Alien by Brendan Deneen

Author:Brendan Deneen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan

13

Chris observed the colony’s headquarters from the shadows.

He was tired—exhausted, really. And felt a deep seed of worry about his daughters sprouting in the pit of his stomach. But an essential part of him, the part that had kept him alive in countless battle zones, told him that the answers to all his questions about the OST were hidden behind the door he had seen earlier.

The streets of the colony were silent. It was late, probably around 3:30am, and mercifully, a thick wall of clouds had finally covered the digital sky, making his mission that much easier. He wondered vaguely if the cloud cover had been programmed, or if it was completely random. Under better circumstances, he would ask Lexa—and maybe this was all a big misunderstanding, maybe his gut was wrong. He truly hoped that was the case.

Satisfied that no one was around, Chris moved towards the building with purpose, like he was reporting to work on a Monday morning. He had noticed earlier that there were no cameras outside of the building—no cameras anywhere in the colony, which struck him as odd. Perhaps the community had voted against it. He knew that privacy concerns had been part of the civil unrest that had erupted on Earth, particularly after the crash of the Auriga and everything that had transpired since.

When Chris arrived at the security pad, he smiled ruefully. Lexa had turned her back to him when she’d inputted the digits, but he was trained to see things that were supposedly impossible to witness, and had memorized the code as she punched it in. The numbers appeared behind his eyes as if they had been burned there, and he quickly punched them in. The pad beeped.

Chris entered the building.

It was dark inside, especially with the cloud cover, but he didn’t turn on any lights. He waited several minutes as his eyes fully adjusted to the gloom. He was in a rush, yes, but there was a right way to infiltrate a location, and that usually required patience, even when waiting went against every instinct in a soldier’s body.

Finally, the inside of the building became clearer and clearer, until he was sure that his eyes were as adjusted as possible, and he moved forward, cautious but quick. His mind went to his daughters, asleep in beds that were still new, in a home that wasn’t truly theirs. A part of him wanted to leave this building at that exact moment, to go back, to keep them safe. But that was a short-term solution. If he really wanted to protect them, he needed more information about what was really happening on this colony. There were simply too many unanswered questions. And those kinds of unknowns were what got people killed in emergencies.

Chris sensed an emergency on the horizon. He just had no idea what kind it would be.

He had memorized the hallways of the HQ earlier that day, so he took the several turns as if he’d been working there for years, finally ending up in the hallway where he’d had the confrontation with Cosgrove.

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