Page 81 of Stars in Umbra
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.
