The Hunt for Truth: A Serialized Sci-Fi Story
Book One: The Hunt Begins
Bleeding but unbowed, Hawke and Jorhan set a trap for Mirek on a dead world. The snare closes—then the Ordo steps in, watching the hunters like specimens.
Fractures in the Fault Lines
The med bay aboard the Whisper thrummed with a quiet life—diagnostic scanners blinked in patient rhythms, soft blue light spilling over cold metal surfaces. But the stillness here was a lie. It pulsed beneath the skin, humming through the veins of those who’d barely survived the last skirmish.
Hawke sat shirtless on the edge of a medical cot, the harsh glow above casting deep shadows across his chest and the ragged gash slashing across his shoulder. The synth-flesh patch clung unevenly, a botched field job. He flexed it experimentally and winced as pain knifed through muscle and bone.
Across the room, Jorhan leaned against a storage console, one arm wrapped tight around her ribs, the other pressing a half-melted ice pack against her side. The swelling there would turn every breath into a fresh insult. Her eyes flicked toward the surgical table in the far corner, the same one where their first encounter with Mirek left her barely clinging to consciousness while Veyra fought to keep her alive. Those memories hung in the recycled air, ghosts that never left. Especially after what she’d done.
The stim was still burning beneath her skin from the earlier injection. She shifted her weight, grimacing as the residual fire coursed through her muscles. After a breath to steady herself, she placed the spent injector on top of the storage console, then pushed off the counter.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” she said without looking at him. “Not plotting your next war.”
Hawke didn’t respond at first. His eyes were fixed on the flickering holo-display anchored midair beside the cot—data fragments coalescing into a fractured trail: Mirek’s movements, intercepted comms, burnt locations. The fragments swirled in and out of order, forming outlines that nearly resembled a pattern—snaking paths, spiraling loops. Predatory. Deliberate.
“We don’t have time for that,” he muttered finally.
Jorhan crossed the room, her boots silent against the med bay floor. She reached into a bin near the cot and pulled out a sterilizer, her movements efficient but deliberate.
“Hold still.”
He didn’t protest, though his jaw clenched as she began cleaning the wound. Then, without hesitation, she peeled off her glove and let her bare fingers touch his skin.
Her touch was warm—warmer than he expected. Not clinical. Not efficient. Just real. Her fingers brushed against the torn skin, steady but kind.
He didn’t look at her, but he felt the change in her breath—shallow, halting, as if her own body was betraying her composure. Her fingers traced the hard line of muscle along his upper chest, pausing over an old scar. She lingered there longer than necessary.
Her reflection in the polished surface of a nearby med cabinet caught her eye. For a moment, she didn’t recognize the woman staring back—not the hardened fighter, not the soldier. Just the vulnerability she fought so hard to bury. She blinked and turned her attention back to Hawke’s wound, fingers steadying against his skin once more.
Her fingers suddenly pressed against the raw edge of the wound—not enough to harm, but enough to jolt. His breath hitched, and he flinched.
“Damn it, Jorhan—” he started, breath catching.
“Hush and let me work,” she murmured, voice low and close, breath warm against his shoulder. Her body hovered inches from his, the air between them pulled tight as a drawn bowstring, quivering with everything unsaid. She paused for a beat longer than necessary, her touch lingering just enough to betray the flicker of something deeper. Her breath caught again, fingertips tracing the memory of a scar she shouldn’t remember so clearly.
“I know why you came back for me,” she whispered.
He turned slightly, just enough to glance at her as she continued working, unaware of his gaze.
She hesitated. “I just wanted to say thank—”
She looked at him, half expecting his eyes to still be locked on the holo-display. But he was already watching her. And the look in his eyes said everything. There was no anger, no judgment. Just understanding. And something deeper.
Silence followed—real silence. Not the hum of the ship or the drone of machinery, but the kind that drops like a curtain. Heavy. Intentional. The kind that demanded you feel it.
She didn’t pull away.
Neither did he.
Their breathing synced, slow and shallow, each breath a thread tightening the space between them. The wound was forgotten. So was Mirek. The war. The ghosts. Just them now. Breathing the same stale air in a room too small to contain the storm between them.
Jorhan’s gaze lingered, locked onto his face like she was memorizing it. The heat in her eyes wasn’t just attraction—it was hunger, aching, restrained by a lifetime of survival instincts and old scars. Her chest rose and fell, shallow and slow, like she didn’t trust herself to move. There was no mask. No armor. Just history. Hurt. And the fire of everything they’d never said burned between them. And then, as quickly as it had built, she pulled back.
She tossed the used cloth into the disposal bin with more force than necessary, cleared her throat softly, and stepped away. When she spoke, her voice was low—calm, but laced with quiet urgency. “You can’t beat her like this.”
