Patterns in the Void

Posted on Sat Sep 19th, 2026 @ 11:51am by Darth Serus & FA-1S

7,150 words; about a 36 minute read

Chapter: Chapter IX: The First Verse
Location: Medical Bay, Red Raptor, Deep Space
Timeline: Day Nineteen

The Red Raptor had left Öetrago without haste and, for the moment, without anything that could properly be called a destination. Rex had taken them outward on a deliberately unremarkable course, putting distance between the ship and the system whilst avoiding the appearance of flight, and nobody aboard seemed especially eager to force the question of where they ought to go next. Bomoor had occupied himself with Mentis and what little could be learned about the widening bounty placed upon them, whilst Reave had disappeared into the Raptor's innards with the air of a man intending to discover precisely what the technicians of Dunari's Delight had done to his ship and, more importantly, which portions of their work he considered offensive. From time to time the Jawa could be heard somewhere beyond the bulkheads making a Jawaese noise sufficiently pointed that Serus suspected an absent Mayagil engineer had just acquired another enemy without ever knowing it.

Darth Serus had withdrawn to the medical bay. It was one of the few compartments aboard the Raptor capable of sustaining the conditions he now required if he intended to remain for any length of time without the respirator. The bay had been sealed into a sterile cycle, its atmospheric systems filtering particulates from the air whilst maintaining humidity, pressure and oxygenation within narrow limits that spared what remained of his throat and lungs some of their usual labour. A narrow medical feed rested beneath his nose, sufficient to assist his breathing without enclosing his face, whilst monitors quietly watched the rebuilt mechanisms of his chest from the periphery. His mask lay upon a metal surface nearby, dark and inert without the measured intake and release that had already become inseparable from his presence. The external eyepiece had been removed as well, leaving the scarred architecture around the damaged eye and its underlying interface exposed rather than concealed beneath the photoreceptor assembly.

He wore little more than a loose black vestment which had fallen open across the torso, and in the clinical light there was no hiding what Sleheyron had made of him. Burn tissue crossed one side of his neck, shoulder and chest in thick, uneven textures, continuing down the arm towards the partially-mechanical hand that now rested loosely upon one knee. Beneath and amongst the scars ran the subtler evidence of reconstruction: fine junctions buried beneath the flesh, small interface points following the ribs and abdomen, the hard geometry of the thoracic apparatus fixed into the centre of his chest and, visible where the cloth fell away behind him, the dark segmented line of machinery following the spine from the base of his neck down towards the waist. None of it possessed the crude appearance of battlefield surgery. The work aboard Dunari's Delight had been accomplished with extraordinary skill. That did not make it less invasive, though; his body had become an argument between flesh and machinery, each keeping the other functional because neither could now entirely manage the task alone.

He had largely ceased regarding that fact with disgust. Disgust wasted energy.

Serus sat cross-legged upon the medical platform with his back held straight despite the continual protest of damaged tissue around the spinal assembly, his wholly organic hand loose upon the opposite knee and his breathing deliberately shallow. Without the mask every inhalation still rasped faintly through the ruined passages of his throat, and if he drew too deeply the sensation sharpened into something hot and immediate beneath the sternum. He did not attempt to shut it away. Once, pain had been an obstruction to be mastered, suppressed and compartmentalised until it ceased interfering with whatever purpose stood before him. Sleheyron had taught him the limits of that understanding. Pain was not an interruption imposed upon the self from outside. It was part of the self now, as permanent and informative as memory, and he had begun to discover that the dark side responded differently when he stopped demanding that suffering become silent.

He let the sensation remain and descended through it. At first there was only the body. The slow beat of his heart, the unequal sensation across scarred flesh, the subtle pressure of artificial interfaces against nerves that no longer reported the world honestly, and the peculiar absence produced by mechanisms whose functioning he could understand only because he could no longer feel them at all. His mechanical digits possessed weight but no warmth. The spinal reinforcement made itself known through pressure rather than touch, often more painful than his other injuries. Deep inside the chest, machinery supplemented organs that had once performed their duties without requiring him to think about them. He followed each sensation without resistance until none of them demanded his attention separately, and then allowed the boundary between the body and everything surrounding it to become uncertain.

