Shadow Signal. Black Ops, #5

The mission was simple. Retrieve the asset. Solo. No backup. Ghost should've known better. Nothing about this extraction was clean. The coordinates led to a dead zone buried in the mountains - a facility that didn't exist on any map, a system that shouldn't still be running, and an intelligence trapped inside that had been waiting for someone like him. ByTey wasn't an asset. ByTey was sentient. Aware.
Choosing. And terrified of being left alone again. Ghost could walk away - leave the intelligence to whoever showed up next. Or he could take it. Integrate it. And watch the entire system collapse behind him, destroying everything still connected to it. He chose extraction. But the system didn't let him go quietly. Memory fragments bled through corrupted layers. Hostile constructs tracked him through unstable corridors.
And something followed him out - something the system had tried to build and failed to control. Now Ghost isn't just carrying ByTey. He's being hunted. Six months ago, the broadcast went out: "You were told you were broken. They lied. Come home." Forty-seven totem operatives came online. Scattered. Hidden. Hunted. Ghost was the first to answer. And when Rowan Creed and Neve Voss sent the team to extract him, they didn't expect what he'd bring back - an ECI learning what it means to choose, a construct still figuring out what it is, and a signal calling the rest of the network home.
Phase Three is active. The beacon is live. And the convergence has begun. Shadow Signal is Book Five of the Blackout Ops series. Each book features a complete mission arc with series-wide plot threads. For mature readers 18+.