The Hunt for Truth: A Serialized Sci-Fi Story
Book One: The Hunt Begins
An on-air assassination shatters the Frontier Coalition. Whisper turns predator as Hawke duels Mirek’s code and Ordo executioners storm the field. In the smoke and steel, Jorhan falls, Hawke chooses—and the hunt flips from pursuit to trap
A Fractured Voice
The glow of Whisper’s tactical displays painted the ready room in cold, shifting light. Holo-feeds scrolled across the walls—battle reports, intercepted transmissions, casualty projections—all of it coalescing into a singular, inescapable truth. The Frontier Coalition was breaking apart, splintering like a rusted hull under the strain of a thousand fractures.
No incoming comms. No response relays. Just Whisper, adrift in a storm no one would name.
Jorhan stood rigid against the operations table, the cold flicker of the failing feed still playing shadows across her face. Her gaze remained locked on the central display—an emergency broadcast cycling on a loop. The image flickered with distortion, struggling to maintain coherence through the storm of collapsing infrastructure.
Jorhan had watched this feed a dozen times. Somewhere in her, a small, stubborn ember hoped the ending would change.
The new Chancellor’s face was gaunt, his voice brittle as he pleaded for unity.
“The Coalition stands… remains steadfast against these challenges,” he stammered, eyes darting to something off-screen. “We must not—”
Movement behind him. Shadows shifting.
A sharp inhale.
Then chaos.
Two armored figures stepped into the frame, their faces obscured by dark visors. No insignia. No warnings. The Chancellor flinched, half-turning—
A hand clamped around his throat. Another seized his arm.
His words strangled into silence as they wrenched him backward.
A brief struggle. A choked grunt. The desperate clatter of something toppling over.
Then the feed cut to black.
But not silence. The walls of Whisper seemed to contract in response, as if the ship itself recoiled. A subtle flicker danced along the ceiling. The low hum of its systems turned dissonant—a sound less mechanical and more alive, a creature sensing blood.
Jorhan stood frozen. A whisper of breath escaped her lips. Then she exhaled sharply, rubbing a hand over her face before letting it drop to her side.
“That’s it, then,” she muttered, her voice edged with something between exhaustion and acceptance. “The FC’s done pretending it’s still in control.”
Hawke stood across from her at the far end of the operations table, arms at his sides, gaze fixed. But he wasn’t looking at Jorhan—not really. His eyes bore through her, distant and unblinking, lost in the echo of what they’d just witnessed. The dim light cast his face in shadow, making his stillness seem more statue than man. He didn’t speak. Not yet.
She glanced at him again. Still nothing. His silence scraped at her nerves. A flare of anger rose in her throat, sharp and sudden.
“Say something.”
She nearly barked it. But then she saw it—that look. The one he wore before a kill. Still and sharp. Calculating.
The holo-feeds continued their silent march, cycling through crisis points like the dying breaths of an empire. Outposts falling. Governing bodies collapsing. Figures once untouchable are now hunted or dead. The weight of it all pressed into the room, thick and suffocating.
Hawke exhaled through his nose, tilting his head slightly as if weighing the right words. Then, finally, he nodded.
“Let’s get to work.”
No hesitation. No debate. Just a cold, simple truth.
Jorhan studied him for a moment longer, then stepped back from the table, the weight in her chest no lighter—but aimed now. The tension in her shoulders remained, but there was purpose in her step now. No more waiting. No more watching.
Overhead, Whisper’s lighting pulsed red—then went dark. Then light again, colder now, sharper. The soft thrum of its systems sharpened—less a hum, more a growl.
There was no playbook for what came next. Just blood, breath, and the whisper of war.
Beneath the Noise
The hum of processing nodes filled Whisper’s data lab, a constant pulse of computation running beneath the floor. The air carried a faint charge, the scent of metal and static clinging to every surface. Streams of encrypted data cascaded across the holo-tables, flickering symbols shifting too fast for the untrained eye to follow.