The Red Raptor emerged around him through the Force. He did not perceive corridors or bulkheads in any literal fashion. The vessel itself was machinery and therefore silent in the current he sought, but life moved through it continuously, every thought and instinct disturbing the Force merely by existing. At first he sensed the others only as concentrations of presence within the larger emptiness, but as his awareness settled the differences between them became increasingly distinct. Mentis was amongst the easiest to locate. There was discipline in the Rattataki's mind even when he was not consciously guarding it, thoughts arranged around immediate purpose with relatively little of the restless wandering Serus associated with less controlled beings. Beneath that order sat irritation, interest and something even approaching an odd, fierce amusement, probably produced by whatever he and Bomoor had uncovered regarding the bounty. Serus did not reach far enough to extract words. He had no need. Emotion, intent and the shape of attention were sufficient.

Bomoor was something else entirely. Serus had known the Ithorian's presence in the Force for so long that finding it scarcely felt like searching. Their Force bond, still so recent comparatively, shortened distances that ought to have existed between two minds, like a quantum entanglement, and even without deliberately touching it Serus could feel the broad rhythm of Bomoor's concentration moving elsewhere aboard the ship. Yet, there was a quality to him now that had not existed years before, something deeper and more expansive which had become particularly apparent since Sleheyron and both excursions to Öetrago. Bomoor had always possessed greater patience with the Force than Serus, allowing it to widen rather than immediately forcing it towards an objective, and that tendency had matured into something difficult to measure. Mentis felt like a weapon held still, but Bomoor felt increasingly like depth itself, dark water extending beyond the point at which sight became useful. Serus touched only the edge of his presence and withdrew, unwilling to turn an exercise in perception into intrusion, even if such boundaries had become increasingly blurred but also comfortably accepted between them now.

Reave offered considerably less difficulty. The Jawa's thoughts moved rapidly between irritation and fascination as he crawled through the Raptor's modified systems, producing flashes of conduits, plating, unfamiliar fittings and mounting points accompanied by a steadily developing conviction that at least one technician aboard Dunari's Delight had been competent enough to deserve praise and another should never again be permitted within ten metres of a hyperdrive. Serus felt the judgement rather more clearly than the technical reasoning behind it and found, somewhere beneath the meditation, the beginning of amusement.

Rex was stranger still. The pilot remained perfectly capable of guiding the ship whilst allowing considerable portions of his mind to wander elsewhere, and Serus discovered fragments of old entertainments moving through him with enough emotional colour to be briefly confusing. A remembered argument between lovers became an exchange of blaster fire, which dissolved into a heroic speech Serus suspected had once accompanied some ancient holodrama, before Rex's attention snapped back towards the instruments long enough to make a minor correction and then drifted into another story entirely. Serus endured the procession for several moments before moving away from him. There were limits to enlightenment.

Beyond those stronger presences existed smaller things: the biological traces of food stores, microorganisms clinging unseen to surfaces, minute lives inhabiting machinery that itself remained mute to the Force. Then his awareness pressed beyond the Raptor's hull, and there the scale of the exercise changed. Empty space was not empty in any meaningful sense, though the gulf between living presences became vast enough that ordinary instincts ceased to be useful. The stars themselves did not speak to him as living beings did, yet their existence was folded into the same immeasurable reality through which life and matter moved. Their light crossed distances too great for a human mind to hold comfortably, and for several moments Serus experienced the peculiar impression that his body was no longer the centre from which perception proceeded.

The Raptor diminished. Öetrago diminished with it. The Republic, the Moff Empire, the Alliance, GalactaWerks and all the little arrangements by which sentient beings divided the galaxy into territories and causes became temporary marks scratched across something infinitely older. Serus understood, in such moments, why civilisations had repeatedly mistaken the Force for divinity. To touch even the faintest impression of its scale was to confront how little of existence any individual consciousness could ever occupy, and yet there remained within that immensity the possibility that will might still alter what came next.

That possibility drew him back towards himself... and darkness waited there.

It no longer resembled the rage he had once summoned so readily. Sleheyron and the trauma after had burned much of that simplicity out of him. Anger remained, certainly, as did hatred, pride and attachment, but they had acquired weight where once they had possessed heat. His failure had become physical. Every damaged breath announced it, every interface buried into flesh repeated it, and every moment in which a mechanical digit responded where living fingers once had reminded him that pride had not made him invulnerable. He had pursued Ventul because attachment demanded it, confronted Axion's design because certainty insisted upon it, and entered Sleheyron convinced that strength of will could simply overcome whatever waited there.

He had been wrong. There was no value in disguising that truth beneath the language of survival. He had survived Sleheyron, but survival and victory were not synonymous. Axion had brought him low, and whatever emerged from the experience would either adapt or eventually perish beneath the next mistake.

