Chapter 5
She could almost hear their voices in her head.
Phantom. Shade. Geist. Spook. And Spirit.
Their pictures were up on the screen in her room. Staring at her with benign accusation.
Had they survived? Did her last, desperate gamble pay off?
Or were her team now just more ghosts in the Void?
Each were listed as MIA. No bodies found. Whereabouts unknown.
But Golden Boy clearly thought that at least some of them were still around. So she let herself hope. Just a little.
It had turned out that Hound was Head of Security on the Eventide. But he’d been an infantry grunt in the War. One, apparently, that specialized in tracking.
She’s a war criminal with a pulse.
In the quiet and isolation of her room she let her lip curl into a sneer. You disobey orders once to try to save people and they brand you a war criminal.
Her hand covered her right hip.
Literally.
Not that the brass ever gave a damn about context. Just optics. And bodies. Well, lesson learned, and it was a mistake she wouldn’t be making again.
She hesitated, then dragged Phantom’s image forward. Let it fill the screen.
Her fingers traced the line of his jaw.
His dark face was grim in the picture, but smiling in her memory. His voice a soft growl in her ear as they moved as one, skin and sweat and stolen moments.
Don’t you fucking dare, Ash.
Those had been the last words he had ever said to her.
She sank onto the bed and pulled her legs up to her chest. The mattress was soft. The silence wasn’t.
Don’t you fucking dare.
But she had. She’d had to. One to die so five could live.
Yet she had survived.
And had no clue whether her sacrifice, willingly made, was worth it.
“She’s a machine!”
The excitement in Patch’s voice felt wrong.
“She’s a person,” Kael said quietly. A deadly one, a damaged and unstable one, but still a person.
“Yes, yes, but she’s an incredible specimen.”
He glared at her and she checked herself, “Person, I mean. After five years in a cell with the bare minimum of nutrition, she shouldn’t be standing. But she’s strong. Conditioned. I bet we could put her in the ring right now against Ramirez and she’d win.”
Ramirez was their current featherweight hand-to-hand champion.
Kael suspected they could put her in the ring with Hound and she’d still hand him his ass. Not because she was stronger, but because he didn’t think she’d have any restraint once she got going.
“Now,” Patch was saying, “she’s definitely not ready to go back into the Fold, but she’s picking up weight. A couple more weeks and I think we can chance it.”
“Why do you call it the Fold, Patch?” He’d heard the term often enough, but as far as he knew she had never been in it.
She blinked at him. “Because that’s what the Inbetween does, Sir, folds space. Also, it’s easier to say.”
Fair enough.
“And the shield?”
“Eh, I need to get her back in the saddle, so to speak. Measure her responses while she’s there. Are you sure you want to go with her?”
He thought of the Tether—his neural signal linked to her spinal column; proximity locked. If they strayed too far apart, it would kill her.
“It’s not a matter of want. It’s necessary.”
“Then we’ll have to keep it short to begin with. Your reactions to the Fold have been… sub-optimal.”
That was putting it mildly. He’d been sick as three dogs every time, even with only briefest exposure. Even now, just the thought of going back turned his stomach.
But he knew if he lengthened Wraith’s leash, as she’d put it, they would lose her. Permanently.
“Then I guess you had better get the shield algorithm working.”
She nodded and the door beeped, a new visitor.
“Enter.”
Hound stalked into the room, nodded at him with the bare minimum of respect due to his rank, and pulled up a display up.
“We’ve lost Phantom, again,” Hound told them. “The man is well named. But I have a line on Spook.”
“That’s my cue to head back to Engineering. With your leave?”
Kael waved Patch on, his attention on the screen. The woman on it had a shaved head, muscular shoulders, and tattoo sleeves covering both arms.
Ghost Command’s hand-to-hand expert and the only other woman on the team. Karina Chekova, aka Spook.
He recalled the vid of her taking down a man three times her size in the ring on Tethys Station. Back when there was a Tethys Station.
“Where?”
“The Folly.”
Kael frowned. Not the answer he wanted to hear.
The Folly was the common name for Ludlow’s Folly. A mercenary stronghold on a black moon, reputedly named for a merc captain that took on a full Battle Cruiser and won.
It topped the list of places people in his position deemed “potentially useful, but otherwise too much trouble to mess with”.
“What do you want me to do?” Hound asked, his tone flat.
The man didn’t like him, Kael knew. Didn’t respect him. Didn’t trust him.
He suspected that it wasn’t that he out-ranked Hound that was the problem.
But the rank and file had differing opinions of how necessary an evil the Strategic Intelligence Division was, and Hound apparently fell on the lower side of that spectrum. Despite utilizing their intel for his own purposes.
Or maybe he just didn’t like the way Kael brushed his hair. Or that he was willing to do whatever it took to get the job done.
“Keep tracking the rest. I want eyes on Phantom yesterday.”
He turned back to the screen, ignoring the hammering of his heart in his ears. “I think it’s time Wraith and I went on a little field trip. Let’s find out how well she plays with others.”