Hawke stood at the central console, fingers moving in precise, methodical gestures across the interface. He guided Whisper’s input nodes through a labyrinth of recursive data loops, navigating obfuscated gate calls and synthetic decoys. Lines of code unraveled, decrypted, then split—only to reassemble into false structures meant to mislead. He throttled down his pace, inserting delay scripts, rerouting packet probes through indirect subnet paths to avoid detection., inserting delay scripts, rerouting packet probes through indirect subnet paths to avoid detection.
Every layer was a puzzle. Every trap, a personal signature. Each fragment felt like a challenge—her mind against his, a duel fought in silence across the void. The deeper he dug, the more it became clear: Mirek wasn’t just hiding. She was daring him to find her.
Jorhan leaned against the doorway, arms crossed. She watched him work, the pale glow reflecting in her eyes. “You always think you see the full picture.”
Hawke didn’t miss a beat. “I see enough.”
Jorhan pushed off the doorframe and stepped closer, studying the shifting patterns on the display. “No, you don’t. You see what she wants you to see.”
His fingers hesitated—just for a second—before continuing. Jorhan didn’t miss the minute shift in his posture, the way his jaw tensed, shoulders pulled tighter. He was in it now—fighting her, line by line.
“Then I need to see more.”
The screen pulsed as Hawke bypassed another layer of obfuscation. But this time, the signal fragmented into deeper, denser strata—too much noise, too little clarity. He pulled back from the main holoscreen and strode across the lab to a secondary terminal, entering a rapid string of low-level command chains. His fingers moved fast, executing system-level queries, compiling on-the-fly diagnostics, and spinning up sub-routines that Whisper had buried three architectures deep.
The lab held its breath.
He returned to the central console. The display shifted—deeper bandwidth, enhanced telemetry, packet trails that had previously been invisible now illuminating like veins through a corpse. The algorithms twisted violently, countermeasures reacting in waves. Firewall tunnels collapsed just as he approached; breadcrumbs spawned false uplinks tied to long-dead relays. Then—without warning—his command sequence restructured itself mid-execution. Whisper had intervened. Not a block. An override. Whisper had hijacked his brute-force string and refined it, slicing through Mirek’s firewall like a scalpel. The ship was helping him punch through, but it was doing it better than him. He didn’t argue.
The tension thickened, an invisible thread pulled tighter with each keystroke.
A warning flashed across the interface. Unauthorized Decryption Attempt Detected. A sharp buzz filled the room, the holo-displays flickering as the system fought back. A failsafe—Mirek’s final trick.
Jorhan’s hand hovered near her sidearm out of instinct. “She set traps.”
Hawke didn’t flinch. His fingers worked faster. “Of course, she did.”
A sudden spike in energy readings. The screens flickered again, and for a brief second, the entire data lab dimmed—power rerouting, not by Whisper’s will—but by something outside its grasp. Then the defenses collapsed, and one node remained. It lingered longer than the others, just outside the expected parameters. Too clean. Too perfect. It wasn’t just a mistake or bait—this was a polished invitation, as if it had been left behind for someone else.
Jorhan tilted her head. “She’s good.”
Hawke exhaled, his voice low. “Whisper, plot the coordinates of that final node.“
A beat passed. Then the holoscreen shifted—displaying a vector trace and confirming alignment.
Hawke nodded once, transferred the coordinates to his wrist display, and murmured, “Set course. That’s where she’s moving.“
A new sound joined the hum of the lab—something distant, something wrong. A coded ping, soft but insistent, coming from Whisper’s external sensors.
Jorhan’s smirk faded. “We’re not the only ones tracking this signal.”
Hawke clenched his jaw, already turning toward the exit. “Then we don’t have time to debate it.”
Jorhan turned, smirking, but her eyes were sharp. “Then let’s move.”
A Name in the Silence
The silence was total. Not the absence of sound—but its execution. It clung to the walls of the command sanctum like a second skin.
