“That’s exactly my point. How can we trust these soldiers if they have no civilian oversight? Do you realize that one of those Phantoms could walk up to both of us right now and kill us?”

  “I do, but do you realize the number of illnesses we permanently wipe out of existence because of the same group?” – From Race to the Senate, Senatorial Debates 3265.

  “What do they use this place for?” Alec asked as they crept down a reinforced stone hallway as quietly as possible. Occasional roughly cut offshoots led into meandering depths and gave more than a little support to his belief that this structure had been here long before humans claimed it.

  “To manufacture the Serum,” Nessa replied, brushing gauntleted fingers along the wall, “Though, why the tunnel of a factory has so many doors is beyond me.”

  Jack almost would’ve preferred if the hallways were dark, mysterious things filled with shadows that seemed endless in their depths. Instead, every inch was well lit to an almost unnatural degree. So bright and sterilized, it reminded him of Algol and the building titled ‘medical.’

  It was a comparison with no pleasant memories.

  He scanned through various viewpoints, expecting more of the same empty corridors he’d seen before. Unlike previous checks, this time he found an injured enemy combatant resting fitfully.

  The enemy soldier was lying on a pile of haphazardly stacked mattresses, injured and unable to fight. Jack didn’t want to attack the sleeping Raak. Killing an enemy that could not defend itself was cowardly. Unfortunately, he understood that leaving an enemy alive and at their backs was stupid and would almost certainly cause issues down the line.

  “We’ve got him,” Nessa said after Jack told the group about the Raak’Shee. Motioning to Candice, the pair crept silently into the room. “Just keep an eye out and make sure nothing hears us.”

  As they approached, threads of power snaked out from the Binder’s armor and around the creature’s body. The cables tightened, constantly adding pressure to the already injured alien.

  Nessa drew her weapons and shaped the blades into combat knives before placing them against its throat. Receiving a nod from Candice, she struck.

  They cut deep, slicing through skin, muscle, and bone as they made the quick journey through its neck. Not to be outdone, Candice’s threads of yellow energy tightened well past what its skin could withstand. In a matter of seconds, the two women had torn the creature apart.

  “Guys, come check this out,” Alec said, interrupting the silent yet brutal scene. “Is any of this standard issue?”

  Across the hall, the dragoon stood in a room absolutely stuffed with half-finished gadgets and weapons. Inside, Jack noted a workboard with a complex drawing of each spectral frequency and how it related to each specific power. Under the image, the word ‘Crossover?’ was written in bold letters with an extremely complex mathematical formula beneath.

  “Actually, no… none of this is standard. At least, it isn’t standard yet,” Alec said, flipping through a holographic schematic in the air and answering his own question. “This must be where they make the new toys. Look at this one. The outer casing seems like it attaches to someone’s armor.”

  Digging deeper into the drawing, he continued, “What’s really odd is this one. These symbols represent multiple frequencies of Light. It proves that the math for processing Aegis Light is much different from the math of a Phantom.”

  “So, what am I compatible with?” Dave asked, poking at a machine, trying to understand its function.

  “According to this, it should be possible for you to layer your power on top of mine and Thea’s,” Jenkins stated, “But I’ve never seen anything that suggests it is possible before today.”

  They cut the conversation short when the sound of heavy footfalls pounded outside the chamber. Within a heartbeat, silence spread across the group like a blanket tossed on a campfire. With as much stealth as they could manage, they moved out of the potential field of vision.

  Grabbing a half-finished machine from the workbench, Jack flung it across the room. The resulting clang created an avalanche of sound that caused the invaders to charge into the workshop to investigate.

  When a pair of Raak crossed the threshold, they didn’t notice the blue barrier that sprang into existence behind them. But even if they did, they wouldn’t have cared. It was time to fight, and they believed wholeheartedly they could win against seven human soldiers.

  The first alien threw its head back and screamed in rage, not noticing the lines of power whipping through the air. Its lack of situational awareness was quickly rectified as one of those lines coiled around its throat like a predatory snake.

  Before the garrote could tighten, the second guard grabbed a red-bladed hand-ax from its hip and threw it at Candice.

  An instant before the weapon hit her, a shield of blue light sprang into existence. The weapon clattered to the ground and Nessa dashed in with both weapons drawn, blades forming even as she readied to strike.

