Aberrant

Chapter 6

Rock and dust. A russet expanse rippling with heat and windblown drifts. The planet's surface temperature had already crept past forty degrees Celsius, and the early morning breeze was building.

Back pressed against a wall of eroded sandstone, Kaplan eyed the harsh terrain, but his attention was elsewhere. Grit pattered against the black Zex flexi-armour of his battle suit. Sweat dampened his dark hair within the suits' cowl and mask. With one gloved hand, he sheltered the sensitive tech of his pistol. He'd need it again soon.

The inhabitants of the planet he'd crash-landed on were as hospitable as the landscape, but they were welcome to come at him and bleed all over their patch of sand. After the fiasco of the last twelve hours, he could do some damage.

But he had other priorities.

A hostile planetary atmosphere.

A ship capable of annihilating a state-of-the-art Coalition stealth vessel.

Those of his crew who had survived entry, descent, and landing, who'd had their LD pods successfully deploy, were now stranded out in the heat only a klick away, holed up in the belly of a large mining droid they'd misappropriated for transport and shelter in the night. They were nursing injuries, and their O2 reserves were running out. He needed to locate supplies and better accommodation ASAP.

In his lower peripheral vision, warnings winked on a blood-smeared screen: his wrist com updating. He ignored the messages: partially blocked respiratory filter; low O2; mild dehydration; swelling—skull frontal bone; major inflammation—left seventh thoracic vertebrae; analgesic recommended. The HUD inside his mask was also updating, feeding him data from the bug eye he'd deployed. He checked his six using the small hovering device.

No movement.

The ghostly image on his HUD showed only rock and sand behind him. He'd left bodies in his wake, but low overhangs and dunes had helped him bury them. No surprises lay in that direction. No evidence of future or past trouble.

The same could not be said for what was in front of him.

A ping of sand against metal.

Kaplan raised his silenced weapon, held it at head height next to the worn stone at his back.

Another metallic ping sounded. A whine came next: mechanical systems changing up a gear.

Resting his dully throbbing head against rock, he waited, sweating into his suit's recyce system. Lost fluid—blood, urine, perspiration—would be purified and redispensed via the feeder tube in his mask. He could have survived days in the heat if it weren't for his limited O2 reserves and the local trash trying to kill him.

A clunk. The spit of disturbed sand. Another clunk. A squeal of poorly maintained joints.

A large droid clomped out past his cover.

Kaplan fired point-blank into its sandblasted casing. The round struck with an anticlimactic thunk and a vague burst of EMF noise across his tech. The droid jerked to a halt, alerts beeping and diodes flashing. Then the unit slumped, going silent and still.

The smell of hot wiring tainted the native air his mask's breather supplemented.

He stayed in cover, pistol still aimed at the droid. The unit was a modified N5 ground surveyor, a common mine-tech tool. Additional sensors sprouted from its squat body, and where an articulated probe arm had once been, a laser weapon now protruded. However, it wasn't the external mods that concerned him that moment.

He'd fired a shock round straight into the region a standard N5 would house its central processing unit, just below the droid's disc-shaped head. But with Frankenstein tech, there was no telling what shielding and redundancies had been retrofitted. Five minutes ago, another unit had rebooted on him. He'd had to waste a second bullet on the trash.