Rogue Ops: Rogue Agents of Magic™ Book 1 Read online

  Rogue Ops

  Rogue Agents of Magic™ Book 1

  TR Cameron

  Michael Anderle

  Martha Carr

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design

  http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  Version 1.00, September, 2021

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-68500-426-2

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68500-427-9

  The Oriceran Universe (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright (c) 2017-21 by Martha Carr and LMBPN Publishing.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Author Notes - TR Cameron

  Author Notes - Martha Carr

  Other series in the Oriceran Universe:

  Connect with The Authors

  Books By Michael Anderle

  The Rogue Ops Team

  Thanks to our beta reader, Larry Omans

  Thanks to our JIT Readers:

  Wendy L Bonell

  Dorothy Lloyd

  Diane L. Smith

  Dave Hicks

  Peter Manis

  Zacc Pelter

  Jeff Goode

  If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!

  Editor

  Skyhunter Editing Team

  Dedications

  Dedication: For those who seek wonder around every corner and in each turning page. And, as always, for Dylan.

  — TR Cameron

  To Family, Friends and

  Those Who Love

  To Read.

  May We All Enjoy Grace

  To Live The Life We Are

  Called.

  — Michael

  Chapter One

  Diana Sheen, formerly Special Agent in Charge and now simply the team leader, grimaced as her gloved hand sank an inch deep into the mud. “Dammit, Rath, whose stupid idea was this, anyway?”

  The purple-haired troll, three feet tall and hunched over so his skull didn’t hit the wooden surface above them, laughed happily. “Yours. Definitely yours.”

  She shook her head, the mess that was her hair flopping into her eyes. “It was my idea to take out these losers finally. I’m pretty sure you were the one who suggested that we should go in from underneath.”

  He cackled again. “Not my fault you’re too tall.”

  She smiled, sighed, and reactivated the comm unit that connected her to the rest of the team. She had turned it off so they wouldn’t hear her griping. “Boss and Rambo, still crawling through the mud. Anticipate one minute plus to final position.”

  Kayleigh, her team’s technical expert, replied snarkily, “Move your fat ass, slowpoke.”

  Laughter in various pitches and tones sounded across the comms, and Diana sighed inwardly. I should have known that girl was trouble from the very beginning and not hired her, regardless of how good she is at what she does. In truth, she and Kayleigh were more than coworkers and more than the roommates they’d once been. They were friends, which gave the perky blonde wench enough latitude to insult her. I wish she didn’t do it publicly or quite as often.

  Her second-in-command, Cara Benoit, callsign “Croft,” replied, “Stark and I are thirty seconds out.”

  Anik Khan, whose last name was also his callsign, checked in. “Face and Khan, ten seconds.”

  The deep voice of Hank Stills finished the roll call. “Hercules, in position and ready to go.” He sounded bored, probably because Diana had excluded him from the infiltration team. He was their backup, waiting in a delivery truck a couple of streets away from the self-storage facility on the outskirts of New Orleans they were currently infiltrating.

  In the many months since their forced departure from their Pittsburgh headquarters—after it became what Kayleigh called a “non-structure” in a giant explosion courtesy of their enemies—and relocation to the vimana in Antarctica, her team had deployed all over the country and to several locations around the world.

  Diana’s boyfriend and nominal boss Bryant Bates had promised that would be the case when they activated Project Adonis, which formally separated them from federal oversight. On paper, they were supposed to be free agents. In practice, the government still gave them orders with deniability guaranteed by a general lack of paperwork. It worked pretty well for both sides.

  She refocused on the task at hand. “Pick up the pace, Rambo.” The troll, whose name and callsign both came from Sylvester Stallone movies due to his obsession with the silver screen, ran faster.

  He could’ve shrunk small enough not to need to crouch, but the tech genius had sized his tactical gear for the three-foot form he preferred, claiming it gave him the best blend of agility and strength. He was hers, she was his, and they would be together forever. The magic bond connecting them both activated when she’d rescued him at the start of her federal career.

  They’d come a long way since then, fighting monsters that looked like monsters and monsters that looked like humans. Or run-of-the-mill folks from Oriceran, maybe. Her team’s overriding goal had been to gather as many Rhazdon artifacts as possible. The malevolent magics long ago created by a tyrant from the magical planet were too dangerous to circulate freely.

