Blink: 3003 (Book 1)

06

6 Months Later

Howler Beta was a hot, gloomy world in a lonely corner of the galaxy; a heat-blasted expanse of jagged rock rendered almost uninhabitable by the power of its blue giant star. The enormous, searing globe reared over a horizon of snarling crags and snaggle-toothed valleys, pouring out deadly radiation and cooking the terrestrial world with lethal temperatures.

And yet, it was home to a small, disconsolate population of colonists, almost all of whom were in thrall to the local sector's mining and shipping contractors. Out in the blind spots of colonial space, you took what you could get. The evidence of this human incursion was limited to a score of half-buried mining settlements that had been dug into the huge series of shaded canyons that scarred the planet's equator

And it was in one of these settlements that Amber found herself battling with her nerves as Hammerhead Squad tackled their latest assignment. Within the mining complex the scorching heat of the surface was counteracted – barely – by a formidable system of liquid nitrogen coolant that coursed through the structure like icy blood. Even with this frigid temperature control, Amber could feel the sweat beading on her cheeks.

The lack of windows make her uneasy, but whoever had built Howler Beta's colony had decided to dispense with the expensive luminosity screens that would have been needed to counteract the blue giant's brightness. Instead they stood inside featureless, silver-walled passages, lit by soft, pale ceiling discs that made everything look colder than it actually was.

She fidgeted with the strap that held her lance carbine securely in place as they discussed their strategy. She still couldn't shake the strange unreality that Blink had given a gun to a sixteen-year-old girl. Back on Illuvari nobody really needed guns. The carbines were not standard military issue – lightweight and compact with a rectangular telescoping barrel – they were designed for a user that didn't carry the build of an average colonial marine.

It had taken a lot of getting used to. She grimaced at the memory of the Blink instructors berating her as she hesitated on the firing range, unwilling – almost unable to process the fact that she had a weapon that could kill people. Eventually, after plenty of harsh language and a lot of concentration, she'd managed to dig her mental heels in for long enough to get through her combat training, but compared to the rest of the squad her scores were still below average.

But it wasn't the gun that had her on edge right now. On the other side of a six inch titanium blast door was an armed man, along with a dozen hostages, one of whom already had suffered a bullet to the leg as the criminal strove to show strength of his resolve. Disgruntled, under-paid and overworked, Tobias Van Hoyt had simply cracked, and with the slack security on these fringe systems, it hadn't been hard from him to get hold of a firearm.

She'd heard his frantic – almost hysterical – demands for a blank cheque of g'lactic and a ship to ferry him off the space-forsaken furnace, and it made for grim listening. Locked in a sealed room with his unfortunate co-workers, he'd made it abundantly clear that he would start killing people in the next hour if his demands weren't met.

What had also been made abundantly clear to her, however, was that the colonial governments did not like to negotiate. This man was getting nothing and going no-where, and it fell to the operatives of Hammerhead Squad to make sure no one died in making that happen.

Not exactly the kind of situation she'd hoped to encounter on her second operational Blink. The rest of her team averaged over fifty, and standing with them now she felt every inch the white-blood rookie.

"Alright, listen up," Darien said as they gathered around a three-dimensional schematic of the facility. An electronic display removed from the planet's rock, it showed a building shaped like a tiered wedding cake that broadened out hundreds of feet below the surface. They currently stood on the top level – a small jutting disc that bore the full brunt of the Howler Beta's blasting heat, where the main administration hub had become a hostage zone.