Aberrant

Chapter 6

He stepped to the edge of his cover. The hovering bug eye and his tech-enhanced psionics told him he was in the clear momentarily. Toppling the droid, he got it out of sight. To make sure it stayed that way, he dragged it into a building sand drift. Its remains weren't going to be pretty.

Holstering his pistol, he slipped a plaz blade from a thigh sheath. The twenty-centimetre blaze of blue-green plasma made short work of the droid's essential systems, cutting through plastic and metal with a sly hiss. Acrid fumes set off hazard warnings on his com before the desert wind dispersed the toxic mix.

The smell reminded him of the field of charred debris he'd left behind hours ago. It reminded him of what had come at him in the void hours before that.

A shadow against the pinpoint lights of a backworld star sector.

His team had been surveilling foreign military activity, a few stray Xykeree vessels, when a strange, cloaked ship had appeared from nowhere, shield disruptors engaged, cannons firing. It had attacked with surgical precision; it had had an answer to every strategy and technological countermeasure. Retreat had quickly become the only option, and even that had been taken from him and his crew in the gravity well of the planet he now stood on.

That knowledge lit a cold fire. Their landing had been ugly. The aftermath worse. Half a dozen crew capsules had failed to launch. Caught in the vessel's wreckage, their buckled shells had been voids to his psionic senses.

Hollow. Soulless.

Kaplan gripped his blade, the sinking sensation of defeat, its brutal cost, a black hole in his gut. He and his crew had been outclassed from the start. Yet a handful of them still breathed. Why? Why hadn't they been taken out as cleanly as his vessel?

A question for his growing list.

Sheathing his blade and redrawing his pistol, he left the rising wind to cover the Frankendroid's remains. The bigger mess behind him, many klicks away, wouldn't be so easily buried.

He wouldn't let it be.

The roar of an engine drowned out that thought and the whisper of shifting sands.

Beyond the shelf of rock he walked beneath, a surface skimmer darted over a ridge. Since dawn, the traffic in the area had been building. Planetary vehicles of all sizes—from personal transports to scarred shuttle trains carrying ore—dodged under incoming and outgoing space-capable craft.

He'd finally found some kind of settlement.

That should have been a godsend. But the hum of life that lay just over the ridge wasn't welcoming. Its ill will had bled out into the surrounding sand and rock. In the last fifteen minutes, he'd disabled five booby traps, decommissioned two armed droids, and blasted a messy hole in a local who'd thought to greet him with the business end of a bolt rifle—a nasty piece of plasma weaponry.

In the backworlds, civilisation did not necessarily equate to civilised.

Kaplan reviewed his bug eye's data for signs of activity. His psi-tech remained silent, an odd sensation. As a laboratory-grown genetic alterant, a Rha Si third-gen from an Original line, not a newly altered human, he was used to receiving a headache-inducing number of psionic signals. A side effect of his abilities, one his genetic origins heightened.

His highly questionable, highly classified origins.

Resentment, useless but familiar, tightened his jaw. The military had their reasons for incorporating alien genes into his DNA: territorial security, social and economic stability ... the Rha Si Originals.

The first humans altered for telepathy by an allied species in the war, they were still the military's best secret weapon. They were stronger psi than anyone enhanced since in black-site labs; stronger than their tank-grown grandchildren, third-gens like him, and their second-gen children. Their success demanded replication, no matter how many attempts it took. Some even displayed forms of psychokinesis, rare abilities their lab-grown offspring could also develop, but only weakly, later in life.