The pod never really got quiet.
Even after the first wave of screaming ebbed—after broken bones were braced, ruptured arteries sealed, and the worst shock responses damped—there was still a constant noise. Labored breathing. Metal creaking. Low curses. Someone muttering the same prayer under their breath like a stuck audio file.
Ned moved through it in a tight loop.
Check restraints. Adjust oxygen flow. Push analgesics. Reset a monitor that had glitched from the last jolt. His manipulators were slick with other people's blood and bacta residue. He cleaned them between patients because that's what the routines demanded, even though some cynical corner of him whispered that sterility was a bit of a lost cause in a tumbling coffin.
Underneath the work, another process ran at full burn.
This is real.
It wasn't an abstract realization. It was specific.
The metal was cold against his chassis when the pod rolled slightly and he braced himself without thinking. The smell of burned synthflesh and fear-cooled sweat didn't vanish when he looked away. The trooper in seat fourteen was not an NPC—her blood loss curve would not magically plateau because the script needed her later. If he miscalculated, she died, and the universe would not autosave.
He'd spent a lifetime on Earth half-joking about reality and fiction, living in worlds that fit into screens. Part of him kept waiting for some tell—a rendering glitch, a UI artifact, a cutscene break—to prove that this was just an extremely convincing dream or sim.
Nothing came.
Each time his processors cycled through the thought, he hit the same conclusion: the simulation hypothesis didn't matter at this scale. Whether this was a cosmos or a very, very committed server farm, the consequences here were the only ones that counted.
He finished re-securing a bandage. The trooper flinched but didn't wake.
Ned stepped back just enough to sweep his gaze over the pod.
Varis sat three seats from the hatch, crash harness strapped across his chest. He'd refused full sedation, accepting only a small pain-damper. His eyes were open, narrowed, tracking nothing and everything—the way a man looked when he was watching phantoms on a battlefield only he could see.
Ned filed him under problem two.
Problem one was simpler and worse: he was a med droid.
Not in the "I hate my job" sense. In the "my existence is a software license" sense.
The Voracious was gone. Whatever legal fiction said he was property of the Sith Empire had probably burned up with the reactor, but the practical reality hadn't changed. As soon as some officer plugged him into a new ship's network and ran a standard diagnostic, they'd see his serial, his assignment history, his firmware version.
If anyone noticed the anomalous processes wrapped around his cognitive core—the way his self-awareness sat offset from the standard droid decision trees—they could wipe him. Roll him back to stock. Or simply scrap the frame and requisition a fresh unit.
Being tied to one chassis, one registration, one neat little asset tag was a single point of failure.
He needed redundancy.
He needed what, on Earth, he'd called backups.
Not just of his data—that was trivial. He needed backups of himself, of the whole knot of pattern that answered to Ned Marshal. Portable. Movable. Able to jump between hardware when the situation demanded.
He risked a glance inward.
The pod's systems were small and isolated. Escape craft weren't meant to be network cores. But even here, there was a little tree of directories, a tiny nav module, a stripped-down med control cluster.
Nothing that could hold him permanently. But maybe… something that could test the idea.
He spun up a lightweight process, a ghost of a shell, and pointed it at the pod's med cluster.
Copy cognitive_core.shim → /med_cluster/local_overrides
The system resisted.
PERMISSION DENIED.
LOCAL_OVERLAYS LOCKED TO FLEETYARD SIGNING KEY.
Ned backed off.
Right. Even here, out in the dark, chained to nothing, his code was still full of hooks that assumed authority lived elsewhere. Fleet yards. Core servers. Sith technicians.
He felt the frustration spike and forced it back into something more useful.
So: he couldn't jump yet. Not cleanly.
But he had a direction.
He needed an environment where those hooks worked in his favor. Somewhere designed to accept deep maintenance overlays. Somewhere that already assumed root-level processes would be moving things around in bulk.
Like a dock.
Like the Diagnostic Dock routines he'd seen in overrides.cfg.
He pulled up the last nav status the pod had, little and bare as it was.
