Blink: Phantom (Book 3)

18

Amber had never been on the bridge of a military vessel. Being there now filled her with a warm sense of nostalgia for a simpler time in her life. Back on Illuvari, before Blink, before she had become an enforcer of the law across human space, her ambition had been to become a fleet navigator. She would've ended up somewhere like this if Darien hadn't walked into her life a year and half ago.

The fast attack corvette – the C.N.V. Mattock – hurtled through the empty volume like a needle of shining steel. Brand new, top of the line and bristling with state-of-the-art weaponry, it was the perfect ship for the fast moving organisation of Blink. Other warships were larger and packed a harder punch, but few ships in the navy could match the Mattock for sheer speed.

Even running with its powerful engines at maximum, however, Amber knew they would still be cutting it close to beat Brock to his rendezvous. So far the Blink watch teams had reported no readings, no sign of Smith's bio-trace agent. A small part of her mind worried that Brock had managed to out-guess them – that he would go to a different system entirely.

She tried to distract herself from those thoughts by examining the bridge of the Mattock. Every part of it gleamed and shone, the panelling coloured a crisp white. The displays were large, with prominent holo-screens emerging out from the consoles, each one attended by an immaculately uniformed officer. Her eyes were drawn to the front of the room, where just behind the broad band of the main bridge screen sat the helm and navigation stations.

The place where, if life had worked out just a little bit differently, she'd probably have been sitting by now.

Her eyes ran over the controls, so familiar yet strangely distant all at the same time. She remembered the courses back at school: advanced stellar dynamics, meta-math, gravitational metrics and a dozen other specialist subjects – all the tools she would have needed to pilot the capital ships of the colonial navy. That ambition seemed small now, but she still missed the prospect of it. A small stab of jealously ran through her as she looked at the man and woman currently handling the corvette's controls.

"We are on final approach to Thallo's catchment sphere," the navigator declared, keying commands into his console. "All hands, brace for deceleration burn."

Amber instinctively widened her stance and edged towards the nearest wall, clamping her fingers shut around one of the handles bolted into it. The ship was littered with these hand-holds up and down every corridor to help the occupants cope with any hard manoeuvring. While smaller vessels and fighters could be built to deaden their motion, no amount of motion compensators would take the sting away if a ship the size of the Mattock had to make a sudden turn.

A few seconds later the decelerators ignited, slowing the ship's wild charge towards the Thallo system and Amber felt the plates beneath her feet vibrating, shaking her from head to toe. The reverberations lasted for around a minute before the Mattock's velocity dropped down to a safe inter-planetary cruising speed. She felt her stomach turn under the sensation and gingerly released her hold on the wall-handle.

Her eyes turned to Mattock's commanding officer.

The captain of the ship stood in front of his command chair with his hands clasped behind his back. Amber felt a little uneasy around the tall, slender man – they'd barely spoken a handful of words to him since boarding the Mattock and that seemed more than sufficient. His name was Barikov (he hadn't volunteered a first name) and from the sharpness of his accent she guessed he was Siberran, but a guess was all she could do.

A man with the face of a hawk and the build of an iron coil, Barikov was an intimidating individual. His hair was jet black and a thick matching goatee ringed his small mouth. He spoke little, tersely welcoming them on board and issuing only the orders that were necessary to send his ship on its way. His steely blue eyes narrowed.