A high, piercing ringing. Hellfire in his skull.

For an instant, Kaplan wished he hadn't regained consciousness.

Then he remembered. The Hydra's hive mind bloated with power. A psionic attack—a debilitating sensory burst. Total overload.

Agony.

He floated in a black ocean of it, all other sensation drowned. His battle suit had to have auto-dispensed analgesic, but he needed another dose. Heavy psi stimuli still seared his brain.

He tried to order more meds via his neurotech, but got nothing, its bio-interface offline.

Resisting the temptation to black out, he concentrated on breathing. It would've been kinder if his psi receptors had just gone deaf under the overload, like human ears after too much abuse. His psi-tech's load-management protocols hadn't been enough to protect him. If he hadn't understood Cal's barely coherent warning and disengaged his amp tech, he'd have been down for the count.

How had the Xykeree gone from primitive psi users to this?

He battled to think past the pain. He needed to figure out where he was, locate Cal and Jinx, Sun and the others. But he couldn't sense anyone, any mind. The hive's psionics were a scorching haze.

He tried to tune into his physical senses.

A dull thud: his heartbeat. The tang of blood in his mouth. Tugging on his legs and a sense of resistance under his back: his armour sliding over a hard surface. Scraping and clicking sounds.

He was being dragged. By at least four small Xykeree: worker exskels.

He suppressed the instinct to break loose. He was in no state to fight. And the Xykeree knew it. They hadn't yet dosed him with paralytic; odd, but he was coming to expect atypical behaviour from this hive.

He opened his eyes, set off stabbing pain. Orange and red lights flooded his vision: HUD warnings, his mask still in place.

He focused beyond its plas.

Darkness. A sense of open space ... and movement.

Blinking, he tried to process the image his low-light tech revealed.

Gleaming metal and composite: large, cyborg bodies either side of him. Lines of them. Overhead ... high, arching, ink-black bulkheads covered in smaller exskels. More workers.

Pulse going jagged, Kaplan shifted his head to the side to confirm his worst fears.

A mass of mechanical bodies. An exskel army in its deployment bay.

He strangled a rush of adrenaline—fear. Most of the Xykeree around him stood strangely passive in precise rows, their weapons idle. Only their metal mouthparts twitched, opening in reflex as he slid by.

Lifting his head, he squinted past the grey dots eating his vision. Four worker exskels had their fangs around his ankles and knees. Their legs danced frantically as they hauled him through the lines of larger exskels. Beyond them...

Limp, human forms. All in dark Coalition armour. All being dragged toward—

A black, spherical ship, its ramp down. Ready to receive its unconscious cargo.

Sight threatening to fade out, Kaplan let his head fall back and breathed deeply. The vessel looked like the one that'd forced him to crash-land on Tirus 7. It wasn't standard Xykeree tech, but the aliens were clearly using it to acquire Rha Si. But for what purpose? Interrogation? Anti-psi drug development?

The memory of Cal's mental contact rose: fragmented telepathy, not quite sane.

Whatever was coming, Cal hadn't survived it unscathed.

Clamping his teeth against the pain, Kaplan raised his head again. Shapes swam in and out of focus: Atlas and Sun being hauled up the ship's ramp. Other unconscious Rha Si weren't far behind them.

He would be joining them all too soon.

Lowering his head, Kaplan struggled to stay conscious—think. Were reinforcements inbound? Had anyone got word to the Black Mercury before coms had been lost? Admiral Tarak had ordered the ship's captain, Delaforge, to hold off on any action for thirty minutes, but more time than that had passed. Something had to have stopped or held up the Mercury. An attack? Sabotage? Treachery?

A queasy certainty gripped Kaplan. Backup wasn't coming. Not anytime soon. And he had to assume the entire boarding party was down. The Xykeree would've swarmed the second he and the other Rha Si had lost consciousness. He'd tried to warn Tras, had telepathically instructed him to evade and resist, but the trader had been sluggish from the paralytic. Odds were he hadn't been able to act in time to save himself let alone anyone else.

The black ship loomed large ahead.

Kaplan breathed through his pain, resisted the pressure in his chest—panic. The Xykeree would launch the vessel once its cargo had been secured. With its speed and advanced cloaking tech, it'd lose itself in the void quickly. He had to move, now, before he was dragged on board.

But there was a good chance he'd black out if he tried.

He'd become used to a certain level of overload, but his senses weren't recovering. It was as if his reg tech hadn't shut—

Cal's jumbled warning rushed back: a sense of immediate peril—the psi attack—then a frantic order to break some kind of "leash".

Horror speared through Kaplan.

His regulatory tech wasn't letting his senses shut down. He was locked in overload.

His tech was compromised.

The ramifications tore through him. Their traitor had infiltrated the medical and research teams. Every med check, every diagnostic, had left the Rha Si open to sabotage—probably by some unwitting non-psi pawn.

The third-gen regulatory-tech problems, they could be a symptom of a silent war, not a tech failure.

Kaplan's heart lodged in his throat. He had to warn other Rha Si—his grandmother—but how? Coms were jammed. An army of exskels surrounded him. Just staying conscious was a crippling battle.

The overload. He had to stop it, shut down his overstimulated psi receptors. But to do that he'd have to—

Break the leash.

Kaplan's respiration seized. His neurotech; he had to take it out. But if he destroyed it, he'd have no control over his abilities. He'd potentially suffer an even worse overload, slip into a coma like his brother, and never wake—

Jinx had no tech.

Kaplan took a moment to breathe, calm his thoughts. Jinx was an aberration. No one knew what made her different. He couldn't assume he could take out his reg tech and survive.

But if Cal had suggested it...

Cal had done it.

Pulse thudding, Kaplan hauled up his head. The alien ship loomed. More unconscious Rha Si slid up its ramp, worker exskels scrambling around and over them. He caught movement within the ship: a humanoid shape, heavily armoured and unlike any Xykeree exskel he'd seen before. More like a security droid than a roach. Beyond it, screen tech glowed, displaying human med stats—

A burst of pain and terror—strong enough to punch through the hive's psionics.

Kaplan's stomach lurched. Someone was conscious, being tortured. A human female—

Jinx.

Kaplan snapped his eyes shut, fought for focus. The Xykeree had overloaded his telepathic senses, but he was a third-gen in his fourth decade of life. Not all his psionics were sensory based.

Nor were they passive.

Pain poured through him like lava as he activated the psionic ability his compromised tech had never been configured to control. Weak, just another sign of destabilisation, his newly developed kinesis hadn't been worth mentioning to any med-tech.

But he didn't need much to fry delicate electronics.

A tiny jolt.

A devastating strike.

Total annihilation of his psyche.

For an instant, pain was all that existed.

Then the void swallowed him; a soulless, silent night. He couldn't breathe, couldn't sense anything—anyone. Truly alone in his skull for the first time in his life, he felt deaf and blind.

Trapped in an airless box.

A scream blew it wide open.