Hawke blinked once like he’d come up from underwater. “Mirek?”
She nodded. “She’s not just brute force. She’s careful. Strategic. She’s baiting you to rush in and bleed.”
He tested his shoulder again. It hurt less this time, or maybe he just didn’t care. He watched her as she turned her back to him, crossing the room slowly toward the storage console where she’d first been standing. She didn’t respond, but her posture shifted—less guarded now, as if retreating into motion was the only way to hold the line. The air between them was cooling, but not closed.
“Then let’s be smarter,” he said, quieter now.
Jorhan paused mid-step, her hand brushing the edge of the console. She turned back to look at him, a wondering expression playing across her face—as if trying to read something she hadn’t expected to find. Her eyes lingered, softening just enough to betray the concern she rarely let show.
The holo-display pulsed in response. One of the spiraling lines reversed course. A red icon blinked into existence—not chasing, but waiting. A trap was laid in open space.
Both of them watched it now, the red glow flickering across their features. Jorhan’s arms folded tightly against her ribs. Hawke’s expression shifted—calm, calculated. A hint of a smirk touched his lips, cold and sure. The game had changed.
Mirek’s web was tightening across distant systems. But this time, Hawke wasn’t hunting her. He was luring her in.
The Web Unraveling
The Ready Room aboard the Whisper was built for war, not reflection. Steel walls curved inward like a predator’s jaw, swallowing sound in thick, humming silence. Tactical displays lined the space like restless ghosts, their flickering blues and reds casting jagged shadows that crawled across the floor. The low pulse of the ship’s reactor murmured in the background, steady as a heartbeat.
Hawke sat hunched at a side terminal, one boot resting on the edge of the chair opposite him, his shirt half-unbuttoned, revealing the fresh wrap across his shoulder. The warmth of her touch still lingered beneath the bandage, but he forced it down—he had work to do. He sat like something coiled, waiting—no longer prey. The skin beneath it throbbed with a deep, stubborn ache. The kind of pain that didn’t just mark injury—it marked survival. His fingers ghosted over the interface, decrypting one feed after another, chasing a phantom through static.
Mirek’s digital trail pulsed across the display like blood in water—corrupted comm bursts, barbed transponder echoes, ghost-pings from shadow systems threaded with malware signatures. Each one a breadcrumb. Each one bait. Each one laced with intent.
But something was off.
He leaned in, eyes narrowing. The static wasn’t random. It pulsed in intervals, echoed patterns. Not forward. Not away. It curved. Retreated. Looped.
“Whisper,” he said under his breath, fingers hovering over the keys like a trigger. “Run the data set again. Use a recursive-predictive algorithm—combat patterns, not civilian drift. Filter for delays and relays in blacksite subnet clusters.“
A beat passed. The interface stuttered, then began to reconfigure. Hawke’s eyes didn’t leave the screen.
Behind him, the Ready Room door hissed open. He didn’t look up.
Jorhan stepped through, stripped down to her utility shirt, a fresh ice pack pressed against her side. The cold bit into her ribs, but it was nothing compared to the chill threading through her chest. She didn’t speak right away. Her eyes found Hawke, hunched over the terminal, his profile half-lit in the tactical glow. For a heartbeat, she didn’t see the war room or the ship or the web they were unraveling.
She saw the look he gave her in the medbay—the one that made her hesitate. The one that almost made her stay.
She hated that she’d pulled away. Hated the silence that followed. But walls didn’t build themselves, and she’d spent years fortifying hers. Letting them crack now would be suicide.
Her grip on the ice pack tightened. She swallowed the ache behind her ribs—both kinds—and reminded herself what needed to be done.
He needed her sharp. Not soft. Not exposed.
The room felt colder than it should have.
She hoped he understood.
And then, damn her, she started second guessing everything all over again.
She stepped farther into the room, steeling herself against the warmth that still clung to the air between them. The moment in the medbay played again in her mind—how close they’d come, how far they still were. She pushed it down, masking her turmoil behind a breath she didn’t realize she’d held.
Then she studied him for a beat before speaking. Her voice came softly, tinged with something unreadable. “You ever wonder what we look like from out there? Not soldiers. Not rebels. Just fragments. Ghosts that forgot how to die—chasing one that never did?”
Hawke didn’t answer right away. The only sound was the soft tap of keys beneath his fingers.
“She’s not a ghost,” he muttered. “She’s the spider.”
He tapped a key. The interface shifted, data reassembling, Mirek’s trail warping into a larger web. Not linear. Intentional. The lines bent back on themselves, forming spirals, hooks—traps.
“She’s not running.”