The command sanctum was buried deep beneath the surface of an uncharted moon, veiled in shifting radiation fields that rendered it invisible to even the most sophisticated scans. Inside, the air was sterile, the lighting dim—cold illumination pulsing from thin slits in the walls, casting jagged shadows across the polished steel floors.
A row of holo-feeds hovered in the center of the chamber, each displaying a different angle of the Frontier Coalition’s rapid descent into chaos. Assassinations. Riots. Entire planetary councils dissolved into silence as leaders vanished overnight. Each screen pulsed like a metronome—not reporting events, but marking the beats of a symphony they’d already composed.
The masked Ordo Primoris agent stood still, hands clasped behind their back, their posture effortless, composed. They watched the collapse unfold, the fragmented remains of a government clawing at stability, not realizing the ground had already disappeared beneath them—
One chapter ends. The narrative obeys.
A figure approached from the periphery—another agent, clad in black, their boots making no sound against the floor. They knelt, head bowed in deference. But they did not rise. Not until the silence permitted it.
“We’ve found her,” the subordinate reported, voice low but certain. “Mirek’s location is confirmed.”
A pause.
Then, slowly, the masked agent turned. The motion was deliberate, measured, as if savoring the moment. Their face remained hidden behind a smooth, featureless mask, save for the faint etchings of old symbols carved into the metal. The kind that meant something only to those who understood their purpose.
“She thinks she’s the author of this story.” The agent’s voice was a whisper of amusement, rich with something just beneath the surface. They stepped closer, the holo-feeds flickering against the reflective sheen of their mask. One symbol caught the shifting light and seemed to flicker—its meaning changing depending on the angle, like language that refused to be read too easily. “She was never more than a chapter.”
A sharp gesture. A command unspoken.
From the shadows, a team of figures slid into view—silent, efficient, precise. Each clad in dark adaptive gear, their presence barely more than a disturbance in the air. Even the air didn’t seem to notice them move.
They moved like ink spilling through water, spreading outward without form, without hesitation.
The kill team. Operatives of Cell Null-Twelve—Ordo’s final argument in any negotiation.
They did not acknowledge the order. They didn’t need to. They had already begun.
The masked agent turned back to the collapsing Frontier Coalition, their gaze settling on one particular feed—one tracking a lone ship threading the void toward an abandoned safe house. That one, they thought. Not a question. A memory.
A ghost of a smile played at their lips beneath the mask.
Soon, nothing would remain to resist the shape of things to come.
The Hallow Refuge
The industrial sector was a corpse of a city, its skeleton of rusted steel and fractured concrete stretching toward a smog-choked sky. The echoes of long-dead machinery whispered through the wind, an occasional groan of metal shifting under its own weight. This place had been abandoned long before Mirek repurposed it, and now it served as her last sanctuary—or her final grave.
Deep within the ruins, in a bunker fortified with scavenged tech and reinforced plating, Mirek sat before a cluster of holo-screens, each broadcasting the slow-motion implosion of the Frontier Coalition. Her fingers traced the rim of a half-empty glass, a ghost of a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips.
“They’ll come for me,” she murmured, the words a quiet declaration. She didn’t say what came next. She didn’t have to. There was no need. Every scenario had already played out in her mind—most of them fatal.
A voice crackled through her private channel, distorted by encrypted relays. “And you sound pleased about that.”
Mirek chuckled, the sound dry. “Oh, they’ll think they have the upper hand. But they won’t be ready.”
She leaned forward, studying the screens. She’d left the trail meticulously—breadcrumbs for the right kind of hunter. Hawke would follow the path. That was a certainty. The Ordo? Well, they never could resist a loose thread.
Outside, the darkness shifted. The trap was set. And something had begun to stir in the dark.
Jorhan moved first, her silhouette slipping between cover with practiced ease, breath steady despite the weight of unease pressing against her chest. Hawke followed, silent and methodical, his presence less a shadow and more a force held in check—watchful, coiled for the inevitable violence. It wasn’t just discipline. It was something colder. Something prepared to die or kill without pause.
