Rock and dust. A russet expanse rippling with heat and windblown drifts. The planet's surface temperature had already crept past forty degrees Celsius, and the early morning breeze was building.

Back pressed against a wall of eroded sandstone, Kaplan eyed the harsh terrain, but his attention was elsewhere. Grit pattered against the black Zex flexi-armour of his battle suit. Sweat dampened his dark hair within the suits' cowl and mask. With one gloved hand, he sheltered the sensitive tech of his pistol. He'd need it again soon.

The inhabitants of the planet he'd crash-landed on were as hospitable as the landscape, but they were welcome to come at him and bleed all over their patch of sand. After the fiasco of the last twelve hours, he could do some damage.

But he had other priorities.

A hostile planetary atmosphere.

A ship capable of annihilating a state-of-the-art Coalition stealth vessel.

Those of his crew who had survived entry, descent, and landing, who'd had their LD pods successfully deploy, were now stranded out in the heat only a klick away, holed up in the belly of a large mining droid they'd misappropriated for transport and shelter in the night. They were nursing injuries, and their O2 reserves were running out. He needed to locate supplies and better accommodation ASAP.

In his lower peripheral vision, warnings winked on a blood-smeared screen: his wrist com updating. He ignored the messages: partially blocked respiratory filter; low O2; mild dehydration; swelling—skull frontal bone; major inflammation—left seventh thoracic vertebrae; analgesic recommended. The HUD inside his mask was also updating, feeding him data from the bug eye he'd deployed. He checked his six using the small hovering device.

No movement.

The ghostly image on his HUD showed only rock and sand behind him. He'd left bodies in his wake, but low overhangs and dunes had helped him bury them. No surprises lay in that direction. No evidence of future or past trouble.

The same could not be said for what was in front of him.

A ping of sand against metal.

Kaplan raised his silenced weapon, held it at head height next to the worn stone at his back.

Another metallic ping sounded. A whine came next: mechanical systems changing up a gear.

Resting his dully throbbing head against rock, he waited, sweating into his suit's recyce system. Lost fluid—blood, urine, perspiration—would be purified and redispensed via the feeder tube in his mask. He could have survived days in the heat if it weren't for his limited O2 reserves and the local trash trying to kill him.

A clunk. The spit of disturbed sand. Another clunk. A squeal of poorly maintained joints.

A large droid clomped out past his cover.

Kaplan fired point-blank into its sandblasted casing. The round struck with an anticlimactic thunk and a vague burst of EMF noise across his tech. The droid jerked to a halt, alerts beeping and diodes flashing. Then the unit slumped, going silent and still.

The smell of hot wiring tainted the native air his mask's breather supplemented.

He stayed in cover, pistol still aimed at the droid. The unit was a modified N5 ground surveyor, a common mine-tech tool. Additional sensors sprouted from its squat body, and where an articulated probe arm had once been, a laser weapon now protruded. However, it wasn't the external mods that concerned him that moment.

He'd fired a shock round straight into the region a standard N5 would house its central processing unit, just below the droid's disc-shaped head. But with Frankenstein tech, there was no telling what shielding and redundancies had been retrofitted. Five minutes ago, another unit had rebooted on him. He'd had to waste a second bullet on the trash.

He stepped to the edge of his cover. The hovering bug eye and his tech-enhanced psionics told him he was in the clear momentarily. Toppling the droid, he got it out of sight. To make sure it stayed that way, he dragged it into a building sand drift. Its remains weren't going to be pretty.

Holstering his pistol, he slipped a plaz blade from a thigh sheath. The twenty-centimetre blaze of blue-green plasma made short work of the droid's essential systems, cutting through plastic and metal with a sly hiss. Acrid fumes set off hazard warnings on his com before the desert wind dispersed the toxic mix.

The smell reminded him of the field of charred debris he'd left behind hours ago. It reminded him of what had come at him in the void hours before that.

A shadow against the pinpoint lights of a backworld star sector.

