Aberrant

Chapter 56

Visions of white fire and churning darkness. A sea of pain.

Jinx fought to reach its surface—reality. This was a glitch, a sickness in her mind. She couldn't give into it. She needed to—

Breathe. The word filled her mind.

The real world snapped back like a punch to the solar plexus.

She coughed—snatched in air, tasted rot and burnt plastic. Her next inhalation came easier.

The significance of that, of her fluttering eyes and tingling hands, sent her pulse into overdrive.

She was still alive, and the paralytic was losing effect.

She fought to recover her vision.

Tubes and winking lights overhead. A glowing monitor beyond them. Reflective bulkheads. She was still in the hold of the black ship, still on a med bed. The andropod...

She froze; listened for the exskel.

The beep of biomonitors. The drone of the Hydra—electric, wildly fluctuating, an almost painful pulse against her skull. But no sounds of activity near her. No sly hiss of mech tech.

Risking movement, she managed to turn her head towards—

Her lungs jammed. The andropod stood poised to subdue her, needle extended. But the alien remained motionless ... tendrils of smoke rising from its composite shell.

Something had baked it, fried its ghoulish circuits and the organic entity integrated with them.

Recall flared: a scream inside her head, then a violent burst of heat and light.

Jinx's heart skipped. That hallucination. She'd had it before. On the Bullhead, just before she'd fled the scorp. Just before—

—she'd found a newly destroyed exskel and blood near the barge's med bay. Rha Si blood.

Channing's offhand comment about Rha Si who could set things on fire replayed.

Gooseflesh raced across Jinx's skin. She fought to turn her head further. Her amped up night vision brought the hellish scene around her into sharp focus.

Bodies hooked up to machines.

All real.

Like the visions of heat and the screams in her head.

An erratic blip on one of the monitors: an unsettled heartbeat.

Jinx felt her own jump as she dropped her gaze to the bed's occupant: a human male—shaved head, gaunt; skin and bone attached to tubes and wires. Behind his ear, a surgical scar cut across a patch of puckered flesh—a healed burn. A med breather of some sort covered the lower part of his face.

Her nightmare flickered: suffocation—a struggle to breathe, something hard in her throat.

A breathing tube.

She stared at the man. The source of the andropod's fatal electrical issues.

The source of her nightmares.

Heart pounding, she looked to the other beds. Four more wasted bodies, just like in her dreams. There hadn't been five because...

She'd seen this through another's eyes.

Callan Tarak's. A Rha Si.

She could feel him now, a restless pressure, the storm at the edge of her mind. Trapped, half-mad—

A fight to breathe, to reach out. A scream into the void. Endless black. Then a flickering connection. An unfamiliar mind, resistant, but—

Jinx jerked out of the stream of memory, none of it hers, and stared at the barely conscious Rha Si. He'd found her. He'd been trapped, desperate...

And screaming for her help for weeks.

Her world spun off-centre.

She hadn't been sliding into insanity. She'd been... God. That drive to run back into the void. That sense of disconnection and loss, something she'd felt ever since blacking out on the bullhead—since the roaches had shoved some kind of implant into her skull. Kaplan had said Rha Si couldn't connect to her mind. But Callan Tarak had. And the Xykeree had known that. They'd stopped her hearing him—helping him. Had they also stopped others accessing her mind? Her memories?

Her stomach clutched. She wasn't aberrant like everyone thought. Telepathic alterants could get inside her head.

A sharp increase in the Hydra's drone.

She forced her head around to face the exit. Only a slice of the bay outside was visible, but the reflective walls around the vessel's entry revealed more.

Rows of exskels, their forelimbs waving as if caught in a rippling breeze.

Like spiders testing their silk.

The hair on her scalp lifted. Dread winged through her, that hunted feeling she'd experienced more than once since leaving Tirus 7. Not paranoia. Intuition. A remnant of recall that had survived her memory loss.

And an echo of Callan Tarak's fear.

She struggled to lift more than her fingers. She needed to goddamn move, now, while the bastards were distracted. Caught up in their creepy bug dance, they hadn't yet noticed the andropod's smoking carcass.

She searched for an escape. Shiny bulkheads. Unfamiliar ship tech. The medical equipment around her might've been of human design, but the ship was alien in every sense of the word. She wouldn't be using it to get away. Hell, she'd be lucky to stand without falling on her face. Her limbs felt like lead. Her poisoned nervous system was on fire. She needed more time to recover from the paralytic.

But how long did she have? How long until another roach came to incapacitate her?

Another surge in the Hydra's drone.

Outside, dancing cyborg limbs moved more violently.

The pulsing pressure on her skull sharpened. Memories from the Bullhead rose: stabbing pain; her fleeing the hold. She fought for air as her temples started to throb. There'd be no running this time, but she sure as hell still needed to move.

She looked down her body, took stock of her tech. She still had her battle suit, its wrist com, and Tras' prototype shield. It also felt like the Xykeree had missed the plaz blade sheathed under her arm and the pistol and ammo tucked beneath her spine armour. The bastards hadn't been thorough—given she'd been paralysed and about to be stripped to her skin for some sick, bug experiment. But a plaz blade and a pistol with twenty explosive rounds weren't going to get her out of this.

Nor anyone else.

She rolled her head back towards the other beds. Five immobilised humans—Rha Si. She could feel Callan Tarak slipping in and out of consciousness, broadcasting disturbing imagery: black talons piercing his brain; endless darkness and flickering lightning. She didn't know how to help him. Any of them.

Nor did she know how to get to Soh, Tras, and Dorf.

It might already be too late for them.

Fear choked her, larder images cascading: pools of organic sludge; drowned, eroded bodies—

Lightning. A spin into the abyss: Callan Tarak's madness.

Jinx groped for a mental anchor, something real—

—and plummeted straight into hell.

Blood. Bodies. An eruption of light and sound.

Gunfire.