Manipulate (Book 1, Alien Cadets)

Chapter 21

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Nat sat cross-legged in the dark hallway, in front of the airlock; the airlock that would kill her in a matter of minutes. The only illumination was the green glow from the control screen and the tiny lights along the floor.

Her inner arm wouldn’t stop itching. She scratched again and again, from the crook of her elbow to her wrist. The handcuffs still dangled off her left hand.

When the screen blinked on and off, she wasn’t looking at it, but she saw the light flicker on her arm. She looked up, but the screen looked the same.

Another scratch, another screen blink.

This time the screen stayed black. The hallway was almost completely black without that light.

NAT

NAT

Small white caps printed slowly on the screen, and then more quickly.

 WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THE AIRLOCK?

NAT?

IT IS AKEMI

Nat looked at the words on the screen in disbelief. Was it a message from the Rik? Did they think to log into the airlock subsystem and see what she’d done? How sick would they be to use Akemi’s name?

NAT I’M ALIVE

COME BACK TO THE CONTROL ROOM

I NEED TO SHOW YOU SOME THINGS

Nat got slowly to her feet, staring at the words. Then she ran back to the control room. The computer was no longer locked, as it had been before. It was dark, with the same white letters talking to her.

TOUCH THE SCREEN IF YOU’RE HERE

Nat punched the screen. If this was a trick…

GOOD

GOOD GOODGOOD

LOOK AT THIS

The computer went dark. Nat wanted to scream. She wanted to pound her fists on the computer and demand to know if her sister was really in there, but she couldn’t do anything.

Pictures flashed on the screen. The first showed a huge metal hallway, curving gradually in an unbroken arc. Next was an aerial shot of a circular building, nearly half a mile long. She recognized these pictures. This was the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland that the terrorists sabotaged seven years ago. The resulting explosion had destroyed most of northern Europe and toxified a large part of western Russia. The environment went to pieces, the Spo came, etc. etc. Why was Akemi showing her this? She knew it all.

The Hadron explosion brought the Spo down on them. Because of the Hadron terrorists, the galactic council wasn’t sure if humanity deserved sentient status. Hence the trial, hence the Spo, hence the cadets getting jerked away from their families for six years. This was where it all started.

The pictures kept coming. First the standard Hadron collider photos, the ones that still played over the news occasionally. Then a short video clip. It was the Hadron collider from space. The camera got closer and closer to the earth, then zoomed in on the collider.

A view from a spaceship, Nat wondered. A weather satellite maybe?

For a moment the video was obscured by a red circular object. Then the red package fell away from the camera and zoomed toward the ground. It got smaller and smaller in the view, until it disappeared. Two seconds later, the ground erupted in a giant firework explosion. The ground rippled away from the blast like cut elastic. Debris mushroomed into the atmosphere. The camera started to shake violently and then the video cut off and the screen went dark again.