Chapter 95—Maxx

Fuxx.

Fuxx.

Nera had twirled out of my seeking hand that was trying to pull her with us toward a room on the right. But she’d gone left, and now we were separated by a hall of footsteps and wind and no way to get to her without being seen.

We appeared to be in a large control room with holographic displays and a massive central command table. The walls were equipped with smart surfaces displaying real-time maps of rocky terrain and Faid positions, all of which were fake, according to Rain.

Just in case someone tried to enter and caught us here, I wedged a nearby chair underneath the doorknob.

“Y’know,” Mosely said, flexing his muscular arms as he sank down in front of a computer, “if this were a painting, I’d call it The Futility of Sneaking Around. No offense, but we sounded like a herd of elephants coming in here.”

“More like The Absurdity of Possibly Getting Caught by Your Toxic Employer,“ Darc countered, her bright-pink hair contrasting sharply against the stark metal walls of the room. “Hurry, Mosely. Okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mosely said, plugging the decrypted into the side of the computer. “Just some light hacking and general mayhem first.”

“Can you get to the classified documents?” I asked him.

He pressed a bunch of buttons in quick succession. “Yup.”

I crossed over to peer over his shoulder. My thoughts raced, consumed with the implications the documents held for Nera and for me.

“What did you find?” Darc inquired, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Something…troubling,” he replied and pointed to the screen. “A lot of somethings. Notice the dates? Because I sure do.”

One by one, the files on the computer decrypted. Hundreds of them, all marked highly classified. What else were they involved in that we didn’t even know about?

I tried to get some idea what they were involved in from the file names, but they were mostly dates. Many of them were centered around the time when Xenoxx made first contact with the humans. When my dad and brother were killed. When the embassy was attacked, and the explosion took Bexx from me and nearly took me too.

I wished I had time to sift through everything. I would though. And soon.

My determination to expose Earth Space Fleet’s corruption grew stronger with each file decrypted. These people, who claimed to be allies, had been hiding things for too fixing long.

The doorknob with the chair wedged underneath it began to rattle.

The three of us froze. The stale air in the room hovered in my lungs. On the computer screen, the decryption progress bar wasn’t even halfway through yet.

Just as suddenly as the rattling started, it stopped.

“They’ll be coming back shortly, no doubt,” I muttered.

“Anything you can do to speed things up?” Darc whispered.

“Other than pull up my email and prepare to send all of this to news organizations…” Mosely read carefully from the screen. “Afraid not.”

I scanned the walls filled with wildly inaccurate three-dimensional maps of Klio-3 I desperately wanted to steal so I could salivate over them, but I didn’t. “Why come in here at all? There are no fuses or generators in here, are there?”

“They’re probably worried about security and anyone coming in doing exactly what we’re doing. Either that, or they need to use this computer for more nefarious purposes.” Mosely nodded to the door as he typed quickly. “Whoever that was is sure to bring friends.”

The progress bar was nearly at fifty percent.

“Didn’t Nera tell Pete to send this from her email?” Darc asked, squinting at the screen.

“Did she? I must’ve not heard that part.” Mosely shrugged, but I guessed his intentions without him having to say any more.

He was trying to protect her, like we all were.

Darc huffed as she peered closer over his shoulder. “Comic Sans font? Really, Mosely?”

“You want someone to open your email?” he said. “You piss them off right at the start. Especially news organizations. They hate that shit.”

“How do you know?” Darc asked with narrowed eyes.

“I’m a man of many talents. Pissing people off is a specialty of mine,” he said while cracking his knuckles.

“We want them to publish this, not piss them off,“ I told him gruffly.

“Look, I get it, but do you know how many emails news organizations get in a single day? You need to stand out. You need to Comic Sans, my friend.”

I hissed underneath my breath. “And if they’re so pissed off that they delete the email without reading it?”

“Then you can delete him,” Darc said to me with a grin while patting Mosely’s shoulder.

Tempting. “You better be right.”

He lifted his hands and leaned back in his chair, the picture of casual. “I’m always right.”

“If we get caught, what do you think will happen to us?” Darc blew a chunk of pink hair from her cheek. “Murder or torture?”

“Or will they just call us all traitors to the universe and lock us up forever?” Mosely shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares?”

Darc rolled her eyes. “I do, obviously.”

I settled my hand on my machete handle, strapped to my side with a black Space Fleet handkerchief. “Let them try anything.”

Mosely nodded. “Agreed. I don’t plan on letting them get away with this. We’ll see who tortures who in the long run.”

Darc offered him her fist, which he bumped with his own.

Their easy, platonic relationship reminded me of Axxel and me…and Miekil and me. Perfectly in sync with one another and natural. Maybe it hadn’t started out that way, but it’d evolved into it.

I wished Axxel were here. I wished Pete were with Miekil.

“Three-fourths of the way done,” Mosely announced, his finger still tapping.

As soon as he said it, a loud boom battered against the door. The three of us jumped then leveled our weapons.

The door suddenly swung open and crashed the chair against the wall. A woman with blonde hair pulled tightly into a bun stood framed in the doorway, her eyes like chips of ice. I recognized her from the bungalow. She’d been an unexpected morning visitor, and Nera had hidden me from her in the closet.

“Lieutenant Avery,” Darc breathed.

“Found you,” she said with a slight smirk. “Don’t look so scared. You all look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“More like a nightmare,” Darc replied.

“You’re projecting, Avery,” Mosely told her, cracking the knuckles of his free hand against his thigh. “You’re the one who looks scared.”

Avery shot him a glare.

For a moment, no one moved, locked in a silent battle of wills.

Time to speed this whole process along.

“We’re about to expose Earth Space Fleet’s lies and deceit,” I announced. “If you try and stop us, you will fail.”

Avery laughed, a sinister sound that dragged across my scales. “Oh, really?”

Two men stepped to her sides in the doorway, both armed to the teeth.

“Well,” Avery said, nodding, “good luck with that.”