Page 9 of Stars in Umbra (The Sable Riders #8)

One Breath, One Shot.

MOLAN

M ist clung to Mo’s suit as he left the wedding, its laughter and music dimming with every step.

He strode across a darkened ridge where no revelers wandered and sensed the silent command buried in his neural node activate.

It shackled his mind in an instant.

All emotion dulled as his purpose was honed with a menacing edge.

The warmth of conversation, the touch of Rina’s hand, the memory of a smile, all cut away.

In their place: mission parameters, timelines, a target profile, a kill window .

He reached his gun ship, a matte-black hyperdrive-enabled blade of a vessel hidden among the ridge boulders.

With a single directive, its canopy slid open, and he dropped into the cockpit.

The autopilot locked onto coordinates transmitted from his node.

He strapped in, face unreadable, as the craft peeled away from Dunia’s lush surface and sliced through the star-cloaked void toward Alloria.

En route, a file of detailed instructions and mission parameters was unpacked into his cerebral nucleus.

His mind immediately went into auto-nav, the sophisticated protocols of his training taking over as he absorbed the data.

He moved to the rear of the corvette, the polished metal of the deck gleaming beneath his boots.

A touch to a concealed panel caused it to fold away, revealing a weapons hold so advanced its contents were unseen by most military defense specialists in Pegasi.

This was not a standard arsenal; it was a curated collection of lethal art.

He selected a nanite-forged handgun, a set of throwing knives, and two blades that hummed with a subdued, kinetic energy.

These were packed into a black rucksack before he retrieved a sleek sniper rifle.

He checked, oiled, and loaded it, his movements fluid and precise.

Made of a sophisticated nanotechnology material, it collapsed into a small, unassuming pack that he slid into his knapsack.

To sustain him for a week in the wild, he added pouches of nutrient paste and distilled water.

He then donned a nano-enhanced stealth suit.

The armor, obsidian as a starless night, molded to his form, becoming a second skin. It was complemented by a glide-on helmet with a Heads-Up Display (HUD) and full-spectrum telemetry, a marvel of clandestine technology.

While not as superior as the Sable Rider’s legendary defensive gear, it was the next best thing his sponsors’ unlimited budgets were able to procure.

The auto-navigation AI announced its destination arrival, its voice a calm, electronic chime.

He moved to the helm, his gaze fixed on the map and live holographic images of Alloria’s spheroid planet growing larger on the primary screen.

The world was made up of jagged valleys and ice-clad peaks where warlords carved out fiefdoms beyond the reach of the weak Allorian government.

His target: Vesk Tyran, a butcher in iron, who ruled an isolated valley riddled with resource mines.

In the last few years, Tyran’s men enslaved the locals, scorched the farmlands, and laughed in the faces of peacekeepers. The bounty was high, the morality clear.

This was a clean hit, a rare win-win. Mo liked those best.

The corvette dropped into low orbit.

Once over his destination drop zone, he moved to a smaller skiff within the hold, a narrow-winged stealth craft built for silent planetary drops.

Stealthing his gunship, he shot out of it in the racer.

It cut through Alloria’s upper storms and threaded between razor-edged peaks, its dark silhouette indistinguishable from the cliffs.

He landed in a glacial hollow three clicks from the target location, hidden beneath a canopy of snow-cloaked pines.

The next few days passed in a hunter’s rhythm.

He ghosted through the forests and rocky escarpments, mapping guard rotations, surveillance drones, and encrypted comms.

He ate little, slept less, and spoke to no one.

His node sent him tactical overlays, heartbeat counts, and wind trajectories.

By day, he buried himself in frost and stone above the warlord’s village.

Studying, observing through a high-powered scope as Tyran swaggered between the mines and his bloated castle-like home, bullying his terrified workers.

By night, Mo stalked the outer defenses, laying charge points and slicing security nodes.

While baiting Tyran’s guards into false alarms that tested their vigilance and fed him data on their movements.

On the third evening, as the twin moons rose over a hoarfrost-veined valley, casting lengthy, spectral shadows, Mo struck.

Snowfall lay crisp and untouched over the outpost ridges.

