Chapter 16
SANTIAGO
The lights dimmed as Kaal tapped the panel on Santi’s desk, casting the room into a quiet hum of holo-feed.
A grainy clip flickered to life above the desk, tinting the space in ghostly scarlet.
‘She’s called The Red Queen,’ Kaal said, folding his arms, his face taut.
Santi leaned forward as the footage played: a masked woman in a crimson suit, her hair a fiery blaze, tearing through a corridor flanked by a swarm of armed Red Skull soldiers.
She moved like a living blade, ruthless, fast, merciless.
Gunfire lit the air behind her as she leapt into the fray with unholy precision, dragging a bladed chain behind her like a predator’s tail.
The recorded holo cut to another angle.
Her silhouette streaking past a fleeing cargo crew, and another, where she executed a rival capo with a flick of her wrist and a grin of savage delight.
‘Fokk, I know her,’ Santi muttered. ‘She led the munitions depot raid attempt a few months ago. I kicked her out with a spectral wave, too. Seems like I shoulda have apprehended her ass.’
Kaal rose the holo, and they both peered at the image.
‘She’s a lycan. A potent one too,’ he murmured. ‘Hell, she’s got a mask that emits a null field, so we’ve nada to go on when it comes to an ID.’
Her disguise was superior: a claret jumpsuit and cloak, molded with high-tech synth alloy over her face, concealing her identity.
Crimson hair streamed from the top of her head, but there were no other features to work with.
‘All I can tell you is that she’s savage, brilliant, and completely unknown,’ Kaal added.
‘We’ve pulled together a working dossier, Miral and I.
There’s no official name. No confirmed history.
Just rumors. The most credible theory holds that she’s a close blood relative of Varnok, the Mad Wolf King, a niece or even a direct scion.
Some think she inherited his position after we put the bastard in a cage. ’
‘What does that mean for us?’
‘We think that now she’s at the helm, she’s taken a more insidious, secretive strategy to get to us. For one, this footage is months old.’
Santi’s eyes stayed on the frozen holo image. The Red Queen, mid-lunge, face twisted in fury and power. ‘So why show it to me now?’
Kaal took a deep inhale. ‘That’s the kicker because,’ he grunted, ‘she’s vanished.’
Santi’s head jerked up. ‘Gone?’
‘In the last four months,’ Kaal continued, ‘there has not been a single sighting of her, not even a ping. It’s like she evaporated off the board. Like she never existed.’
A cold ripple ran down Santi’s spine. ‘Eliminated or a deliberate disappearance?’
‘We don’t know, brother.’ Kaal met his eyes. ‘And that is a major fokkin’ problem.’
Santi stood and began pacing, his boots thudding against the metal floor. ‘So either she’s deceased and departed, which is unlikely -’
‘Or,’ Kaal cut in, ‘she’s tucked away somewhere we can’t see, planning and plotting.’
Santi stopped and stared out the porthole, space streaking past them in steady silence. His jaw flexed. ‘We need more intel.’
‘That’s all we have,’ Kaal grunted. ‘Miral conducted a deep dive through every security node, dock manifest, and black-market whisper across the flotilla. We’ve got three holo vids that are months old, two hearsay reports, and dead air.’
Santi exhaled, anger crackling under his skin. ‘Regardless, the mutterings in the prison and on DarkNet are that the Red Skulls are gearing up for a major op.’
Kaal nodded. ‘We don’t know when or where, but everything points to one thing: they’re preparing to break Varnok out.’
Santi turned. ‘You think the Red Queen’s behind it?’
‘She might be gone. She might be orchestrating it. Either way, we can’t predict the play without understanding the player.’
‘So we talk to him.’ Santi’s voice was flat. ‘To Varnok.’
Kaal shot him a mirthless grin. ‘Exactly. He’s still locked up in our high-tech, zero-contact cryo-box. Floating detention rig. AI-run, no humans on that deck.’
The prison isolation unit, in the bowels of The Sombra, was a relic of war and paranoia.
The old Cold Sector facility hung suspended in a reinforced gravity pod over the massive platform floor, ringed by automated defense drones and rotating AI-coded lockouts.
Inside, Varnok Gage existed in nothing but time. No visitors. No conversation. Just select holo videos, synth food trays, and his thoughts.
‘Is he aware that The Red Queen has vanished?’ Santi asked.
‘Not sure, but he will know who she is,’ Kaal replied. ‘If we get a name out of him, hell, even a whisper of how her mind ticks, we might have a shot at stopping the coming shit storm before it erupts.’
‘He won’t give you a damn thing willingly.’
Kaal’s grin turned wolfish. ‘I’ve got more than one way to persuade my marks.’
Santi arched a brow. ‘I’m accompanying you. To make sure you don’t try to kill him.’
‘No promises,’ Kaal said, already heading for the door. ‘Are you ready? Because I am. Let’s roll.’
