A sign on the door of Joy Frost's workshop invited him to please walk in, so Face did. Inside he found himself in a small room, crammed with, at Face's guess, a million broken things. A young man, barely more than a boy, sat at a bench dismantling a piece of machinery. Face recognised him from the hotel, as one of the Lambert's kids. This town is too small, he thought, I already know everybody. The boy looked at him, questioningly.

"Hi, Russ isn't it? I'm here to see Joy Frost."

Russ gave him one of the hugely unimpressed looks teenagers specialised in and called out, "Hey, Frosty. You've got a visitor." Then he went back to his dismantling, losing any apparent interest in Face.

"Who is it?" A woman said as she walked in from a back room. Aged perhaps fifty, Face guessed, she wore overalls and her greying hair was cropped short, almost still military style. Seeing Face, she stopped in the doorway and stared. "Oh my."

"Hello, Captain Frost." Face smiled at her. "I'm Templeton Peck, pleased to meet you." He held out his hand and she came over. Face kept the Smile on full power as she shook his hand slowly, looking him up and down, wide-eyed. Then she looked up into his face and grinned.

"So, when do my other two wishes come true?"

Face laughed while she still hung onto his hand.

"Ooh, old people flirting. That's really sexy." Russ said, not looking up from his work.

Joy let go of Face's hand and scowled at Russ. "Go and put the coffee maker on, child." He sighed, slid off his stool and headed through to the back room. "We'll talk later about the word 'old'," she called after him then turned back to Face, smiling again. "Ignore him, he's seventeen, he thinks humans should be culled at the age of thirty."

"He works here with you?" Face asked, sitting down as she waved him to a chair.

"Oh he's just picking up some experience of how machines actually work, before he goes off to college and they stuff his head full of theory." She cleared some spare parts from another chair and sat down herself. "So what can I do for you, Mr Peck?"

"Face, please."

"Face?" She laughed. "I can buy that. Call me Joy."

Face could buy that. She'd been joyful since the moment she'd set eyes on him.

"So you're one of the A-Team, eh? Matt's talked about nothing else for weeks. Says you fellas will deal with Kyle like that." She snapped her fingers.

"We aim to please," Face said. "That's why I'm here actually. We need to find his base. I'm told you're the expert around here on adapting machinery to cope with the radiation. If we're going to be over there on the dark side trying to track him down we may need some adaptations to our ship. And the scanners."

She nodded. "Of course, I'll help out where I can." She looked thoughtful. "Could be that with your ship you can get enough power to your scanners to actually find the base. All the other ships here are just dolled up shuttles basically."

"Do many people - thanks, kid - have shuttles?" Face asked as Russ handed them coffee.

"Not many, just the people who have to get out and about. The sheriff, the doc, me."

"For when her broomstick's in the shop," Russ muttered.

"His dad," she nodded at Russ, "a few other private ones. Matt has a larger one. We call it the 'bus'. He delivers supplies and brings people into town." She sipped her coffee. "We've been over to the dark side and tried scanning of course, but Kyle must be deep underground."

"What about tracking his ship back there?"

Joy shook her head. "Radiation obscures any trail his ship leaves. You'd need to keep it in visual range. And it's too fast for any of ours to keep up."

"But maybe it's not too fast for ours." With BA on the case, Face would put money on that in fact.

"Maybe not." Joy nodded. "There's something else I thought of too --"

A buzz interrupted her and Face said, "Excuse me." He pulled his communicator from his pocket. "Go, Hannibal."

"Face, get over to The Spot right now, Kyle's guys just beamed in."

"What? Okay, meet you there in five minutes."

"They beamed in?" Joy said, following Face as he hurried for the door. "They must have a booster to punch them through all the rock."

Face nodded, not interested in engineering talk right then. He saw Russ following too. "You stay here," he ordered the boy. Face hit the street and ran.

-o-O-o-

Hannibal, Murdock, BA and Ted pounded up the street and skidded to a halt beside a small group of people outside The Great Red Spot. The sounds of destruction emanated from inside the bar. Ted grabbed the arm of a man with long brown hair.

"Alan! Are you okay?" Ted asked, a hectic tone to his voice, face flushed.

"Yes, yes!" Alan said, though he had a wild look. He held up what Hannibal recognised after a second as the broken off neck of a guitar. The snapped strings curled and waved. "My best one! They smashed it!"

"How many men?" Hannibal asked.

"Seven, I think," Alan said, and shook his head. "I didn't stay to count. Just got the customers out."

"Right." The sheriff drew his gun, a furious scowl on his face. "Let's go."

"Wait a second." Hannibal grabbed Ted's arm as Face ran up to join them. "Sheriff, you stay out here."

"What?" Ted, turned to Hannibal. "Colonel, Alan and I happen to be joint owners of The Spot. That's my place they're destroying!"

"The sheriff owns the saloon?" Murdock said with a grin.

