Aberrant

Chapter 61

Pain ripped through Kaplan as Jinx's mind tore away from his. His ears rang with the abrupt mental silence and the punch she'd just taken. The alien in the humanoid exskel, the Qua-zi scientist he'd interrogated through its forced psi link to Jinx, had knocked her cold.

To stop him. To get to him.

He shook off the blow and tried to reconnect with his senses. The punch had only felt physical to him. For Jinx, it would have been.

He shoved down his fear for her. The alien considered Jinx unique, invaluable to its research. It wouldn't do her permanent damage.

He, Cal, and all other Rha Si were another matter.

He forced open his eyes. His vision swam: HUD lights and darkness. The Hydra's psionics drummed against his skull—muted now, his psi receptors no longer jammed open by sabotaged tech.

He was still in the deployment bay, sprawled on his back near the edge of the Qua-zi ship's ramp. The workers that had been dragging him had stopped.

Thousands of exskels surrounded him. All unnaturally still.

All enslaved.

The scale of the Qua-zi's betrayal drove the air out of him. They'd sold themselves as allies—victims—in the past war, but they controlled the Xykeree host, had used it to gather research subjects, even elicit volunteers, like the Originals. They'd manipulated—crippled—Rha Si from the beginning.

And they were about to start another war just to wind up that 'unsatisfactory' experiment.

He had to find a way to warn the Coalition. They were about to be blindsided.

The hive's psionics surged. The workers gripping his legs released him.

Kaplan froze, halfway upright. He tried to tune in, gauge the threat, but everything remained muffled, as if he were trapped in a tight, dark space.

His skull.

He stifled the claustrophobia. The painful, open flood of psionics he'd endured all his life hadn't been natural; it'd been a side effect of his reg tech locking his telepathy to his physical location. He'd also been trained to route everything through his neurotech, and he'd literally burned that bridge.

He'd need time to adapt.

Time he didn't have.

The hive's psionics rose in a drowning tide.

Every mechanical forelimb around him lifted in eerie synchronicity, then began to wave.

His blood iced as the movements escalated with the rising psi. Thousands of minds resonating.

Amplifying the hive's psionics.

Feeding the Qua-zi power.

Kaplan cursed—braced.

The telepathic strike hit like a wall, knocking him back flat.

Everything went dark—then bloomed brilliant. Pain. Excruciating pressure. A brute-force attack on his mental shielding, more extreme than anything his grandmother had ever inflicted. Qua-zi were strong telepaths in their own right. But with an entire Xykeree hive behind one...

It took everything he had to prevent a mental incursion. The familiar burn of overload blazed behind his eyes. He scrambled to counter the attack, reinforce his shields. But he had no tech to channel or amplify his abilities.

A clunk: a sound nearly lost in the blaze of pain. A whir: mechanical systems.

A shape loomed on the alien ship's ramp. The Qua-zi. Not in the standard biosphere unit of its kind, but a droid-like, armoured vehicle. The alien had been hunting Jinx in the backworlds. It'd chosen tech to protect and disguise its soft gelatinous body.