‘Give me 5.’
Kaal raised his chin. ‘I’ll be outside.’
Left alone, Santi swiveled back to the frozen image of the crimson-clad woman that flickered in the air, his jaw clenching tighter with every beat of his pulse.
He didn’t know why, but something in his gut told him the wraith they were chasing was far closer than they imagined.
Santi checked in with Miral before he made his way to the prison deck.
‘How is she?’ he murmured into the node under his collarbone.
Miral’s voice slid into his mind.
Sleeping. Her vitals are within the acceptable range. She’s resting with no spikes in pain.
After a beat, the dulcet tones continued. You should see how she clings to your pillow.
Santi didn’t reply, but the ghost of a smile tugged at his mouth.
He exhaled, then sealed away the thought, locking it somewhere safe prior to prowling to the deck elevators and stepping into a grav-lift.
It stopped at a dark terminal bay where a hovercraft waited.
At the terminal, Kaal waited for him beside a two-seat hover skiff.
His wraith-silver eyes were unreadable, his bulk dressed down in a matte black duty jacket.
‘We’re cleared for approach,’ Kaal said.
‘And the drones?’
‘On stand-down. We have ten minutes of flight time.’
The hovercraft hissed to life, lifted from the launch bay, and flew into the expansive central air shaft that ran through the entire ship.
Beneath them was a vast chamber, an abyss of stillness, at the center of which hovered the Cold Sector rig.
Their descent was a journey into a rarely seen part of the ship.
The facility had once been The Sombra’s fail-safe, a prison rig suspended in reinforced gravity fields, wrapped in drone-perimeter defenses and rotating AI-coded lockouts.
A relic of paranoia from the last war. No one got in. No one got out.
The descent into the Cold Sector was a quiet, eerie fall through time.
The elevator shaft plunged down the spine of The Sombra, past crew quarters, tactical levels, and engineering bays.
The further down it sank, past the lower decks, the colder the lighting and temperature became.
Gone were the warm steel walls of the upper decks.
Down here, things were built in a different age: paranoia had shaped this sector, and it had never been meant to see light again.
Soon, darkness cloaked the gigantic cavity, all except for the eerie bioluminescent lamps set at intervals.
Ten minutes later, they went through an extensive shield, coded to their bio-signals.
Moments later, they arrived at the old-world cryo-box detention rig, shaped like a jagged cube of gunmetal and synth glass.
The walls shimmered with containment fields, and the hovercraft docked outside a large view panel looking into the prisoner’s sealed chamber.
A man lay sprawled on a synth-couch inside the bare cell, the lights dim.
His prison sweats were a stale, institutional gray.
The fabric hung loose over his once-broad shoulders, the muscle beneath withered by time.
His red hair had dulled to a dry, coppery, and ashy blend, stringy and flattened to one side.
Lines etched his pale skin, creases from years without sunlight, and madness curled behind those wily, shark-bright eyes.
Varnok Gage was hard, hoary, and hairy as fokk.
Santi’s lips twisted as he recognized the man he and Xander had once strong-armed into this prison, after a citywide search that ended in a gunfire inferno.
Hundreds of innocents had died by Varnok’s hand during those chaos-blighted days, leading to his brutal monikers: The Carmine Cardinal and the Mad Wolf King.
AKA The Butcher of Vael’Na’ra.
The man in question glanced up with a smirk. ‘My my, fokk me timbers, I’ve not seen me a human since forever.’
His accent was an eerie cocktail of old aristocracy and gutter filth.
He bent forward to take a closer look at the pair.
‘Heck, you’re no mere humans, you’re freakin lycan spirits in flesh form,’ he drawled, stretching with deliberate insolence. ‘Pretty too. Wait, you’re the Signet warriors who captured me. Hoorah, a reunion.’
Kaal raised a brow. ‘Still got that tongue. Shame no one’s been around to bite it off.’
Santi leaned against the barrier. ‘We brought news, Gage. Figured you’d want to hear about the outside world. Maybe even get in on the gossip.’
Varnok snorted. ‘The only rumor I care about is who finally blows up the Signet packs, and how large their balls are.’
Santi feigned a chuckle. ‘Well, it’s our balls that deserve the praise because we did space a few dozen Red Skulls capos on our bridge.’
Varnok’s jaw ticked, but he covered it up with a nonchalant shrug.
‘A shame,’ Varnok muttered, examining his cuticles. ‘My brother tends to pick the worst talent.’
Santi remained relaxed and smiled, charming, even lazy.
‘We come bearing no ill will, just questions, not torture,’ he rasped. ‘Unless you prefer the latter.’
Varnok laughed, a raspy, corroded sound. ‘Whatever you need from me, I won’t share it even if I’m knee-deep in blood.’
The Signet pair glanced at each other and stepped forward.