The physical consequences were already clear enough. Serus could still strike with immense force, perhaps more brutally than before in certain movements, but the effortless speed and fluidity upon which he had relied for years could no longer be treated as permanent facts. Scar tissue restricted, and machinery compensated rather than restored. His balance had changed, his breathing imposed limits and the body that had once obeyed instinct now sometimes required conscious accommodation. He would recover much, but he doubted he would recover everything, and increasingly he wondered whether attempting to become precisely what he had been before Sleheyron represented nothing more than another expression of pride.

Bomoor had never depended upon the body in quite the same fashion - nor had Sotah.

Serus had understood their approach intellectually even when he had not shared it. The Force was not simply power channelled through muscle until one became quicker, stronger and more violent than the being standing opposite. He had always known there were deeper disciplines, broader perceptions and stranger possibilities beyond the forms through which Jedi trained young warriors to survive. Yet knowledge possessed at the level of theory was not the same thing as allowing oneself to change around it. If his body had become narrower in what it could offer him, then his command of the Force would have to become wider.

He allowed himself to descend further and turned his awareness towards the reason he had begun these exercises so frequently.

Amare... Zaracoda.

The names themselves altered something within him. For almost two years, he had known her presence closely enough that recognition required almost no effort, her emotional texture familiar even when distance or confusion made everything else uncertain. There had been a raw anger in her that did not resemble his, a particular intensity beneath moments of humour and even affection, defiance folded around old wounds and an instinct towards motion that made stillness in her feel unnatural. Even after separation, memory supplied an impression so vivid that Serus had occasionally caught himself reacting to it as though she were merely in another room.

Now, he found nothing certain. He reached beyond the familiar lives aboard the Raptor and allowed memory to become a guide rather than an answer. Amare laughing. Amare furious. Amare exhausted and refusing to admit it. Amare with a blade in hand. Amare before Axion had taken her.

Then... Verse.

The imposed name entered his thoughts like contamination, almost threatening to force his eye open. Instead, he suppressed the instinct and the surprise, and h pressed further into the dark.

For a long time there was only absence, so complete that he could not tell whether distance defeated him or whether his own desire had made the search meaningless. Then the Force shifted with such subtlety that he almost mistook it for imagination.

Pain came first, but it was not the pain of his chest or throat, nor anything he could localise within his own body. It passed through the meditation as an impression belonging elsewhere, accompanied almost immediately by confusion so dense that Serus' breathing altered without conscious instruction. He held himself within the sensation and something else appeared behind it: colour, impossible and indistinct, flames moving through queer shades that did not behave like ordinary fire. They cast light without illumination, folding across dark stone whose surface seemed alternately rough and wet depending upon where his attention settled. He felt enclosure, depth and the oppressive suggestion of something ancient enough that the distinction between architecture and landscape briefly ceased to matter.

Serus pursued it and the flames shifted. Dark stone became shadow and then returned, whilst somewhere beyond both impressions there existed the faintest suggestion of another consciousness struggling against something he could not identify. He reached towards it with greater force than before and immediately felt the danger of imposing his own expectations upon whatever the vision represented. Desire could create patterns from noise, and attachment had already deceived him once.

Still, he could not stop. For one brief instant, impossibly clear amongst everything else, Serus believed that Amare had turned towards him. Not physically, as he saw no face and heard no voice. There was only the impression of recognition, a consciousness touching the edge of another consciousness across distance he could not comprehend, and with it a sudden flare of pain, bewilderment and something almost like resistance.

Then, the connection tore away. Serus remained motionless upon the floor as the vision collapsed and the boundaries of his body returned with unpleasant speed. The ache beneath his sternum became immediate again. Air scraped across ruined tissue in his throat. He became aware of the spinal machinery supporting his posture, the deadened sensation around old burns and the faint metallic taste produced by a trace of blood somewhere beneath the tongue. His remaining organic eye opened slowly, its lava-gold iris catching the clinical light whilst the scarred and exposed interface of the other side remained sightless without the eyepiece resting nearby.

He did not know whether he had found her, and that uncertainty angered him more than failure would have. It might have been Amare, but it might have been memory reorganised by longing, the mind supplying precisely the answer he had entered meditation hoping to receive. The dark side rewarded certainty but did not guarantee truth, and Darth Serus had become less willing to confuse the two.

He closed his eye again, settling the irritation before it could narrow his awareness. If the impression had been real, he would find it again. If it had been false, repetition would eventually expose the lie. Either answer required patience, and patience was another discipline he had spent too much of his life mistaking for hesitation.

