The next day all of Hammerhead Squad assembled in the mess area, bright and early. Hekket and Idas had arrived as scheduled from their trip screening candidates on Barrko and hadn't missed a beat when Darien filled them in on their new assignment. He sat hunched over his data pad, a steaming mug of black coffee clasped in both hands, letting the fumes waft up into his nostrils. This was real coffee too, not the knock-off synthetic crap he'd grown up with. Only the best, for the best.

Still, the sheer scale of the task that lay before them had become quickly apparent when they started sifting through the avalanche of reports that Smith hurled their way. The man had not been exaggerating the numbers. People seemed to vanish on an almost industrial scale across human colonies, the rates rising exponentially the further they pushed into the outer rims.

He stared disbelievingly as the names rolled down the screen, each one linking to a file that varied wildly in depth of information. And these were just the disappearances that were documented. The closer to the big colonial hubs he looked, the more comprehensive the case files became. That was to be expected – the long-established colonies had their own substantial local security forces, including detachments of the Colonial Navy.

Taking a sip from his coffee, he began methodically removing the inner colonies from the list. If the kidnappers had been operating for any length of time their only hope of going unnoticed would be to stick to the areas of human space where the law took a turn into the grey.

"Hell's teeth," Idas rumbled, slumping forward onto his elbows, glaring at his own data pad. "How are we meant to pick anything outta this mess?"

"A bit of patience," Darien murmured, glancing up at his friend with a smile. Taller than him by half a head and bulky with it, Idas's skills were better suited to a fire-fight than a game of cat and mouse. The other boy scratched the thin fuzz of his dark hair with the expression of an angry toddler.

"I don't even know where to start," he declared. "Take this thing at face value and your buddies have a small army working every colony in space."

"Take out the inner colonies," Niamh chimed in, echoing Darien's own deductions. "There's no way they could run a regular scam in those sectors. Too much security."

"She's right," Amber agreed. "They hit Marnill because it's out on the edge of nowhere. There's no navy presence there, just local fleet militias. The whole planet is one big hunting ground for these people."

"That still leaves an awful lot of space to search," Hekket put in unhappily. The medic leaned forward with one elbow on the table, his hand buried in his sandy mess of hair. "And what are you classing as an inner colony? The lines look a bit blurred to me."

"We can discount anywhere that has a substantive navy presence and heavy port security at least as 'less likely' targets. We've got to start somewhere."

"And then what?"

"Then cross reference the disappearances," Darien said. "You all know the M.O. that we're looking for. Disappearances at the low end of Blink's catchment – twelve or thirteen years old. There will be no demands, no warning. You're looking for any kind of atmospheric or orbital disturbances, any readings that match up with the ship Amber and I saw on Marnill. Take a sector each: find me something that fits."

"And what if there's nothing?"

He glared at Idas. "Then we start from scratch. Now quit grumbling and get on with it!"

To their credit, they did. While his operatives could bitch, moan and complain with the best of them, Darien had no doubts that when they did knuckle down to a task they would do it better than anyone else on the station. A bubble of silent concentration descended on the six operatives as the rest of life on the station bustled on around them unheeding.

Hours crawled by. He worked mechanically, crossing off planets, crossing off names, collating any and all possible incidents that might throw up a lead into a separate data cache on the pad. After two more cups of coffee he was beginning to feel a little on edge from the caffeine and his eyes started to hurt. He leaned back in his seat and rubbed his eyes with one hand, mind racing with possibilities.

Why would someone come after Blink candidates in the first place? If that's what they were doing. While it seemed the most likely scenario, Darien was painfully aware that he had made a big extrapolation from a single incident. He couldn't make himself believe it, but the possibility existed that Indigo Farrier's kidnapping didn't have anything to do with her Blink aptitude. The initial circumstances had intrigued Smith enough to let them investigate, but if they came back empty-handed he didn't know what the next step would be.

Shoving those thoughts from his mind, he shook his head to clear it and leaned forward to again. If they didn't try they'd never know.

"Alright," Amber sighed after another hour of trawling through dossiers. "I've cut mine down to a short list." She pushed the pad away, blinking and rubbing her eyes with both hands. "So I'm going to stop before my eyeballs start bleeding."

"Seconded," Idas grunted. He pushed his computer aside and slumped forward, resting his head on the table.

For a moment Darien considered telling them to keep going, but he decided against it. The six of them had been working flat out since the crack of dawn squinting at the screens and ploughing through a veritable avalanche of information. He could feel it too – the sense that he was losing his concentration. They needed a break, and more importantly, they needed to step back and see the things from a broader perspective.

"I think you've all earned a little breather," he declared, whereupon an appreciative rumble passed through the other operatives. "All of you go get something to eat – take a walk, clear your head – whatever you need to do. Load up your caches and shunt them to my pad."

"Then what?" Amber asked as she started tapping commands into her device.

"We need to take a step back – lay the whole list out and put our heads together. Maybe then we'll pull something useful out of all this."

With the best efforts of all six members loaded up onto Darien's data pad Hammerhead Squad dispersed for a short respite away from the grim statistics. He opted not to cram more caffeine into his body, instead tracking down a carbonated stim-drink. Across the colonies these bottles would be branded and re-branded in the ever-present market games, but the supply on Blink Station Alpha had been stripped of its trappings and finery. The bottles were pure white, like porcelain, with black bands of bold text to indicate their flavour.

He grabbed one at random, popped its cap with the flick of a thumb, and took a long swig. The fizzing sensation tingled in his mouth and throat, the citrus tang flushing through his system. He closed his eyes for a moment, letting his head rock back as he let the stims do their work.

