Aberrant

Chapter 14

Noise—physical and psionic. Pain—all too physical.

Swallowing a hint of blood, Kaplan pushed into the service corridor behind A-Deck's food court. Pipe-lined walls closed in. Environmental system fans thrummed, the air pungent with spices and heat from nearby kitchens.

Will alone stopped him from emptying his gut.

Other people's thoughts and emotions poured through his brain like coarse sand despite him being alone in the corridor. After half an hour in the port's crowds, his psi receptors were overstimulated, his neurochemistry out of whack. He needed a break. Five minutes at least. Without one, he'd burnout—go painfully psi deaf. Brain damage was also a possibility.

His mind already felt raw.

The start of a psi burn.

Taking a deep breath and a few long strides, he cleared the worst of the food court's psionic noise. Even with his amplification tech switched off, the deluge out in the port's public spaces was unmanageable. In addition to the surface thoughts of people within his one-and-a-half-metre effective range, he'd caught fragments from minds outside that radius, and psionic static—thousands of signals too weak to interpret.

His implant's management tech couldn't meet the shortfall as it worked to supplement his natural filtering and shielding. His empathic abilities compounded the problem, feeding him signals from an even wider area than his telepathy. His psi-tech had never controlled that aspect of his psionics well. His empathic range had always fluctuated depending on his mental state and energy levels.

Both could be better right now.

Propping his back against a chipped wall, he closed his eyes and focused on slowing his pulse. His mind continued to overreach. In the quiet of the port's back corridors, he sensed five minds within thirty metres—no thoughts, just an awareness of sentient life—but he recognised three. Sketski, Fero, and Cruse; the pilot and two Atillians in or near the storeroom they'd set up a base in.

He shouldn't have been aware of them. Not with his amp tech turned off.

Opening his eyes, he focused on the graffitied wall across from him and the thick smell of synthesised butter chicken, then he dragged his mind back to why he was risking a brain bleed in Tirus 7's main port. Downed ship. Dead crewmates. The Xykeree—four vessels in local space. He'd join Fero and the others in a minute, after he'd regained some mental 'skin'. He'd hear their reports, then decide their next move.

Leave Tirus 7.

He grimaced. His personal limitations—psi overloads, a heightened degree of caution and paranoia since the crash—couldn't drive mission decisions. Extracting his surviving team members and reporting to Star Sector Defence was a priority, but their exact risk status was unclear. He'd found no overt sign his team was still being tracked. All he had were unusual communication issues—planetwide satellite outages—and the suspicion his team had been allowed to crash-land. He needed more intel.

With that top of mind, he wiped the blood from his nose and headed to rendezvous with his team.

A ripple of familiar energy.

As he rounded the next corner, Sun strode out of a stairwell, her borrowed coat flowing about her Zex-clad figure in a gaudy flutter of metallic blue. Its hood covered her hair and shaded her gold stare, but she hadn't disguised her armour and weapons. Misappropriated or bastardised military gear was common in the backworlds, and like the rest of the team, she'd removed any insignia. Most people on Tirus 7 would think her a bounty hunter or mercenary.

There'd be little footage of her for anyone to analyse later and prove otherwise. The local lowlifes had ensured there was no working surveillance in the port's warren of utility passages and disused sections, and the use of disruption tech was commonplace, affecting official and personal recording devices. His team had only had to engineer a few tech outages in the main port to cover their presence, interference that would be blamed on the settlement's criminals. They'd exercise caution until they'd confirmed they'd lost their hostile tail.