Blink: Phantom (Book 3)

04

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.