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.
A reminder of why his kind stayed to the shadows.
If their existence was ever confirmed publically, there'd be chaos.
The cat alterant's mask flickered as his HUD fed him data. "Images circulating the local data net indicate the docked ship is a 4-M Bullhead. Probably the vessel we observed twenty-four hours ago. Damage reports vary. Officially, the Bullhead has unspecified electrical, engine, and environmental problems—results of a failed predator attack."
Kaplan considered that unlikely. The local system was known for ore transport, not convenient commodities and ransom targets. However, a group of mercenaries might take on a foreign military vessel if a paying client was involved. It was a scenario that could also explain his downed vessel. But if it was the same hostile ship, why attack both his vessel and the Xykeree's?
The reasons that came to mind fed the pain building behind his eyes—a side effect of his age and being near multiple life forms. War was profitable, and anarchy was often motive enough for some.
"Stay on it." His team might be wounded and grounded, but their mission was still in effect, even if survival and extraction were now their primary goals. "Find out what happened to that ship. It might give us a clue as to why the Xykeree are in this area." The starsec wasn't a typical hunting ground for the aliens—too few unprotected species to prey on—and they had no known local trade agreements. "And keep looking for tracers and jammers."
"This place is where bad tech goes to die, Kap." A feline growl. "And there are plenty of criminals on this rock who'd have reasons to monitor and sabotage tech. The coms might always be this erratic."
Kaplan didn't take any reassurance from that fact. Nor did his e-specialist. Despite proof of the planet's corruption bleeding on the tunnel's floor, Fero's thoughts ran along the same path as his. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to blow their vessel out of the void. They needed definitive answers, not convenient explanations.
They also had more immediate problems than their unknown enemy.
Kaplan crouched beside one of the human addicts he'd knocked cold. Certain details spoke volumes about the planet's culture: thermally protective overshell; breather unit for respiration on the planet's surface; permanent i.v. port in the forearm. The weapon the man had drawn wasn't an enviable piece, but it said something that a man enslaved to chemical highs hadn't sold it.
Searching the unconscious men and the Vok's corpse, Kaplan located and disabled any coms, although he suspected trackers would be unlikely. The group weren't the types to want to be easily located and didn't look worth the effort for someone else to trace. However, they had gone to some trouble to display a common purple colour: the hair on one human; a facial tattoo on the other; and a painted jaw on the Vok. Gang affiliates.
The passage was part of some drug lord's territory.
"They get a signal out?" Kaplan rose, deactivating but not sheathing his blade.
Fero grunted. "You're not slow, Kap, banged up or not."
Kaplan brought a hand to his cracked rib. Another solid blow to the injury and painful would become life threatening—the reason the Vok was dead, not just down like its human associates.
"Make sure no reports of our presence reach the local data net." He glanced back as other dark-suited figures started to emerge from the airlock: three humans, another combat-bred cat alterant like Fero, and a second psi specialist, her mind shielded but familiar. His cousin Sia Samsun—Sun—a lithe shadow with hawk-gold eyes. All were injured to some degree. One dragged out the addict he'd taken down in the wastes.
"Secure anything with a pulse," Kaplan instructed. "Then health status, inventory, and equipment checks. Be ready to move again in three minutes. I'll find out what we've just walked into."
"Pharma op complete with gang-bangers." Fero's fangs gleamed within his mask. "We're crawling into this dump through its arse, Kap."
"Just keep low and stay dark."
He didn't wait for an acknowledgement. His psi-tech was picking up fluctuations on the limit of his range, and Fero wasn't wrong about the backdoor route they were taking. Things would get messy again soon enough.
At the end of the corridor, he smelled more weapons fire. Two blast doors blocked his path, but they'd slipped out of alignment, creating a triangular gap. He sheathed his blade, drew his pistol, and went prone.
The space beyond was wide and dark. He extended a flexible optic on his ear headset. It immediately fed low-light imaging to his implanted tech. He received the camera's picture as he did psionic signals—another layer of awareness on top of standard sensory information.
A scan of the room backed up his decision to go in slow and low and to definitively take down obstacles. It was an old weapons store, but while the casings littering the floor were long past their days of bloodshed, other things had only just ended theirs. Prematurely. Permanently.
Bodies. Three humans: two with their throats cut; one with a hole burnt through his forehead. All fresh kills.
A fourth body in a metallic-blue coat and torn lingerie lay sprawled near the far door; a female with purple body tattoos and lips encrusted with pink saliva. She was a tweaker so deep in her bliss she barely breathed.
Kaplan tuned out her weak mental signals. Stronger ones pulsed beyond her. A painful mass of them. Over the past year, crowds had become his kryptonite—the reason he'd joined a long-range scout crew. In-population recon work was best left to younger Rha Si. They picked up less psionic noise, their sensitivity and range still developing.
Their minds were yet to reject the tech that kept them functioning.
A gaunt face came to mind. Waxen, olive skin. Lank, dark hair. Grey eyes so like his own, but glassy and vacant. His elder brother, Saul, three months ago. Just one of dozens of third-gens slipping into the abyss as their minds and tech failed—sensory overload inevitably transitioning to severe pain then coma.
Kaplan buried the memory.