His team had been surveilling foreign military activity, a few stray Xykeree vessels, when a strange, cloaked ship had appeared from nowhere, shield disruptors engaged, cannons firing. It had attacked with surgical precision; it had had an answer to every strategy and technological countermeasure. Retreat had quickly become the only option, and even that had been taken from him and his crew in the gravity well of the planet he now stood on.

That knowledge lit a cold fire. Their landing had been ugly. The aftermath worse. Half a dozen crew capsules had failed to launch. Caught in the vessel's wreckage, their buckled shells had been voids to his psionic senses.

Hollow. Soulless.

Kaplan gripped his blade, the sinking sensation of defeat, its brutal cost, a black hole in his gut. He and his crew had been outclassed from the start. Yet a handful of them still breathed. Why? Why hadn't they been taken out as cleanly as his vessel?

A question for his growing list.

Sheathing his blade and redrawing his pistol, he left the rising wind to cover the Frankendroid's remains. The bigger mess behind him, many klicks away, wouldn't be so easily buried.

He wouldn't let it be.

The roar of an engine drowned out that thought and the whisper of shifting sands.

Beyond the shelf of rock he walked beneath, a surface skimmer darted over a ridge. Since dawn, the traffic in the area had been building. Planetary vehicles of all sizes—from personal transports to scarred shuttle trains carrying ore—dodged under incoming and outgoing space-capable craft.

He'd finally found some kind of settlement.

That should have been a godsend. But the hum of life that lay just over the ridge wasn't welcoming. Its ill will had bled out into the surrounding sand and rock. In the last fifteen minutes, he'd disabled five booby traps, decommissioned two armed droids, and blasted a messy hole in a local who'd thought to greet him with the business end of a bolt rifle—a nasty piece of plasma weaponry.

In the backworlds, civilisation did not necessarily equate to civilised.

Kaplan reviewed his bug eye's data for signs of activity. His psi-tech remained silent, an odd sensation. As a laboratory-grown genetic alterant, a Rha Si third-gen from an Original line, not a newly altered human, he was used to receiving a headache-inducing number of psionic signals. A side effect of his abilities, one his genetic origins heightened.

His highly questionable, highly classified origins.

Resentment, useless but familiar, tightened his jaw. The military had their reasons for incorporating alien genes into his DNA: territorial security, social and economic stability ... the Rha Si Originals.

The first humans altered for telepathy by an allied species in the war, they were still the military's best secret weapon. They were stronger psi than anyone enhanced since in black-site labs; stronger than their tank-grown grandchildren, third-gens like him, and their second-gen children. Their success demanded replication, no matter how many attempts it took. Some even displayed forms of psychokinesis, rare abilities their lab-grown offspring could also develop, but only weakly, later in life.

The Originals were the reason the Coalition had survived the Xykeree host.

And they were the reason that, despite the hazards and controversies of genetic enhancement, the military's illicit, top-secret alteration programme had not only continued but expanded after the war.

Unknown to all but a handful of non-psi politicians, military personnel, and scientists, well-placed Rha Si operatives and a shadow council now stealthily influenced the Coalition's High Council, government, and military.

Because strength wasn't everything. Control mattered.

Kaplan closed his eyes briefly against his headache. Control. Exactly what he and other third-gens were losing; paying the price for their parents' and grandparents' decisions and ambitions. Rha Si's sensitivity increased with age and with it the number of psionic inputs. In third-gens, the tech implanted in their skulls to control and translate that constant flood was failing to keep up. Failing to protect their minds.

But right that second, he wasn't on a ship, wasn't surrounded by the rhythms and internal dramas of multiple sentient life forms. He stood in the middle of an arid valley; a strange almost dead world.

Treacherous and empty.

Calm. Devoid of pain.

A prickle of sensation interrupted that uneasy thought. The extrasensory plane that had been so featureless a second ago rippled faintly.

A life form twenty metres ahead.

Kaplan scanned his mask's HUD. His bug eye detected nothing, its visuals unremitting sand and rock. But his psi-tech fed him an input. A ghost of something—something distorted and noticeable only because of the lack of other psionic stimuli.

