Intergalactic Affairs [FINAL CHAPTER OUT NOW!!]

Special Training

Michelle went back to her room and thought about what had happened in the past few hours. Her head was buzzing from all of the information that she had yet to process fully. She was going on a secret mission. She was going to go spy on people. The thought of befriending people then selling them out still made her feel queasy, but she did her best to put the thought out of her mind. Her brain jumped to the other thing that was bothering her: her fight with Nikolas.

She lay back as her brain replayed the argument, and she couldn't keep the tears from once again springing to her eyes. Michelle wanted to run to Nikolas's quarters, to apologize and to give him news of her new job, but she wasn't sure if he would listen, and she doubted he was in his bunk anyway. Instead, she sat back up and brushed away the tears, taking in a deep breath as she did so. The resolution to that argument would have to come later. For now, she figured she ought to get some lunch before her special training began.

She slid back off of her bed, out of the door. She headed to the canteen, where lunch would be served from 10:45 until 13:45.

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At 12:07, Michelle was done with lunch. She had close to an hour to kill before she had to be in training, and so she wandered the halls of the base. The corridors remained mostly empty while she walked as almost all of the boys were in some type of class. She walked past the shooting range, and heard the sharp pops of bullets firing, and the excited cries when the target was hit. Clearly, these boys were new, and knew nothing of the horrors of real war. Michelle had never been so naive; she knew even before she came to this boot camp what it was like to fire a gun and see your enemy's life bleed out. She knew what it did to people. She shuddered and walked away quickly.

By 12:46, Michelle had wandered through most of the hallways that she knew. Instead of heading towards training area 17 to wait for the sergeant and the others, Michelle turned down a hallway she'd never seen before.

It wasn't lit very well, not that any of the other corridors were, and Michelle could only just make out the wording on the doors. She passed one marked Nuclear Detector, and another marked Encoded Messaging. It wasn't until she passed a door marked Galactic Strategies that Michelle began to wonder what this hallway was. She got her answer when she reached the end of the hall. Universal and Galactic War Council-Restricted Access. The words were printed backwards across the glass of a large red door. Michelle had found a back entrance into the hallway.

That wasn't what bothered her, though. It was the fact that the war council hallway looked abandoned. Shouldn't this hall be filled with people, busy receiving orders from the galactic or even universal high command? Even if the base had never been for war specifically, surely the commanders in charge of training had to get their orders from somewhere...

Another thought struck her. If the base had never truly been for an army, just trainees, why did it have rooms like Nuclear Detector and Galactic Strategies?

Before even her high functioning brain could think of a logical solution, the portable communicator in the collar of her shirt pinged. She'd set a reminder so that she wouldn't be late to her training. Sure enough, it was 12:50.

Leaving the puzzling corridor behind, Michelle sprinted almost all the way across the base. She reached the training corridor at 12:58, and stopped for a moment to catch her breath. If she arrived to her special mission training panting and sweating, she was sure some eyebrows would be raised at her credibility for this mission.

So it was that at 13:00 exactly, Michelle was outside the door to training room 17, waiting to be let in. The room was actually around the corner and down the corridor a bit from the other rooms; not so far away as to be conspicuous, but enough to be private. Michelle didn't really have time to wonder at this before the door opened and Sergeant Knight gestured for her to enter.