Darien was seething.

He couldn't quite put his finger on who or what he was angry at. Amber for defying him? Merlynn for ordering them on this mission in the first place? Smith for sending him back to Ravine? Kyros for his blood-soaked moral crusade? He could lay blame in a lot of places.

Right now it didn't really matter. He cleared everything out of his head; locked those dark thoughts away to be wrestled with another day. He'd been through a lot in the last few years as an operative, but he'd never left a job half done, and he wasn't about to start now.

One more mission and he could leave Ravine and never come back. If he was being honest with himself, that was all he really cared about.

With the footsteps of Amber and Hekket receding into the corridors he sucked a calming breath in through clenched teeth and looked to Niamh.

"Get to the barracks," he told her flatly. "Bring Cath and Gale from Tundra Squad. They can fill in and I'm damn sure they'll want to be here for this."

Flicking a quick salute Niamh gave him a nod and darted from the room. Only once she was out of sight did he allow his anger to slip out, like glimpsing a supernova. With one hand he lashed out, smashing a fist down hard against the display table before turning sharply away, hands on hips as he tried to get a handle on his rage.

"Darien," Uther said quietly. "You shouldn't hold this against them."

He shot the older operative a grim look. "You think I will?"

"They disobeyed orders, but they're right – we're not supposed to be doing the government's wet work. They have their own branch of psychopaths for that."

"So you want to walk away as well?"

The tech shook his head. "No, I'm with you. I want to finish this and go home, but I understand why Amber and Hekket did what they did."

"This is a real shitty planet you have here, Darien," Idas muttered, flopping down into a chair with his arms folded almost petulantly. "You know, I miss when it was just us against the bad guys – nice and black'n'white. Give me a giant spider the size of a city, or an alien parasite that steals people's bodies, but this?" He flapped a vague hand at their surroundings. "Colonial politics is more than I signed up for. What a mess."

Darien nodded. "Isn't it just." He scuffed a boot off the solid metal floor and looked to Uther. "I'm not going to hold anything against them for what they did, but there are going to be consequences that are out of my hands."

The other operative gave him a stiff nod of understanding and Darien felt his shoulders relax just a fraction with the knowledge he wouldn't have to deal with any further challenges to his authority – at least not right now. He shuddered to think of the disciplinary actions that might now come crashing down on the heads of Amber and Hekket when the operation concluded. They had disobeyed orders from both himself and from a military colonel. He knew from experience that at the very least suspension beckoned. More realistically the pair had probably jeopardized their future in Blink altogether with such an act.

They waited in a heavy silence until Niamh returned, the two operatives from Tundra squad close on her heels. The medic, Cath still more a grim expression as she shot a dagger-like glare in Darien's direction from beneath the fringe of her short blonde hair. Still bitter, still angry, just as he'd expected. Behind her was Gale, the stocky boy who'd tried in vain to keep a rein on his furious comrade what felt like a lifetime ago. He had a shaven head and pale skin, sharp blue eyes flickering as he took in the room. They moved up to the table both of them examining the globe suspiciously and for a moment no-one spoke.

Darien waited.

"What do you want, Flint?" Cath asked, folding her arms without even a pretence of respect for rank.

He saw Niamh bristle and shot her a warning look. He had a feeling Tundra's medic would fall into line once he explained the situation.

"That little blotch of red on that map?" he said, jerking a thumb towards it. "That's where Kyros Bakirtzis, the man who caused all of this, is hiding."

Her expression changed in an instant, eyes widening as she looked back to the map. She opened her mouth; closed it again, struggling for the words. In the end, her comrade piped up instead.

"So they guy who got Vass killed? He's there?" Gale asked quietly, nodding to the map.

"Yes."

"Cath..."

"Looks like you're two short," she said icily. "What's the catch? You need some extra bodies to run interference for you?"

"If you lock your attitude up for five seconds I'll explain," Darien snapped, his patience thinning. There was only so much insubordination he could handle in one day. "Operatives Garret and Mozer voluntarily withdrew from this mission because of the nature of our orders. I've asked you both here because I think you will be willing to take their place."

Cath pursed her lips thoughtfully. "And what about the orders was so bad they didn't want to be a part of it?"

"We're going in there to kill Kyros."

"Cut the head off the snake, eh?" Gale grunted. "Count me in."

