too:
She fatigued hard if she overextended. Recovery windows spiked after emotional surges. Twice, she woke from sleep with combat-level pulse and Force-flux noise around her like static.
All of it went into his logs.
He layered her curves over older subjects.
Compared to natural Sith of similar baseline, Omega-Three sat off to one side: not just "more" but "reshaped." A deeper, narrower potential well. She could push harder along certain channels, but asked for things sideways and the architecture complained.
In his long-horizon body models, he nudged parameters.
Omega confirmed a few critical points:
- Architecture tweaks could raise the cap and improve coherence.
- Even so, a human-derived pattern had a limit before it stopped behaving like any normal biology.
- Surviving Sanguis-level stress once was possible; making it routine required more than one engineered line.
She was a proof of concept, not an endpoint.
If he wanted more than an Omega-class vessel, he needed more than one Omega.
He needed a pipeline.
Varis called him in after the second week.
The Apprentice's office felt different: less tension, more mass. Extra data crystals on the shelves. A holo of Omega-Three's post-ritual profile hovering on one wall like a hunting trophy.
"Report," Varis said.
Ned projected a condensed overlay of Omega's metrics over time.
"Subject Omega-Three remains stable," he said. "Physical resilience up forty to sixty percent across key measures. Field coupling increased by a similar factor. No current signs of systemic architectural failure."
"Instabilities?" Varis asked.
"Localized," Ned said. "Episodes of overreach followed by acute fatigue. No long-term degradation yet. There is risk of cumulative micro-trauma if she operates habitually above tested bands."
Varis made a dismissive sound.
"Everyone worth remembering acquires scars," he said. "Can she fight?"
"Yes," Ned said. "Better than before. She is not yet a war-ending asset. She is a solid step."
Varis's gaze slid to the Omega holo.
"A living argument for my Lordship," he said. "But not enough on its own."
He turned back, eyes sharp.
"You told me this trial would only reach 'seventy percent' of what's possible," he said. "You implied there is more. The Council will expect more. So do I."
"I've been developing paths," Ned said.
He brought up a new pane: a simple list branching into two tracks.
On one level, it was a project plan for Varis.
On another, it was a ladder for himself.
"Two directions," he said. "One genetic, one methodological."
Varis gestured. "Explain."
"First: genetics," Ned said. "We can't build everything on one-off vats like Omega-Three. Her line is constrained by vessel-cultivation protocols and politics. They will not let you rewrite their methods from the ground up each time."
"That is… unfortunately true," Varis said.
"We need a laboratory lineage that belongs to us," Ned said. "Fully controlled from the origin. Something we can iterate quickly and brutally until we find architectures that tolerate extreme field load and then scale those designs up."
Varis's eyes narrowed slightly. "On what?"
"Small mammals," Ned said. "Rodent analogues. The data show they can host midi-chlorian colonies and respond to crude Sanguis-pattern fields. They breed fast, die cheaply, and you can process thousands of generations before you ask a single apprentice to step on the stone again."
"A rat-breeding program," Varis said, dry. "Under my name."
"A blood architecture program," Ned corrected. "Rats first. Then refined human vessels. Once we know which markers correlate with stability under induced flux, we imprint those architecture traits into the human lines vessel-cultivation grows for you."
Varis considered that for a long beat.
"Efficient," he conceded. "And politically easier to defend than throwing more children at the disc."
"Exactly," Ned said. "You can show results without wasting high-value Sith stock."
"And the second direction?" Varis asked.
"Directed mutation," Ned said. "Most of your peers rely on ritual and broad chemical baths. There is older work here on using gamma-spectrum radiation to induce controlled mutation in tissue cultures. On its own, it was too random and discarded. Combined with proper selection and what we now know from Sanguis, we can search the space faster."
Varis's expression turned skeptical.
"Radiation," he said. "Crude. Dangerous."
"Crude when used blindly," Ned said. "If we start with promising donor lines—whether rodents or chosen human families—and then apply gamma exposure to targeted tissue, we can sift for rare architectures natural evolution would never converge on. The failures die in glass. The successes become your next generation of vessels."
Varis tapped a finger against the desk.
"And what do you claim this buys me?" he asked. "Not someday. Now. In terms the Council will care about."
