Aberrant

Chapter 57

Kaplan lunged, tackling Trippoli before the man could blow his own brains out—no psionic compulsion. Tripp had decided to die rather than turn his weapon on his fellow soldiers. Like the other experienced non-psi in the Hydra's larder, the combat specialist knew his mind was being hijacked.

Any misgivings Kaplan had about allowing that level of self-awareness in his team died as he telepathically punched Tripp into unconsciousness, ending the man's battle.

Weapons fire boomed and flashed overhead, lighting the chamber's steamy air.

Kaplan rolled clear of his subordinate, staying low. The psionic assault hammering the chamber was like nothing he'd felt before. He tasted blood as he telepathically dropped another two soldiers, stopping them shooting one another. There was no getting into the affected non-psi minds to counter the attack. The mind subverting them was too strong.

The Hydra's hive.

Its power drowned the larder. Waves of aggression, backed by thousands of individual consciousnesses.

The Xykeree had turned their mental network into a potent weapon. Damaged droids and bodies littered the deck. Others floated where they'd fallen in the bio-soup. All Coalition soldiers and tech. All taken out by their own side—non-psi. The battle droids' programming prevented them returning fire.

Kaplan whipped up his pistol and punched a hardened shock round through a soldier's rifle before the man could fire it into a medic's skull. Sun swept in the next instant, took out the soldier with a mental strike. She kicked out the legs of his target and slammed that man into unconsciousness as well.

Kaplan rolled to his feet, firing, taking out weapons and limbs, covering Sun as she dove through the madness dropping soldiers like a silent plague. Half-way down the chamber, they joined with Atlas and the quick, mech-legged Stroma: four Rha Si against the remaining fifteen well-armed soldiers.

Thirty ugly seconds. That's all it took to take down the last of their colleagues.

The chamber fell quiet, filled only with the hard breaths of the four of them left standing.

Atlas turned to Kaplan, his mask obscuring his expression, but his unease thrummed, strong enough to make it through the hive's destructive psionics. "I can't reach Admiral Tarak. Too much psi noise, and coms are being jammed—along with our tech sensors, going by the rubbish I'm getting."

Sun angled her armour-encased head. "I'm not making out much in this mess either, but I can sense unconscious minds outside. The other teams were probably hit the same time we were. The admiral could be down."

Kaplan skimmed an eye over the carnage. "I don't think that was the goal." Plenty of shots had been fired, but none directed at him or the psi standing with him. That wasn't down to good fortune.

Something sly crawled through the Hydra's heavy psionics.

Kaplan felt the hairs on his neck lift.

"Arses back in gear now." He grabbed up a fallen soldier's mobile turret. "Gather remote- and motion-activated weapons. Get any live bodies out of the soup and see if any droids are still functional. Set up defences." He swung to Atlas. "We need to take out the hive mind, disrupt its cohesion. We can't do it psionically—"

"So, we do it the old-fashioned way," Atlas concluded, snatching up a grenade launcher. "Biblical levels of carnage."

The four of them dove into action, the plan simple: secure their location then resort to old-school, anti-hive tactics. Cause enough chaos, destroy enough crew and systems, and the hive mind would lose integrity, impairing its psionic strength and troop coordination.

Sun tossed Kaplan a directional charge and planted one of her own. "The Xykeree shouldn't be able to affect one mind, let alone dozens at once, Reid. We need to find out how they're doing this."

Kaplan tried to tune into the hive as he set his charge. Erratic signals blocked him: a standard psi defence. Stronger ones pulsed, strikes designed to overwhelm his psionics and force a link: a standard offensive technique. "They've been learning from us. From our traitor and the Rha Si they've taken."

"We have to warn people." Sun cut a look around the bloody, body-strewn larder. "This isn't an abduction. It's a weapons test."

It was both. Kaplan cursed inwardly. Jinx; they needed to find her quickly, before mounting a counterattack. An offensive against the hive might motivate the Xykeree to cut their losses.

He scanned for active minds, the hive's interference shortening his effective range. No Xykeree nearby, but some of the downed non-psi were stirring. Tras, just a few metres away, was fully conscious. There'd been no need to knock him out. The Xykeree's paralytic had been enough to prevent him from—

Kaplan dove forward, hitting the deck and slamming a hand down on the battle rifle Tras reached for. He locked onto the trader's mind—

—and found it open. Not under any influence.

Kaplan's abdominals went taut. He snapped his attention back to the hive.

Its attack on the non-psi had stopped. But the psionics around him hadn't weakened.

They were, in fact, building.

He held up a hand, signalling Tras to hold position, and swept out his senses again. The interference continued to worsen. He had to fight to sense even the minds in the chamber with him. Just the barest whispers of life in a sea of noise and—

Fear. Confusion.

Kaplan froze, his pulse accelerating. All but lost in the hive's psionics was a psi mind—one weakly linked to his. He didn't dare breathe, the connection was so fragile.

And disorienting.

There was no sense of a physical presence, as if the individual were everywhere and nowhere at once—a ghost, mist he couldn't grab.

But the presence felt painfully familiar.

His heart lurched against his ribs. He'd unconsciously allowed this link because he'd been reaching for it.

Jinx. Scared, pissed off, alone—No. Something, someone was—

A blast of images and sound: a brutal telepathic push. Someone else's fear swamped him: erratic heartbeats; mental screams; garbled words—a plea to "break the leash".

Recognising the mind linked through Jinx's, Kaplan tried to hold onto it, understand the deluge of fragmented telepathy.

The hive's psionics surged.

Foreign knowledge—alarm—punched through Kaplan.

He disengaged his amp tech an instant before a wall of extrasensory noise hit. Pain exploded in his skull—instant overload. He struggled to stay conscious, focus, reach out—

Ice-green eyes. The barrel of a battle rifle lifting. A ruthless mind in the agonising torrent of psionics. One craving violence.

Kaplan groped for it, tried to force his will into it. Then pain swept him under.

The last thing he sensed was the hive's cool satisfaction.