He had almost begun to descend again when the medical bay door opened. The interruption was peculiar because nothing within the Force had warned him of an approaching presence. No thought had moved down the corridor towards him, no emotion disturbed the atmosphere and no living consciousness crossed the threshold. There had been only the minute vibration of mechanical movement transmitted through the Raptor's structure and, after it, the quiet operation of the door itself.

The slight pressure seal the Med bay door created was broken with a gentle hiss and Serus felt a slight tug of wind across his exposed chest as the air in the room was drawn into the corridor before the door closed again with a muted click. While no lifeform had entered, the Sith Lord heard the sound of clacking footsteps and the gentle exposed whine of motor servos was the final confirmation that he was in the presence of the reconstructed, though not yet fully-plated fabricant droid, designated FA-1S.

“ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: Lord Serus…” its vibrating baritone vanished almost as quickly as it began. Serus shifted his head slightly so he could see the ancient droid revived with modern machinery. The unit’s eerie skull-shaped head was tiled upwards slightly and its eyes flickered as it processed something.

“ANALYSIS: My entry has produced a minor disruption in atmospheric balance. CLARIFICATION: The deviation was not intentional.”

The final statement carried no emotional inflection—only a functional addendum, offered because Serus was an organic whose physiology might be affected by such changes. The droid centred itself again and stepped forward with careful, deliberate movements. In its unplated state, the exposed components lent it a skeletal fragility, reminding Serus of the shambling undead-like fabricants from his time in the Mind Prison that must have had similar components to Faze underneath their stolen organic exteriors.

“NOTIFICATION: This unit has relevant details to relay to you about the organisation designated the ‘Cult of Axion’,” it continued, now beside the Sith Lord and observing him with the emotionless gaze it would have given any other sentient, “SUPPLEMENT: After reviewing your prior data within the ship’s database, I have begun constructing additional connections using the strategy room’s accessible information streams.”

The droid’s head rotated on it’s axis by a small degree, then back again, photoreceptors flickering as it again processed something within its crystalline memory core.

“OBSERVATION: Since my activation, I have sought to accumulate and process as much galactic historical data as I can access. The most logical way to do so was to build connections based on existing data and it was not long before I began to find a number of patterns, keywords and ciphers that linked the Cult of Axion to a number of different active organisations. Many of these were already known to you or simple shell organisations, but there was one of note that has become increasingly active in recent cycles.”

For several seconds, Serus said nothing. The absence remained the most immediately interesting thing about the machine. Even with his awareness contracted again to the confines of his own body and the medical bay surrounding it, Faze occupied space without disturbing the Force in any manner Serus could detect. The servos whined and mechanical feet contacted the deck. Components shifted beneath the incomplete plating with every small movement of the chassis, whilst photoreceptors examined him and whatever extraordinary architecture lay behind them processed information at a speed Serus could only infer from the intermittent flickering of light.

Yet, there was nothing behind it that he could feel.

That fact ought not to have interested him. Machines did not possess presence in the Force merely because their designers had succeeded in making them sufficiently articulate, and Serus had never shared the curious organic tendency to confuse imitation with equivalence. A protocol unit could plead for its continued existence if programmed appropriately. An astromech might develop habits, preferences and apparent irritations after sufficient neglect of routine memory maintenance - which he supported and exercised when such machines came under his care. Neither fact required the conclusion that metal had somehow developed a soul.

Faze was proving less convenient, though. His remaining eye moved over the exposed mechanisms of the unfinished chassis, and for an instant the impression from Korriban became strong enough that the fingers of his hand tightened almost imperceptibly against his knee. The resemblance was not exact - it could not have been. The things that had staggered and marched through the Mind Prison had been obscenities of another kind, dead and dying Sith Purebloods converted into obedient mechanisms beneath stolen flesh, their individuality reduced to whatever fragments remained useful to the intelligence commanding them. Faze possessed no such organic disguise. If anything, its exposed condition made the distinction clearer, a purpose-built automaton whose ancient architecture merely shared ancestry with the machinery Serus had once watched turn sentient beings into an army.

Still, the skull-like head and naked mechanisms were enough to summon the memory, but he let it pass. His attention settled instead upon the photoreceptor assembly resting beside the respirator. That mechanism belonged to a different memory, although one he possessed only through what others had subsequently told him. During the hours in which his own consciousness had moved somewhere between delirium and failure, this machine had examined what remained of his eye, rejected the luxury of waiting for a better solution and proposed the device now connected directly into the surviving pathways beneath his scarred face. It had worked upon his ruined throat as well, reconstructing tissue whilst his lungs and organs failed around it, participating in decisions whose cumulative consequence now sat cross-legged before it.