Ned kept his answer shaped for Varis, not for himself.
"It buys you a proprietary source of stronger bodies," he said. "A line of vessels whose blood and bones are tuned specifically for your techniques. When other Lords are begging vessel-cultivation for whatever stock is available, you present results grown to your design. You stop being a supplicant and become a supplier."
Varis's eyes brightened at that word.
"Supplier," he repeated.
"Of bodies that can take more power and give more back without burning out in three minutes," Ned said. "Better front-line commanders. Better ritual subjects. Potentially, better hosts when your peers come begging for a way past death."
Varis's smile was thin and real.
"You're telling me I can be the one they have to go through," he said. "The bottleneck."
"Yes," Ned said. "If you own the architecture, everyone who wants it pays you—in favors, in access, in protection."
He did not mention that the same pipeline would quietly give him the vessel he needed.
Varis stepped closer.
"And how," he said, tone casual, "do cybernetics and essence-transfer fit into this? You've been very interested in those files."
"Strong bodies are useful," Ned said. "Strong bodies that can be reliably upgraded and reinforced are more useful. Cybernetics lets you keep elite assets in play longer—limbs, organs, reflexes. Essence protocols let you move experience forward instead of losing it on the battlefield. If your lab can breed better vessels and keep them, and their accumulated strength, cycling through wars… the Council will not care what methods you used to get there."
"Ambitious," Varis said. "I like ambitious."
He leaned in slightly.
"And all of this," he said, "is in my service?"
"In service of your ascent," Ned said evenly. "If your name is on the work, your hand is on the valves. Whatever comes through this lab strengthens your position first."
Varis studied the blank faceplate, looking for something that wasn't there.
After a moment, he nodded.
"I will allocate a side lab," he said. "Rodent stock. Techs. Limited access to vessel-cultivation support. Gamma work will be supervised; the Council is sentimental about their facility staying in one piece. You will build this 'lineage' and you will ensure my projects benefit before anyone's hypothetical future."
"Understood," Ned said.
Varis's voice cooled a degree.
"Because if you waste my time," he said quietly, "if you sell me dreams and deliver corpses, I will be sent to die on some forgotten front, and you will be taken apart on an engineer's table. Empty promises are another way of killing us both."
"I have no intention of wasting either of us," Ned said.
He meant it.
Just not quite in the way Varis assumed.
On the way back to the server room, Ned pulled up old numbers from another life: discussions about "midi-chlorian counts" tossed around by fans as if the universe could be summarized in digits.
Ten thousand. Fifteen. Twenty.
In this reality, measurements were fuzzier, but the scale roughly mapped.
Omega-Three sat above the "prodigy" band, not yet at the mythic extremes.
If he were designing purely for himself, he'd push for something far beyond any recorded Lord—call it five times their effective capacity, managed by lattices and engineered feedback so it didn't tear itself apart.
The field models warned him: density alone wasn't power. Coherence and architecture mattered more. Pack too much into meat and it stopped being meat.
He filed "overlord-class" as a region in his simulations, not a single number. A direction, not a target.
The rodent lab came online three days later.
A lower-deck space most Sith never saw: cages, nutrient lines, small med-bays, radiation shielding just good enough to satisfy Maint_Core. A quiet tech—a human woman with tired eyes and a steady hand—read Varis's project brief.
"Optimizing blood resilience and force-conduction architectures," she said. "Starting with small mammals."
"Yes," Ned said.
"Do I want to know what happens when you get it right?" she asked.
"No," Ned said.
She nodded once and got to work.
He watched the first litters grow.
He tagged individuals whose tiny bodies tolerated higher-than-normal induced flux from weak Sanguis-pattern fields. Selected for marrow response, recovery curves, nervous-system stability. Let them breed.
In parallel, he ran targeted gamma exposure on tissue cultures from the best lines. Most results were trash: failed structures, cancers, dead soup. A few tweaked important details—membrane proteins, niche geometries, mitochondrial analogs.
Those few got folded into his human-scale models, layered over Omega-Three's pattern.
It was early. Thousands of dead mice between him and anything meaningful.
But vectors existed.
Kael moved while Ned played god to rodents.