Jorhan moved to his side, slow, cautious. As she leaned in to see the display, her arm brushed against his—a fleeting point of contact. The warmth of it lingered, noticed by both, acknowledged by neither. Her voice dropped, barely above the Ready Room’s hum.
“She’s circling something.”
“Yeah,” Hawke breathed. “A location? An asset? Doesn’t matter. She’s nesting. And that means she thinks she’s safe.”
He said it like a man who knew what it meant to mistake silence for safety.
Jorhan tilted her head, her breath brushing his temple. “You can’t kill a spider in its web.”
He glanced at her.
“You have to make it leave the web first,” she finished.
Hawke stared at Jorhan for a breath, searching her face for something unspoken. Then his eyes slid back to the display. His jaw tightened. The interface reflected in his eyes like firelight off broken glass.
“Then we bait her.”
He knew exactly where to place the hook.
The room didn’t move. The shadows didn’t flicker. But something shifted.
His breath slowed. The pain in his shoulder faded behind instinct. The hunter was awake again.
For the first time in a long while, Hawke wasn’t running, wasn’t reacting. The hunted had become the predator. And he could feel it—like gravity shifting, like something dark and patient finally standing upright.
Finally, he was the Hunter.
Jorhan said nothing. Just watched him—the angle of his jaw, the focus in his eyes, the stillness that had taken root in his frame. This was the man she had studied in classified dossiers and whispered war briefings. The one she expected to find when they first crossed paths on the Anvil. Calculating. Relentless. Cold.
And she wasn’t sure whether she admired that part of him… or feared it.
The Careless Whisper
The relay station was a corpse wired with power.
Half-submerged in the belly of a derelict orbital grid, its architecture was a fusion of dead languages—rusting GDEC conduits, FC-era transmitters, and forgotten Aelari subroutines stitched together like scar tissue. Electrical scars buzzed through bulkheads like phantom nerves, and coolant dripped in lazy intervals, pooling beneath exposed conduit spines. Radiation warnings flickered dimly from cracked displays, long ignored. No flags. No guards. Just dust and decay, humming quietly with surveillance protocols no one remembered how to shut off.
Hawke moved through its bowels like a surgeon through rot. Careful. Intentional. The console he’d chosen sparked once in protest as he touched it, blinking faintly beneath decades of grime. The air reeked of ozone and scorched lubricant—a place allergic to life. A minor miracle.
Or a carefully placed lie waiting to be used.
He wiped the display with a sleeve, revealing a sluggish interface still bonded to old encryption layers. Perfect. It had to look old. It had to be old.
Fingers danced across the controls, composing a narrative in pulses and code. A corrupted Ordo file—fragmented, unfinished, just enough to hint at something real. He embedded a single redacted term inside the metadata—a name stricken from the archives, one that hadn’t surfaced since the Summit Massacre. Dangerous. Tantalizing. Bait too precise to be a coincidence, but just sloppy enough to pass for desperation. The name wasn’t just a lure—it was tied to an op Hawke had buried deep. Something the Ordo had buried. But not well enough. Something Mirek had once denied ever happened.
The breadcrumbs had to feel unintended. A data packet mislabeled in an unsecured directory. A relay point left unlocked. Just enough human error to smell authentic.
He knew Mirek. Knew how she thought. Pride wrapped in paranoia. She wouldn’t ignore this. Couldn’t. Not if there was a chance someone had decrypted part of the Ordo’s erased archives. He waited for Whisper to push back. It didn’t. That made it worse. It only listened—silent and inert, like a blade deciding if it would cut the hand that held it.
Hawke leaned in, adjusting the transmission frequency. Just outside military bands. Sloppy, but not too sloppy. An amateur trying to play pro.
The signal went live with a quiet chirp.
It moved like poison in water—subtle, slow, sinking into the channels Hawke was sure she still watched. Not screaming. Whispering.
Behind him, Jorhan leaned against the doorframe. She’d studied his old ops before they ever met on the Anvil—classified debriefings filtered through GDEC intelligence, handed down by command structures she now believed were riddled with Ordo rot. She remembered one mission in particular: a strike against a blacksite ghost network that ended in silence and a half-dozen bodies no one could officially account for. Now, watching him here, it felt the same. Calculated. Personal.
Her arms were crossed, and the fatigue around her eyes hadn’t dulled the suspicion in her voice. She watched the way Hawke moved—each keystroke surgical, every parameter chosen like a predator marking terrain. He wasn’t improvising. He was engineering obsession.
“You’re betting everything on the idea that she takes the bait.”
Hawke didn’t look up. He typed a final sequence, eyes locked on the spreading data trail.
“She doesn’t have a choice.”
He hit send.
The trap was no longer theoretical.
Now it breathed.
Now it waited.
