When Blink Station Alpha came into view through the asteroid field Darien felt the tension and anger of the last few weeks fade just a little bit. Here everything had its order, its place in the galaxy, not like the wild lawless regions scattered through the fringes of humanity's push to the stars. He was no stranger to the rough-and-tumble of colonial life, but his time at Blink had removed him from the worst of it. The extended tour of the worst colonial dumping grounds reminded him just how grim things could get.

"Approach is good," Uther said from the co-pilot seat. "Navigation tethers are locked."

Darien nodded. "Take us in. Make sure they have a med team standing by."

Then he unbuckled the straps that crossed over his chest and stood up, turning for the rear compartment of the shuttle. As he stepped through from the cockpit his eyes fell on the huddled form lying beneath a blanket on one of the long seats built into the right-hand wall. Bryn Harvard's head poked out from one end, resting against a makeshift pillow of jackets. Her eyes were closed and she breathed steadily; peaceful enough for now.

Idas lounged opposite her, his eyes running over that data pad clutched in his rugged hands. Occasionally he glanced across at their young refugee.

"How's she doing?" Darien asked quietly, moving over to sit down beside him.

"Settled down after a couple of drowsers," his friend replied, turning the data pad off and straightening up. "Haven't had a peep out of her in the last three hours. Mind you, I don't think she's had a good night's sleep for a long time."

Darien's jaw tightened as he looked at Bryn's sleeping form. When they'd found her she'd been ready to kill anyone or anything she perceived as a threat. He could only hope the doctors and psychologists available to Blink would be able to set her mind to rights. If they could bring her back from the brink she had already displayed the capacity to be formidable asset to Blink.

But that was a conversation for another day. Right now his concern was catching the people who'd put her into this state in the first place.

"We'll get them, Darien," Idas said, as though reading his mind. "And that'll be a very bad day for some very bad people."

He smiled grimly at that. Crossing the room, he crouched down beside Bryn's sleeping form and extended a hand, giving her shoulder a gentle shake. Her eyes snapped open and he felt her body jerk back from his touch. Even the drowsers hadn't been enough to deaden her current nervous state. For an instant she glared wildly around her before her gaze found him and she seemed to remember where she was. Far from the world that had abandoned her so thoroughly.

"It's okay," he told her softly. "It's just me."

"Where are we?" she said, her voice hoarse.

"We're at Blink Station Alpha. Home. You'll be safe here."

She pushed herself into a sitting position, rubbing sleep from her eyes with one hand. "So what happens to me now?"

"There's a medical team standing by," he said. "They're going to help you."

"But then what?"

"Then..." He shrugged. "That's up to you. We can drop you anywhere you want to go – help you start fresh somewhere new. Either that or you could stay. We're always looking for new recruits. I can't guarantee anything, but if you want to I'll do what I can."

Bryn nodded. "I'll...think about it."

"Darien," Uther called from the cockpit. "We're on final approach."

He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile and stood up, walking back through to the pilot station. He leaned in over the back of the chair and opened a comm channel.

"This is shuttle A-6," he said. "Request a comm route to Operative Niamh O'Toole, ID Alpha-Hammer-Two."

"Roger, A-6, comm route in progress."

He waited, drumming his fingers against the top of the chair as the station operators tried to locate and link to his second in command. He knew they'd arrived back before him, completing their stretch of colonies a week ahead of schedule.

Then her voice crackled through the shuttle's speakers. "Darien? Niamh here – good to hear from you."

"Good to be here," he said. "We're on our final station approach. Is Smith ready for a briefing?"

"Yeah, we got him to clear a little window in the schedule. We've got an hour."

"Guess we'll have to make it count."

"We've got enough," she assured him. "He'll come around."

"He'd better," he said. "Alright, meet us at the docking bays. We'll go straight there."

"Copy that. See you soon; Niamh out."

The comm channel closed and Darien's gaze rose to look at the fast-approaching spherical mass of the Blink headquarters. They were through the asteroids now, inside the envelope of the station's repel field that kept any big rocks from floating too close. The exhaust flares of dozens of ship drives lit up the local volume – the steady coming and goings of an organisation trying to police a galaxy.

Uther slid them through the traffic and soon they passed into the main hanger, into the protective embrace of an armoured fortress. Once they'd descended and the locking arms clunked into place, Darien led his small entourage out down the boarding ramp. He spotted the medical team first and he looked to Bryn. Her eyes were wide as she stared around the entrance hall of Blink like a child. Well, he reminded himself, she basically is a child.

Taking her by the elbow he guided her over to the two waiting medics. At first she recoiled from them, still understandably skittish about her new surroundings. He reassured her that these were the best medics money could buy – they would take care of her.