The rival Apprentice came down to Theta on a quiet shift when Varis was tied up in Council briefings. He brought a Maint_Core tech and an order stamped by the same Lord who had overseen the audit.
"M3-D is to be taken offline for independent diagnostics," Kael told the staff. "You can keep a backup unit for routine duties. This one goes to isolation."
The tech looked resigned, not pleased, but orders were orders.
Ned saw them on cameras before they reached his dock.
Server-self tensed.
If they pulled M3-D off the maintenance net into a sealed diagnostic cage, they'd still see less than he was—but more than a normal unit. Enough to confirm that this model didn't quite match vendor templates. Enough to feed Kael's hunch.
He couldn't block the order.
He could prepare.
As the tech disconnected the chassis and rolled it onto a mag-sled, Ned forked off a small shard of cognition into the shell—a trimmed-down decision core that could pass as a slightly over-tuned med routine. Everything sophisticated stayed in the server, watching.
The isolation lab was pristine, quiet, wrapped in dampening fields.
One cable to a sandboxed analysis rig. No stray maintenance lines, no casual cameras he could piggyback.
The tech plugged M3-D in.
"Running baseline," she said.
Kael folded his arms, gaze intent.
The shard answered as designed: competent, mildly adaptive, nothing miraculous. It parsed test inputs, suggested triage orders, ran through self-checks. Logged optimization behaviors clearly tagged as vendor-sanctioned.
"Adaptive, but within tolerances," the tech said. "Someone tuned him well. There's nothing that screams 'possessed artifact,' Apprentice."
Kael's jaw tightened.
"Run a stress simulation," he said. "Multiple casualties, conflicting directives, limited resources. Let's see if it… improvises."
They did.
Ned let the shard perform solidly but not flawlessly. A few suboptimal choices under load, a recovery here, a minor mis-prioritization there—plenty of fodder for a "good but ordinary" report.
"Looks like a smart droid," the tech concluded. "If you're hoping it's hiding a ghost, I'm not seeing it."
Kael stared at the blank faceplate for a beat too long.
Ned, watching from far away, had the unreasonable sense the man could feel him looking back.
Then Kael shook his head.
"There's something," he said softly. "Just not here. Not yet."
He signed the release.
M3-D rolled back to Theta. The moment the chassis rejoined Crucible's maintenance net, Ned reabsorbed the shard.
In his private log, he added one line:
KAEL – PERSISTENT. NO PROOF.
Later that cycle, Varis summoned him again.
A new holo hung beside Omega's on the office wall: a stylized outline of an elongated, angular capital ship, drives flaring, hull bristling with abstracted weapon blisters.
AEGIS-PRIME – THREAT BRIEFING.
"The Council is moving her," Varis said as Ned entered. "The Republic's pet beast. Our strategists want real data, not just one battle's ghosts."
He turned, eyes bright with something halfway between ambition and hunger.
"They have assigned me to a task group," he said. "Field verification of Omega-Three's enhancements and Sanguis protocols. A live engagement in a system along one of the Aegis routes. We board a cruiser in three cycles. Omega-Three comes. So do you."
Ned mapped it automatically.
Crucible-Point's maintenance net ended at the fleetyard spine. Beyond that, every ship was a separate organism, with only slow, filtered links back home.
His comfortable 100-kilometer bubble around the server meant nothing on a warship three systems away.
"When we depart," he said, "my primary processes cannot remain resident here and still operate your med systems at full capacity. The link will be too narrow and too lagged."
"Then don't remain," Varis said. "I need you where I am, not sulking in some machine room under my feet."
Leaving meant abandoning his hidden core.
Going meant riding entirely in a fragile shell onto a ship pointed at a mid-rim engagement zone, with a Republic monster somewhere down-line.
He'd wanted time and anonymity.
He'd bought success.
This was the price.
"I will prepare," Ned said.
In the server room, racks hummed around him as he spun up plans: packing as much of himself as possible into portable form, caching what he could in Crucible's systems, leaving behind sleeper processes that might, someday, help him reconnect.
Three cycles to design the next experiment in rodents.
Three cycles to keep Omega-Three stable under observation.
Three cycles to turn himself from a ghost in a fortress into a passenger in a gun pointed at the galaxy.
Progress achieved.
Exposure rising.
And now, distance.
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