  They’d rounded up quite a lot of them, but there always seemed to be more. Her information indicated that a finite number existed, but somehow, she doubted it. Either someone else continued creating them after Rhazdon was gone, or the bastard simply lied about how many they produced. Today’s operation would bring them several, though, if their infomancer’s research proved to be accurate.

  The others reported being in position before she and Rath made it to the spot she’d chosen. Kayleigh and Deacon had given the place a thorough inspection with drones ahead of the infiltration. They had found this unexpected access route, an excavated area used for drainage because of the high water table. They’d also discovered that the
central set of eight garages weren’t garages at all but a single large building with a lot of heat signatures inside it.

  Ultrasound scans had modeled the interior. They weren’t really ultrasound, but every time Kayleigh tried to explain how the sonic sensors worked, Diana’s mind glazed over, so she’d decided to call it ultrasound.

  It was a large room, empty of identifiable furniture or inner walls but filled with crates and boxes of various sizes. Two trucks had pulled in to make deliveries while they had the location under surveillance, but their drones hadn’t been able to get low enough to peer inside without risking detection.

  We need to figure out how to scale up that cloaking tech Ruby created. Their recent efforts had led them to Ely, Nevada, the so-called Magic City with its magical-owned casinos. While there, Diana had connected with a local technomancer, a woman who blended magic and technology to create cool stuff. Kayleigh could do the same to some degree, working with Deacon, but Magic City’s defender had a gift for the work.

  Her inner voice criticized, “That’s not relevant right now.” Shut up, you. Diana shook her head to clear it. Ahead of her, Rath pressed a flat cylinder onto a section of the wooden surface above them, then backed away from it. She said, “We’re ready to go.”

  Kayleigh replied, “Countdown begins.”

  Her team all wore glasses or goggles, depending on their preference. They connected to a shared tactical computer the tech managed during big operations. Diana’s were mostly filled with a thermal image of the bodies in the room above as she looked upward, plus a clock counting down from ten. The rest of her people had similar displays, customized to their preferences.

  Diana’s also included a series of green dots that represented the health of each of her subordinates. They would change to yellow in case of serious injury and red to indicate critical damage that required immediate intervention.

  Their uniforms contained integrated bio-monitors among a plethora of other useful gadgets and systems. Since their earliest days as a new unit, improving their tech beyond what the government had to offer had been as much a crusade as a priority, and they’d worked hard to ensure they were always on the bleeding edge. Except for drone cloaking, apparently. Kayleigh, you slacker.

  She grabbed Rath’s arm and pulled him to her side because he tended to want to rush into battle ahead of her. She was protective of him, and he was equally protective of her, which occasionally put them at odds. The clock hit zero and the explosive he’d placed detonated, creating an irregular rectangular hole and sending splinters flying out at their enemies. Diana crawled forward and launched herself through the opening.

  No surprises awaited her, meaning that the recon Kayleigh and Deacon had performed was once again top-notch. Diana lifted her modified M4 carbine and pressed down on the trigger, firing a three-round burst at the nearest enemy.

  Had she been shooting at a human, that would’ve been sufficient to make it a very bad day for them. However, the seven-foot-tall Kilomea, a giant with a leather tunic and a rough-hewn, square-jawed face, only grunted at the impacts and continued to move forward to engage her, one hand pulling a huge knife tucked through his belt. She snapped, “Possible body armor.”

  Kayleigh, callsign “Glam,” replied, “Acknowledged.”

  A pair of knives flew past her on either side, tumbling through the air to stab into the Kilomea’s shoulders. The creature growled and crossed its arms to yank them out, then threw Rath’s weapons at her head. She took one hand off her rifle and waved it, using her telekinesis to redirect the blades toward an empty spot to her left. Then he was too close to shoot, so she dropped the rifle to dangle from its strap and stepped forward to meet him.

  * * *

  Cara waited while the explosive cord did its work, cutting a hole in the roof and dropping the metal piece it had severed into the building. She leapt through the opening, using her magic to land softly on a burst of force. The view in her glasses had prepared her for landing in the middle of a group of enemies, too tightly arranged to engage with her rifle.