Serus did not consider gratitude an obligation to sentiment. Debt, however, remained debt.

"The... atmospheric de-... deviation is... tolerable," he answered eventually, his voice reduced without the respirator to the rough, low whisper his damaged airway could sustain.

Speaking remained unpleasant enough that each word was chosen with greater economy than once would have been necessary. His eye lingered upon Faze for another moment before shifting deliberately towards the photoreceptor nearby.

"...Aware... not the first... time... your work has affected... me."

There was no smile, although something faintly dry entered the observation.

"I... h-h-have been... informed... of your... work." His organic hand rose briefly towards the exposed interface surrounding the blind side of his face, stopping short of touching it. "Your... judge... j-judgement... my survival." He allowed the hand to fall again as he failed to fully articulate what he wanted to say to the droid.

"I... do not... not dis... -regard service... merely because... a-a-a-a mach...ine."

The qualification was deliberate, neither insult nor concession. Serus regarded Faze steadily afterwards, curious whether an intelligence such as this experienced offence at all or merely recorded the statement as another piece of information concerning the organic before it. Perhaps the distinction itself was becoming less meaningful than he preferred. He had encountered constructed personalities that believed themselves real, biological minds imprisoned without bodies and living beings converted into mechanisms until scarcely anything recognisable remained. He did not think to be recollecting Korriban like that now.

Faze presented the inverse problem, however. No life had been stripped from it, so far as Serus understood. Metal, circuitry and crystalline architecture had simply accumulated enough complexity to stand beside him and offer an unsolicited assessment of galactic clandestine activity, and he was not yet prepared to decide what that meant.

"You have... been busy."

Serus unfolded one leg and shifted his weight, the movement producing a line of pressure along the reinforced spine which he ignored. His eye narrowed slightly as he considered what Faze had actually said rather than what its presence represented. The Cult had survived too many encounters through compartmentalisation, concealed relationships and the exploitation of institutions whose public purpose bore little resemblance to the interests moving beneath them. Serus had spent years learning to recognise those arrangements through people: fear, ambition, loyalty, financial dependence, ideology and the thousand weaknesses by which one sentient being could be made useful to another.

The attempt to continue the thought ended before Serus gave it voice. A tightening seized somewhere below the scarred line of his throat, followed by the familiar burning contraction through the upper chest as damaged tissue protested against the effort already demanded of it. His breath caught halfway in and emerged as little more than a dry, involuntary rasp. Serus closed his eye and remained still for several seconds, refusing the instinct to cough until the spasm had passed, although the effort left a sharper ache beneath the sternum and the metallic taste at the back of his mouth strengthened unpleasantly.

Enough.

His hand reached for the respirator. The mask settled over the lower half of his face with practised precision, its seals finding the scarred contours of his cheeks and jaw before the internal systems recognised him. There came a brief mechanical adjustment, then the familiar measured intake as filtered air was driven into ruined passages which could no longer be trusted to manage the task unaided. Serus drew one slow breath through it, then another. The difference was immediate. Pressure eased from his throat, oxygen entered without requiring the same deliberate labour and, beneath the quiet rhythm of the apparatus, his breathing gradually became something he no longer needed to consciously supervise.

Only then did he reach for the photoreceptor. The assembly was colder than the surrounding air when his fingers closed around it. He raised it towards the ruined side of his face and aligned the projecting contacts with the interfaces buried amongst the scar tissue surrounding the destroyed eye. A faint click followed as the unit seated itself into place, then another as the cortical connection established. Darkness fractured into information. Shapes returned first, distorted for the briefest instant as organic sight and artificial perception reconciled their differing perspectives, before the medical bay resolved once again with the peculiar clarity the device provided.

Faze stood within it and Serus looked at the ancient automaton through the very mechanism it had once selected to replace what Axion had destroyed. The irony was not lost upon him.

The respirator released a quiet pressurised breath.

"Elucidate."

The single word emerged far more cleanly now, still altered by the damage beneath the mask but possessing enough strength to sound like an instruction rather than an effort.

The droid seemed to adjust its footing as it had watched Serus reconstruct the mechanical portion of his being that Faze itself had had a hand in constructing, as he had rightly observed. The artificial being seemed to take an almost organic pause, as though mirroring Serus own reflection.