Cath, however, wasn't so easily baited. She regarded Darien coldly. "So this is what, your way of making amends?"

"It was never my fault, Cath." He stepped around the table to face her, standing a couple of inches taller as he held her gaze. "I'm your commanding officer and I don't owe you a damn thing. If you want to be a part of this, this is your chance. If you don't, then I'll find somebody else. Now which is it?"

He saw her jaw tighten, her muscles tensing as they stood there, anger fizzing beneath her skin with every passing second. Her gaze flickered to the map and back to him. 

"Cath, he's right," Gale said, nudging her gently with an elbow. "C'mon, let's go out there and get this bastard. For Vass."

She looked at her squad mate for a moment, into his beseeching eyes. Then her shoulders slumped and she turned back to Darien.

"Alright. When do we leave?"

*

Darien hated to admit it, but now that they were on the move, the two operatives from Tundra squad were showing why Vass had held the respect of so many despite his wild nature. There was a crisp, controlled viciousness to their movements as they snapped up to corners, carbines hunting determinedly for targets. They were drilled to fight.

The six operatives scampered their way through the pitch blackness of one of the more remote feeder tunnels, bypassing a lonely guard station concealed in the surrounding rocks by Blinking straight into the structure itself. Deliberately Blinking underground had been a rather unnerving experience, particularly when they landing complete darkness, but once their night-sight goggles were primed and they could traverse the tunnel discipline quickly reasserted itself.

In pairs they leapfrogged each other. He moved with Idas, staying low and quiet as he scuttled around a bend in the passage. On either side in staggered positions the two operatives from Tundra held their positions, carbines primed and ready. Darien sank silently into a crouch several meters further up the tunnel with Idas on the opposite wall. Niamh and Uther came ghosting by an instant later.

Piece by piece they worked their way forward. Through the goggles Darien could make out the age old scorches and scarring from where lava had once been directed through these passages. No prospect of that happening now, thankfully. They didn't expect to run into any guards in the tunnels themselves, but it paid to be ready for anything.

Soon they encountered a stagnant glow at the far end of the tunnel that indicated they were approaching the main structure, and more guards. He snapped up a fist, bringing the others to a halt and waving Uther forward. With a silent chopping gesture with two fingers he motioned for the older operative to scout it out through the scope of his heavier lance rifle.

Uther slithered forwards, slinking down onto his belly in the shadows and taking aim at the doorway for a few seconds. Then he raised his head.

"No guards on this side of the door," he said, speaking in a hoarse whisper. "Camera trained watching the outside approach – standard lensing angled with the door as primary. We can probably get to within fifty meters on the left wall before we enter its cone."

"That's close enough," Darien replied with a nod. Gesturing for the others to fall in behind him, he pressed himself close to the warm rock of the left hand wall and started moving again, running through the facility plans Merlynn had provided in his mind. Their dark fatigues blended into the charcoal of the walls and he stopped them a little shy of Uther's fifty meter estimate.

"According to our schematics there's a connecting passage just past this entrance," he said quietly. "Ten meters forward and five meters left to be out of field of a corresponding camera on the opposite side."

Silent nods. They'd all read the same plans as him.

"Standard spacing." He folded his carbine up against his body and glanced down the line to make sure they had all done the same. "On my count. Three, two, one..."

He made it happen, briefly divorcing himself from the physical universe in an instant of gut wrenching weightless and darkness. The space around him shimmered and bent, then he was gone, sliding through a rip in reality to rematerialise in a passage on the other side of the doorway.

The light seared against his goggles as he emerged into the world once more, and he quickly whipped a hand up to shove them up onto his forehead. He stayed with his body tucked tight, taking in the dark metal walls illuminated by lights tinged with cobalt blue. He felt the twinges in space as in a line to his left the other members of the Blink contingent arrived in perfect spacing in the empty corridor.

Night sight goggles were swiftly removed and weapons raised. So far their presence remained undetected. Despite the cameras and the guards, Darien quietly hoped the rebels wouldn't expect any colonial force to have penetrated to the heart of their command structure.

"On me, two by two cover," he ordered in hushed tones, taking the lead with Idas as they resumed their scuttling, leapfrogging cover formation through repurposed magma siphon, heading upwards towards the armoured command node.