Somewhere, deep in the black, an old relay flickered to life. Dust flaked from buried signal dishes. A forgotten receiver pulsed once in reply—then hissed into silence.
The signal didn’t vanish. It rippled. And something out there listened.
The Spider Moves
The command center drifted through the outer layers of the Venom Cluster, where espionage and betrayal bled into the very space between stars. Masked beneath radiation shadows and falsified beacon pings, it drifted like a rumor unspoken—one more secret in a region built on lies and leverage. From the outside, it was just another derelict hauler. Inside, it was a war room carved from precision and paranoia.
Colonel Mirek stood at its center, boots planted, arms clasped behind her back. A tactical map flickered before her—a sphere of luminous data points pulsing like nerve endings—red for rising heat signatures, blue for fleet positions, and ghost-white for contacts that shouldn’t exist at all. Her jaw was still, her eyes colder than the ice fields of Kholodna, but the tendons in her neck flexed with every silent beat her foot tapped out.
The room was alive with tension. Holo-screens buzzed with incoming feeds. Intelligence streams filtered in from covert channels, pirate syndicates, even dead drops rigged to old relay codes. All converging on one thing.
A name.
Hawke.
An aide stepped forward, face pale behind his tactical visor. “We confirmed the leak.” He hesitated, then added, “It’s moving through shadow networks. Quiet but… spreading.”
“Details?” she asked, voice flat.
“Fragmented file. Looks like recovered Ordo data. Badly obfuscated. But the headers match old field protocols. If it’s real—”
Another voice cut in, sharper, older. “If it’s real, the Ordo won’t wait. They’ll burn everything. Him first.”
Mirek didn’t blink.
Her mind spun beneath the surface, cold and fast. Hawke knew too much already. If he had even a piece of the Ordo’s erased black files—if he figured out what she authorized before the Summit, what she covered up—he wouldn’t just be a liability.
He’d be a lit match tossed into a silo of dry powder.
And the Ordo? They’d erase her name before they sent a team.
For half a second, a flicker of doubt touched her spine. She killed it.
She exhaled, slow and sharp.
“No more running,” she said.
The aides stopped. Silence rippled outward.
She turned toward her operations officer. “Pull every shadow asset we have from the Outer Frontier. Redirect Whisper intercept protocols to my authority. No cutouts. No deniable operatives. This is mine.”
The officer hesitated. “Colonel, with respect, we don’t know where he is.”
“We will.”
Mirek stepped forward, her reflection ghosted in the tactical map’s glow, fractured by data pulses. Not cornered. Not desperate. Just resolved.
“He wants to draw me in. Fine.”
She touched the interface. A beacon lit up—a soft, pulsing red dot on the edge of a forgotten system.
“I’m coming.”
Stillness
The chamber was buried deep within a forgotten node of the Selen Vortex Array—a relic of pre-expansion communication tech long thought dismantled. Its corridors were narrow, ribbed with rusted conduit, the hum of ancient servers a constant subsonic drone that vibrated in the bones more than the ears. Dust curled in stagnant air, and the dim glow of auxiliary lights pulsed like the heartbeat of something dormant. Watching. Waiting.
In the control room, the only light came from the screens. Rows of them. Stacked three high, each flickering with surveillance feeds, packet intercepts, echo traces, and entropy-mapped predictions. No voices. No alarms. Just motion. Just patterns. They flickered not like machines, but like eyes—watching, blinking, anticipating. The quiet here was absolute—an engineered silence so thick it crushed sound before it could form.
The operative stood motionless in the center of it all, a silhouette etched from menace itself. Clad in black, his armor was matte and seamless, absorbing light rather than reflecting it. His masked face bore no insignia, no emotion—just the void. Hands clasped behind his back in a stillness too deliberate to be natural. Not a man. A presence. A judgment suspended in time.
He didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. He could’ve been carved from the same obsidian used to mark execution sites in the Outer Reaches. He didn’t process the data—he communed with it, as if the network bent to his will, not the other way around. The only hint of life was the occasional tilt of his head, slight and inhuman, in response to shifting inputs—like a predator scenting blood in the current. Ever aware. Ever watching. Ever waiting to strike.
Hawke’s false transmission was there. A blinking node on five different screens. Scrubbed, filtered, dissected. The metadata had been altered, but the cadence was unmistakable. Like a song the operative hadn’t heard in years but remembered instantly.
A memory. A signature. A whisper from a ghost he thought long buried.
A figure stepped forward from the shadows—younger, less composed. Their steps faltered just slightly on the threshold of the control room. Gloved hands trembled as they held out a datapad. Reflections of the display danced across their visor—warped, distorted—as if the system already sensed they didn’t belong.
“Sir, the leak is replicating. Outer Frontier syndicates, GDEC fragments, even the old Coalition deadbands. It’s spreading faster than projected.”