  Instead, she drew the pair of pistols from drop holsters on each thigh and lifted them, shooting directly to her right and left with arms outstretched, three rounds center mass, like she’d learned in the military and as official guidelines required. Two humanoid forms fell away, her mind categorizing one as a wizard and the other as some kind of elf. Another of the six—now four, as the pair she’d shot dropped out of the picture—surrounding her went down as her partner Tony, the team’s most proficient marksman, used his position on the roof to good effect.

  Three remained, and they forced her to dive aside as a fireball blasted through the spot she’d occupied and continued through the opening she and Stark had created in the circle. Nice job of adapting. These folks aren’t pushovers.

  She spun up to her feet and shoved her pistols back in their holsters. Anik and Sloan had entered the fray, breaking in through one of the garage doors, and now the bodies were mixed up enough that a stray bullet might be bad. Sure, they all had excellent body armor, but it was always possible that the wrong shot at the wrong angle could wind up doing serious, even fatal damage.

  Cara slipped to the side of the nearest foe and rammed a knee up into his groin. The man—this one was a Light Elf, as opposed to the Dark Elves, the Wood Elves, and the Mist Elves—doubled over, as a strike to his junk had the same effect as it would on a pure human. She smashed a punch into his jaw, her stun glove going off with a snap and dropping him unconscious to the floor.

  She continued that move’s momentum into a spin and delivered a backfist to another elf who was sidling into an attack. It caught the woman above her ear, and the stun blast dropped her onto her face. Cara shook her head. “Not quite the A-Team. Maybe the B-team.”

  Rath laughed. “I love it when a plan comes together.”

  At that moment, a shimmering emanated from several locations in the warehouse as magical portals opened and enemies flooded through. Diana gave an audible sigh and said, “See, Rambo, this is what happens when you tempt fate.”

  The troll cackled again. “More bad guys available, more fun knocking them down.”

  Cara smothered a grin at the troll’s optimism and headed for the nearest newcomers, ready for some of the fun he’d promised.

  Chapter Two

  Diana flinched as the magic deflector set into her vest cracked, expending its protective power by sucking away a blast of shadow magic that had sought her. With the battle transforming into a scrum with the new arrivals, crossfire made guns too risky, so she reached over her shoulder and drew her sword from its back sheath.

  Fury was the standard length for a katana, but as a magical artifact weapon with a sentient being inhabiting it, it was far more deadly than an ordinary blade. She’d developed a synergy with the sword, and her senses grew sharper with it in her grip, allowing her to identify and defend against attacks more effectively and find optimal angles for her assaults. Combined with her magical sixth sense about harmful magic targeting her, those abilities made her devastating against humans and magicals alike.

  She skipped forward and snapped out a sidekick at the Kilomea’s knee, but he gave a deft twist and took the blow on his thigh instead. His fist crashed out at her, but her free hand deflected it out of line so that when it finally grazed her chest, it had lost almost all its power. She grinned at the huge figure. “This is no time to make advances on me. Keep your hands to yourself.”

  The taunt caused his face to screw up in anger, which switched quickly to pain as she lunged forward and drove Fury’s point through his shoulder. With the proper twist and yank, she could’ve severed the limb but instead drew it out the way it went in, then leapt in the air and smashed the hilt into his nose. The giant creature fell backward with a loud thump. Diana gave him a kick in the head to make sure he stayed down and looked around to find her next target.

  * * *

  Rath had already thrown all six of his knives, two at the Kilomea and
one each at witches and wizards who had targeted him and his partner. While Diana had proven on any number of occasions that she was completely capable of handling herself without his protection, he was committed to making sure she didn’t have to when they were together.

  When they’d operated from their Pittsburgh base, circumstances had frequently required them to work apart. Now that his skills had improved to equal that of any agent in her group, thanks to endless training at the vimana with the rest of the team, he’d probably wind up on his own even more often going forward.

  For now, in this place, his primary goal was to watch her back whether she wanted him to or not. He reached down to his thigh holsters and drew his batons, flicking them out to full extension with a satisfying snap. Each contained an electrified tip fed by a battery on the rear of his belt. When he held them in his gloved hands, induction pads on the palms completed the circuit.