"Rough day at the office, huh?"

Darien opened his eyes to find Niamh standing in front of him, a playful smile on her face. "Oh...I guess so."

"You okay? You're burning pretty hard on this."

"Don't I always?"

She smirked. "I suppose."

"This one just feels kinda personal," he admitted. "These people yanked that kid right out from under me."

"From what you've told me there wasn't much you could do."

"That's what bugs me."

"Hey." She stepped closer, putting a hand on his arm. He stiffened slightly at her touch. "We'll nail them, Darien. You and me, just like we always do. We've beaten aliens, giant sea monsters and everything in between. A bunch of cowards who run around snatching defenceless kids – they don't have a chance."

Darien smiled ruefully. "Sounds good to me."

"Besides, once we get shot of these scumbags we've got some leave due." She winked. "And I've got a bone to pick with you."

"Oh yeah?"

"But I'm a patient girl. One thing at a time."

*

Once the operatives reassembled they shifted their investigation to one of the many briefing rooms that were scattered across the station. As they entered, Darien couldn't help feeling a little odd. In the last year or so walking into one of these chambers had been the launching pad for some of the most terrifying and exhilarating experiences of his life.

The others spread out around the room; Niamh lounged with her feet up on one of the desks, arms folded. Hekket and Amber sat together as though attending a full briefing while Idas turned one of chairs around, sitting down and crossing his arms cross the top of it to use as a chin rest. Uther didn't sit, instead leaning against one of the tables, hands in pockets, waiting intently.

Moving to the head of the room, Darien synched his pad to the main display monitor and keyed in the activation command. In an instant the screen flashed into life. At first the display was nothing more than a list. The collated efforts of the team ran down the left side in one massive scrolling column. Even with their attempted culling of the records to narrow the search there were still well over three hundred incidents that potentially warranted further investigation.

His fingers danced over the screen of his data pad as he reconfigured the display parameters. A moment later the image before them changed completely. Gone were the lists, replaced by a zoomed-out map of colonised space, a vast area stretching across a quarter of the known galaxy. All across it the incident sites that the six operatives had identified were marked with spurs of blue. Most were concentrated along the outer edges, dropping sharply in number the closer they drew to the inner colonies and Earth itself.

"Okay..." he murmured. "So this is a map of every incident we've marked as a possible."

"Bloody hell," Idas grunted.

Darien found he had to agree. Even with the substantial cull they were still left with a truly daunting number of disappearances to investigate. The blue spurs steered away from the inner colonies, but beyond that there didn't seem to be a pattern.

"This doesn't make sense," Amber said, leaning forward and propping her chin up on her hands. "There's no...pattern at all."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I thought we'd get some kind of focal point. They must be operating from somewhere. They might have advanced tech but they're still stuck in the real world like everyone else. To a certain point the time it takes for a ship to get out and back again would become unmanageable."

"Hang on." Darien punched in a new modifier to the data. Part of him knew this would be too simple, too good to be true, but they needed to exhaust all possibilities. So he keyed in a formula, collating and examining the distances between each disappearance – searching for one planet that was within striking distance of every single incident.

Sure enough, despite its best efforts the computer system couldn't reconcile his demands.

Uther squinted at the screen. "The time stamps don't match. It would take too long for a ship to traverse that much space – I don't care what kind of hardware they've got in the drive core. It's impossible."

"That leaves us with three possibilities," Darien replied. "First, there's more than one planetary base. Second, they operate out of a mobile base – a ship or a station."

"And third?"

He glanced grimly at Uther. "They've broken the laws of physics."

An uneasy quiet settled over the squad as they exchanged looks. He didn't want to believe it either, but by process of elimination it was something they had to consider. The human race was still making scientific leaps, striving every hour of every day to further imprint themselves upon the universe. Maybe, just maybe, someone had overcome the physical barriers of that universe.

Eventually, Hekket spoke up. "We need more concrete information. We can stare at this map until the galaxy spins apart, but unless we go out there and do some real digging I think we're stuck."

"I think you're right." Darien turned to face the screen, eyes flickering across the screen as he formulated a plan. There was no quick fix to their current situation. If they wanted to make progress it looked like they would have to grind it out the hard way. "We'll split into two teams; take half the possible incidents each."

"That's a lot of ground to cover," Idas pointed out. "Is there no way we can get another team to help out? Or two?"

He shook his head. "Afraid not. Right now we've got leave to see if there's anything to this. We need to get out there and find some evidence that there is something more to what's going on out there. Until then, the buck stops with us." Blowing out his cheeks in a sigh he clasped his hands together behind his head, rocking back in his seat. "Okay...Niamh, you take Amber and Hekket. Start by working your way through the incidents on the edge of the Vulcan Colonial Network."

He glanced across to see her reaction. She said nothing, simply nodding, but he thought he saw her throw him a suspicious look. The team compositions were by the book – once officer and one tech each. A convenient excuse, perhaps, to put off any further exploration of their relationship.

Looking back to the screen, he continued. "Me, Idas and Uther will take the run from Kelthic to Brunnos."

"There are over fifty possibles along that route," Uther said dubiously.

"Then we'd best get moving." Darien stood, looking each of his squad mates in the eye. "I want everyone fully geared and ready for departure in the main hangar by 1500 hours, station time. Every minute we waste we could lose someone."

"Not on our watch," Niamh agreed, standing up and giving him a nod of encouragement.

He looked at her for a long moment, then let his gaze wander over the other. "Alright then. You all know what to do. Let's get out there and skewer these bastards."