The operative didn’t move.
“It could be a trap,” the subordinate added, as if hoping the words would deflect responsibility.
A long pause. The silence between them stretched like a wire drawn taut.
Then, the operative tilted his head a fraction.
“A trap for whom?”
The subordinate swallowed. Hard. Said nothing. Their reflection lingered in one of the screens—just for a second—then blinked out.
On the central screen, Hawke’s signature ghosted in and out of the decrypt layers. Not a location. Not a message. A provocation. Calculated. Intentional. Familiar.
He used to say silence was a weapon, the operative thought. But it was always Hawke who broke it first.
The operative raised one gloved hand with surgical precision. Screens shifted instantly. New protocols overlaid the data, adjusting threat assessment metrics, predictive engagement vectors, and Ordo field response parameters.
“We do not move yet,” he said. His voice was modulated, mechanical—a voice trained to strip tone and leave only command.
“Then what are our orders?”
“Observe. Catalog. Do not interfere.”
He turned from the screens at last, the movement smooth and unsettling, like a machine resuming function. He disappeared into the corridor beyond, boots silent on the grated floor. His voice followed, cold and low, like a signal meant only for the shadows.
“Let them think they hunt each other.”
As the door sealed behind him, the chamber fell still.
One of the central screens blinked. Once. Twice.
Then settled into a deeper, slower pulse.
Hawke’s face flickered on one screen for a single frame. Then vanished.
The Ordo watched.
And waited.
The Baited Hook
The dead world had no name anymore—just a designation: X-4114, a forgotten coordinate buried in decommissioned star charts and redacted logs.
Once, it might’ve been a mining colony or a refueling depot—something useful. Now it was dust and static, its surface split by tectonic wounds so old they’d forgotten how to bleed. Scars ran deep through the broken crust, and long-dead infrastructure jutted like bone fragments from a corpse. Satellite wreckage hung in the upper atmosphere like frozen ash, caught in orbital decay. No wind. No storms. Just a silence so vast it swallowed stars and memory alike. It wasn’t just emptiness—it was expectancy, like the planet itself held its breath.
Near the equator, buried beneath the collapsed hull of an ancient cargo tower, sat what had once been a smuggler’s outpost. Steel ribs buckled under time and neglect, rust carving arteries into the metal walls. It had the look of a place not just forgotten by governments—but actively erased. A scar no one wanted to remember.
Perfect.
Inside, the air was brittle, laced with the dry taste of carbon scoring and the metallic sting of ozone. Jury-rigged powerline strips buzzed dimly from the walls, pulsing like dying veins, while somewhere below, a battered generator chugged in irregular, mechanical coughs. Every breath felt borrowed. Every sound scraped raw against the thick silence.
Hawke sat at a scarred workbench near the blast doors, rifle across his lap, fingers idle but eyes locked forward. His shirt clung damp to his skin beneath his gear, and the wrap around his shoulder pulsed with stubborn heat. But he didn’t favor it. Couldn’t. Not now. The tension in the room wasn’t sharp anymore. It had condensed into something colder. Heavier. Like a wire pulled taut just before the snap.
He glanced toward the sensor console, then back to the rifle, his jaw tight. He’d baited traps before. But this time, his prey had claws.
Jorhan paced the opposite wall, her boots making little sound against the dust-caked floor. She moved with the coiled precision of someone trained to channel fear into motion—checking gear, inspecting magazines, recalibrating a sidearm she’d already calibrated twice. Her jaw clenched and unclenched. Each step marked time she couldn’t control.
Her eyes flicked toward Hawke.
“You’re sure about this?” she asked without stopping.
Hawke didn’t look up. “She’ll come. She has to.”
He reached for a set of thermal scopes, fingers moving with unconscious precision, and slotted them into place on the rifle. Click. Locked. Done.
The generator wheezed. The overhead glow buzzed. Somewhere in the ceiling, metal creaked with the temperature shift.
Then—a sound.
Barely a sound at all.
A single, sharp ping from the sensor panel. Like a fingernail on glass in the middle of a cathedral.
Hawke went still. Not startled—ready.
Jorhan was already moving. Two silent strides took her to the console. Her fingers danced across its cracked surface, bringing up grainy readouts and scrambled telemetry.
The signal arrived just as planned—quiet, precise, unmistakable. No grand arrival. No alarms. Just the soft echo of something falling into place.
Something was coming.
Something heavy.
Low altitude. Silent burn. No transponder.
Jorhan exhaled, the breath long and slow, like she was bleeding pressure from her lungs. Her thumb tapped once against the grip of her sidearm—an unconscious rhythm, like counting seconds until the first shot.
“Showtime.”