Sending a mental command to the translator embedded in his skull, he adjusted its filtering. The weak signals cleared enough for him to ID their source.

He had an adult human male ahead of him. Unfamiliar mental signature. Possibly unstable, though the quality of the signals hampered diagnosis. Likely some brain damage, but fortunately, not enough to deny access. That extreme level of mental aberrance was rare and more than inconvenient. A truly aberrant mind was a wall of painful, disorienting noise.

Moving forward, he tried to get a better sense of his company. The external component of his psi-tech—his ear headset—helped amplify the psionic signals he sensed. Paranoia mixed with a haze of fading euphoria. Thoughts collided and spun off on confused tangents before ricocheting back to malformed plans to spill blood.

He checked the settings of his pistol, an adaptable VP250 Jinn. Muzzle velocity: suitable for hard targets at short to medium range. Ammunition: ten-millimetre shock projectiles. The rounds would be lethal even without the secondary electrocution damage. They'd be overkill.

Fine by him.

He needed answers and backup, not another arsehole armed with trashtech.

A dull click—an ammo clip finding its niche.

Aiming his pistol along the wall of rock at his back, Kaplan picked up on a few thoughts related to loading an antiquated mech pistol, but a lot of what his headset amplified was mental garbage. The man ahead of him was out of his skull, buzzing on some kind of substance. Just another backworld tweaker.

Out of the mess, Kaplan caught enough information to understand why the hovering eye he'd put in the sky couldn't get a visual on the man. A tunnel lay ahead, a forgotten escape passage. The nearby settlement, which the man had just come from, had been built on top of an abandoned military outpost. There'd once been an auxiliary landing pad somewhere among the rocks, and the tweaker had stowed his automated drug lab in one of the disused av-fuel tanks.

That explained the booby traps and modified droids.

Edging forward, Kaplan used his surveillance tech to sweep the surrounding rocks. The thug he'd put a bullet into only minutes ago had been lying in wait for someone, probably the wannabe drug lord a mere metre away. There could be other armed individuals close by, possibly in another hidden tunnel. An illegal drug lab was worth something to these people. Worth spilling a stranger's blood, no questions asked.

He kept his trigger finger easy, not allowing impatience or disgust to take hold. Any other day, he'd have been happy to leave the planet's wildlife to their cannibalistic business practises. Today, the local vermin were in his way, and he had places to be. Places he needed to get clear of.

A mild suggestion—a vague redirection of the man's paranoia—had the tweaker stepping out of the passage into the harsh sunlight. A blow to the back of the man's dreadlocked head saved Kaplan a bullet.

Stepping over the man's body, Kaplan kicked the addict's mech pistol away and did a visual sweep. He confirmed what his psi-tech told him: the passage the man had just exited was clear of other two-legged vermin.

That's where his luck ended, however. The passage had no functional airlock, nor any other kind of environmental control system. He checked his respiratory gas supplies, bioreadings, then the walls of rock around him. The sandblasted valley would soon be an airless oven.

He'd take the escape route offered. There was no time to do otherwise.

Breaking coms silence, he sent his team a single ping, telling them to double-time it to his position. With no idea how far he was from good air, he couldn't spare the time to hike back to them, but they were waiting for his signal.

He just hoped no one else was listening for it.

The planet he'd crash-landed on was theoretically friendly territory. A couple of trashtech droids and armed locals told a different story.

And they weren't the only things to.

Kaplan eyed the traffic darting about the ridge a klick or so away. The coms signals from those surface and space-capable vessels indicated normal traffic-control procedures had been disrupted that morning—and not only because of the arrival of a damaged Xykeree vessel, a concerning matter in itself. The transmissions he'd listened in on had spoken of rescheduled flights, lost docking slots, and lost satellite feeds.

Signs were local communications had been compromised.

But was that random misfortune in a backworld sector, like the unconscious drug addict at his feet, low oxygen, and a baking local sun? Possibly. But there was also a chance he and his team were still in someone's crosshairs.

But whose? And why?

He shook his head and retrieved the tweaker's pistol. He was going to make it his business to find out.