Aberrant

Chapter 21

Violent bursts of noise and light. Screams and gunfire outside the port airlock. A psionic storm of fear. Inside, plasma—bolts of high-energy particles tailored to stun unprotected nervous systems and disable unshielded tech—hammered down from the main vent, blasting bins of recyce.

Hunched behind a crate, Kaplan squeezed his Jinn's trigger. Pain—alien—flashed across his overloading senses. A piece of the subhive intelligence spreading over the port's C-Deck died.

A dog-sized body dropped from the airlock's vent.

Another four limp, multi-legged forms followed in quick succession, brought down by his team. Xykeree vent crawlers. Infiltration units. Dual-barrelled guns drooped on the aliens' black carapaces: plasma weaponry twinned with a small-calibre ballistic.

More life forms seven metres up.

Kaplan signalled his team to hold position. Another wave of crawlers inbound. Aggressive. Hunting. Close enough for him to sense their separate consciousnesses.

The overarching presence of the attack force hummed beyond them. The subhive, the collective mind that formed when large groups of Xykeree left their ships. The psionic construct removed any reliance on technology-based coms. Even with intense jamming, ground troops could act as one cohesive organism.

Kaplan gauged its size: big enough to spread beyond his range. To interfere with it or gain some control over it, he and Sun would need time and a secure place to focus. They weren't their grandparents. The Originals could infiltrate Xykeree subhives in a minute or less, control large groups or blow out multiple minds at once to destroy hive cohesion and disorient troops. Later generations of Rha Si, whether newly altered or tank bred, hadn't achieved that level of skill and power.

As the units above closed in, the subhive's intent bled into Kaplan's consciousness: capture, harvest, consume. Senseless instinct.

But if organics were the goal, why target a rock-bound port? Why draw the wrath of the Coalition to fill a few ships' larders?

He filed his questions and 'pathed his team, warning them of the inbound threat and ordering them to board the Fire Witch the second the crawlers had been terminated. Fero had finally forced open the external exit. The ship's crew were piling into their cargo hold—Jinx with them, thrown on board by Tras. The trader was yelling at his people to load the warp isotopes and—

Kaplan dove out the exit, a plaz bolt from one of the inbound crawlers barely missing him. In the space of two heartbeats, he had his pistol at Tras' temple and mental claws in the trader's brain, stopping him from closing the vessel's hatch. Triggering a number of spinal cord nerves, Kaplan debilitated the man. No telepathic mind trick, but the use of the weak kinesis he'd developed over the last year, powered by the wep-tech trader's own combat suit, the energy stores in it.

Tras dropped to his knees with an agonised scream.

Kaplan shoved him away from the hatch and turned to check on his team and the Fire Witch's crew. Sun and Sketski—the pilot not slowed by his head injury—were through and covering the exit as the rest of the team took out the second wave of crawlers. Tras' ship engineer, Konnu Phang, was in the engine room, loading the warp isotopes. A Throlean mind was on the top deck: Ike, the co-pilot. She was at the ship's controls, her fractious, reptilian thoughts a haze of confusion.

That only left Tras' ginger-goateed muscle—Dorf Gorstav—and Jinx in the cargo hold to stare slack jawed as Tras shuddered, wrenched off his battle suit's mask, and threw up in pain.

Kaplan avoided Jinx's gaze and bent to unclip a few of the directional charges Tras wore across his chest. He tossed them to Shio as the young ensign rolled clear of the airlock, the rest of the team on her heels. Shio caught the explosives and planted them inside the dark chamber. She set their motion detectors an instant before Trippoli closed the airlock and the ship's hatch.