Page 24 of Chosen By the Alien King
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 lotof 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 fuxxing 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,notpiss 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.”