They moved with all the stealth they'd been trained with, Blinking around the security cameras they encountered scattered through the halls, disabling none, doing their utmost to keep their presence within Kyros' inner sanctum a secret until the last possible moment. From deeper in the complex Darien could hear the dull thunder of machines, faint reverberations rippling through the superstructure and transferring to the hyper-sensitive frames of the operatives. He couldn't stop to wonder about what those sounds might be now though. They were too close; so close.

Two levels later their stealthy incursion was brought to an abrupt, and violent end.

It was Cath who had the misfortune of easing her head around the top of the blocky metal stairway, only to be greeted with a yell of surprise and half a dozen wild pistol shots. The girl jerked back sharply, spitting a curse in a language Darien didn't know before she motioned with her head.

"Guard post ahead," she hissed. "Sighted two – twelve meters."

"Copy that." Gale loped up alongside her, freeing a concussion grenade from his combat vest and tossing it in a lazy arc around the bend. It clunked off the wall and out of sight, but Darien heard the deafening bang of its detonation.

"Weapons free," he barked, surging past the pair with Idas right on his heels. A security checkpoint greeted them – not much more than a desk with an obsidian sheathed computer console bolted into it. One guard was up, his hands clasped over his ears as he staggered around. The second coughed violently, scrubbing at his eyes with one hand as he scrabbled for the radio in his belt with the other.

Darien's first lance pinned that hand to the man's torso. The next punched through his throat before he could scream, sending him toppling backwards. Idas's jackhammer boomed once in the tight confines of the passage, blowing the remaining guard off his feet with a crater in his chest.

"Double time!" Darien shouted, barely giving the unlucky guards a second glance as he set off. "We're almost there."

Six pairs of booted feet clattered along the halls, bounding over the two corpses where their radios fizzed with dead static. No alarms blared – no message had escaped the guard post. For all intents and purposes they were still undetected. Adrenaline began pumping through Darien's veins as he ran, a measure of calm suddenly descending upon him. This was it: the final push. In a few minutes he could bring this whole hellish mess to an end. Right now that thought was sweeter than any other.

So when they encountered more guards closer to the command node, he didn't hesitate.

There were four, moving at a jog in the opposite direction to the operatives, perhaps on their way to investigate the unresponsive team below. When faced with six armed intruders, the guards hesitated for a fatal second.

His first lance smacked a female guard in the shoulder, sending her spinning with a scream of pain. The man directly behind her took two shots from Niamh square in the chest and collapsed choking. A third was clipped in the legs by a snapped shot from Cath and stumbled with a yell, then a shot from Uther's lance rifle to punched him through the heart. He toppled backwards, only for his corpse to be caught by the fourth and final guard.

"Scatter!" Niamh's yelped warning came in the nick of time and the operatives through themselves down and to the sides of the passage as the last guard aimed blindly around the body of her comrade, using him as a shield as she fired a big, grimy looking pistol.

Heavy, solid state rounds ripped chunks from the metal plating, leaving dents and scorch marks in their wake. The guard back pedalled frantically as she fired, yelling into her radio.

Darien felt the buckle and warp of space as one of his team Blinked. An instant later he saw Niamh materialise behind the woman, her carbine slung and her long-bladed combat knife at the ready. The guard never stood a chance.

Niamh pounced and the knife flashed once.

As the woman's body crumpled lifelessly to the floor plating the alarms finally started to blare. Darien looked up for an instant as the keening, piercing noise scythed into his hearing before turning to the other operatives.

"Stay on mission!" he shouted above the din. "One more level!" Turning he waved at Niamh and jerked a thumb upwards, indicating that they would not be taking stairs. She understood at once, sheathing her knife and clasping her carbine again. "Blink on my count!" Darien called.

He counted them down again, and barely five seconds later the incursion team burst into being on the top level of the complex, where the armoured command node awaited them.

Two more guards were taken totally unawares when Darien's team emerged from a passage behind them. Cath and Gale gunned them down without remorse, venting their grief on the unfortunate defenders of Kyros' bunker. Niamh and Uther raced past them to the next passage, and in a slick, deadly combat formation the six operatives continued their stiletto-sharp plunge to the heart of Ravine's rebellion.

When they reached the final crossroads leading to the command node, they almost walked straight into Kyros himself.

