Page 158 of Star Claimed Omega
‘Mi sol.’
Outside the cabin, the lake shimmered beneath the night’s artificial moon, the waves lapping in sighs against the sand.
Xander stood beside Miral and Kaal, his arms crossed, jaw locked tight as Santi’s grief, even in sleep, radiated through the walls behind them.
He turned to Miral. ‘I’ve made a decision. Given that Soleil attempted to save you three, I’ll be pardoning her. The question is, do we know for sure she’s gone?’
Miral took a deep breath. ‘I might have to go over the feeds and holo footage, see what I can confirm.’
‘Can you think of anything else we can do to ease his agony? If she’s dead, do we need to plan a funeral?’
Miral kept her eyes forward, toward the water where Santi had paced only moments ago, agonized and broken. ‘I’ll look into it.’
Xander exhaled, slow and heavy. ‘Promise me you’ll remain with him until this shit lifts. ‘However, it might never be over.’
‘Indeed,’ Kaal growled. ‘Grief like this is rooted in the soul. He lost his first love. And now, losing Soleil? The woman he let inside after so many years? It’ll scorch him.’
The CO swallowed. ‘Fokk, this might be what breaks him.’
Miral flinched even as her lips pursed together. ‘I won’t allow that to happen. I can’t. Regardless, I’ll stay and monitor him.’
In the hush of Santi’s home office, the console’s light washed Miral’s face as she worked.
She sat motionless, her Synth-frame engaged in an intense code search.
Even so, her ear remained attuned down the hall, as she monitored the rhythm of Santi’s sleep, the uneven cadence of a man mired in quiet grief.
Her neural manifolds thrummed beneath her skin, humming in synchrony with the console’s interface.
Her mind linked to the massive nanite network threaded throughout the ship, and the world sharpened as her consciousness split between the physical and digital realms.
Her subroutines flared with a cold, focused purpose, their reach extending to every data stream in the flotilla and beyond.
First, she followed a promising cyber trail emanating from a relay deep in the North of the Wildlight.
Her cogitation tore through thousands of data tendrils in moments, isolating and confirming the comms traffic she intercepted.
One particular thread again demanded attention: a scrambled data burst from a backdoor satellite node nested in an abandoned comm tower.
Her internal systems decrypted it in under eight seconds.
Her lips parted, and a curse escaped.
There it was: proof of coordination between theRedSkullsand the Falasian insurgents in Pegasi, and their plot to destabilize the flotilla. To strike at the Sable Riders.
The Falasians had indeed supplied theSkullswith their sophisticated weaponry and bombs through deals with Vern Gage.
Miral followed the comms trail with the lethal precision of a hunter. Layer by layer, she shredded firewalls, some primitive, others sophisticated.
The signal led her to a submerged subnet cluster: theRed Skulls’ coded databases housed aboard theCrimsonShrike,their home station.
The server was cloaked beneath a series of false ports and garbage data designed to mimic debris pings.
Miral’s fingers held still, yet inside her frame, her consciousness spun through lines of command like wind slicing through glass.
Then came contact. She breached the mainframe.
Data poured in: messages, deny lists, encrypted orders, supply manifests, and payment receipts buried in code.