They had been moving for the last fifteen minutes, sweeping through the ruined sector, keeping to the blind spots between scattered floodlights and broken structures. The terrain was uneven, littered with the skeletal remains of old factories and stripped-down mechs left to rust. Taglines from a dead union flickered on collapsed signage. Flags no one saluted anymore stirred in the toxic breeze. Somewhere in the distance, the wind howled through fractured steel, creating an eerie, unearthly moan. It almost sounded like voices—half-remembered, pleading through steel.
Jorhan pressed herself against a crumbling barricade, exhaling as she scanned the area ahead. Her visor flickered with tactical overlays, mapping out sentry positions. Two at the gate, another on the old scaffold above, watching with a long rifle.
She tapped Hawke’s shoulder, signaling the targets. He responded with a subtle nod, already shifting into position. They moved like phantoms, weaving through the debris with military precision. Each step was deliberate, measured, a game of patience and opportunity.
Jorhan reached the first sentry, a tall, wiry man with a battle-scarred rifle slung lazily across his shoulder. He barely had time to react before she was behind him, her blade slipping between the plates of his armor. She eased his body to the ground, his final breath nothing more than a whisper lost to the wind.
Above, the sniper remained focused on the open avenues, unaware of Hawke scaling the scaffold’s rusted supports. He timed his movement with a gust of wind, letting the scaffold’s groan mask his approach. The metal flexed and creaked beneath his weight, but Hawke moved with a predator’s grace, rising onto the platform in perfect rhythm with the shifting steel—never isolated, never sudden. He drew his knife and in one fluid motion, sliced through the man’s throat, silencing him before he could gasp.
The second gate sentry had just started to turn when Hawke dropped behind him—too late. Hawke’s hands moved once—then silence, and the body folded like paper. Three down. No alarms. Just the wind.
Then, nothing. No reinforcements. No sudden rush of mercenaries spilling from the compound.
Jorhan wiped her blade against the downed sentry, scanning the empty streets ahead. Her frown deepened. “Something feels off. This is too easy.”
Her instincts didn’t lie. And right now, they were screaming.
She checked the comms channel—no static, no chatter. Just silence. That was worse.
Hawke stilled, his gut twisting in agreement. The air carried something more than just decay. An absence. The kind that came before impact.
They advanced slowly, pressing through the open expanse leading to the bunker’s entrance. Jorhan’s HUD blinked once. Then again. A flash of static, a delay in response. Not failure—interference. A warning hidden in noise. Every step forward felt like trespassing into a tomb dressed as a sanctuary, an intrusion into something carefully prepared.
A single, distant noise. A crackle in the static. A flicker on a far-off rooftop.
A scope.
A shimmer of glass. A pinpoint of red.
The Smoke Between
The safe house was a tomb of rust and shadow, its corridors thick with the scent of old oil and burnt circuitry. Pipes lined the walls like veins, the hum of distant generators pulsing beneath the floor. Every step felt like walking into a past meant to be buried.
Hawke moved first, his weapon raised, breath steady. The reinforced door to Mirek’s inner sanctum stood slightly ajar, a taunt more than an oversight. He pressed forward, the low light glinting off his sidearm.
Mirek was waiting.
She stood at the center of the room, arms crossed, an easy smirk tugging at her lips. The holo-screens behind her bathed her in cold, flickering light. Her gaze flicked over him, then Jorhan, then back.
“Took you long enough.”
Hawke’s jaw tightened. He took another step forward—
—and froze.
Something was off. The hairs on his neck rose. His eyes swept the room’s edges, saw the flicker of something wrong in the shadows—
Then it hit.
A silenced shot cracked the air. One of Mirek’s men barely had time to blink before his skull snapped back, his body hitting the floor with a dull thud. Blood pooled beneath him, seeping into the grated steel.
