Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier-ARC (pdf conv.) by Myke Cole

lightning. This was clearly the battle’s aftermath, and it looked like they’d won.
    Carmela greeted him at the office, hair and makeup perfect, as if she’d been awake and at her desk all night. “Evening, sir,” she said. “Colonel Taylor’s in the huddle room.”
    “Thanks,” Bookbinder said, trying to sound confident, and headed toward the door.
    “Sir.” She stopped him, then handed him a pad of yellow paper and two ballpoint pens. How could I forget? The tools of my trade.
    Colonel Taylor, Chief Warrant Officer Fitzsimmons, Lieutenant Colonel Crucible, and two other officers sat gathered around the table, poring over a map of the FOB. They were talking in low tones that stopped when Bookbinder entered. They looked up at him, their brows furrowing, as if unsure of why he was here.
    “Colonel Bookbinder,” Taylor said. “I’m not sure if you’d heard. We had a significant breach tonight. Goblins overran our Suitability Assessment Section. There have been significant losses, but we’ve beaten them back and secured the breach.”
    He talks like I never got out of my rack to try to fight.
    “I heard,” Bookbinder said.
    There was a brief silence as the officers looked at one another, as if trying to decide if they should say anything further to him.
    “Gentlemen,” Bookbinder said, “you got me out of the rack, and it looks like the fighting is over, so I doubt you want me to lead anyone into the thick of anything. Why don’t you tell me how can I help?”
    Crucible smiled, Fitzsimmons’s face was stone. Taylor nodded.
    “Oscar Britton has escaped.” Fitzsimmons said.
    “The Portamancer? The one from Shadow Coven?”
    Fitzsimmons nodded.
    “I thought he’d raised the flag,” Bookbinder said. “Come around to our line of thinking?”
    Taylor looked daggers at Fitzsimmons. “I may have overestimated his degree of commitment to the mission, sir,” Fitzsimmons said.
    “Wait. Didn’t you have a beacon in his chest? Some kind of a bomb?” Bookbinder asked.
    Fitzsimmons nodded. “We detonated it once we realized he was running. Took out half the cash. It turns out one of the Physiomancers in the SASS with him helped him to get it out.”
    Bookbinder racked his brain, trying to remember the names of the SASS inmates from their personnel records and funding lines. “Therese . . . Therese Del Aqua?”
    “That’s the one,” Fitzsimmons said. “They fled in the company of a goblin spy, Mardak Het-Parda, but Britton and his flunkies called him “Marty.” I don’t need to tell you how serious it is to have an ability as unique and dangerous as Oscar Britton’s in goblin hands.”
    Bookbinder sucked in his breath. “No, I guess you don’t. Who else got out?”
    “Don’t remember their real names, sir. They give themselves nicknames that they go by. There’s an Aeromancer called Swift, a Terramancer called Peapod, a Hydromancer called Tsunami and a Pyromancer called Pyre.”
    Bookbinder shook his head, making a mental note to update the personnel database on the missing, once he’d figured out their real names.
    He sucked in his breath. “Wait . . . what about the Witch? The superdangerous one . . . Scylla?”
    “Gone,” Fitzy said, shaking his head.
    “Jesus,” Bookbinder breathed. “What can I do?” Is it my magic? Is there something I can do with it? His heart leapt.
    “You can sign this. We need a special line of funding authorized to enable a special asset we’ve put in place to handle this kind of contingency.” Taylor pushed a ream of papers toward Bookbinder.
    As quickly as the hope flared, it died. They wanted him to do what he’d always faithfully done—push paper.
    “It allows simultaneous operations both on the Home Plane and here in the Source. It needs authorization at the J1 level. In the past, I was the acting J1, so I’d just do it myself, but now you’re here so . . .” Taylor didn’t look pleased.
    “So, now you need me to do it.” Bookbinder slumped