The low, background hum of alien hostility and idling ship systems. Slicing across it, a high whine, like feedback on the psi-sensory plane.
Kaplan hauled himself out of a maintenance shaft, up into the Hydra, the hair at his nape prickling inside his battle suit. The hull breach had gone to plan—except for one vital thing.
None of the Rha Si on the infiltration team had been able to connect with the ship's hive mind. Not even Zio Tarak.
Something—odd psionic interference—created a wall of noise that prevented a stable connection.
After over fifty years of vulnerability, the Xykeree had found a way to block mental incursion. Not good news for the current mission.
Nor the continuance of intergalactic peace.
Kaplan rolled clear of the maintenance shaft, out of the way of the soldiers and droids coming up behind him. The corridor he'd entered was a utility passage: narrow and damp—unnervingly evocative of a cocoon of black mucus. A passage built for Xykeree workers, not larger soldier class exskels. The men, women, and battle droids who'd led the breach under Atlas' direction were positioned at all junctions, including a vertical one that led up to the next deck level.
As more soldiers and droids hauled themselves up into the corridor, Kaplan gripped his battle rifle and checked the sensor data on his mask's HUD. The readings confirmed what his psionics told him: no Xykeree within thirty metres of the breach point, in any direction. The only life forms detected were on the hazy edge of his psionic range, in the aft section of the ship's main larder.
Three non-insectoid life signs.
Kaplan focused on his breath, easing the tightness in his chest. Jinx wouldn't be one of those life forms. The Xykeree wouldn't go to this much trouble just to harvest her organics.
A whisper of enmity: Zio Tarak entering the corridor. On his signal, Kaplan moved out with his team to start the search for live bodies. Another team headed for the main engines, while a third held position, protecting their exit point.
Each team had two or more Rha Si. Normally, that would have enabled a near effortless psionic network to back up general coms. But the ship's odd psionics hampered mind-to-mind links. Too variable and intense to allow focus.
Moving with his team toward the larder chamber, Kaplan felt his awareness of Tarak at the breach point and Omar, the Rha Si stationed on the Grey Hawk, blur, like com signals lost in static.
Unease slithered down Kaplan's spine. With each hard heartbeat, the ominous could-be-ambushed-at-any-moment sensation increased.
But his team met no resistance.
Reaching the larder's downward sloping entrance, he took up position behind Cruse's Atillian hulk and a shield droid, two other battle units flowing in behind them. Fero linked with the door controls, ready to trigger them. Other heavily armed soldiers and droids held their positions in the humid, black corridors around them, watching their backs and overhead, including Sun, Atlas, and Zuri Stroma, a mech-enhanced Rha Si with over thirty forced-boarding missions under her belt.
Working against the psionic interference, Kaplan focused on the chamber he was about to enter. His pulse thudded. The life signs ahead of him were all human—all under physiological stress. Get the medic ready to move, he 'pathed Atlas. Two of the minds he sensed were unconscious. One was—
Tras. Full of fury and desperation. He was fighting the Xykeree's paralytic. The anti-venom dispensed by his battle suit was kicking in, but not fast enough for him to save the woman with him.
Kaplan gave the signal to move in.
As he swept into the chamber behind the shield droid and Cruse, his low-light imaging fed him a horror scene. A steaming lake of festering organics. Floating lumps, some still recognisable as body parts: human and alien. Walls dripping with moisture—
Three bodies. In and near the edge of the soup.
A female floated in the erosive sludge, her naked skin ruddy, in the first stages of breakdown. Her face just cleared the surface, held up by the partially stripped male lying at the digestion pool's edge. Tras.
Another male lay nearby, his body half out of his red battle suit, his exposed face bloody. Dorf Gorstav. Tras' crewman. The mech-alterant's artificial eyes had been ripped out of his head to ready his organics for harvest.
The moment the long chamber was cleared, Kaplan double-timed it to Tras, signalling for the medic. Pain lit the trader's mind. The arm he had in the bio-soup burned, his skin breaking down. But his fury burned brighter.
Kaplan dropped to one knee and hauled Jinx's warp-tech friend, Soha Wilkirk, from the soup. As the medic and an assistant started working on the woman, checking her lungs, removing the digestive juices from her inflamed skin, Kaplan dealt with Tras, cleansing his arm—and ripping memories from his mind.
Soha had been leverage. Jinx had agreed to hand herself over. The Xykeree wanted her alive, and Tras had banked on the Coalition military taking action to find out why.
They'd all been pawns being moved into place.
Kaplan cut a look across the steamy chamber. The hive mind drowned the psionic plane with fluctuating noise. He still couldn't catch and ride its currents, but he felt its hostility.
Its increasing activity.
Again unease crawled through him; the sense he'd walked into a spider's web. Right where his enemy wanted him.
But he still sensed no Xykeree nearby. No physical booby traps or other threats had been detected.
Kaplan shoved Tras back into his half-dislodged battle suit, all the while ripping through the trader's memories. A stun grenade had been sent in with Soha at the hostage exchange, creating a diversion, allowing the Xykeree to board the Fire Witch without lethal force. They had definitely wanted Jinx alive.
And they'd taken her. Tras had no idea where.
A low, growl rippled across the chamber.
Kaplan snapped his gaze to Fero.
The Atillian turned, his psionics hot. Feral. "Kap, my aggression's increasing. Someone is fucking with my—"
A whump of force and hot light—a plasma rifle discharging.
A body falling. A battle droid.
Taken down by the Throlean soldier behind it.
Kaplan whipped up his rifle even as he slammed Fero into unconsciousness with a psionic blast.
Chaos erupted in the chamber and outside in the surrounding corridors.
Coalition troops turning on one another.