Page 23 of Stars in Umbra (The Sable Riders #8)

An Involuntary Incursion

MOLAN

M o lay still, limbs tangled with Rina’s, her skin warm against his as the last waves of pleasure faded into a quieter, deeper afterglow.

Her hand trailed over his chest as he pressed a kiss to her hairline.

Somewhere in the hush between breaths, he murmured, ‘I never asked, how was your day, mi kaya ?’

She sighed, the sound half-wistful, part-weary. ‘That was hours ago. Still, it sucked. I spent it chasing shadows. There was an assassination in Alloria. Vesk Tyran is dead.’

He shifted, turning toward her. ‘The rebel leader?’

She nodded with a sigh. ‘ Naam . A sniper shot him in his forest hideout. Kainan has given me a strict deadline to find out who took the job and who authorized the hit. Maybe you can help.’

She reached across the bed and knifed to a sitting position.

Grabbing her commtab from the nightstand, she swiped its screen.

‘I wanted Mirage’s assistance in identifying them, but she’s up to her circuits managing her shit, so I used SableNet. My team found something.’

She pulled up a grainy satellite feed, static-laced, with a jittery vision as it captured a figure sprinting through the Allorian canopy.

It was distant, blurred, and indistinct, a fuzzy silhouette.

Still, the form moved with disturbing precision.

‘Here,’ she pointed. ‘Study the gait. The way they pivot before the ridge. It’s almost like -.’

Mo leaned in, peered, and blinked. The air in the room seemed to snap taut.

Without warning, a bolt cleaved through his skull, like ice lancing through bone.

His limbs stiffened for a breathless instant, eyes going unfocused as his cognition skidded and shifted out of his control.

A hand not his own gripped the wheel of his mind.

His vision tunneled, and the sound of Rina’s voice muffled as if underwater.

He jolted as the unseen grip released.

His breath returned, and he snapped his eyes open to find Rina staring at him.

‘Hey, handsome, I lost you there for a second.’

He smiled, rubbing his face, falling back onto the pillows. ‘Sorry. Just tired. My brain checked out.’

She narrowed her eyes, studying him. ‘You okay?’

‘Never better,’ he rasped, kissing her shoulder. But please, baby, no shop talk. I can help you with your identification tomorrow, sawa ?’

She took an inhale and then nodded.

‘Now come here.’

She set her commtab aside, snuggling back into his arms as he tucked her closer.

They kissed again, with languid passion, then curled around each other under the linen throws.

Mo buried his nose in her curls, her scent grounding him. Soon, her breathing slowed.

Sleep came. For her, it was a deep, quiet slumber.

For him, however, it did not last.

At 02:47 AM, Mo’s eyes opened.

Both orbs were blank, glassy.

He rose without a sound.

His bare feet padded across the polished floor, his body moving with eerie precision, unnatural stillness in his limbs, too mechanical for sleepwalking, too smooth for awareness.

He crossed to the side table.

Rina’s comm tab was still open.

He lifted it, then shifted it to the living area, out of her line of sight.

He sat at the dining table, fingers hovering, sliding the holo screen and keypad before descending.

They moved fast with rapid strokes across the keyboard.

The neural override hijacked his motor controls, guiding his hands with ghost-like fluency.

The commtab flared to life under his touch as he accessed the secure SableNet channels. Lines of code unfurled.

His pupils dilated as he pulled the assassination footage from its archive and loaded it into an encrypted visual editor.

Frame by frame, he modified the feed.

He restructured the silhouette, altering its stride, reshaping its posture. He stretched the stride by 0.04 seconds.

He reduced the vertical hip displacement. He masked its left-handedness with mirrored overlays. The figure now leaned to its right and sported a limp.

The gait was now unrecognizable.

He compressed the modified footage and archived it, overwriting the original.

With a quick flick of his fingers, he went into the Sable servers and purged critical metadata. Satellite logs from Allorian airspace, those showing any trace of his ship got wiped.

Trail maps, thermal tags, and heat exhaust readings, all gone.

Every line of evidence that could tie him to the assassination vanished beneath his moving hands.

A soft ping confirmed the updates.

He blinked once, twice, then closed the device.

In mechanical silence, he rose and returned to bed.

Slipping under the covers, he curled around Rina.

By the time dawn brushed over the curtain slats, he was asleep.

The memory of what he’d done was scrubbed from his mind like chalk from slate.

At the same time, in a private command suite beneath Sable HQ, Mirage swayed in through her hidden entrance with a post-salsa glow still shimmering across her skin.

Her dress, a glittering amethyst number that hugged her curves and caught the light like a sequinned promise.

Her silver platform heels clicked against the gleaming floor as the door hissed shut behind her, sealing her from the outside world.

She sighed with contentment, letting herself smile.

She was still on a high despite the late hour.

The evening had been so needed.

For once, she’d said yes to a dance and dinner offer from General Thal Oceran, the silver-skinned Galician cyborg with a grin like starlight and shoulders broader than a freighter hull.

He was equal parts charm and polished titanium, with a voice tuned for persuasion and a rare understanding of how to follow her lead on the dance floor.

They’d laughed, spun, and dipped through three hours of live-band salsa in the metropolis’ diplomatic quarter.

And while she’d deftly declined his subtle invitation for a nightcap, she appreciated his suave.

Mirage hummed to herself as she slipped her earrings off and padded across the room.

Her internal systems began decompressing from the strain of the past week: air traffic, planetary entry logs, cargo dock scans, diplomat routing, vertical security chains.

Eden II’s operational management was a blessedly chaotic mess with the Pegasi United Military Conference, and even her non-corporeal threads were starting to fray at the edges.

She was halfway through storing her metanoid-infused gown when the signal struck.

A ripple.

A thread, a freakin’ twist of red in her data field.

Her hands stilled mid-zip. Her head tilted.

An anomaly.

Her HUD flared to life across her inner vision. Someone, or something, was worming its way through the shared security architecture she oversaw between Sable HQ and the Pegasi United Galactic Army.

She blinked, and the glitter of her dress faded, overwritten by spectral gold threads as she summoned her complete interface.

Firewalls screamed. She flung up blocks. Redirected nodes. Routed power from SableNet’s deep core.

A freakin’ hack?

It was slick, aggressive, masked under innocuous surveillance requests.

As fast as it began, it vanished.

She froze, parsing the withdrawal.

It was an unauthorized attempt, but not contained, nor thwarted by her, as she hadn’t had the chance even to lift a nanite.

This was a voluntary retreat.

‘ Fokk me,’ she whispered, one high-heeled foot planted, one still hovering mid-step.

‘That wasn’t just any breach, it was a distraction,’ she murmured to herself. ‘A flash-and-scramble to keep me distracted while another action beneath it went into play, a stealthed and fast infiltration.’

‘What or who the hell were you covering for?’

Her golden eyes flicked across the dozens of systems she monitored.

She found no evidence of red flags, zero collapsed threads, only subtle anomalies, microscopic wraiths, and a whisper of shifting cipher.

She narrowed her eyes.

This wasn’t the time for paranoia. Not yet, but it was time to ask questions. She’d have to loop in Kainan, Zane, maybe even Rina at dawn.

‘ Fokk me,’ she muttered, spinning on her heel.

The sequinned dress dissolved around her like moonlight, strands of code fracturing her physical form.

She shimmered, her features disassembling into a constellation of living data, dispersing into the glowing matrix of her chamber.

The room pulsed as her reset protocols kicked in.

At her core, however, a seed of suspicion surged, and Mirage took note, never prone to forget an incursion, not even the momentary, fleeting attempts.