Infiltration by Susanna Rogers

Author:Susanna Rogers [Rogers, Susanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bucher & Reid
Published: 2017-12-04T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

The volleyball game over, two girls by the pool were complaining about putting dry clothes over their wet underwear.

I rolled my eyes. That was the least of my problems. Besides, I was a soldier and had been through much worse. This was nothing compared to wearing wet combat fatigues in a mosquito-infested jungle where you stayed damp all day. These girls didn’t know how good they had it.

Someone had brought out towels so I’d already dried my hair as best I could. My clothes were on and they were staying on. Back home we might not have any qualms about nudity but this wasn’t New Nation.

Lauren nudged me. “I told you we’d have fun, Nicola.”

Not wanting to miss out, she’d jumped in for the volleyball game too and thrived on it, whereas I wasn’t cut out for all this fun. I may have been trained by the best officers in New Nation but nothing had prepared me for this.

I worked my way toward the fence, thinking I might watch from the sidelines when Ben appeared beside me.

“You don’t like crowds?” he asked.

I shook my head. “It’s all a bit much for me at the moment.”

He took my hand. “I know a quiet spot.”

I shouldn’t go with Ben. Given my conflicted reactions, I should behave in a professional manner and keep my distance. What the hell, I followed him anyway.

Lauren’s words rang through my head. Bad choices. I didn’t care.

He led me to a small, grassed area wedged between a small outbuilding and the fence behind some trees at the rear of the garden. Though there was no escaping the noise of the party, this spot felt secluded.

I flopped down on the grass on my back. “It’s good to get away from all that.”

Ben lay down beside me, much more graceful than I’d been. He didn’t touch me. Didn’t say anything either. Just looked up at the stars. Glancing across, I watched the rise and fall of his chest, grateful he was wearing a shirt, then looked up again.

The night sky didn’t look like this in New Nation where permanent pollution created an obstructive haze. Then there were recent volcanic eruptions that created spectacular sunsets but caused other problems with ash clouds.

“Do you believe there’s life out there?” I asked.

“On other planets? Sure.”

“Do you think about it much?”

“Not a lot, but we’d have to be incredibly vain to think that on all the planets in all the galaxies in the whole universe that there isn’t some sort of life.”

There was a big world out there, bigger than Ben knew, probably bigger than I could imagine too. I’d discovered so much in Altabena that it made me realize how small I was, nothing more than a tiny cog in an enormous universe. Small but pivotal.

“For me, the question isn’t whether there’s life on other planets,” Ben said. “The question is what sort of life, how intelligent, how advanced. And maybe that life is so far away we’d have no way of contacting them.

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