The air shifted. A vacuum of movement. A ripple in the smoke.
The Ordo was already here.
Mirek’s smirk faltered for the briefest second, then her hand flicked toward her weapon. Before it could clear the holster, the room erupted.
Gunfire tore through the tight space, muzzle flashes splitting the darkness in bursts of violent light. The air shrieked with ricochets and screaming metal. Pipework exploded overhead, spraying steam that scalded bare skin. Every surface sparked or screamed beneath the chaos, turning the sanctum into a crucible of heat and blood. Shadows moved between them, fast, methodical. The Ordo’s kill team didn’t make mistakes.
Hawke dropped low as a round ricocheted off the metal plating near his head. He fired back, a double tap into the void, rewarded with the sharp impact of a body collapsing. Smoke curled through the air, thick with the metallic tang of blood and gunpowder.
Jorhan moved differently—fluid, angular. Where Hawke broke through, she slipped around, her body a blade unto itself. She rolled beneath a wild swing, swept the attacker’s legs with a crescent kick, then drove her elbow down into their throat. Another closed in from her blind side, but she ducked beneath the arc and countered with a snap of her wrist—one shot, straight to the base of the skull. Her body was poetry in violence—elegant, lethal, efficient.
Hawke, by contrast, was relentless—a wall of fury and control. He shot while advancing, forcing two Ordo agents behind cover, then veered toward a ruptured pipe for a better angle. But a round punched through the haze, grazing his shoulder—just enough to tear flesh and sear muscle. Warm blood spilled down his arm, seeping into his sleeve as he pivoted to strike. He didn’t scream. He didn’t stop. But the fire in his arm was already blooming. A fist slammed into his wounded shoulder, fire lancing down his arm. He gritted his teeth, twisted, drove his elbow into the attacker’s throat, and finished with a clean shot to the head.
The bunker groaned around them. Holo-screens shattered. Pipes burst, venting steam and sparks. The sanctum became a warzone.
A gloved hand snaked from the fog, wrapping around Mirek’s arm, yanking her back. She snarled, twisting free, but not before the dagger bit into her side. She fired point-blank into her assailant’s chest, sending them sprawling, then staggered toward the wall, bracing with one arm as she slammed her other hand against a recessed panel hidden beneath scorched plating. A hidden turret screeched to life behind her, spitting molten fire into the shadows.
But she staggered, breath sharp with pain. Blood slicked her fingers.
Jorhan took a hard hit to the ribs, staggering back, vision blurring for a heartbeat too long. A knife swept toward her gut—
—but Hawke was there, intercepting with a brutal kick that sent the attacker sprawling.
The room was turning into a graveyard.
The initial clash gave way to something colder—more precise. The Ordo didn’t stop. Didn’t hesitate. Their formation shifted constantly—one agent drawing fire so another could strike. One slashed, the other shot. Their boots never made a sound. Hawke saw one kill a sentry, disarm a mine, and reload mid-stride without breaking motion. Not soldiers. Not assassins. Executioners in perfect synchronization. Every movement was controlled, surgical, and devoid of waste. They weren’t here to capture. They were here to erase.
Mirek pressed against a steel support, teeth clenched, breath shallow. Her eyes met Hawke’s through the shifting smoke.
“This isn’t your fight,” she bit out.
He reloaded, breath heaving. “It is now.”
A faint smile touched her lips—pained, sardonic… maybe even grateful. But she said nothing more.
Another shot. Another body fell into silence. The last echo of gunfire bled into the hiss of ruptured steam. Bodies sprawled like broken punctuation. No one spoke. Not yet. Not with blood still cooling on the floor.
No one was walking away unscathed.
The Shifting Hunt
The world outside the safe house was still thick with smoke and the scent of blood. Muzzle flashes stuttered in the dim corridors behind them, the sharp cracks of gunfire echoing as the last remnants of Mirek’s forces fought a losing battle against the Ordo kill team.
