Fractured Mind Episode One (A Galactic Coalition Academy Series) (12 page)

It took a few seconds for Nora to reply.
“The Academy's on yellow alert.”

“What?”

“Listen, I have to go. I'll call you back.
You will promise to answer, won't you, Sarah?”

Sarah considered telling Nora never to call
again.

But she couldn't do that to her friend.

She dropped her gaze and stared at her
already muddy shoes. “I'll pick up. Good luck with your alert. I
hope it's not serious.”

Nora let out a relieved laugh. “Who cares
if it's serious? All that matters is we've reconnected. I'm so
sorry for everything that's happened, Sarah.”

A few tears touched Sarah's eyes. She nodded
feverishly. “So am I.”

“Alright, gotta go—” Nora's line was cut
off.

Sarah frowned. She brought her communication
unit up and tapped it a few times. Maybe she was making this up,
but it didn't sound as if Nora had ended the call – it sounded as
if the communication line had suddenly gone blank.

After a few more seconds of prying and
prodding at the device, trying to figure out if there'd been a
problem with the feed, Sarah gave up.

The yellow alert was probably a drill. And
once it was over, Nora would call back.

Though an uneasy feeling fluttered through
Sarah's stomach at that, she also felt a scrap of relief.

While she had absolutely no intention of
going back to the Academy, it would be nice to keep Nora as a
friend.

And as for Lieutenant Karax... maybe she'd
give him one more chance, too.

If he called, perhaps she'd do him the
dignity of answering.

As Sarah pushed the yellow alert from her
mind and crammed her bag back on her shoulder, she kept her
communication device clutched in her hand. Though she'd gone to put
it back in her bag, she'd stopped.

She wanted to hold onto it for now.

She continued her trek.

In another few minutes she crossed over a
mist-covered hill and looked down at a stunning sight.

The floating mountains of Zhangjiajie.

They were breathtaking. She'd never seen
anything like them. They pulled up into the sky, sheer rocky sides
struck through with waterfalls. With their dense foliage-capped
tops, they looked more like megalithic trees than mountains.

She stood there until she spied the bar.

While the mountains themselves were one
thing, the floating bar was another. She'd read up about it before
she left the city. During the day, it was separated into units
where the staff lived. Little pod-like structures that drifted off
through the floating mountain range and nestled against the craggy
peaks.

At nighttime, when the bar kicked into gear,
the pods joined together and floated around the mountain range to
make best use of the view.

It's one of the reasons she wanted to work
for this bar, specifically – as it provided not just a source of
income, but bed and board.

Plus, she adored the idea of having her own
small pod ship that she could park against any number of these
beautiful peaks. She could wake up to dusk setting through this
incredible mountain range, light penetrating the craggy peaks and
ever-present mist.

It was nearing dusk now, and as she tipped
her head back, she saw the stark oranges and purples play against
the horizon far above.

She pushed her bag higher up her shoulder,
drew in a deep breath of the pure, clean air, and strode
forward.

Though she wanted to say she'd put the
Academy and her past behind her, her mind kept flicking back to
Nora.

To the yellow alert. And once or twice, to
Lieutenant Karax....

Lieutenant Karax

“Admiral, what the hell is going on?” Karax
knew that he should keep his voice quiet, and mollify his
sentiment, too, but he couldn't.

The yellow alert kept blaring through the
building, so loud he swore it shook his teeth in his head.

Staff kept running around him, shooing
confused students from class and leading them to evacuation
points.

But here's the thing, nobody had any idea
why the yellow alert system was going off.

“We're working on it. We're working on it,”
Admiral Forest snapped, her voice reverberating over his WD.

Though Karax knew it wasn't the time, he
couldn't stop himself. “They shouldn't have been given access to
our internal security systems.”

He felt like he was a recording on a loop.
He'd been saying this for days now.

The Academy top brass were putting too
much trust in the Corthanx Traders.

Yes, for all intents and purposes the Sora
program was incredible. And yes, even he had concluded that if the
Academy procured it, it would give them a lasting and tangible edge
in their fight against the Ornax.

But there were some benefits that came at
too great a cost. And he could no longer turn away from the dense,
ominous feeling that kept churning in his gut, that kept telling
him they were headed in the wrong direction.

“This isn't the time,” Admiral Forest said,
voice strident.

He should have responded to her curt tone.
He didn't. There was something about the truly insistent pitch of
the yellow alert rattling through the room and echoing through his
mind that undermined his reason. “When is a good time, admiral?
I've been saying this for days now—”

“Lieutenant—” the admiral began, her voice
punching out like a slap.

Except it stopped.

Abruptly.

Just before his hackles could rise and he
could prepare for a reprimand, she cut out.

His brow condensed so hard and fast over his
eyes, it was a surprise he didn't push them half the way down his
face. “Admiral? Admiral?”

No reply.

Despite the insistent pitch of the yellow
alert blaring around him like a discordant orchestra in full swing,
he clenched his teeth, brought up his WD, and tried to ascertain
whether it was broken.

It wasn't.

Something else was.

The entire Academy communication
network.

He paled. It felt like all the blood drained
from his face.

He pushed off into a jog, then a run, then a
sprint.

Something wasn't right. Those three words
kept repeating in his mind, louder and louder, faster and faster
until they sounded like the drone of a cruiser pulse cannon
desperately trying to take down an enemy ship.

He rounded a corner, almost collecting a
detachment of the Academy Security Forces.

He skidded to a halt, slamming a hand
against the wall to steady himself.

The lieutenant in charge of the security
detachment snapped his head towards Karax.

At almost the exact moment they both asked –
“What's going on?”

Karax's stomach sank. If he'd hoped the
security detachment had any idea what was happening, he was clearly
mistaken.

