"Good," Lathe said. "I'll see you then."

Lathe was halfway down the wide lodge staircase when the tingler on his right wrist came to life, tapping out rapid-fire blackcollar code onto two sections of skin: Lathe: Lepkowski calling; urgent.

He slid two fingers beneath the sleeve of his black flexarmor turtleneck shirt. On my way, he tapped back.

Hamner Lodge, located in one of the most picturesque areas of the Greenheart Mountains and convenient to Capstone, had once been a retreat for hunters, hikers, and other nature lovers. After the Ryqril Groundfire attack devastated the majority of the planet, the lodge had been largely abandoned. A

few years after the TDE's surrender, the blackcollars had reopened it, using it as a place where the old embittered veterans could get together to relive the glory days.

Or so the Ryqril and Security forces had been led to believe. Once the enemy had come to that conclusion and serious surveillance had ended, the blackcollars had turned the lodge into a quiet headquarters, running secret combat training for some of Capstone's youth and slowly turning it into what they hoped would someday be a fully operational command center.

The communications room in the lodge's basement had been one of their first upgrades, despite the fact that at the time there had been no one out there for them to talk to. It had been as state-of-the-art as they could manage, with long-range transmitters, encryption systems, and—most importantly—overlapping bug-stomper systems to make sure no one was able to slip any eavesdropping devices into the room.

Chelsey Jensen was seated at the panel when Lathe arrived, his eyes shifting back and forth between the monitor displays. "How's the reception today?" Lathe asked as he closed the door behind him.

"I think we may have some ears to the door," Jensen said, tapping one of the displays. "If we do, though, it's a very slick tap. The signal shows barely a whisker of perturbation."