Hawke stood, shoulders rolling back as he settled the rifle strap across his torso. His silhouette seemed taller now, drawn tighter to the moment. No breath wasted. No words needed.
Outside, past the fractured ceiling and the blank, starless sky, the spider descended.
A shadow crept across the surface—gradual, stretching, inevitable. Dust curled upward from the cratered soil as the air itself seemed to retreat. The light changed. The silence broke.
The trap was set.
And the web was tightening.
The Spider and the Fly
The world outside the outpost was breathless.
Dust rolled in thin layers across fractured rock plains, untouched by wind, by life, by anything that moved without purpose. Horizon to horizon, the dead world stretched like a graveyard of time itself. No birds. No clouds. Just the weight of silence—tense and unbroken, coiled like a tripwire.
Near the edge of a crumbled ridge, Hawke lay prone against the cold stone, rifle balanced on a makeshift bipod. The scope blinked with faint thermal returns, its reticle locked onto shadows moving through the dust. Four figures. Tight formation. Minimal noise. No chatter on the open bands.
Professional.
But it wasn’t the team that held his gaze.
It was the fifth.
A half-step behind, helmetless. Steady. Controlled.
Mirek.
He watched her move—not fast, not reckless. She was reading the land, the angles, the possibilities. But it didn’t matter. She was here.
His finger hovered near the trigger. He could take the shot. One breath, one pull, and it would all be over. Revenge, clean and final.
But the truth clawed at him. What did she know? What had the Ordo shown her? Had she acted alone at the Summit, or was she just another pawn in someone else’s game? The questions burned hotter than the hate.
And then—
a flash.
A single frozen instant.
Smoke.
Screams echoing through rubble.
The stench of burning flesh and scorched metal.
A body—charred and broken—twisted beneath a shattered comm terminal.
Ash fell like dirty snow, and distant wails carried through the ruin like the last breaths of a dying world.
The trigger remained untouched.
He gritted his teeth. Not yet. Not like this.
“You always think you’re the one pulling the strings, Mirek,” he muttered, more to himself than to Jorhan beside him.
She crouched a few meters to his left, carbine braced against her shoulder. She shifted subtly closer, just enough for him to sense it. A quiet, wordless signal.
I got you. Don’t waver.
“So what happens now?” she asked.
Hawke didn’t look away from the scope. His breath was steady. The trigger still untouched.
“Now,” he said, “we see if she realizes just how much she’s already lost.”
He squeezed.
The shot cracked across the flats like lightning through dry air.
One of the shadows collapsed—spine severed mid-step, the body hitting the ground with dead weight.
Chaos didn’t follow.
Mirek didn’t flinch. She dropped to cover behind a jagged slab of metal, signaling with a sharp hand motion. The remaining operatives dispersed with eerie synchronicity, gliding through the dust like phantoms bleeding into the terrain, moving with ghost-quiet precision.
Jorhan adjusted her position. “They’re not panicking.”
“They’re hers,” Hawke replied. “She trained them not to.”
Through the scope, he watched her. Mirek leaned out, eyes scanning the cliffs.
She knew this was a trap.
But she hadn’t figured out whose.
Another shot. Jorhan, this time. A second operative dropped.
The last two moved in tandem—too fast to track easily, breaking toward cover, cutting distance.
And then Mirek rose.
Hands lifted, weapon holstered. She stepped forward slowly, out of cover, like she had all the time in the galaxy. The wind caught the edge of her coat. Dust swirled around her boots. Her silhouette cut through the haze like a phantom refusing the grave.
Hawke stiffened but didn’t fire.
She moved with the confidence of someone who didn’t fear death. Only irrelevance.
“I didn’t come to kill you,” she said, voice raised but calm. Her words carried across an open-band comm channel—static-laced, deliberate, a signal they’d activated the moment she stepped into view. “I came to offer you clarity.”
Jorhan kept her sights locked. “This a surrender?”
“No,” Mirek said. “It’s an invitation.”
Hawke stood, rifle lowered but not slung. He stepped out from behind the rocks, boots crunching over fractured stone.
“You think I’d work for the same people who tore everything down?” he asked.
“You already did,” she countered. “You just didn’t know who was signing your orders.”
Silence stretched between them.
Mirek had been advancing slowly since stepping from cover—deliberate, unarmed, eyes never leaving Hawke’s perch. Now she stood only a few meters below the rise, close enough for him to see the set of her jaw, the steel in her spine, the weight behind her words.
“You could be more than a ghost chasing ghosts, Hawke. With your mind, your reach… You could shape what comes next. No more running. No more lies. Just control.”
He studied her through the dusty veil between them—watched the tension in her stance, the way she held herself just a breath too steady. Not her eyes, but the conviction underneath. The belief. The desperation.