The security guard was in black armor,
though his helmet was currently in off mode, nothing more than a
black metal band around his throat. The guy took a pressured step
forward, his armored boots squeaking against the polished floor.
“We can't get any information, sir. What the hell is
happening?”

“I have no idea. But the communication
network is down. We should concentrate on evacuating all of the
students and finding Engineering Chief Falstaff.”

The guy snapped a salute. He turned hard on
his boot, presumably to follow Karax's orders, but a second later
he stopped.

Because a second later a completely
different warning alarm blared through the corridors.

The pitch was more insistent, the volume
louder, and while the yellow alert felt as if it had shaken through
the building, this alarm sounded as if it wanted to shatter the
windows. He couldn't help but bring a hand up and clutch it over
one of his ears. “What the hell is that?”

The security guard's eyes bulged. It was
such a visceral, gut-wrenching reaction that Karax couldn't help
but take a snapped step forward.

“That's the systems alarm,” the guy managed
to scream over the blaring warning.

“Systems alarm?” Karax mouthed
pointedly.

“Something's overloading the primary
computer network. Or interfering with it. Point is, it means the
computer's on the blink.”

It was Karax's turn for his eyes to almost
bulge right out of his skull.

The primary computer network ran everything.
From communications, to security, to the energy network, to the
Academy's link to the outside world.

“We need to find out what is happening,
now,” Karax spat. He had to dig deep and wrench all the vocal power
from his lungs in order to scream louder than the systems
alarm.

The guy snapped a salute.

“With me.” Karax spun on his foot and pushed
forward.

As they streamed through the corridors,
pounding footfall almost completely obscured by the whooping
klaxon, it didn't take long to come across more confused staff and
students. Not a single person had any clue what was going on.

Finally he encountered the one person who
should know what was happening.

Admiral Forest.

She was stalking forward, a harrowed look on
her face, crumpling her brow and making her penetrating gaze all
the more intense.

She pointed right at Karax and waved him
forward. Though she began to speak, Karax didn't catch a word of it
until he'd skidded to a stop by her side.

“What's going on, admiral? Are we being
attacked?”

“The alterations to the holographic system
have somehow overloaded our primary computer network. We have a
full detachment of engineers working on it now.” As she spoke, he
picked up every word. She'd had years and years of bellowing orders
and making herself heard even over the most calamitous of
disasters.

His shoulders began to relax. “What do we
do—”

He stopped.

Because at that exact moment, the yellow
alert and the systems alarm ended.

An eerie silence filtered through the
corridors.

Other staff – who'd been rushing around
seconds before – came to a confused halt.

The admiral tipped her head back, let her
eyes roll into the back of her head, and she let out a sigh.
“Finally.”

Karax's hands were still clutched into tense
fists by his side. “Is it over?”

“It should be. Our engineers encountered
an issue whilst upgrading our distributed holographic network to
make it compatible with the Sora program,” the admiral
explained.

Karax's ears were still ringing from the
bombardment of the whooping klaxon. Heck, he imagined it would take
a day for them to readjust to ordinary speech. “What kind of
issue?”

“Unknown at this stage. The chief, however,
is working on it. We should have no more issues.” She suddenly shot
him a warning look.

Which was appropriate, because he'd been
seconds from pointing out for the millionth time that this was
wrong.

Instead he clenched his teeth and swallowed
hard.

Admiral Forest watched him like a hawk. “I
know what you're thinking, lieutenant, and you do not need to tell
me once more. I assure you, our best minds are working on this. We
would not be integrating the Corthanx Trader’s holographic
technology into our own unless it was considered completely safe.
The chief engineer has also managed to isolate the systems he's
upgrading. If anything untoward were to happen, he'd be able to
completely cut off those holographic systems and lock them out of
the primary computer network.”

He understood every single word – he really
did – he also appreciated it was Admiral goddamn Forest who was
saying them.

But that didn't reassure him one single
bit.

The churning nerves running riot in his gut
would not be quelled.

He resisted the urge to take another step
forward, to repeat his misgivings for the millionth time.

Instead he ground his teeth together. “Maybe
I'm not the right person for this mission,” he suddenly said.

The words came from nowhere. He tried to
stop himself from saying them, but he couldn't. They flowed out
with all the force of blood from a split jugular.

The admiral had just a second to pale, to
stare at him with a stiff, angry expression.

Then, from further down the corridor, they
heard something.

A thump and a gasp.

He recognized those two sounds first,
stiffened, and jerked his head towards them.

“What—” the admiral began.

Footsteps. Practiced, measured footsteps.
Resounding – belonging to somebody in armor.

They came closer. Step after step. Pounding
up a set of stairs.

With every step, he felt as if something was
clawing its way up his back.

Both he and the admiral turned just in
time to see one of the Corthanx Traders appear over the lip of the
stairs.

The trader was a slight, small alien, and
barely came up to Karax's hip.

Those steps did not belong to him.

The admiral turned her confused gaze on the
trader. “What are you—”

Something flickered by the trader's side.
Nothing more than light, at first, it soon pulsed into a
recognizable form.

And those steps echoed out.

Sora.

The admiral curled one hand into a fist and
took a rigid step forward. “What are you doing?”

The trader did not answer until he'd reached
their side.

Sora kept flickering on and off. Taking a
few steps, only to disappear and reappear a meter down the
corridor. The sound of her resonant footfall echoed in an out,
becoming sharper, only to drift off to the edge of hearing.

Karax's stomach clenched. Every muscle.
Every millimeter of his skin became cold, slick with sweat, encased
with fear.

His hackles rose, a shot of nerves charging
up his spine and sinking like a fist into the back of his skull.
“Admiral—”