He moved like vapor across the rise, breath controlled, limbs sheathed in silence.

The mountain wind moaned in the pines, drowning out the slight crunch of his boots as he slipped past the outer perimeter.

A single flick of his wrist released a pulse of static into a nearby comms sensor, shorting it just long enough to blind the guards.

No alarms. No lights. Just the endless dark and the silver hush of snow.

He scaled the west watchtower with precision, fingers catching cold iron ledges like he was born to climb.

At the top, he clung to the boundary for a breath, listening. Below, the command hall glowed with firelight and indulgence.

Inside, Tyran paced alone, half-drunk, the polished epaulets of his rebel general’s coat gleaming.

A crystal decanter sloshed amber over his knuckles as he poured another measure. Papers were scattered across his desk.

Mo caught his voice, rich with swagger, dictating another proclamation meant to crush the resistance.

Mo slipped through an upper vent and dropped behind him like a shadow detaching from the wall.

Tyran turned too late.

Mo was already aiming.

One breath. One shot.

The silencer hissed, and the round struck clean through his chest.

Tyran’s body folded backward in slow motion, the glass shattering in the hearth.

He hit the stone with a dull thud, scarlet blood blooming like ink across his medals.

Mo’s eyes lingered just long enough to see surprise followed by the last flicker of life leave Tyran’s face.

Then he ghosted out through the same vent, vanishing like fog before the kill had cooled.

He made it to the southern ridge when his boot unseated a rock on the cliffside.

It clattered down the escarpment. Fokk .

A patrol unit, sharper than the others, caught the sound.

Sirens cracked open the night like gunfire.

Red floodlights swept the slopes, piercing the trees.

Mo pivoted and sprinted, vaulting down a steep gully, only to find himself face to face with an elite Allorian soldier.

This one was different.

He was not just armor-plated, but forged, augmented.

The glow of his mirrored mask burned across the soldier’s visage, and his stance screamed trained lethality.

‘Stop!’ the trooper barked, in a filtered and cold intonation. ‘Hands where I can see them!’

Mo raised his palms slowly, eyes half-lidded, calculating.

Mo’s neural node parsed the man’s identity using his voice.

Yatin Mlitko .

Tyran’s 2IC and a formidable soldier in his own right.

His battle stats projected over Mo’s visual HUD interface, and he grinned.

‘You want my hands, Mlitko, I’ll give them to you.’

‘Hell, how do you know who I am?’ the rebel growled.

‘Tis no matter, just that I do. I’m all over your fight style, so if you want to persist with this shit show, tis your funeral.’

Mlitko blinked, shrugged, smirked in a devious incision of his mouth, and lunged, his mono-spear sweeping in a diagonal slash.

Mo ducked, somersaulted, came up on one knee, and flung two knives that appeared from nowhere, glimmering from the nanites in his armor.

One aimed at the rebel’s chest, the other at his thigh.

Both were deflected by the combat suit, skittering off with sparks.

‘Cute,’ Mlitko growled.

The mono-spear ignited, its blade screeching through the snow in a blur.

Mo’s vision narrowed. He dropped the pretense. His breath went still.

His plated garb went translucent, and his skin sigils flared, allowing his power to leak through and blind his opponent.

Mlitko hesitated. ‘The fokk ?’

Mo’s body pulsed with a radiant silver-black light, his outline blurring, stretching, flickering between dimensions.

Then he moved, faster than the eye might see.

He appeared behind Tyran’s second in charge and struck the base of his neck with a crackling palm, sending a pulse of concussive force straight through the armor.

Mlitko staggered, stumbled, but Mo was already above him, feet landing on his shoulders, twisting mid-air.

He unleashed a coiling thread of otherworldly spectral, phantasmic power that tore through the soldier’s weapon arm, ripping cables and blood in one seamless surge.

The soldier roared, his systems flaring red.

Mo landed as the snow around him lifted, swirling upward in a cyclone of kinetic pressure.

For a moment, his body flared as if he were made of starlight.

With a guttural cry, he struck the ground with both fists.

The energy erupted in a focused shockwave, sending the insurgent flying thirty feet into a ridge, his armor cracking on impact.