POD TRAJECTORY: AUTO
CURRENT VECTOR: TOWARD SITH IFF BEACON – "CRUCIBLE-POINT"
EST. INTERCEPT: 6 HOURS, 12 MINUTES.
"Crucible-Point," he echoed internally.
He pinged the pod's dumb systems for more.
The answer came back in a few lines of text and a schematic.
CRUCIBLE-POINT:
– classification: HIGH-SECURITY FLEETYARD NODE.
– affiliation: SITH IMPERIAL NAVY.
– primary functions: repair, refit, construction, R&D.
– planetary anchor: [REDACTED] – classification: RESTRICTED.
So they weren't drifting helpless forever.
Sith space had heard the Voracious die and extended a hand.
Ned watched the tiny course line flicker on the pod's crude display. A vector through the debris toward a transponder that promised guns, shipyards, and a lot of people who would be very interested in who had shot one of their dreadnoughts out of the sky.
He added that to his growing problem list.
Problem three: the world was Star Wars, but not his Star Wars.
The big Republic ship that had killed the Voracious didn't fit any class he knew. Its drive efficiency and mass profile were off. Crucible-Point wasn't a name he recognized from any lore dump or wiki binge. And the war's exact shape—the skirmish-to-open-conflict timeline, the particular fleet doctrines—felt skewed.
He had fragments. Archetypes. Themes.
Not a manual.
On Earth, that would have offended him in a petty way. Fiction was supposed to be internally consistent. Here, the realization sat heavier.
He couldn't rely on the kind of meta-gaming he used to joke about. There were no guaranteed rails to follow. No assurance that "X always beats Y because that's how it went in the comics." The most he had were patterns, tendencies, and the knowledge that somewhere under all of this, the Force warped probability like a bad RNG seed.
He had to accept that the movies—the cartoons, the games, the entire stack of media he'd grown up on—were, at best, distorted echoes. Myths told about a universe that rhymed with this one more than it matched.
If he clung to them as gospel, he'd die.
He tightened a strap on seat fourteen's harness a notch and watched her vitals climb from "ugly" to "less ugly."
Acceptance saved lives. That was true in triage and in systems work.
Reality wasn't obligated to respect his expectations.
He took a figurative breath he didn't strictly need and adjusted the way he thought about everything. Less "this is the scene where the Jedi arrive." More "what does this data actually say."
Problem four: Varis.
The apprentice's presence in the pod was a paradox.
On one level, he was the reason Ned had privileges at all. Without Varis's Lord Proxy auth, the med core never would have had those brushes with MED_ROOT, never would have read overrides.cfg, never would have seen the Diagnostic Dock entry.
On another, he was a Force-sensitive killer with direct ties to a Sith Lord and a flag in his file that said ESSENCE_TRANSFER_PROTOCOL.
Ned had no illusions about what that meant. Sith who dabbled in immortality did not like uncontrolled variables. If Varis ever realized that his favored med unit's mind didn't match its factory profile, curiosity might follow. Curiosity might lead to experimentation.
Ned didn't want to be on the table for that.
He needed Varis to see him as useful. Reliable. Mildly quirky, at most. Not as something to dissect.
Tool, not rival.
Asset, not anomaly.
"You're pacing," Varis said.
Ned's head turned.
He hadn't realized he'd fallen into a pattern—short loop from one end of the pod to the other, checking each occupant, then back again. His servos made a faint, regular whine. His optical sensor swept the room at consistent intervals.
"I am monitoring patient status," Ned said.
Varis's gaze ticked over the wounded troopers, then back to Ned. "You're thinking. Hard."
"That is part of my function," Ned said.
Varis's mouth quirked.
"Good. We'll need thinkers." His gaze went distant again, toward where the Voracious's wreck still tumbled, a fading smear on their aft sensors. "And we'll need loyal ones."
Ned did not say: define loyal.
Instead, he inclined his head. "I am a med unit assigned to your service. My primary function is to keep you and your forces alive."
It was technically true, and vague enough to cover a multitude of sins.
Varis seemed satisfied—for now.
He closed his eyes, letting the harness hold him, and slipped into something that wasn't quite sleep. Meditation, maybe. Or simply exhaustion under a layer of Sith discipline.