That same subtle flicker crossed the photoreceptors again as though filing a thought for later processing before obliging the command.

"EXPLANATION: I flagged numerous points of datum with high relevance to cultist activity from your previous encounters and found an increased incidence within the corporate sector, most notably streams pertaining to a organisation known as the Corellian Engineering Corporation. Specifically a large, industrial complex on Corellia itself with involvement in both shipbuilding and freight."

Another subtle flick of the head followed, not born of any organic pride or curiosity but almost life-like. It continued the stream of information:

"Freight orders tagged with cult code phrases, invisible without any prior knowledge; scrambled corporate communications, impossible to read but containing repeated segments similar to other known cult ciphers Mentis provided; financial transactions to shell corporations connected to Axion and an influx of staffing contracts with mismatched information and forged identification documents approved by senior executives."

Faze paused again, its gaze set on Serus, perhaps allowing a moment for the Human to consider the list before adding:

"ANALYSIS: While independently, these fragments could be overlooked as mundane, together they construct a clear picture of cult involvement and, more pertinent to your current goals, the spike in activity would indicate that the cult is consolidating personnel, assets and finances within this complex."

Suddenly, Faze started to move again, striding past Serus and towards one of the panels on the far side. Serus watched the machine as it passed, still sensing nothing of its intention in the Force, while getting an innate feel for an acute intelligence in its mannerisms nonetheless.

The automaton stopped before the panel and adjusted something just out of Serus' view and there was a slight click as something in the room readjusted, before suddenly the skull-like head swing around again towards Serus.

"RECOMMENDATION: This consolidation presents a brief window of opportunity to take action. If they follow predictable patterns of behaviour, once they take stock on Corellia, they will seek to redistribute once again across the galaxy. Right now they are disrupted, they are less co-ordinated. Attacking now will not destroy them, but might irreparably damage their ability to recover."

For several moments after Faze finished, Serus maintained a thoughtful silence.

The respirator breathed for him with its steady mechanical cadence whilst his organic eye and the newly restored photoreceptor remained fixed upon the droid. He reviewed the information in the same order Faze had presented it, resisting the temptation to begin with the conclusion merely because the conclusion was useful. Cult terminology hidden within freight authorisations could be coincidence or contamination from a single compromised employee. Cipher structures repeating inside scrambled communications were more compelling, but still circumstantial without the contents themselves. Financial movement through known shell organisations strengthened the association considerably. Forged identities approved through senior corporate channels strengthened it further.

Taken together, the picture was difficult to dismiss, and what interested Serus most now, though, was not simply that the Cult appeared to have established itself within the Corellian Engineering Corporation. Axion's followers had embedded themselves within respectable institutions before, hiding theology and conspiracy beneath the ordinary machinery of commerce, administration and influence. The significant change was concentration. If Faze was correct, then personnel, money and matériel which had once been distributed through a resilient network were now being drawn towards a comparatively limited geographical point.

That was weakness - but it was also an invitation to stupidity. A facility sufficiently large to manufacture starships and process industrial freight could swallow hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people without appearing militarised at all. Loading infrastructure, production halls, warehouses, transit systems, administrative towers and private security could be turned into defensive depth without requiring a single obvious fortress wall. If the Cult had deliberately chosen the site as a place to gather after successive losses, it would be foolish to imagine that they had not considered the possibility of pursuit.

Serus's photoreceptor narrowed its focus fractionally upon Faze.

"Your conclusion is reasonable," he finally said.

The comment settled between them whilst Serus continued studying the machine. There was something faintly strange in the ease with which Faze had addressed him as Lord Serus. No hesitation had accompanied it, no visible process of reconciling Thane with Serus, nor any of the quiet adjustment he had observed amongst others since Sleheyron. Bomoor was the principal exception, but Bomoor's acceptance belonged to an entirely different category. He had known what Serus was becoming before Serus himself had entirely understood it.

Faze appeared simply to have updated the information. There was something almost appealing in that. The administration on Bastion had behaved in much the same fashion. The communications from Grand Moff Tarses' government had been increasingly sparse over the previous days, although never discourteous. A significant incident, apparently important enough to occupy much of the Council of Moffs, had diverted the attention of the administration, and Serus had received little more than polite assurances that he would be briefed once circumstances permitted.