  Enraged that its partner was still bound and choking, the second guard swung a fist and forced the Breaker to flip backward to dodge. Dropping a weapon, she sprung back up from the impromptu backflip with her free hand and away from the creature.

  Alec raised his weapon and fired a mini-Gatling at its chest, further distracting the Raak’Shee. The rounds penetrated its hide, but the thick skin stood up well against the Dragoon’s barrage.

  Covering his eyes with one hand, the alien reached down to his belt and unhooked a large double-bladed ax that glowed red with heat as it reached armor-melting levels.

  Armed and pissed off, the Raak’Shee attacked.

  Nessa dropped to her knees to avoid a horizontal chop that would have probably cleaved her in half. When fighting an opponent this size, the secret was finesse, and that was something she had in spades.

  Inside the enemy’s guard, she sprang to her feet. If she didn’t kill it now, she risked trading her body for a single attack. She slammed the knife into its side and commanded the blade to elongate.

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  It gasped in pain as the foreign blade grew, carving a path through its body. Before it could react, the tip of Nessa’s weapon exploded from its opposite shoulder, deadening the limb from further use. But even if it hadn’t, the fight was long gone from the Raak. It slumped down to the floor, its organs a mess of bloody ribbons as it sighed its last agonizing breath.

  She breathed heavily as the adrenalin faded and left the faint taste of copper in her mouth. Across the room, one of Jenkins’s Crawlers dragged the body of the first alien away from the door. Apparently, she had missed the other half of the fight.

  “Come on, Walker, help me pull this one away from the door,” Jack said, grabbing one of the Raak’Shee’s feet. “If they catch wind of what happened here, we’re screwed.”

  With the help of their armor, the two soldiers dragged the two-thousand-pound beast out of the immediate field of view. There was nothing of value to the Raak in this room, and so there would be no reason for the enemy to go inside.

  “Does anyone actually know what the Serum producers look like, or are we just shooting in the dark?” Alec asked, glancing into another doorway.

  “Not really, but I assume our HUD’s will let us know when we see it. Can’t be too easy to hide something like that,” Dave said, holding the point position as they worked their way down the hall.

  What he said was both true and unsettling. How were they supposed to know what they were looking for if they didn’t know what to look for? While Jack felt he would instinctively know the machine without Bob’s help, that was not a guarantee.

  Dave jumped back in alarm after turning down a poorly lit hallway, signaling for everyone to step back and retreat to the last room they’d found. Once inside, he raised his faceplate and spoke without his armor’s radio.

  “Jack, why in the hell didn’t you catch those two guards up there?” He hissed through his teeth, “I about shit myself when I saw them. Hell, if they’d seen me, we would have the whole building on high alert right now.”

  Surprised and ashamed he’d missed not one, but two enemy combatants, Jack focused on a camera angle that looked down the hallway in question. What he saw was a pair of hulking Raak’Shee standing guard over a door.

  The reason they hadn’t seen Dave was immediately apparent as he watched both guards tap distractedly on handheld tablets. When Jack dropped into their vision, he was amused to find one guard playing some sort of game while the other was occupied with a video.

  “Neither is paying attention right now,” Jack said, reaching over and sliding Dave’s faceplate shut, “But you’re right, I screwed up. Any suggestions on how to move on from here?”

  He looked around and found nothing but confusion. It seemed that, embarrassingly, nobody planned for this eventuality. And sadly, that number included himself.

  “I can send in one of my Crawlers as a distraction again,” Jenkins said, already funneling Light into the spiderlike machine.

  “Too much noise. If we start the fight like that, we will have the whole building on us, like Alec on beer,” Jack replied.

  “We can strangle them,” Candice started. “I could send in a pair of lines to tie them up and if they survive, Nessa can go and murder the shit out of them.”

  “That could work,” Nessa replied with a grin, “But I think the whole question is about to become moot. Notice anyone missing?”

  With a start, Jack whipped his head around to do a quick headcount. Sure enough, a member of their squad had gone missing; Thea.

  Immediately focusing on her vison, Jack watched in silent horror as the woman he loved moved silently through the shadows. She hugged the wall as she traveled, ensuring the active camo in her armor had something to copy. While the camo feature was available to everyone, only the Phantoms could use its fullest potential.