Slipping through the gap in the doors, only just getting his shoulders through despite the close fit of his armour, he focused on the mass of minds ahead. Avoiding pools of blood and scattered trash, he rolled to his feet. His passage across the room was nearly silent. Stepping over the motionless tweaker, he moved out into the next corridor.
The music he'd been hearing grew louder. His psi-tech hummed: too many signals to process. A scarred door lay beyond a vandalised snack machine at the end of the passage. He stepped up to it, peered through its cloudy window.
A bar glowed under banks of black lights in the next room. Augmented serving staff in transparent polymer worked tables loaded with credit chips and dice. A stifling buzz of fear, lust, and greed filled the space.
A gambling house. One doing a roaring trade. As were the illegal tech traders in the corner booth and the numerous pharma dealers working the crowd.
Kaplan noted the bar's exits, monitoring system, and numerous bouncers. Tuning in to localised coms for a moment, he found the message traffic erratic but substantial. Everyone in local space would know within minutes if an armed group walked in from the backroom. To complicate things further, the bar was full of individuals sporting purple body art. Gang members and enforcers. Getting across the lounge would be a blunt, bloody exercise.
Before he could consider his options, he caught a thought in the turmoil, one that had him moving back to the storeroom's entrance. A moment later, the door to the lounge opened, releasing a burst of music and conversation. Someone entered, heels clicking. Grit got ground into concrete as the individual swivelled to close the door.
"The boss wants them fed to his herbal product." A male but effeminate voice cut across the muffled noise of the bar. "Them dumb bastards worth more dead than alive."
"You shitting me?" A second voice—deep, unequivocally male. Irritated.
"Organics are organics." Stiff fabric scuffed across the floor, the first individual shifting with a sharp tap of heels. "And we all got to pay our debts one way or another."
Using his flexible optic, Kaplan got a look at his company. A big male in a loose overshirt stood by the far door, his facial tattoos glowing in the lounge's light. Beside him stood a brunette in a white, floor-length coat and little else—some kind of human alterant who'd paid to blend pert female sex organs with his proudly upstanding and highly pierced native male biology. A pleasure regent.
"That ain't what I meant." The brute clenched his fists, revealing rows of spike implants along his knuckles. "The fucking mulcher's on ground level. I ain't carrying them bastards up three flights."
"Don't be a pussy." The regent slid a hand to one bare hip, striking an insolent pose. "Cut 'em up or something. Just fucking do it. I got more interesting business to deal with this morning, believe me."
"People to fuck, you mean."
"Oh, honey, you know it." Gold-painted lips curved. "Lot of people delayed and looking to be entertained today—thank you aliens, sandstorm, and whatever the fuck is going on with the sat tech right now."
"Bugger that. Them roaches are taking up prime dock space. They need to fuck off, full warp."
"You ain't the first to say so, hon." The pleasure trader's smile turned shrewd. "The mine exec who just had me for breakfast said his shuttle followed the bug ship in, and he didn't see nothing wrong with it, 'cept it was creepy as fuck."
"So, the mine bosses gonna move the cockroaches on then? That ship ain't good for business."
"Tell that to the wep-tech traders, baby doll. Business been through the roof this morning. Them roaches hang about much longer, things are gonna get noisy."
The brute bared his teeth. "I could shoot some damn bugs."
"No, hon, you got trash bags to fill." The regent waggled gold talons in the storeroom's direction—Kaplan's direction. "Compost them arseholes."
Kaplan looked for an escape. There wasn't one—not without rock-boring tech or more oxygen for his team. Holding position wasn't an option either. The passage was well used, and the gang members bleeding on its floor would eventually be missed. And there was a further complication: the local populace appeared to be aggressively stupid. They could go after the Xykeree, start a diplomatic shitstorm.
He didn't want his people near that. A special recon team on site when an interspecies altercation went down? They'd be stuck in debrief for the rest of their careers.
Catching a thought about dismembering bodies with a laser pistol, Kaplan figured he had thirty seconds to find a solution.
"This ain't gonna be pretty, pu'ta." The brute yanked up his overtunic to retrieve his weapon and a wad of polywrap bags. "Does the boss seriously want body bags dragged through his credit farm right now?"
The regent swaggered to the door. "Darling, there are at least a dozen arseholes overdue on their monies laughing it up back there. What do you think the boss wants you to fucking do?"
"Fine. Go fuck something."
"Bitch."
"Just make sure the enforcers know I'll be coming through. I don't want no shit."
"Oh, they're already expecting a parade, baby. They gonna round up the welchers right after. Drag in a little blood." The leggy alterant yanked open the door and left in a burst of pounding music.
The brute slapped off his weapon's safety and punched on the corridor's lights. Flipping out a polymer bag, he headed for the storeroom.
Instincts honed over ten years of intelligence work raised a chill on Kaplan's skin. If he was right about the source of the planet's coms problems, discovery right that minute could lead to worse things than a bloodbath in a seedy underground corridor.
His team needed to move.
He sized up the human male about to walk around the corner and right into him: weight, height, and build. The gangster was a formidable mound of muscle. Dead sober. Well armed.
An opportunity.
Kaplan lifted his pistol.