Sly woke with sweat caking his face, not knowing where he was. He groaned as the last nightmares fled, then waved at the sensors to trigger the lights. The skin of his neck buzzed again and fast footsteps outside said others had received the alert.

  Feeling clammy, Sly swung out of bed, put on his shades and belted on the Sig. He trotted to the duty watch desk, to be told the medical alarm was tilted by not one but two men. Emil Marcus’s high heartrate had crossed the upper threshold. Worse, Christian O’Connor’s was the opposite, his stats through the floor.

  “Marcus was on patrol with O’Connor, Kim and Clarke,” Ramirez said, joining him. “Maybe a bug but we’re investigating.”

  Sly checked on Marcus’ location and stats, now elevated but in a normal range. According to the map, Marcus was one level down, not moving around. There were others from the team with him.

  Four minutes had passed, but communications were still confused.

  “Who else is down there?”

  “Kim and Clarke. They were part of the same duty, two and two.”

  ‘Two and two’, so split shifts. Kim and Clarke had been asleep but nearby when the incident happened.

  Ramirez froze, distracted by a report through his shades.

  Then he moved again, only faster.

  “Marcus is okay but was paired with O’Connor, and O’Connor’s down.”

  Sly wondered if he’d heard right, then experience and training took over and he set his jaw against the shock. Self-recrimination would come later, when he knew what had happened. He and Ramirez sprinted to the map co-ordinates, emerging from a tunnel to find Marcus on his knees, Kim standing over him, with the barred entrance to the L3 cage-hoist as the backdrop to the scene.

  Kneeling in a widening pool of blood, Marcus applied pressure to O’Connor’s throat. Clarke, in body-armour and helmet and pointing a carbine away from the group, watched from the side. Boldly lit, the frozen scene was reminiscent of an artistic masterwork, the death of a Patroclus or Wolfe.

  Sly divined only bad news.

  “O’Connor was the duty medic, I wanted one per watch,” said Ramirez, sounding unnaturally level. “I’ve sent for Smith, but he was off-duty and asleep.”

  Lieutenant Kim reported that Marcus and O’Connor had patrolled together. They separated as Marcus walked a perimeter and the medic stayed at the lift entrance. When Marcus returned, he saw O’Connor already in trouble, his throat cut.

  Josh Smith ran in, half-dressed, but when he knelt by Marcus the medic’s shoulders sloped, and Sly intuited the medic was way too late.

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  “Sergeant Marcus grappled with the attacker,” Sarah Kim continued with stiff formality, “a skilled fighter. Marcus took knife hits, which were blocked by the ceramic armour, he said. The assailant fled, then Marcus chased.”

  Head bowed, Emil Marcus rose and padded over in tactical armour, wiping his hands. He was a bear of a man, and O’Connor’s killer had needed formidable skills to take him on.

  “Sergeant… in your own words?”

  The sergeant’s expression was as flat as the glacier, but it held an underlying emotion Sly could barely read, except he felt it himself. Shame.

  “Captain,” he said, his voice deep and resonant. “The guy who killed Christian was a real Ninja-type, matte-black armour, a cloak and a hood. I ran trying to catch him, but he disappeared.”

  “He sprinted away?”

  “No, Colonel.” Emil’s stare was crocodilian, daring him to disagree. “He disappeared, like vanished. He literally faded, a ghost on a breeze.”

  “There’s no one here,” Grace Clarke interrupted, a tension in her voice. “I checked the corridor – no one.”

  Sly flicked through the record of Marcus’s camera feed. The sergeant’s shades were switched to night-vision, but data from the other cameras were automatically sent to Gus. Marcus had certainly seen someone. His shades captured an indistinct figure, blurred by night-vision’s inability to follow very fast movement.

  Sly rewound and tried three feeds at once, picture-in-picture.

  In playback the pictures jerked around as Marcus fought frantically, the audio recording ragged breaths, then the attacker turned and bolted away. Marcus pursued explosively and held the gap for two, three seconds. Then the figure ahead became indistinct between one camera-jerk and the next.

  And vanished.

  Gone. The picture-in-picture infrared image also disappeared.

  Even as two of the screens cleared, the image from the short-range UV camera blazed like a magnesium flare. The jinking shape of a running man filled the screen, so bright in the foreground that the image contained nothing else.

  By the end of the sequence Marcus had been looking entirely the wrong way.

  “Holy cow,” Sly muttered. He sent the clip to Ramirez and Marcus. Ramirez watched the clip, biting his lip in frustration, but by the end was ready with orders.

  “Gus, broadcast please... This is Command, I want a two hundred metre cordon centred on me. When you’re all in place, close in slowly. O’Connor’s down. His killer has a new invisibility tech, it’s effective but is a roman candle under UV. I repeat, switch to ultraviolet, and if you see anything call it in. I want the killer alive. Shotguns, load up with ‘fist’ beanbag rounds. This guy is tough, don’t assume fists will knock him cold, but give it your best shot. Command out.”

  Beanbag rounds fired from a shotgun were a variety of less-lethal ordnance the team carried to deal with a protest group. If O’Connor’s assailant wore body armour, ‘less lethal’ mightn’t be enough.

  No one got to try beanbags as, thirty minutes later, it became clear Ghost had slipped the cordon. Captain Ramirez and Sly were ringed by the grim faces of eight other Green Berets, fully armed, and no one saw anything as the ring tightened.

  Were eight in the cordon too few for the many natural corridors? Or had the ghost walked through walls? Either way, O’Connor’s assailant had escaped.

  As they searched, Sly heard Nio Gonzalez wondering aloud how Ghost’s gear worked. Sly himself knew of two ways to make an invisibility cloak. The first used metamaterials that could bend electromagnetic waves, like light, around an object. The second method used camouflage that mimicked patterns, colors and textures so the cloak was indistinguishable from its background, similar to the skin of a cuttlefish or chameleon.

  Neither approach could entirely explain how Ghost disappeared while moving, or why the cloak reacted to UV. Or, Sly told himself, why people with perfect camouflage didn’t carry guns.

  No one saw Ghost again that night.