"Okay, I understand that," Hannibal said, "but, Ted, me and my men, we're a team, and we work best just the four of us." Hannibal had no doubt Ted could handle himself, but it came down to teamwork, of knowing without even looking, where each of the others was and what they were doing. A stranger, even a trained one, threw off the long rehearsed rhythm. "Anyway," he went on. "I need a man out here."

"To do what?" Ted asked.

Hannibal grinned.

"Catch."

-o-O-o-

Shattered lights left the interior gloomier than before, but enough light remained to show upended tables, broken chairs and slashed upholstery. Glass crunched under Hannibal's feet as he walked into the bar with the team at his back.

Several men turned as the team came in. Seven, as Alan outside had said. Piece of cake. One of them nudged a young dark-skinned man, who'd been too busy slashing a couch to notice the team's entrance.

"Hey, Leto. They're here."

Leto turned, grinning. "Well look, fellas, more party guests."

Hannibal saw no sign of Kyle. The one called Leto seemed to be in charge of the little wrecking crew. Hannibal had him pegged in an instant. A slick and arrogant little bastard who liked knives more than would be considered healthy.

"Time to leave, scumbags." Hannibal glanced around, seeing them positioning themselves, ready for a fight. The team spread out too, doing the same thing.

Leto stood his ground and smirked. "Sorry, Smith, the party just started and we're having a really smashing time."

"Where's your boss?" Hannibal asked. "I don't waste my best material on peons."

"Me neither. Deputy." Leto sneered at the star Hannibal wore.

"Okay, well why don't I send you out to meet the sheriff?"

Hannibal attacked. The rest of the team took their cue and charged.

Hannibal dealt with Leto quickly, disarming him and putting him in a headlock with little effort. No combat vet this one, just a minor thug Kyle had picked up some place. Smart, with a side order of sadistic, but no match for Hannibal's Special Forces skills. He dragged the struggling man to the door and tossed him outside to land in the sheriff's waiting arms.

Ted cuffed him fast, easily quelling his struggles. More people had gathered now, Maggie Sullivan among the small crowd, doctor's bag in hand, waiting to pick up the pieces. Hannibal threw her a salute, then turned back into the fray. He dodged as the dartboard flew across the room like a Frisbee and smacked into the back of the head of a thug grappling with Face. Face waved his thanks to Murdock who'd thrown the board, and then he tossed the limp man to Hannibal.

Thug number two flew out of the door.

One by one, the rest of them followed. The last one took a joint effort from Face, Murdock and Hannibal. A huge man, that BA had worn himself out dealing with, before finally knocking him over the bar to lie still. While BA leaned on the bar, panting, the other three dragged his opponent up and tossed him out of the door.

Hannibal stepped outside, grinning like a maniac and dusting off his clothes. The thugs sat or lay around. Maggie checked them over.

The crowd had grown to nearly the whole population of the town. As the rest of the team followed Hannibal out, someone started to applaud and a second later most of the people joined in.

Hannibal loved it, positively basked in it. Maggie, who crouched nearby, working on one of the battered thugs, glanced up, and smiled at him. He winked at her, then strode up to Ted.

"I hope you've got enough room in your jail for this lot."

"What?" Ted looked distractedly at Hannibal as he cuffed the last of the thugs. "Yes, but we have to get them there quick. The cells are shielded, so they can't --"

Hannibal didn't know if he felt or heard it first. The bristle against his skin and the whine of a transporter field. He reacted on pure instinct as the captured men started to shimmer. His tackle threw Maggie away from the man she'd been tending, the man she'd had her hands on. The man who vanished and who would have taken her hands right away with him if Hannibal hadn't thrown her out of range of the field.

The two of them landed in a heap, him on top. He looked down into her wide and shocked eyes.

"You okay?"

She held her hands up and stared at them as if making sure they were still there. Perhaps they still tingled. Hannibal tingled all over, and then he shivered.

"My god," Maggie whispered, "I could have..."

"Colonel!" Murdock and Face grabbed Hannibal's arms and started helping him up, off Maggie.

Geez, thanks a lot, guys, he thought. A woman in overalls helped Maggie up, patted her shoulder.

"You okay, doc?"

Hannibal turned back to the sheriff who stood scowling at the empty space his prisoners had occupied only a moment ago. Then he shook himself and looked up at Hannibal.

"Their ship has to be nearby, we can try and pursue them."

Hannibal shook his head. "Too late. Never mind, we'll have another chance. You go check out the damage." He nodded at where Alan and others had started to venture back into The Spot.

Ted frowned for a second, but didn't speak, just went into the bar. Hannibal grimaced, thinking he should have tried to make that sound less like an order.

"Another chance?" Murdock prompted as Hannibal turned back to the team and Amy.

"Yeah." Maggie and the other woman had moved away, but Hannibal still lowered his voice, glancing around at the people milling around. "Those creeps knew exactly who we were. And they had a pre-arranged escape planned. We've just been tested. Tried out." He looked around again. "So what I want to know is: how did they know we were here?"