A great armoured bulkhead gaped open at the far end of the hall, and six heavily armed guards were in the process of escorting Kyros out of the room when the Blink operatives arrived. He saw Kyros's face; saw the squint that morphed into an expression of resignation. Then their quarry was swallowed up by the phalanx of guards surging forwards to protect him. A blast from Idas's jackhammer downed one of them before the others started firing.

He recognised the woman who'd brought him to meet Kyros, the thick braids of dirty blond hair and long blast coat over her wiry frame unmistakable. She no longer wore her face wrap, revealing a young woman perhaps in her late twenties with scorch-cracked skin and parched lips. She also carried a bulky shotgun, the kind normally used by naval boarding teams.

Her face twisted with fury as she pumped the shotgun and fired.

A thunderous boom echoed down the hall and the operatives dropped, ducked and rolled aside as she fired, rising to snap off shots from their own weapons. Darien slid back to the corner of the passage, seeing the shredded crater of metal where a storm of lacerating shotgun pellets had ripped into the ground just a few meters from him.

"Back, back inside!" he heard the woman snarl as she placed body between them and Kyros. One guard went down with an expertly placed heavy lance from Uther taking his leg out from under him, and the woman fired again. Though the distance between them negated the worst damage the shotgun could do, it still shredded a section of wall plating and showered Cath on the opposite corner with shards of torn up metal, causing her to leap backwards, shielding her eyes with one hand.

Two of the remaining guards bundled Kyros back into the command node while the other sprayed the hall with bullets to help keep their attackers at bay. By the time Darien was able to duck back out of cover and aim he saw the bulkhead grinding shut again, sealing Kyros and his guards inside. Exhaling a breath he raised a fist, looking around.

"Sound off!" he barked. "Everybody in one piece?"

The responses came back clear and crisp – a few scrapes but nothing serious. They formed up as he led the way down the passage, carbine raised, flicking left and right as he went. He had no doubt more guards would be descending on them imminently – their lightning strike had bought them a small window of opportunity. He came to a halt at the formidable bulkhead that now barred the way to Kyros; barred his path to escaping Ravine once and for all. A grim smile crossed Darien's face.

The room was designed to protect its occupants from lava flows, earthquakes and explosions, but it could not protect them from the operatives of Blink. He glanced at the cumbersome locking mechanism that held the thing shut. It had seen an upgrade since Kyros' people had moved in, but there was only so much one could do to a hulk like this.

"Uther, think you can pop this beast?"

The lanky tech shot him a questioning look. "Sure, if you give me a few minutes, but I'm not sure we have that kind of time. But why would you want to do that? We can just-"

"We can Blink in, but Kyros knows who and what we are. They'll be ready for that."

"So we crack the door as a distraction," Niamh interjected. "The Blink in when they have their guns on the entrance."

He nodded. "Exactly."

"You'd better get to work then," Cath said sharply, glancing at Uther. "We don't have long before this place is swarming."

"Rein it in a notch," Uther growled back. "I don't take my orders from you."

She bristled but Darien stepped between then, looking at Uther. "Work fast, get it open. We'll cover you."

The other operative cast one final scathing glance at Cath before nodded and turning to the door's control panel. In a quick, violent motion he broke open the metal casing with his combat knife to reveal a series of thick, greasy wires that controlled the bulkhead's hydraulic fail safes. A military grade installation might have had more hardened security around these systems, but the converted civilian office had never been designed to prevent such outside tampering.

It was the work of a few short moments for him to sever the correct wires that would override the bulkhead's oxygen monitors. With the system believing its occupants would soon be suffocating if kept inside, the fail safe kicked in.

Metal creaked against metal and pistons hissed as the bulkhead eased open.

A thunderous boom of the female guard's shotgun echoed violently through the passage as she fired through the opening door, hoping to obliterate whoever was on the other side. The Blink operatives, however, were not there. As soon as the door opened they Blinked, as a unit, into the middle of the room beyond.

They were amongst the guards in an instant. Two of them were cut down where they stood by a storm of carbine fire. The third spun, spraying bullets from his rifle in a wild arc, only for a shot from Niamh to catch him in the mouth. He toppled, gurgling before a second lance ripped through his heart, silencing him for good.

The female leader of the guard troop reacted faster than her compatriots, pumping the shotgun and spinning to fire. The first blast hurled Gale backwards into a wall. Not waiting to see if he would get back up, she reloaded and turned to aim at Darien who was standing barely six feet in front of her. They faced each other for an instant before she pulled the trigger, her gun roaring defiantly.

