Kaplan dragged the last body bag from the gambling lounge, past two tattooed bouncers. Tugging down the hood of his newly acquired overshirt, he squinted through his headache and assessed the underground corridor.
The neon-lit doorways of pleasure houses and pawn-shops bled light, turning bared flesh strange colours. People swigged liquor, shot up drugs, and made deals. A haze of lust, fear, and malice choked the corridor.
Sweat crept down Kaplan's back as he pulled his haul forward. Sketski, his pilot, wasn't particularly heavy, but the effort to focus took its toll. So many minds. Fragmented thoughts hit like shrapnel. He could only catch those closest to him.
His stride faltered.
Someone wanted to kick "the dead body"—Sketski.
Snatching a moment of control, Kaplan zeroed in on the source: an idiot kid with pink hair. He redirected the moron's impulse, causing the kid to kick a friend as the other youth bent to retrieve his psychedelic alcopop from the floor. A fight started. Liquor bottles scattered. Knives got pulled.
Blades of a different sort sliced into Kaplan's brain. Wavering on his feet, he pushed open the door to the stairwell and pulled his polywrapped crewmate out of sight.
His two earlier hauls were waiting. Fero stood guard just inside the door, the black, nomad-style headscarf he favoured when off-duty obscuring his blond hair and feral features. One of the long, thermally protective coats the locals liked to wear covered his battle suit. Shio, the teams' youngest member, stood on the stairs, pistol in hand. Purple body paint now striped her crew cut, and dark ink outlined her eyes, highlighting the Earth East-Asian Japanese ancestry her genes had chosen to outwardly express. She'd also acquired a green jacket covered in chains and metal studs, making her seem more teen trash-pop star than soldier. The source of the ensign's new look pumped up one of the two discarded body bags by the wall. Kaplan caught the hum of an unconscious mind.
Crouching next to the bag at his feet, he moved to release Sketski.
The barrel of a pistol parted the seal first. Then a bandaged, sandy blond head. The pilot pushed out of the bag, sucking in air like a man half drowned. "Goddamn it, Kap." Bloodshot blue eyes blinked. "I know your kind are backward when it comes to being social, but even you must know there are better ways to leave a bar." The man groaned and righted himself. "Wrapped up in something hot and exotic comes to mind."
"You're in no state to be thinking about extracurricular activities, interspecies or otherwise." Kaplan rose to his feet, assessing the man. The pilot was in pain but functional. He'd been lucky. A thruster on his LD pod had malfunctioned. He'd hit the dirt hard. His battle suit and tech-heavy pilot's helmet had saved him.
Kaplan tuned out the man's discomfort, but couldn't dull his own. Taking up a position on the opposite side of the door from Fero, where he could see the stairs, he tilted his head back, propping himself against the wall.
His team didn't need to know his nose threatened to bleed. Except for his cousin Sun, the team's other psi-specialist, they didn't have clearance to discuss his health issues—any Rha Si issues. And they needed to focus on their jobs, find out what was happening with the Xykeree and the local situation.
The crowd around him had already given him valuable intel. Tirus 7's port was in crisis. A sandstorm had caused delays, and the communication issues plaguing the planet were making things worse. As were the Xykeree. The Bullhead was taking up multiple docking slots, and wasn't going anywhere until repairs were complete. If that wasn't bad enough, corrupt port staff were making the most of the mess. The black-market price for docking priority had gone up dramatically over the last hour.
The situation was primed to boil over.
Three familiar minds slipped into the mental turbulence of the corridor outside. Kaplan tracked them, ignoring the throb at his temples. A minute later, the last of his team entered the stairwell, dressed in borrowed finery like Fero and Shio. The tacky blue coat of the blissed-out prostitute in the storeroom now covered his cousin's lithe form, its hood dragged up over her dark hair.
A little psionic redirection and the distraction of a few polywrapped bodies had been enough to allow Sun to smuggle Trippoli and Cruse out of the back passage. Hauling the two combat specialists out in bags hadn't been an option. Cruse, an Atillian like Fero, looked like he'd been crossed with a steroid-enhanced bull, not a cat. Tripp, who was pure human, was only a fraction smaller.
Fortunately, like most of the locals, they were both uglier than sin. Sun wouldn't have had to redirect much attention from them after exiting the backroom. Cruse's bald brown head and flat face looked like they'd been through a grinder, most of the damage old, from past missions and volunteer work 'extracting' Atillian youths from gangs. As for Tripp, old burns puckered the skin by one green eye and a fresh cut slashed from his shorn black hair down across his large, hooked nose. The latter was thrice broken: professional misadventure coupled with six brothers, all built like tanks. With a few wardrobe and weapon adjustments, the two combat specialists looked like outlaw muscle.