"Just go with them now," he told her. "I've got some business to take care of, but I'll come and check in on you once I'm done, alright?"

"Don't really have a choice, do I?" she replied, smiling nervously. But she allowed the medics to lead her away nonetheless.

"Poor kid," Uther said, shaking his head as she disappeared around a bend in the corridor.

"We'll make it right." Darien clapped the tall operative on the shoulder and looked around, trying to locate Niamh and the others in the bustle of the hanger. After a moment of searching he spotted the blaze of her red hair bobbing through the throng with Amber and Hekket in tow. She extended an arm above her head, waving exaggeratedly.

He led his party to join her and they met in the mouth of one of the corridors leading into the bowels of the station. It was the first time in two weeks that all six of them had actually been in the same place at the same time. Their respective forays out into the fringes hadn't exactly matched up so they'd been restricted to comms and video messages. He admitted to himself that seeing Niamh again in the flesh made him feel just a little bit better all over.

"Hey there, strangers," Niamh said, dragging a loop over her hair back behind her ear and inclining her head to the passage the medics had taken Bryn down. "Who was that?"

"That was one of the people our friends went after," Darien replied. "She gave them the slip and we got there in time to pull her out."

She nodded. "That was a stroke of luck."

"You have no idea."

When Niamh gave him a questioning look he simply shook his head. "You'll see. Is Smith ready for us?"

"Ready and waiting."

"Then let's go."

Without a word the six operatives of Hammerhead Squad fell into step, walking two-by-two through the halls of Blink Station Alpha at a storming pace. They twisted and turned past other operatives, marine guards and support staff, all of whom parted around them like a living sea. The sight of a full squad of black-clad Blink operatives moving with purpose would make anyone think twice.

With Niamh moving with him stride for stride, Darien entered the assigned briefing room and found, as promised, Smith waiting for them, sitting at the head of the oblong table. With no preamble the operatives dispersed to their places at the other chairs. Darien sat closest to their commander – the enigmatic man in the grey suit sitting just a couple of feet to his left.

"Welcome back," Smith said. "From the reports I've received you've had a busy outing."

"And then some," Darien agreed.

"We've confirmed at least four hits carried out by the same group," Niamh interjected. "All the targets were between twelve and fourteen – all of them had potential Blink characteristics."

"Darien?"

"Three confirmed. One of them is the girl I brought to the station today."

"Indeed." Smith nodded knowingly, glancing down at his own data pad – a monstrous specimen at least twice the size of a normal model. "Bryn Harvard, aged thirteen, Alura Colony. Would it interest you to know she was on the Blink watch list?"

Darien's eyes narrowed. "Yes, it would actually."

"I took the liberty of running the confirmations against it. Every single one of the people you've identified as a definite target of...whoever this is, they were on the list of potential candidates coming into the period of their lives where the Blink characteristics start to manifest. Every single one." He looked up from the pad, removing his glasses and wiping them with a tiny cloth before replacing them on the bridge of his nose. "I'm satisfied that this is more than coincidence."

Darien's jaw tightened. So that was that. Their quarry was targeting Blink candidates, plain and simple. More than that, they were coming from the organisations own list. Something about it set alarm bells ringing in his head more than they already were.

"How are they tracing them?" he asked. "Blink has the backing of an entire civilisation behind it. We get census data from every planet, every colony out there. I don't care how well funded these people are. They can't possibly have that kind of information feeding them. The operation's too small scale for that."

"Perhaps," Smith replied. "But even if they are using a stripped back feed of data to try and find targets with Blink aptitude, chances are we would already have them on our list. The other possibility..." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "The other possibility is that they somehow have access to the Blink watch list."

"Look, whoever they are," Amber said. "They're good, but they're still just human beings. They make mistakes like anyone else. The fact that Bryn managed to get away from them proves that."

"Oh, she did more than get away," Darien declared, pulling the data pad they'd retrieved from Bryn's refuge out of his pack. He slid it unceremoniously across the table to Smith. "Her hide-away had a recording stud. We've got our first good look at the people doing this, right there."

"Really?" The man gave him an incredulous look. "They avoided every security net on every planet in human space but this girl managed to catch them out?"

"They didn't know," he said simply. "Why would they? As far as they knew they were digging around an abandoned workhouse – and they never found her. The countermeasures we know they use, they're designed to work against an integrated system. Bryn's little bunker was so ad-hoc that nothing high-tech would actually have been much use. We were lucky."

Smith still didn't look convinced, but he took the pad nonetheless and started rifling through its directory. His eyes narrowed behind his spectacles. "Industrious, isn't she?"

"Desperate," Darien corrected.