“You really don’t get it,” he said quietly. “You think this is about control. But you’ve already lost it.”
He tapped his wrist. A display blinked to life—highlighting a curated data stream pre-seeded with the leak. It bloomed across the comm bandwidth with ruthless precision: projected outcomes, destabilization vectors, and key fragments already cascading through Outer Frontier intel channels.
Mirek’s face flickered.
“You don’t even know what they kept from you,” Hawke added. “But you will. Soon.”
For the first time, her eyes shifted—not with certainty, but with doubt.
Then—
The ridge behind them exploded in light.
A shockwave rolled through the stone, and alarms inside Hawke’s HUD flared red.
“Proximity breach,” Jorhan snapped, spinning.
Shapes moved through the dust behind them. Sleek. Silent. Featureless.
Ordo.
Not soldiers. Not even assassins.
Predators.
They moved without footfall, without breath. Cloaked in matte obsidian armor, they seemed to bend the air around them. Distorted the dust. Bled static into the HUDs. For a moment, Hawke’s display shifted—his own vitals, his own position, rendered in alien metrics and symbols.
They were seeing through Ordo’s eyes.
The violation wasn’t just physical. It was conceptual.
“Shit,” Hawke growled. “They’re not here for her. They’re here for us.”
Pulsefire cracked. Jorhan opened up with tight bursts, dropping one of the black-suited agents.
Hawke ducked, dragging his rifle around and returning fire. “She set us up.”
“No,” Jorhan shouted, voice tight. “They used her.”
Through the haze, Hawke saw Mirek retreating, her last operatives dragging her back toward a dropship kicking up dust near the horizon.
He hesitated, then turned sharply, the decision hard and immediate.
“Fall back to the outpost!” he shouted.
The trap had worked.
But some spiders drag you into their web.
Contingency
Inside the Null Mantle—the Ordo’s mobile command crucible—the air was colder than the steel it was built from. It drifted silently above the battlefield, a shadow without name or origin, its hull matte-black and signal-silent, as if reality itself recoiled from its presence. No identifiers. No insignias. Just seamless dark alloy walls veined with soft white light, and banks of floating screens casting shifting blue across the faces of those inside. Operatives moved with silent precision, each gesture rehearsed, exact, ritualistic. There was no idle chatter, no hesitation—only the steady hiss of pressure seals and the rhythmic pulse of hidden machinery, like a distant heartbeat reverberating through the deck plating.
At the center, the commander stood alone before the main display—tall, unmoving, hands folded behind his back like a man contemplating art. His uniform bore no rank. His face, what little of it was visible beneath the shadows and display glow, was void of anything recognizably human.
The screen flickered as Mirek’s transmission ended. Her face vanished. Only silence remained.
“Contingency authorized,” a voice whispered.
No reaction.
Only the hum of shifting data, as a dozen overlapping feeds cascaded onto the main interface—biometric reads, enemy combatant tagging, threat matrices running at full parse. No names. No identities. Just asset codes. Targets.
Hawke and Jorhan.
The commander gave a single nod.
The order didn’t echo—it rippled.
Outside, the Null Mantle peeled open like a mechanical bloom. Black-clad Ordo operatives deployed into the dust with inhuman synchronicity—soundless, featureless shadows sliding into formation without a word, like death cultists summoned from the void.
The outpost was a bleeding wound in the stone.
Gunfire cracked through the dust-choked air, bursts of plasma and kinetic thunder rattling across twisted support beams and half-collapsed scaffoldings. The air reeked of scorched metal, blood, and ozone. Hawke moved like instinct-given form—back pressed to a crumbling wall, rifle raised, counting breaths between shots.
To his left, Jorhan dropped behind a rusted bulkhead, reloading in practiced rhythm. Blood trickled down her arm where a pulse round had grazed her, but her grip never wavered.
“They’re pressing us hard,” she said, breath short.
Hawke peered around the edge of their cover. Two Ordo operatives swept low and tight through the flank. He fired twice—one dropped, the other rolled and kept moving like a machine.
“They don’t break,” he muttered. “They just adapt.”
A flashbang dropped behind them.
“Down!”
They hit the ground as it detonated. Ears ringing, vision swimming.
The enemy was close now.
A shadow lunged from the haze—Hawke caught the arm mid-strike, pivoted his hips, and used the operative’s momentum to drive them hard into the crumbling wall beside him. As the soldier staggered, he struck again—an elbow to the visor, shattering the mask and dropping the body cold.
Jorhan met the charging operative head-on, sidestepped at the last instant, and drove her knee into their ribs with a sickening crack. As the soldier doubled over, she snatched the blade from her belt in a blur and drove it upward beneath the chin plate. Blood sprayed, hot and sudden, across her arm as she twisted the knife free. The body dropped without a sound. She didn’t wait to breathe—only turned, already scanning for the next.