Their minds told a different story: sober, clinical.
Kaplan pushed off the concrete behind him. "Patch anything that's still bleeding and get ready to move. Signs are we've got limited time before the situation at this site gets complicated."
"Anarchy is this place's religion, Kap." Fero adjusted the discreet HUD lens he'd replaced his suit's mask with. "We've got hits being called on enforcement and port staff, and there's growing talk of running the Xykeree vessel off—legal challenges as well as physical threats."
Kaplan eyed his team as they distributed weapons and gear. "Stay out of local politics. We don't interfere unless there's a credible threat to the Xykeree. Our brief is to observe, not interact." He saw and felt his team's agreement. "Right now, we need intel on the Bullhead: what happened to it, the damage it suffered, why it's in this sector. Regarding our unknown hostile, I want to know who's behind the current coms issues and who exactly is screwing with what on, or near, this planet: criminal factions, commercial groups, everyone. Gather all reports of unidentified craft or unexplained vessel disappearances in this region over the last six months."
"You really think we're still targets?" Trippoli slipped some local's blade up the sleeve of his stolen coat. The big combat specialist remained calm, but he was thinking of the people they'd lost, of the unfinished business he had with their unnamed enemy. All the team were.
"Can't rule it out, so we keep a low profile." Kaplan skimmed a hard look over his people. "Payback comes after we ID our hostile. Stay focused." He caught his cousin's hawk-gold stare. Sun's mental shields were solid, but he sensed her simmering anger and grief thanks to a quirk of his destabilising psionics and empathic abilities.
No hint of physical pain registered, however. Her injuries from the crash were superficial, and at twenty-seven years of age, just three years his junior, she was a Rha Si in her prime. She hadn't yet experienced any serious degradation in her psionic control.
Don't go blowing out minds because you're pissed, he 'pathed her. You're giving off enough hostility to make even Cruse look at you sideways.
There are no minds to blow on this planet, Reid. His cousin's mental voice sliced past all other psionic noise. Amoebas have more intelligence.
Play nice. A reminder he'd given her more than once over the past couple of months. For him and Sun, the crewmates they'd lost in the crash were the latest kick in the gut. His cousin might not be suffering the side effects of her altered genetics, but so many others were. One of her academy classmates, her number one enemy on the firing range and best friend off it, had recently gone on medical leave. And the diagnosis had come early, deepening the wound. At twenty-eight, Lieutenant Callan Tarak, a brawny stretch of good humour and reluctant intellect, should have had years left in him.
If he'd been anything other than a third-gen Rha Si, he'd have had decades. Newly enhanced humans—first-gens—didn't experience problems until their sixties. Second-gens, the lab-grown children of those who'd been altered, also seemed stable. It was the grandchildren of the Originals who were failing.
Falling fast.
Kaplan cut the mental bridge to his cousin, ending the conversation. Sometime soon, he'd have to tell Sun he was 'retiring'. He had another year, maybe.
Assuming he survived their current mission.
He looked to his team as they finished securing gear and disguises. "Let's make this quick. Tripp and Shio, find us a ride off this rock. Fero, you, Sketski, and Cruse find supplies and a secure location to hole up. Dig into the local data. Sun, work this level and make your way up. I'll move top down. Everyone rendezvous with Fero in an hour. Limit coms; use shifting frequencies as agreed. Any questions? No? Move out."
As the rest of the team made for the stairs, Sun jerked open the stairwell's door. She stepped back into the seedy underground passage without a hint of fear; an enhanced psionic trained for combat. Kaplan hoped he wouldn't have to mop up too much blood. His cousin didn't suffer idiots on the best of days. And it wasn't a good day—or year.
He followed his team up the stairs, thankful the gambling lounge's patrons used the nearby lifts for access. The stairwell was quiet. Only a couple of addicts fouled up its corners, and the three gangsters his people found in the middle of a bloody business deal got taken down swiftly.
At ground level, Kaplan exited the stairwell with his people, stepping into a busy entertainment plaza, a sea of perspiring bodies and beeping service droids. With a brief nod to Fero, he parted with his team.
A bank of lifts took him up to the port's pulsing heart: its main promenade.
It was chaos—on both mental and physical planes. Hundreds of minds. Hundreds of bodies, all competing for space. Frustrations and worries about lost business, missed flights, and alien battleships burst in and out of the static of everyday concerns.
Pain lanced through Kaplan's skull.
He didn't stop, simply turned off the amplification tech in his headset with a curt mental command. His world closed in. The pain lessened a fraction. A year ago, only the psionic signals within a metre or so would have reached him, sensed by his innate ability alone. He received more now, noise outside his natural effective range, filtered—inadequately—by his implanted tech.
Knowing his time was limited, and not only because of the unstable local situation, he went hunting.