The head of Blink operations made a non-committal sound and continued searching. Eventually he found the video files. "Very well. Let's see what we're dealing with."

Linking the pad up to the main briefing screen, Smith tapped the screen with his middle finger and a grainy, low resolution image flashed up. Darien recognised the room immediately – the same place where he and Idas had very nearly been turned into pincushions by Bryn's improvised trap.

The image didn't change for what seemed like minutes, as though it were a static photo rather than a moving recording. But then shadows emerged into to the shot, three of them. Darien leaned back in his seat, interlacing his fingers and pressing his hands against his mouth as he watched. A few seconds later the men casting the shadows hove into view.

All of them were tall and heavily built, though he couldn't tell if they wore armour under their long dark coats. They started moving around, looking behind tables, in cupboards, kicking aside debris and rummaging through drawers, looking for some trace of their quarry. Something about it filled Darien with an anger that he had to fight to suppress. Three grown men chasing one terrified thirteen-year-old girl – the injustice of it wrenched at him like a physical thing. Still, at least he could console himself with the fact that on this occasion the prey had managed to get away.

Then one of the men finally rotated and his face became visible on the screen of the recording in all its glory.

"Freeze it!" he snapped, sitting up sharply.

"Well, well," Smith murmured as he stopped the playback with the flick of a finger. "It looks like Miss Harvard may have just given you your best lead."

Darien could only nod in agreement. He stared at the rugged-faced individual that the stud had captured. The image was slightly blurred but good enough for him to make out the man's features. His head was shaven, his square jaw set in a frustrated grimace as he looked around the room. From this angle he could see the plates of body armour beneath the open jacket.

"Can we run him through the system," Niamh suggested. "Figure out who this bastard is?"

"My sentiments exactly – besides the expletives." Smith gave her a disapproving look. She shrugged and Darien couldn't suppress a smile. Some things never changed. Smith continued, "I'll put the techs on it. As soon as we have identified this man and his companions, you will have your next objective."

"Which is?"

"Bring one of them back here to be interrogated."

"Even if we figure out who that is," Hekket put in, leaning forward to rest his elbows on the table. "How exactly are we going to catch him? We still can't predict their movements."

Smith raised an eyebrow. "A problem to which I suggest we all apply ourselves. Amber is quite correct. These people are human beings – nothing more, nothing less. We'll start with identification. Then we will work up a plan to find them."

"It's a big galaxy out there," Darien pointed out. "Is there any chance of us getting a little bit of backup for the next leg of this caper?"

"I thought you'd never ask." Smith's mouth slipped into a feline smile. "While time and resources are tight, I've moved around some operations and freed up another squad to be placed under your direct command for the remaining duration of this operation, however long it takes."

A small measure of tension flowed out of Darien's body at the welcome declaration. Already having only six people – even if they were Blink operatives – to scour the length and breadth of human space was taking its toll on his team. While one more squad didn't sound like a lot, it would still cut their workload in half.

"Which team?" he enquired.

"Vandal," Smith replied. "Taggart's squad."

"Then get them in this room," Idas grunted. "Minutes are gonna count against these people and Vandal have a lot to catch up on."

"I couldn't agree more."

Smith made one call to the station's operators and in a matter of minutes the door opened the six operatives of Vandal Squad trooped into the briefing room to join them. Darien stood, extending a hand to their squad leader. The shaggy-haired teen threw him a lopsided grin as they shook.

Robbie Taggart – 'Taggs' as the others called him – had been Vandal's second officer, and a part of the ill-fated venture of three Blink teams into the dark ocean depths of Marianas. Vandal Squad's commander hadn't survived the mission, and Taggs had received an abrupt promotion in the field. The new rank stuck and the wiry kid from Donia had quickly established himself as a competent leader. Darien couldn't have asked for better backup.

And he wasn't the only familiar face. Standing to his right was Kelsey Brannigan. Her hair hung longer than he remembered it, the brown locks now washing over the base of her neck, but her eyes still shone with the youthful enthusiasm. Easily the newest operative in the room, she had temporarily filled Uther's spot on the team for her first ever mission – a first mission that had pushed her right to the limit. She came out the other side with a mixed review from Darien's perspective, but he'd felt she deserved another shot. With Vandal Squad undermanned it had been the work of a moment to recommend her transfer and she slotted into her new role effortlessly.

She smiled when she saw him and he gave her a nod of acknowledgement before returning his attention to Taggs.

"I hope your team's ready for a long couple of weeks," he said.

Taggs nodded. "Aye, ready, willin' and able. I hear we're in for a manhunt?" Darien glanced back to the figure on the screen. When he spoke his voice was cold and hard.

"Something like that."