Ghost Legion by Mike Brooks

Author:Mike Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction: space opera (FLS)
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2026-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

08.13.57

Cinereous moved fast. She had reached Karmana ahead of her nominal allies, and even a city preparing for invasion was child’s play to infiltrate for someone with her talents. It was not about the shape- and feature-changing abilities of the Callidus Temple, although those skills certainly smoothed the way. It was her adaptiveness that was key, her ability to swiftly read her environment and blend into it. How someone looked and dressed was only part of the puzzle; people moved differently in a prosperous city to how they moved in an underhive slum, and they moved differently again in one of the small, rural worker settlements on agri worlds.

They certainly moved differently in an industrial city facing attack. There was a nervousness, a twitchiness, that you rarely found except on the eve of war. The populace had seen the lights in the sky that spoke of void combat with miles-long starships unleashing unfathomable destructive power at each other, and they had surely seen the distant stream of craft bringing the landing force down, even if it had been disrupted by the Alpha Legion’s opportunistic attack. They had lived the last few hours under the thunder of Karmana’s relatively few gun emplacements sending what ordnance they had towards the enemy, and the observant would have seen the angles of the barrels depress as the enemy grew closer. Lines of sight were limited amidst the canyon-like surroundings of the towering plant buildings, and that gave an extra edge to the nervousness. The steady crawl of an invader’s advance was hard to tear your eyes from, but it was in some ways easier to cope with than knowing they were coming without being able to see it – to have a familiar landscape turn traitor on you, as the buildings amongst which you had spent your entire life now hid from you the approaching threat to your very existence.

Cinereous had detected the fear as soon as she negotiated her way through the sparse, hastily assembled sentry positions, and fed it into her next identity. Dema Kulver was unlucky enough to take a shortcut down a side alley at the wrong time, and emerged from the other end somewhat later than might have been expected, but still moving with a sense of urgency and with lots of nervous checking over her shoulder in case the Imperials suddenly appeared. That was handy, since Cinereous wanted to be moving quickly. An operative’s wants should always be secondary to the character’s nature unless there was no alternative, so the Imperial advance served more than one purpose. There was little more frustrating than knowing the mission called for you to be pushing ahead, but to be stuck in the dull plodding of a cover that was in plenty of time for their shift change and had neither reason nor desire to hurry.

She headed for the maglev terminus. Sertra was possessed of a high-speed subterranean service that connected many of its largest cities, ferrying goods and people back and forth.

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