Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games Read Online Free PDF

Ajax-Type that he was, couldn’t quite make himself go all-out on me.
     
    Could I have taken him for real? I had no idea, but he knew he’d been touched hard. When he got back home he wouldn’t just be talking to his comrades about how cute I was. Anyway, the match took my mind off my impending trip until it was time to go.
     
    Ozma called to let me know she’d meet me in the flight bay. With the expanded team and two Atlas-Types to provide fast lift, Blackstone had made an agreement with NASA for us to house a pair of their ground-to-orbit Atlas Lift pods. A GTOAL pod was basically a five-man carrier (the fifth being the Atlas “lifter”) with separate payload space. Stripped down, they were only meant for direct docking to other spaceships or stations and we kept them ready for emergencies. In return, we got to use them for in-atmosphere trips when we really needed speed—we could lift with them from the Dome in under two minutes.
     
    She arrived in the bay with Nix on her shoulder and wearing her art-deco robes and silver wire coronet, Grendel following with her “luggage,” and I was surprised to see Riptide flanking him.
     
    “ Think she’s trying to impress someone? ” Shell whispered in my ear. I kept the grin off my face (with Ozma’s robes, Grendel’s preppy vest and tie, and Riptide’s street-hood leather duster they made a colorful and mismatched sight), but I couldn’t resist bowing her majesty through the hatch at the rear of the pod. Her smile recognized my brief amusement and her nod played along, something I really needed.
     
    “Buckle up,” was all I said, giving grumpy Grendel a pat on the arm as he squeezed inside behind her. When Shell told me they were ready, I flew to the top of the pod and buckled into my own external lift harness. Shell opened the bay doors, and I maneuvered the arrowhead-shaped pod up and out with the ease of hours of practice.
     
    “ Safe flight, Astra ,” Blackstone said in my earbug as I cleared the doors—as formal as always, but knowing he’d been watching my departure helped.
     
    “We’ll be back for dinner, sir. Unless the Hollywood Knights have a good table tonight.”
     
    “ See that you are .”
     

 

     

Chapter Four
     
    Orb is one of the strangest breakthroughs I know. She’s blind and deaf from birth, and her floating silver sphere sees and hears for her. But she’s told me her “sight” spans the full electromagnetic spectrum, plus her sphere’s fine-grained pressure sensitivity lets her map three dimensionally with sound waves . Add to that her total control of the sphere’s location, motion, and topography—she can form it into a nearly indestructible shield, or a floating blade with a monomolecular edge that can cut me with little effort. So my question is, what kind of weird breakthrough produced that thing? And what does the world look like to her?
     
    From the journal of Hope Corrigan
     
    ----
     
    Lunette’s looked just as downscale and seedy in the daylight as it had the last time Shell and I had visited the superhuman nightclub. Papers blew across the empty walk outside its industrial-steel doors, and without darkness to cover them the squat building’s white stucco walls were gray and dingy.
     
    The fenced-in and nearly empty parking lot gave me plenty of room for the pod and Orb met us at the doors, standing below the crescent moon that was Lunette’s sign. Her crisp white pantsuit was a perfect contrast to Ozma’s jade robes. Her golden hair, done up in its signature hard-set and eye masking conch shell doo, gave Ozma’s golden locks serious competition. As always, she looked too classy for the club she owned.
     
    She ignored Ozma and her party. “Astra. It’s good to see you.” The silver orb hovering above her shoulder rippled in micro-patterns as it projected her voice.
     
    “You, too.” I smiled, uncertain if she “saw” it. “How’ve you been?”
     
    “Busy.”
     
    I certainly knew that;