More were coming.
“Three left,” she hissed. “Maybe four.”
“No time to count.”
The fight collapsed into chaos—brutal, breathless, no more tactics, just survival. Pulsefire gave way to snarled breath and the wet sound of fists connecting with flesh. Blades flashed in the haze, catching the last of the dying light. Every movement became instinct. Elbows shattered jawlines. Boots crushed hands reaching for weapons. Hawke drove his shoulder into an operative’s gut, sent them sprawling, then followed with a savage stab to the throat. Jorhan grunted as she slammed another into the wall, spine first, the crack echoing louder than any gunshot.
This was no longer a battle. It was a slaughter, and they were still losing.
Hawke took a brutal hit to the ribs—his armor cracked under the force, the shock bruising deep. He reeled, snarling through the pain, and surged forward with a wild headbutt that sent the enemy staggering. No pause—he followed with an uppercut that shattered the operative’s visor and sprayed blood across his knuckles. The man dropped, twitching.
Jorhan slammed into another like a storm—grappling, twisting, forcing them down into the dirt with raw violence. Her blade flashed once, twice, blood arcing as she carved through tendon and throat. She was gasping now, breath ragged, arms trembling from strain. Her precision had become desperation—deadly, but breaking.
They were both soaked in blood, theirs and the enemy’s, breath coming in shallow, rattling gulps. Every heartbeat felt like a countdown. Every second was bought with another piece of flesh. And somewhere deep in Hawke’s mind, a memory stirred—Voss’s last breath, Emery’s final look of panic. Not failure. Not silence. Not again.
But the tide was shifting.
Hawke fell to one knee, coughing blood into the dust. Jorhan slumped beside him, arm clutched tight against her side, blood streaming between her fingers.
“Out of ammo,” she rasped.
“Same,” Hawke muttered, dragging his sleeve across his face. “Down to knives and broken promises.”
Jorhan gave a raw, humorless laugh that turned into a grimace. “This how it ends?”
He didn’t answer at first. Just stared across the haze as black shapes moved with machine certainty. He could feel the circle closing.
“You want to surrender?” he asked, voice low, quiet enough to feel like a confession.
She shook her head, barely. “Do you?”
“No.”
“Then we go out swinging.”
“Yeah,” Hawke said, almost a whisper. “But not before we make them bleed for every inch.”
Jorhan turned her head slightly, eyes locking with his. “In case we don’t get another chance—”
“Don’t,” he said, breath shallow. “Save it.”
But he reached out, just briefly, letting his bloodied hand rest on hers.
And for a heartbeat, they were still.
Together.
Waiting to die.
They were together. Bleeding, fatigued, and outnumbered—but not broken.
Within the Null Mantle’s observation chamber, the battle unfolded in perfect silence.
The commander watched through HUD feeds—each soldier’s POV layered and filtered, angles stitched together in a seamless tapestry of calculated violence. No emotion. No commentary. Just metrics. Muscle response. Oxygen debt. Kill counts.
“Sir,” a subordinate said finally, voice tight. “Kill or capture?”
The room paused.
The commander did not turn. He did not speak.
Seconds stretched like a tensioned wire.
“Sir?”
He finally nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“Pull them back. We’re leaving.”
The subordinate blinked. “But—”
The commander’s voice was calm. Inevitable.
“We’ve seen enough.”
The feeds began to go dark, one by one. As if the machine itself had blinked. As if the system itself had reached a conclusion.
All but one.
Hawke braced himself against the wall, chest heaving, blood in his mouth. Jorhan staggered beside him, sidearm raised on trembling arms.
But the final push never came.
The last of the Ordo operatives disengaged. Fell back.
Within seconds, they were gone. No extraction trail. No gunfire. Just absence.
Hawke looked up, eyes scanning the ridgeline.
“What the hell…?”
Jorhan wiped the blood from her lip. “They had us.”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “And they let us go.”
A pause. Then Hawke said quietly:
“Because it was never about us.”
This wasn’t about the outpost’s defenses. It was about them—how they broke, how they bled, how long they lasted.
Within the observation chamber of the Null Mantle, the commander stood alone before the final screen.
Hawke’s image flickered in thermal silhouette.
Then faded.
The command console pulsed with faint white light, casting sharp shadows behind the still form of the commander.
A voice, colder than before, whispered again:
“Contingency authorized.”
And the lights dimmed—not in retreat, but in ritual.
The system had seen.
And it remembered what came next.
Pieces are moving, and every secret has a price. Continue the Hunt for Truth—read the next episode now. Episode 21 arrives Friday, September 19. Subscribe to get it the instant it drops.