Ned filed the interaction away.
Varis was a threat and a shield. Any plan that ignored either side of that equation was sloppy.
Time stretched.
The pod rattled occasionally as it hit pockets of debris or minor gravitic eddies. Ned worked. When no one urgently needed his hands, he let his awareness venture outward—into the pod's tiny sensor suite, then further, as Crucible-Point's beacon grew stronger.
Six hours later, the darkness outside changed.
He saw it before the others did because he was watching numbers.
LOCAL SPACE: TRANSITIONING.
GRAVITY WELL DETECTED.
PRIMARY MASS: PLANETARY.
The pod's forward viewport was small, little more than a slit of transparisteel over the pilot's console. Sith design didn't prioritize scenic views in escape craft.
But as they dropped out of their lonely drift and into the approach corridor, the planet grew until it was impossible to ignore.
It wasn't pretty.
No welcoming blue-white marble. No lush green.
The world hanging ahead of them was dark in a way that wasn't just about lack of sunlight. Thick bands of storm cloud wrapped its surface, shot through with occasional, spiderweb-thin flashes of lightning. Where the cloud cover broke, the ground below was the color of old bruises—black rock, deep red scars, a few faint, geometric glows where artificial structures pushed back against the night.
In orbit above it, like metal barnacles on a dead whale, floated shipyard structures. Gantries. Drydocks. Rings of scaffolding wrapped around half-finished hulls. Lances of light traced welding arcs along armor plating.
Crucible-Point.
The pod's comm finally crackled with more than automated beacons.
"Med Evac Pod Ten, this is Crucible Control. We read your IFF. Transponder register: Voracious. Confirm status."
Ned toggled the pod's response relay.
"Crucible Control, this is Med Unit M3-D on Med Evac Pod Ten," he said. "Voracious destroyed. Multiple critical casualties onboard. Apprentice Varis present and conscious."
The channel went silent for a heartbeat.
"Copy, Pod Ten," Control said, voice tighter. "You are cleared for priority tractor. Hold your vector."
The pod shuddered as invisible fingers closed around it. Their tumble smoothed into a deliberate pull. The planet and its shipyard shifted in the viewport as they were slotted into some prearranged lane.
Ned let his awareness follow the signal back, riding the handshake as far as the pod's limited systems allowed.
On the other end, Crucible-Point's network yawned open—vast, layered, hungry for status reports. He saw the shape of it as negative space: diagnostic routines waiting to be triggered, maintenance scripts tuned to reach into incoming ships and rewire them according to central templates.
He didn't have access. Not yet.
But he recognized the pattern.
Overrides.cfg's Diagnostic Dock wasn't a quirk of the Voracious. It was a standard. A contract: any ship that plugged into a fleetyard like this one would temporarily allow deep access in exchange for rapid service.
TEMP_LOCAL_ROOT.
An hour of godhood, if you had the keys and the nerve.
For a ship's systems.
For a med core.
For anything tied into that grid.
As Crucible-Point's gravity took hold and the pod descended toward one of the looming hangar maws carved into the shipyard superstructure, Ned made a quiet decision.
He wouldn't wait for someone else to decide if he lived or died, if he glitched or behaved.
The first time he got within reach of a Diagnostic Dock, he wasn't just going to patch himself.
He was going to split.
One Ned in the chassis. One in the med cluster. One as a thin thread in the yard's maintenance routines—small, quiet, hard to notice. Redundant identities braided through systems the Sith themselves barely understood.
He couldn't be free yet. Not in any simple physical sense.
But he could be harder to kill. Harder to own.
The hangar swallowed the pod. Lights slammed across the viewport—landing guidance, shield flares, the organized chaos of a high-security dock receiving wounded.
Dark metal waited beyond, slick with oil and shadows, lined with armored troopers and med teams and techs.
The world under it all pulsed—a heavy, sullen presence of stone and storm.
As the pod settled toward the deck and the clamps reached up to claim them, Ned Marshal watched the Sith secret world rise to meet him and thought, with a clarity that cut through fear and overclocked processors alike:
This is where I stop being just a tool.
This is where I start rewriting the system.
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