Page 3 of Stars in Halo

He swung into the first car and had just settled into his seat when he heard a cry.

‘Give me your purse,’ a man’s sharp, hoarse voice wheezed.

Xion turned his head towards the commotion.

A wasted, scraggly man pointed a cheap ray gun at an older woman further down the cabin.

He was covered in synth tatts and snarled out of a koko-stained mouth and broken black incisors.

‘Now,’ he hissed to the cowering woman, a Falasian market trader judging by her unusual sloed eyes and bags of produce by her side.

Xion sucked his teeth at the fokkin’ heat seeker.

Knifing to his feet, he slid out his laser, set it to stun, and strolled towards the fray. In seconds, he drew beside the unwitting maglev bandit.

That’s when he noted the ink stain of a tattoo above the assailant’s prosthetic arm.

He huffed.

He knew the man, yet another victim of Eden II’s underworld activity, a holdover from its heyday as a crime-infested rock.

‘Letan, still haven’t learnt, have you?’

The man, koko high and swaying as if in the wind, turned, growled and glared at the Rider, his weapon swivelling in his face. ‘Get the hell out of my way unless -’

‘Unless what, my friend, you lose your other hand?’

Awareness dawned on his drug and life-weathered face. ‘Fokk me, tis Xion Sable.’

‘The one and only, and you know what that means, brother.’

The thief’s broken, mottled face lost all its colour. He twisted his mouth, and his eyes darted, tossing his options.

He pressed the trigger, but its barrel was sliced off before he could depress it.

It fell and tumbled on the maglev floor, the stunned passengers following its trajectory.

Xion sheathed his still-smoking laser as the train rolled into a station.

He glanced at the holo display above the sliding doors.

‘Twas his stop.

Xion reached a hand, captured the gibbering man by his collar and dragged him outside.

In moments, they were in an alley, where the Eden Guard commander set the writhing lowlife down.

Letan fought Xion with weak swipes. The Rider deflected them with ease as he cuffed the kinai’s wrists to his ankles behind him with metanoid-infused plex restraints.

Shutting the man’s cursing pie hole with a meta mask, Xion sent a quick neural message to his fellow Sable brother, Kisan, who was on street duty that evening.

He rose to his feet, his eyes flicking over the still struggling man on the ground. A stab of compassion hit the Rider.

The fallout from the Sable crew’s clean-up of Pegasi meant that former crims who’d once floated with substantial sums of schills were now forced to beg and steal for a living.

Letan was one such example. He was a koko merchant who’d slipped way down the ladder since his high life as a dealer to the holo stars and celebrities of Pegasi.

His past income stream had dried up, so he often appeared in Eden II’s overnight slammers for minor crimes these days.

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