CLEARANCE WARNING

This page assumes you have finished Hard Parole and Conditional Release.
There will be spoilers.
Still catching up?

Finished Hard Parole but not Conditional Release?

Caught up?
Excellent.

Geist has been expecting you.

---

Ghosts don’t retire. They regroup.

Six months after Conditional Release, everyone has been trying to move on.
With varying degrees of success.

Wraith, Shade and Kael have spent the last six months together aboard the Lethe, attempting something vaguely resembling a life.
Kael has been touring the frontier trying to persuade an interdimensional cult that he is not, in fact, their returned god.
It is not going particularly well.
Shade is having memories that aren’t his.
Spirit is alive, recovering, and profoundly unimpressed by the entire experience.
Phantom has built a life with Seori in the Void.
Rina has gone home.

And Geist?
Geist has been watching.
Because the Confederation is lying again.

So, six years after the War tore Ghost Command apart, a message goes out to every surviving Ghost:
Operational convergence required.

Or, translated from Geist:
Come home.

For the first time since the War, Ghost Command will stand together again.
All six of them.

They have changed.
Their enemies have changed.
And the universe has absolutely not finished with them.

---

The reunion you’ve been waiting for

Hard Parole brought the Ghosts back into Wraith’s life.
Conditional Release began reconnecting the pieces.
Flight Risk puts them all in the same room.

Wraith.
Shade.
Geist.
Rina (a.k.a. Spook).
Phantom.
Spirit.

Ghost Command.

Together again for the first time in six years.
Older.
More damaged.
Significantly harder to kill.
And still carrying twenty years of love, resentment, loyalty, grief, inside jokes and highly specific methods of annoying one another.

There will be tactical planning.
There will be emotional reunions.
There will be alcohol.
There may be broken ribs.
Some of them will be accidental.

---

Unfortunately, someone has noticed the ghosts

The Confederation has a problem.
Six years of peace have not delivered what its leaders promised.
Public anger is growing.
Faith in the government is falling.
And the manufactured threat of a new war with the Others isn’t working the way it was supposed to.

So the people in charge reach for something that has worked before.
Fear.
Old footage.
Old enemies.
Old lies.

And the final battle of the War – the battle that destroyed Ghost Command – is suddenly useful again.

The dead make excellent propaganda.
Especially when nobody expects them to object.

That assumption may prove unwise.

---

Family reunion. Galactic conspiracy. Ancient cosmic bullshit.

The political situation would be complicated enough on its own.
Naturally, it isn’t on its own.

Because Shade is changing.
His visions are becoming something else.
His tattoos are becoming something else.
And something older than Ghost Command appears to know exactly what he is becoming, even if he doesn’t.

Meanwhile, Kael can feel a deadline approaching.
He doesn’t know what happens when it arrives.
He only knows that the thing inside him does.

And somewhere beyond the Confederation, the people humanity once called the Others may have answers Ghost Command has spent six years avoiding.

There is only one obvious solution.
Go ask them.

What could possibly go wrong?

---

Turns out, the Others have a family too

For two books, humanity’s oldest enemy has existed at the edge of the story.
Ships in the dark.
Strange technology.
Leviathans.
The people on the other side of the War.

Phantom knows better.

And this time Ghost Command has to follow him into a world much larger (and considerably stranger) than the one they thought they understood.
Old assumptions are about to become liabilities.
Old enemies may not be enemies.
And the difference between human, Other, Artifact and god is becoming increasingly inconvenient.

Geist would like everyone to stop changing the parameters of the problem.

The universe has declined his request.

---

At its heart, this is still a family story

The galaxy is getting bigger.
The mythology is getting deeper.
The stakes are becoming distinctly existential.
But Flight Risk is ultimately about six people who once became more than a team; and what happens when they try to become that again after six years apart.

Because reunion isn’t the same thing as repair.
Some wounds have healed.
Some haven’t.

Some have merely become easier to hide.
And coming home means confronting the people who remember exactly who you were before you learned how to survive without them.

The Ghosts are very good at surviving.
Being human remains an ongoing challenge.

---

If you’ve been waiting for…

The full Ghost Command reunion

Yes.
Finally.

More Shade

Unfortunately for everyone involved, yes.
He has acquired additional cosmic responsibilities.
He remains exactly as responsible as you would expect.

Spirit

He’s alive.
He’s struggling.
He’s recovering.

And Ghost Command has opinions about all three.

Phantom and Seori

The resident giant has to decide how much of his old family can coexist with the new one he chose.
Seori is considerably less worried about this than he is.

Wraith, Shade and Kael

Six months of living together has solved absolutely everything.
Obviously.
There are no insecurities, complicated boundaries, cosmic possession problems or emotionally constipated former Majors anywhere in sight.

This statement has been reviewed by SID and rated Entirely Fictional.

Geist being Geist

Someone has to work out what the hell is happening.
Unfortunately, the universe keeps changing the answer.

Rina

Back with the people she loves.
Still capable of solving most problems by hitting them.

Some systems remain reassuringly stable.

---

The universe has started using nouns ominously

The Void.
The Choir.
The Artifact.
The Guardian.
The Warrior.
The Holy Sun.

At some point, capitalisation stops being grammar and becomes a threat assessment.

Flight Risk begins pulling together questions that have been building since Hard Parole: about the Inbetween, Ghost Command, the Others, the Artifacts, and why certain people have been caught in the middle of all of it.

You will get answers.

This is not necessarily comforting.

---

Reader advisory

Flight Risk deals with darker psychological and political material, including:

• propaganda and political corruption
• trauma and PTSD
• dissociation and loss of self
• suicidal ideation and intent
• possession and compromised agency
• violence
• morally questionable decisions
• psychological distress
• institutional manipulation

There is also sex.

Shade would like it noted that this time he gets some.

Geist has asked that this section end immediately.

[VIEW FULL CONTENT INFORMATION]

---

Ready for the reunion?

They survived the War.
They survived six years apart.
They survived finding each other again.

Now they have to figure out what Ghost Command is for when the war they were built to fight is over and something much older is beginning to move in the dark.

All six Ghosts.
One family.
Several governments making extremely poor choices.
And considerably too many cosmic entities taking a personal interest.

---

Already survived Flight Risk?

Well.
That escalated.
Your clearance level has been upgraded.

Possibly against Geist’s better judgement.

[I FINISHED FLIGHT RISK]

You now have access to caught-up-reader material, including deeper Archive files, bonus fiction and material that would ruin several perfectly good revelations for anyone further back in the series.

[ENTER THE CLEARANCE 4 ARCHIVES]

---

Next: Hostile Intent

The Confederation wanted a war.
Something else was listening.

What comes next is bigger than Ghost Command, bigger than humanity’s old conflict with the Others, and considerably less interested in remaining hidden.

And Helios?
Helios is done waiting.

[JOIN THE HOSTILE INTENT WAITLIST]

---

Want to go backwards before you go forward?

Now is also an excellent time to read:

Ghost Formation

You’ve met Ghost Command.
You’ve seen what six years apart did to them.
Now meet Ash, Zane, Matt, Rina, Elijah and Zahir before they were ghosts.

Before the end of the War.
Before the prison.
Before they lost each other.

You already know where the story ends.
That does not make it hurt less.

---

Flight Risk
Book Three of The Inbetween Archives
by AJ Pryor