Aberrant

Chapter 8

The Vok hit concrete with a squeal, its dermal bone armour gouging the tunnel's already scarred wall.

Kaplan slammed into its ridged back before the alien could charge again. Ramming his plaz blade up under its jaw, he ended the quadruped's chances of staving in his rib cage. A brutal twist of his wrist silenced the creature's drug-addled mind.

Stepping back, he let the Vok's heavy form slump, feeling a second of pity. Its weirdly beautiful opalescent blood pooled under the creature's flat, broken snout, contrasting with the grime the alien had been living in.

Looking about the refuse-strewn tunnel, taking in two other crumpled bodies—both human—he searched for any other sentient life.

Behind him, his team crouched in a corroded airlock, awaiting his signal. Finding a habitable atmosphere had been a mixed blessing. They'd walked straight into a nest of armed addicts. And the promise of further altercations was written on the walls: demonic graffiti; ominous burns and spatter.

A warning beep in his ear. Low O2. Yanking his mask down, he took a breath of whatever the locals called air. It was dry, tainted by burnt Vok flesh and unhealthy bodies. The addicts' greeting salvo lingered: the bite of laser weaponry.

Kaplan tuned out his team's thoughts to focus beyond their position. The structure around him vibrated with noise: ventilation systems, creaking plumbing, distant music. A substantial populace lay ahead of him. The records he had on the star sector confirmed it was a local hub. But two-week-old societal data, provided by his desk-bound colleagues in Coalition Intelligence, were not going to get him the answers he needed and keep his team alive. He needed fresh intel.

"Fero." He turned to one of the seven life forms in the airlock behind him. "What you got?"

His electronics-surveillance specialist emerged from the hatch, facemask still attached to his Zex flexi armour, his shaggy bleached hair hidden, but not his tiger eyes and the scar that bisected one eyebrow. Lean and muscular, the man moved like a stalking predator, an indication of the alien animal in his altered DNA: Atilorian forest cat. The military had broken more than one genetic-alteration law in the rush to save humanity in the war. Soldiers altered to withstand the enemy's toxins and heal swiftly had inadvertently been left able to breed naturally, unlike the Rha Si and other genetic alterants. A new and dangerous human subspecies had been created: Atillians.

Fero's surface thoughts held a bright awareness of the blood on the ground and an unholy note of approval. His voice, however, was an irritated rasp. "A lot of poor-quality coms. These vermin have probably gnawed out pieces of their own tech. Chatter indicates substantial illegal activity, planetwide communication problems, no long-range coms. Contact off planet is out. The damaged Xykeree craft docked at the main port is also complicating matters for the local authorities."

"Details?" Though he could have, Kaplan didn't psionically reach for the information. Not without an invitation. Fero, like the rest of the team, was a non-psi loyal to the Rha Si, but he and his teammates hadn't always been shown the appropriate respect.

To Rha Si drowning in other people's mental noise, non-psi could be irritations at best. To those charged with intergalactic security, non-psi were tools or, worse, puppets. Despite strong psi protocols, abuses happened—deep mind reads, thought manipulation, memory wipes—especially in non-psi dealing with sensitive information. And the standard nondisclosure compulsions embedded in all non-psi who knowingly worked with Rha Si too often stopped psi overreach being reported.

Kaplan allowed his subordinate to gather his thoughts and intel, any impatience not directed at the e-specialist. It had taken him six months to repair his team's faith in their minds and mission and another three for the team to accept his cousin when she'd joined them for training. Human psyches needed the boundaries his kind had been created to cross—or at least the perception of them.