Blink: Interdiction (Book 4)

34

The surviving operatives that trudged off the transport formed a grim, quiet procession through the dock at Beltock's Wake.

The long ride back to the nearest Blink Nav-Rod had given Amber a lot of time to process what had happened on Ravine, but her anger hadn't gone away. It clawed in her guts like a physical thing as she tried to sort out who to blame for what.

Overriding it all was the hard truth that they'd failed their mission.

Ravine's melting pot had left no winners in its wake. Kyros's broadcast had blasted across the entire inhabited surface of the planet, and it whipped up fresh hell with every settlement it passed through. Open war raged across huge swathes of the planet with the rebels whipped up into righteous fury after their leader's televised assassination. Rather than put fear into their hearts it had stiffened their resolve. A lot of people living on the planet had simply had enough and there were not enough guns in the universe to change that.

Amber kept replaying all the steps of the mission back in her mind, trying to think of what they could have done to head things off. The realisation she kept coming to with each new circuit of those events was that things on Ravine had been well out of control before she or any other Blink operative ever set foot there. It had been like trying to stick a plaster over an erupting volcano. Hell, for all she knew they'd sped things up.

She'd battled with a lot of things as a Blink operative, forced to confront and overcome things a normal person her age would never had dreamt of, but for all the tests and all the hurt she had never felt useless. Right now that word rattled around her brain like a wrecking ball. The knowledge that all the death and all the conflict that had played out on Ravine may not have changed anything left an ashen taste in her mouth.

In the long run, alone, Kyros's forces couldn't win. She knew that much. They had no navy of their own, no off-world supply lines, and relied on captured or converted factories and machine shops to arm their ragtag army. The Beltock Dragoons and the loyalists of Ravine's government had them outnumbered and badly outgunned, but that didn't seem to matter to the rebels.

Ravine is over the edge, and the rest of the galaxy is going to follow.

That was what Kyros had said, and he clearly believed it. She wondered if anyone else did. Certainly the killing on Ravine showed no signs of stopping, but did that really mean this fire could spread any further? She tried to imagine it. On her home planet of Illuvari it was simply unthinkable that such a jewel of a world could fall victim to violence and strife. But their galaxy spanning manhunt of less than a year ago had shown her the darker side of the colonial system; downtrodden worlds of downtrodden people.

None of them approached the situation on Ravine, but still she wondered.

With an effort she dragged her gaze from those screens and her mind out of her ruminations. Ravine was behind them now; out of their hands. On one level she felt nothing but relief. She looked up the line to the head of the group where Darien walked, his shoulders square but his head slightly lowered, unwilling to meet the gaze of anyone in the port.

She was glad for him that they were no longer on Ravine. She thought back to that briefing, what felt like a lifetime ago, when Smith had explained the rationale. Someone native to Ravine, someone who knew the planet and its people – he had been the logical choice. Now, however, it was clear that assigning Darien to the mission had been, at the very least, a serious risk. He had too much history, too much stake in what happened there and it had taken its toll.

The anger she'd felt towards him for ordering them to kill had been assuaged somewhat after his confrontation with Merlynn, but she still felt uneasy. He'd barely spoken two words to either Hekket or herself since they'd left Ravine. Niamh and Idas kept a wide berth too, their trust shaken. The pair would follow Darien to hell and now they knew there were people in the squad who didn't feel the same.