Aberrant

Chapter 14

Nothing but idiots with habits and guns on the lower levels, Sun 'pathed as she fell into step with him. No one I psionically read recalled hearing about a high-tech, cloaked vessel. The current theory is scavs brought down the sat tech, but given the timing...

Kaplan nodded. We were either unlucky to arrive when we did—during an uncharacteristically large-scale scavenger attack—or our hostiles sabotaged the tech.

If they're still in local space like you suspect, we might be able to draw them out. We need to ID and neutralise them. Sun's cool, telepathed words reflected none of the emotions motivating them—a brew that seared Kaplan's empathic senses. His pulse jolted. Then it quickened, a sympathetic mirroring of his cousin's internal war: dead crewmates; friends and family being lost to psi overload. Her best friend, Cal Tarak, was more than mere light years away, having shut everyone out of whatever remained of his life after diagnosis.

Kaplan wrenched back control, the next wave of anger his own. As an empath, he couldn't afford to lose focus. He risked physically experiencing others' emotions, even those of Rha Si. Mental shields couldn't prevent the effect, and familiarity increased the problem.

And he'd run riot with Sun as a child, shrieking down the psi-only sections of their home population ship, long before tempers and psionics had been mastered. Her desire for revenge, to fight, resonated with his, even without empathic mirroring.

But the memory of the enemy ship, of what remained of his team, iced that burn.

Needing mental clarity—distance—he responded verbally. "We report, then get hyperspace-capable warships deployed to this system."

Sun raised an eyebrow, but didn't comment on his unsecure communication choice. Working within a non-psi team required adjustments. Bad habits could develop. "That'll take weeks, Reid. With the long-range coms down, we'll have to travel to Feuria to report to SectDef, and the transport options on this rock are poor to nonexistent. Our hostiles will be long gone."

Kaplan breathed past her frustration and his own. "We're not in any position to hunt that crew, Sun. We gather what intel we can, then we bug out."

"Yes, sir." A slight narrowing of her eyes was the only sign of dissent. He outranked her in every aspect of their lives: a lieutenant commander to her lieutenant rank in the Coalition Space Corps; a senior operative and her current trainer in the intelligence service; and a first-grade senuri to her second-grade experience and ability level in the Rha Si's covert hierarchy. But he sensed no real resentment.

Sun was a better soldier than him in many ways.

He'd come to question more than a few of his superiors' decisions.

Like his creation.

Using his implanted tech, he gave himself a hit of analgesic through his battle suit's medical systems. Anyone checking the suit's logs would assume the meds were for his cracked rib—an assumption he wouldn't correct while he could still do his job. "Let's see what the others have found out."

The corridor outside the storeroom the team had set up base in was quiet. Not a surprise given Cruse stood on guard, a mountain of dark, scarred muscle. His flat, rust-brown stare delivered the same warning as the battle rifle he gripped.

Kaplan nodded to him as Sun strode up and yanked open the storeroom door. The big Atillian barely blinked, but his mind filled with details on the threats he'd assessed in the area. Like most who knowingly worked with Rha Si, the cat had grown up on one of the six military population ships the Rha Si High Council used for creating and training psionics. Few outsiders got approached to join those closeted communities, only those with special skills or the right genetics for psionic enhancement. But whether they'd grown up with psionics or not, all non-psi employed by the Rha Si had to develop a pragmatic attitude to having their minds read.