The shot hit nothing but air.

Calculating the short distance in a heartbeat, Darien Blinked behind the woman and in a fluid motion spun around and shot a lance into her back.

She let out a wheezing gasp of surprise, her body spasming briefly, one hand flapping at the bloody hole punched in her spinal column before she pitched forward. Her body hit the ground with a dull thump, her eyes staring sightlessly off to the side in an expression of shock. Darien's gaze lingered on her for a moment before he tensed, looking up and bringing his carbine to bear on the last surviving rebel in the room.

Kyros just stood there. He hadn't even bothered to draw the pistol holstered at his hip, an expression of grim resignation on his features. Their eyes met.

"Gale?" Darien said quietly, not taking his eyes from their quarry.

"Bitch winged me," the Tundra operative snarled, his voice tight with pain. "Armour caught the worst of it."

"I can patch him here," Cath confirmed, having scampered over to aid her squadmate. "He'll be alright til we get him to a proper med centre. Let's just bury this bastard and go home."

He nodded, exhaling a slow breath. His finger curled gently around the trigger and out of the corner of his eye he saw Niamh and Idas edging out to flank their quarry. Then Amber's words screamed unbidden into his mind as he stared down the barrel of his carbine at Kyros.

We were supposed to be the good guys.

He certainly didn't feel like the good guy right now. No matter the logic, no matter how justified he felt in his actions something inside him still felt all wrong as he stood there amongst the bodies of half a dozen guards, people who died for something they'd believed in. He'd snuffed out those dreams in a heartbeat.

Darien tried to think; tried to pinpoint the time when killing had become something he could stomach so simply. The death of Theodore Logan had felt justified too, but since then he'd passed over an invisible dividing line – a line where some people had to die to keep the peace.

He didn't know whether to hate himself for it, or be proud that he had the backbone to do what had to be done.

"So this is how you want it to be?" Kyros said through a hollow chuckle, pulling him from his dilemma. The rebel leader reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a cigarette free. "Do you mind?"

When Darien didn't reply Kyros took it as tacit agreement, lighting the black stub and taking a deep drag.

"You know," he said through a cloud of smoke. "I really thought when we spoke I might have got through to you."

"You thought wrong," Darien snapped. "I've lost good people because of you and your war, Kyros. Whatever goodwill you think you bought, it's long gone."

"So you're going to kill me? Just shoot me dead like a mongrel dog?"

He stiffened. They could take him captive. The operatives could get him out and take him back to Karpa Luna for a trial. But what then? He'd be disobeying a totally different set of orders, going against Colonel Merlynn – going against the instructions of the ranking military officer of this planet on a whim. Going against the Colonial Government.

And he wasn't convinced it would even be the right thing to do.

"You'll never change," he said, fighting to keep his voice level. "And as long as you're alive this war won't end – whether you're in a prison cell or not."

"I'm flattered you think so highly of me," Kyros laughed blackly. "But none of you really get it, do you? You can kill me but that won't change a thing. Ravine is over the edge, and the rest of the galaxy is going to follow."

In that moment, Darien made his decision. He'd had just about enough of the rantings of zealots and fanatics justifying their horrific actions. However he dressed it up, Kyros was not any different. He eased the stock of the carbine against his shoulder and sighted his crosshairs, taking no pleasure in what he was about to do.

"I'm sorry, Kyros."

The young man smiled sadly. "I'm sorry, too. Good luck, Darien." Then his hand flashed to his hip.

He was quick. But Darien was quicker.

Before Kyros had dragged his gun more than halfway from the holster Darien's carbine barked, its muzzle flashing in the confined space. A lance spat across the space between them and hit Kryos between the eyes.

The man jerked to a halt, his mouth lolling open in surprise. A couple of seconds teetered by before the gun clattered from Kyros' nerveless fingers and his body crumpled like a deflating balloon. He hit the ground with a dull thump, eyes staring lifelessly at the ceiling, the slender shard of ceramic protruding from his skull like a grisly flagpole.

For a moment all Darien felt was numbness, a creeping cold that froze him to the spot, staring at his one time companion. One time friend. He swallowed down the feeling of nausea that surged in his gut. His carbine barrel dropped and the taut muscles of his shoulders unwound with aching slowness.

For better or worse, it was over.