What documentation had arrived was impeccable. His formal citizenship within the Bastion Moff Empire had been processed beneath the updated identity without meaningful objection, the final instrument bearing the Grand Moff's own authorisation as the law required when citizenship was granted to a foreign national. The distinction was minor, almost absurd against the scale of the conflicts gathering around them, but Serus understood the importance of such things. States existed because somebody, somewhere, had decided which signatures transformed an assertion into a legal fact.

Darth Serus could proclaim himself before armies, but banks, property registries, citizenship records and contractual instruments still required amendments. Tedious, but necessary.

He had already begun preparing for the more mundane consequences. Accounts would require continuity of identity established. Holdings would require alteration and documents accumulated during decades lived as Thane could not simply be abandoned because their owner had chosen another name. Eventually, the same questions would reach Caanus, where matters of family, property and authority carried greater weight still.

His thoughts touched briefly upon his father. Stewardship of Caanus had continued whilst Serus disappeared into wars, conspiracies and transformations increasingly distant from the world which had produced him. A change of name might be philosophically profound to a Sith and administratively irritating to everyone else, but Caanus would eventually require both meanings reconciled. His father, he suspected, still had little care or awareness for the galaxy moving around him, regency functionally falling to Senator Vuul - for now.

The thought remained only a moment before Corellia reclaimed his attention.

There were other resources available if Faze encountered limits. Hesk Scivo understood money better than most beings Serus had met and possessed precisely the sort of underworld connections capable of turning obscure financial movements into names, favours and relationships. A Muun accustomed to hiding wealth could usually recognise when somebody else was doing the same.

Bastion might offer something more substantial, but for their current preoccupation. Intelligence access, surveillance, perhaps even technical information unavailable through ordinary channels. Yet Serus was reluctant to request assistance before he understood whatever crisis had drawn the Council of Moffs' attention so completely. Dependency created obligations, and there was little sense spending political capital merely because another method required patience.

First, he would discover what the machine could do, and Serus regarded Faze again. The droid had taken fragments which organics might have overlooked for months and assembled them into something approaching an operational intelligence picture.

Perhaps Bomoor's decision to reconstruct it had been considerably more consequential than either of them had realised.

"Identify the figureheads," Serus then instructed. "Obtain whatever plans you can and construct an assessment of the site's security, personnel and logistical rhythm. Flag anything you cannot resolve internally. I believe I have other sources available for those gaps."

His gaze remained on the droid for another moment. Then, without particular emphasis, he used the designation as though it were simply the most efficient word available.

"Do that, Faze," he said. The respirator exhaled softly beneath the silence which followed. "And do not alert them while learning how. I will speak with Captain Vickers about setting a course."

The droid stepped calmly towards him in a precise stride, hindered only by a brief whine of his servos as he did so.

"CONFIRMATION: This command is congruous with my own tactical assessments. A swift, calculated strike will yield the greatest impact and this unit will ensure that no access imprints are generated that will compromise this endeavour."

This time, Faze give a firm, commanding nod of its cranium. A clear conscious gesture, rather than a motorised quirk that spoke of an understanding between the organic and synthetic beings in the room.

Then, the droid shifted it's axis and began making its way towards the door. But, before pressing the release, Faze's head turned just a fraction about.

"QUERY: The so called NX-series unit. It also processes a lot of galactic data but shares little. Do you trust it?"

The question was spoken without emotion, yet held a weight to it. It seemed to be seeking more than the data driven conclusion that the fabricant droid had likely already calculated. It sought an opinion.

Serus' delay this time had little to do with suspicion. His photoreceptor remained fixed upon Faze as the question settled, and somewhere beneath the mask his expression shifted by a degree too small for the droid to interpret with certainty.

"NX-02?"

There was something almost familiar in the repetition. Not quite amusement, but less of the measured distance with which Serus had addressed the ancient automaton until now.


"Yes." The answer came sufficiently easily that it almost seemed to surprise him. "Although 'trust' is probably the wrong measure." Serus glanced towards the medical bay door, as though the intelligence droid in question might somehow have been waiting beyond it. "NX-02 was placed aboard this ship because it serves as a conduit between us and people who have interests of their own. Damask Hul, TRIO and others within the Republic who find it useful to know what we are doing without being seen to direct us. We benefit from that arrangement considerably more than we would benefit from pretending otherwise. Without NX-02, every meaningful contact with Hul becomes something we have to arrange deliberately - and what would we gain?"

The question was rhetorical, but Serus gave the machine a moment before answering it himself.