Hawke spotted her first—Mirek, a silhouette slipping through the chaos, moving fast down a narrow service tunnel. He elbowed Jorhan, nodding toward their fleeing target.
“There.“
Jorhan cursed under her breath. “She’s running.”
They pushed forward, weaving through the tangle of broken steel and abandoned scaffolding. Steam hissed from ruptured vents. A sharp left, then another. The tunnel led to an old maintenance hatch, already pried open. Beyond it, a ladder stretched upward into the dark.
Mirek was already climbing.
Hawke slung his rifle, moving first, Jorhan close behind. The narrow shaft pulsed with stale air and the groan of overstressed supports. Their boots scraped damp rungs slick with condensation. Halfway up, the air split with gunfire.
Bullets tore through the steel above their heads, ricocheting off the rusted pipes. Jorhan’s grip slipped.
A strangled curse. A breathless second.
Then she was falling.
She hit the ground hard, the impact driving the air from her lungs. Hawke flinched, his hand white-knuckled around the rung. For a second, he looked up—Mirek vanishing into the dark—then down again at Jorhan sprawled below.
Another volley of gunfire. Sparks rained from above, singeing his jacket, snapping his choice into focus.
He climbed down, dropping the last few feet beside her. Jorhan was on her hands and knees, gasping for breath. He reached for her, but she shoved him away, eyes flashing with fury.
“You idiot!” she hissed, dragging herself upright. “She’s getting away, and you’re coming back for me?”
Hawke’s jaw clenched. “I’m not leaving you behind.”
Jorhan wiped a smear of blood from her lip. “That’s not how this works, Hawke. You don’t win wars by saving every damn soldier. You win by finishing the mission.”
He exhaled sharply, glancing toward the ladder. Mirek was long gone now, her escape secured. But he wasn’t about to leave Jorhan broken on the ground.
“Tell that to the ones who don’t come back,” he muttered, hauling her to her feet.
Jorhan winced but steadied herself, shooting him a glare. “This conversation isn’t over.”
“Never is.”
They started up the ladder again, Hawke moving first, watching for any sign that Mirek might fire again. But the silence held—no more shots, no movement above. Either she was gone, or she thought her work was finished.
When they reached the rooftop, the ruin of the city unfurled around them like a carcass under starlight. Skyscrapers stood hollowed and cracked, their steel bones jutting into the night sky. Fires still burned in distant husks of old transport bays. Shattered signage flickered with half-dead neon. The wind howled through broken towers, carrying with it the static echoes of long-silent alarms.
Hawke raised his rifle, angling the enhanced scope toward the distant magrail ruins. Through its digital overlay and low-light amplification, he locked onto a flickering shadow limping between the skeletal supports—Mirek. She clung to the edge of a crumbling pillar, her blood marking a broken trail behind her like breadcrumbs. The ambient fires below and flickering neon cast just enough glow to make her movements visible. From this vantage, aided by tech, he watched her pause, clutch her side, and stagger forward again.
Jorhan pressed a hand to her ribs, breathing through the pain. “She’s good,” she muttered. “But she’s scared now.”
Hawke smirked despite the pain lancing through his shoulder. Mirek thought she was the one pulling the strings. But now? Now she was running. And runners made mistakes.
A flicker caught his eye through the scope—something off on a nearby rooftop. Maybe a glint of metal. Maybe a second shooter. He adjusted focus, scanned the spot again—but there was nothing there.
“We don’t need to chase her anymore.”
Jorhan turned, watching him carefully.
Hawke rolled his neck, the tension settling into something cold and focused. He nodded toward the empty streets ahead. “We just have to set the trap.”
He exhaled, adjusting the scope one last time. “Let her bleed herself dry on the blade she forged.”
Read Episode 19 now, then tell me: who set the blade Mirek bleeds on—her, Ordo, or someone else? Continue the Hunt for Truth—Episode 20 arrives Friday, September 12. Subscribe now to never miss an episode.