Aberrant

Chapter 59

A high, piercing ringing. Hellfire in his skull.

For an instant, Kaplan wished he hadn't regained consciousness.

Then he remembered. The Hydra's hive mind bloated with power. A psionic attack—a debilitating sensory burst. Total overload.

Agony.

He floated in a black ocean of it, all other sensation drowned. His battle suit had to have auto-dispensed analgesic, but he needed another dose. Heavy psi stimuli still seared his brain.

He tried to order more meds via his neurotech, but got nothing, its bio-interface offline.

Resisting the temptation to black out, he concentrated on breathing. It would've been kinder if his psi receptors had just gone deaf under the overload, like human ears after too much abuse. His psi-tech's load-management protocols hadn't been enough to protect him. If he hadn't understood Cal's barely coherent warning and disengaged his amp tech, he'd have been down for the count.

How had the Xykeree gone from primitive psi users to this?

He battled to think past the pain. He needed to figure out where he was, locate Cal and Jinx, Sun and the others. But he couldn't sense anyone, any mind. The hive's psionics were a scorching haze.

He tried to tune into his physical senses.

A dull thud: his heartbeat. The tang of blood in his mouth. Tugging on his legs and a sense of resistance under his back: his armour sliding over a hard surface. Scraping and clicking sounds.

He was being dragged. By at least four small Xykeree: worker exskels.

He suppressed the instinct to break loose. He was in no state to fight. And the Xykeree knew it. They hadn't yet dosed him with paralytic; odd, but he was coming to expect atypical behaviour from this hive.

He opened his eyes, set off stabbing pain. Orange and red lights flooded his vision: HUD warnings, his mask still in place.

He focused beyond its plas.

Darkness. A sense of open space ... and movement.

Blinking, he tried to process the image his low-light tech revealed.

Gleaming metal and composite: large, cyborg bodies either side of him. Lines of them. Overhead ... high, arching, ink-black bulkheads covered in smaller exskels. More workers.

Pulse going jagged, Kaplan shifted his head to the side to confirm his worst fears.

A mass of mechanical bodies. An exskel army in its deployment bay.

He strangled a rush of adrenaline—fear. Most of the Xykeree around him stood strangely passive in precise rows, their weapons idle. Only their metal mouthparts twitched, opening in reflex as he slid by.

Lifting his head, he squinted past the grey dots eating his vision. Four worker exskels had their fangs around his ankles and knees. Their legs danced frantically as they hauled him through the lines of larger exskels. Beyond them...

Limp, human forms. All in dark Coalition armour. All being dragged toward—

A black, spherical ship, its ramp down. Ready to receive its unconscious cargo.

Sight threatening to fade out, Kaplan let his head fall back and breathed deeply. The vessel looked like the one that'd forced him to crash-land on Tirus 7. It wasn't standard Xykeree tech, but the aliens were clearly using it to acquire Rha Si. But for what purpose? Interrogation? Anti-psi drug development?

The memory of Cal's mental contact rose: fragmented telepathy, not quite sane.

Whatever was coming, Cal hadn't survived it unscathed.