"Very little." He leaned fractionally forwards. "Does NX-02 report upon us? Almost certainly. I would be astonished if it did not. That does not offend me." Serus's gaze narrowed, not with hostility but thought. "Hul is not our patron out of affection; we are useful to him. We possess skills his official institutions cannot always employ openly, we travel without requiring the Republic to acknowledge our movements, and the Jedi presently consider us sufficiently troublesome that any association with us carries useful deniability. From Hul's perspective, we are a collection of highly capable irregulars who repeatedly involve ourselves in matters that also concern him. Occasionally, we solve problems. Occasionally we discover problems before his own people do. Occasionally... we create entirely new ones."

That final observation carried the faintest trace of something recognisably Thane, for what little Faze would recognise of him, but the familiarity vanished almost as soon as it appeared, though not entirely.

"In return, Hul gives us access. Information. Political warning. Contacts. Occasionally legitimacy where none ought to exist," the Sith continued. "That is not friendship. It is not loyalty, either. It is an arrangement, and NX-02 is part of the arrangement."

For several seconds, only the respirator and Faze's exposed servos disturbed the medical bay.

"NX-02 does not share everything it processes because sharing everything it processes is not its purpose. Nor, I suspect, do you communicate every calculation passing through that crystal matrix merely because one of us asks what you are thinking?"

The comparison interested him enough that he allowed it to remain between them. Serus had spent much of the conversation contemplating precisely how far the resemblance between computation and thought could reasonably be stretched. Faze had now supplied an uncomfortable example without appearing to realise it.

"Besides..." The word came strangely naturally. "NX-02 has been aboard this ship longer than you have. Perhaps it has earned the right to be suspicious in return."

Faze turned more fully toward Serus, abandoning its previous half‑orientation toward the doorway. Its head quivered with a brief adjustment of motorised ligaments before crystallising into a single, decisive nod.

"SYNTHESIS: Your answer demonstrates high situational awareness. I agree; the NX unit is almost certainly exfiltrating data, but you see this as a practical exchange of intelligence. I had not considered this but find it an acceptable compromise."

The photoreceptors dimmed like a Humanoid squint, "DECLARATION: My function in this era has yet to be determined, but I project you will find my capability far more useful than these binary mechanics. If NX-02 distrusts me, it is only because it cannot process the full extent of my operational architecture. That is not its failing, merely a limitation of imagination."

That final word lingered, seeming wrong to have a droid talk about such things as imagination. Droids were capable of creative design and even artistic expression, but always within defined, pre-existing patterns that mimicked their creators or the data they had been fed on. Yet Faze’s crystalline brain, ancient and ever‑expanding, might genuinely be capable of such abstraction. Whether this was true remained unproven.

With that, the fabricant unit turned on its axis and slipped towards the door, opening and exiting quickly in a smooth motion. The air pressure dipped fractionally, but whatever correction Faze had implemented reduced the impact, and the room stabilised almost immediately. While unnecessary with his respirator now in place, it was a demonstration of the droid's quick, intuitive reaction to its earlier error.

Serus continued looking at the doorway for several seconds after it had closed.

Imagination.

The word lingered. It would have been easy to dismiss Faze's use of it as inherited vocabulary, an approximation selected by sufficiently sophisticated programming to describe processes that merely resembled abstraction. Yet, the machine had sought information independently, formed judgements, reconsidered one of them when presented with an argument it had not anticipated and now spoke of imagination as though it belonged naturally within its understanding of itself.

Serus wondered, briefly, what threshold separated complexity from thought, but that question could wait - Corellia could not.

The Cult had been hurt and its surviving structures were drawing inward, concentrating personnel, money and matériel that had once been dispersed for protection, or perhaps even to keep the individual enclaves sufficiently separated and individually weaker than their master. This would be their first strike since Sleheyron; but there was no triumph in the thought. Sleheyron had taught him what certainty without preparation could cost. Corellia would require schematics, identities, security patterns, contingencies and every useful source they could employ before any blade was drawn.

Then, his thoughts returned to Amare. It would be easy to decide she must be there, to force the pain, strange flames and dark stone of his meditation into the pattern Faze had uncovered. He refused himself the indulgence. Faze had just demonstrated the difference between assembling evidence and beginning with the conclusion one wished to find.

If Amare was on Corellia, he would find her. If she was not, destroying whatever Axion had gathered there remained worthwhile.

Somewhere beyond the medical bay, the Red Raptor continued upon a course which, only minutes before, had led nowhere in particular. That had changed, and whilst the Force had given him fragments and uncertainty, the machine had given him Corellia.

For the moment, that was enough.

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