His life signs, displayed on Mo’s HUD, sputtered and died.

Mo blurred forward, grabbed the man’s discarded comms unit, and crushed it beneath his boot, leaving no witnesses.

His keen hearing caught the wail of sirens as they approached.

He didn’t have time to bury a body, so he left Mlitko sprawled like a stain on the white drift.

Breathing hard, skin flickering with a residual spectral glow, he sprinted into the tree line, disappearing just as floodlights raked the hillside.

Quicker than any drone was able to calibrate.

A blur to any imaging sensors or cameras.

His speed stretched the limits of flesh and physics, energy rippling from his limbs, lashing through the cold air in sparks of blue fire.

Gunfire snapped past his heels, wild and useless.

By the time their probes caught up, he was gone, ghosting into the craggy hills where no one followed.

The skiff was waiting where he’d left it.

He swung into it and launched into orbit, escaping the chaos behind.

He returned to the gunship and, once settled and en route to Eden II, his neural core pinged his handlers.

MISSION COMPLETE. TARGET NEUTRALIZED.

The response was swift.

ACKNOWLEDGED. OUTSTANDING WORK. YOU REMAIN OUR TOP SILENT BLADE. REST. AWAIT FUTURE DIRECTIVES.

The node thread ended, with the words glimmering into nothing, leaving no trace.

He landed the aircraft at a secret bay in the spaceport, one run by Iccythrians and also one with diplomatic ties.

Which meant its bays, hallways, and corridors were among the few hidden from Mirage Sable’s keen eye.

He changed on board, left all his gear, nabbed a small cross-body bag, and lit out.

Using a series of maintenance chutes, he cut through the busy terminals, emerging in a public fly cab rank.

He took the first available air taxi and pointed it towards the Riders’ famed fortress of glass and steel, which rose like a crown against the city’s neon horizon.

It was early morning, and only a few souls were roaming the streets.

He strolled out of the hovering craft and into the building, keeping his gait relaxed, and with the nonchalant ease of a man who’d come off night duty.

He took the elevator to his private apartment, a quiet, luxurious space stripped of clutter.

Smooth charcoal walls, high-end alloy fixtures, and floor-to-ceiling plexiglass framed the endless skyline of Eden II, where the city burned in neon and midnight.

Neat and minimalist, everything had its place, apart from the gorgeous planter boxes overflowing with verdant, lush greenery and blooms.

The door slid shut with a soft hiss, sealing him in solitude.

First stop, the bar.

He crossed the polished surface and poured himself two fingers of Sartixian vodka, which delivered a hit of a silky, clean burn.

He downed it, allowing the fire to wash away the remnants of adrenaline twisting in his gut.

Next, the shower.

Steam rose, hot and welcome, as he scrubbed away the grit of three relentless days.

The water sluiced away the frostbite dust of Alloria’s peaks, the smoke of Tyran’s dying empire, and the copper scent of violence still clinging to his skin.

He stood under the driving deluge longer than necessary, his head bowed beneath the jets that pounded him into a human again.

Finally, the bed.

He dropped into it without ceremony, his body aching, his brain too wired to dream but too spent to fight sleep.

He relived the mission, making note of how and where he needed to improve.

Still, the mattress was softer than the rocks he had slept on in the hills, warmer than the frozen winds that had clawed at his face.

So soon, he sighed, long and deep, letting himself sink into the dark.

Only then, as his intellect slipped beneath the surface of consciousness, did the neural nucleus activate.

It worked in silence, with ruthless efficiency.

File after file was wiped; visual and aural, all aspects of the mission, the kill, the chase, all of it gone. Erased from his waking mind as if it had never happened.

All that remained was the steady, quiet pulse of the node resting under his skin, silent.

His eyes snapped open at dawn’s first light.

He exhaled, rolling onto his back and blinking at the pale glow bleeding through the curtains.

His body ached, and he marveled at a fast-healing bruise on his arm, though he had no memory of why.

He sat up, swung his feet to the floor, and crossed to the window.

Beyond the glass, Eden II stretched vast, restless, unknowable.

He stared out over its spires and shadows, his face a mask.

Free again.

Until the next mission.