  Motioning for everyone to hurry, they stacked up against the corner of the hallway. He fully believed she would be safe, but it didn’t stop the primal fear running through his veins. As he nervously flicked between viewpoints, he watched her progress in tense anticipation.

  ~~**~~

  Ten more steps. Thea thought as she closed the distance to her targets. Ten more perfectly silent steps toward a pair of rhino things that could rip me limb from limb. On the bright side, if I die, I won’t have to listen to Jack complain about how reckless this was.

  She hoped beyond hope Raak’Shee soldiers were just as easily lulled into complacence as humans during the mind-numbing assignment of guard duty. If they were, their attention would be on almost anything other than the task at hand.

  As it turned out, they were exactly like human soldiers.

  The guard on the left grunted to his partner and held up his device to show what was on the screen. Apparently, it was so interesting, the guard on the right looked away from his device and immediately shoved a hand into his pants.

  One more step.

  Her foot scuffed, and she froze in fear. Thankfully, the sound was not as loud as she thought, or perhaps the two soldiers were much too interested in the device to worry about such an insignificant noise.

  Standing behind them, she drew on the well of power inside her and reversed the healing nature of the ability. If Jack were there, he would say that she was using the low end of her spectrum of Light rather than the high, but the science didn’t matter to her.

  In her mind, the power of a Phantom was like a coin; impossible to use both sides simultaneously, but still two parts of a whole. When she wanted to heal, her ability to harm was nullified.

  But if she needed to kill…

  A sickly green Light danced between her fingers as she reached for the exposed skin at the two warrior’s necks. Standing at that angle, she caught a glimpse of what was distracting the pair. Unsurprised, yet still disgusted, she saw two naked rhino-like things wrestling in a pit of mud.

  Well… that lives in my head forever now.

  Her hands shot forward, grabbing both creatures and sending her power—and mind—into their bodies.

  The first and most important task was to find the tangled web of electrical impulses that passed for a nervous system in this species and sever it. In her training, they made it very clear that most bipedal creatures had similar physiologies, and it turned out that the Raak’Shee were no exception to that rule.

  The nauseating green energy took shape as countless microscopic scalpels and began the grim task of slicing through their spinal cords. A year ago, she believed a process like this one would take hours. And while that belief still held true for healing a creature, execution was much faster.

  The newly branded paraplegics slumped to the ground under their own massive weight. Not willing to leave an enemy alive, or in a state of permanent disability, she became an angel of death and took their lives. With another exertion of will, she found their hearts and cut each artery from the organ in question.

  The entire process took less than five heartbeats, but in that time she came to understand, for the first time, why she and others like her were called Phantoms.

  ~~**~~

  Jack watched in grim fascination as Thea killed the two guards. He always understood what her Corps did in concept, but this was the first time he’d seen her power used offensively.

  It was terrifying, and it was impressive.

  “Alfson, that was more than a little reckless,” he chastised, “But… you solved a problem and you did it without revealing that we are here.”

  “Thanks. Someone had to do the dirty work. Since you guys were just standing there arguing over why different methods wouldn’t work, I took care of it,” she shot back, refusing to be scolded for something that was successful, “Now, if you don’t mind getting off your collective asses, we need to stash these bodies and figure out what they were hiding… other than the rhino porn.”

  “Oh, gross!” Nessa exclaimed, reconnecting her comm at the exact wrong moment. “I turn my radio off for one second, and you sick assholes start talking about rhino porn? Come on Alec, where is the line?”

  “It wasn’t us!” The Dragoon defended. “Dave and I were watching regular porn.”

  “Oh… so… like two straight people wearing socks and doing it missionary?” Warren asked.

  “Nah,” Dave said, grunting as he started dragging a body, “Alec is into this thing where one dresses up like a pig and the other like a frog… it’s weird…”

  “That frog girl had her social media on the truck stop door. Am I supposed to just ignore such a golden opportunity?” Alec asked.

  “Yes. That’s what reasonable people do,” Nessa said. Casually chopping an arm off one corpse, she turned to throw it through a nearby door and froze. “What the fuck?”

  On an elevated table in the middle of the room was something they recognized immediately.

  The unmistakable body of Unranked Officer Benjamin Hargrave.