Collided

Chapter 30

For an agonizingly long ten minutes, Alyssa lay in place watching the bright ceiling as it continued to shrink down towards her, and the white walls left, and right did the same. The panic left her frozen in cold sweat as she dry heaved, attempting to find her bearing. At last, she tried to remember what her father would say to her when he was still alive every time she had panic attacks like this.

"Deep breaths," he would say. "In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The world is not closing in on you."

She followed his voice as she remembered it, shutting her eyes, and tried doing accordingly.

"In through the nose, out through the mouth," she muttered as she inhaled and exhaled. "The freaking universe is not closing in on you."

Releasing slowly through the mouth a final time, she opened her eyes again. The claustrophobic feeling was still there, but now she was focused enough to remember Blaze's instructions to open the pod.

She reached down with her left hand to the wall around her waist and found the level Blaze spoke of. She grabbed it, twisted, and pulled.

With a loud hiss, the hatch at the end of the pod swung open. The bed on which she was lying slid out automatically until she was in the bigger space that was the bedroom.

She got off the bed and stretched, shaking off the rest of that constrained feeling. When she was back to normal, she set her mind on the task at hand. Reaching into her shoe, she pulled out the access card she had stashed in there; a gift from Blaze.

She got out into the hallway. It was strange finding it empty and knowing no one else on the ship was awake yet. It was as empowering as it was frightening.

Her target was in the command room but she had a secondary objective to take care of first, and she had about three minutes to do it. She needed to make sure no one could see what she did while she was roaming the halls.

Blaze had given her a device to assist her in this particular mission. It was capable of wiping the records of the camera feeds for the past five minutes—Blaze said the security personnel would see it as a glitch as far as it was just five minutes. Other than that, the device would also freeze the camera feeds for thirty minutes after that moment so the rest of her mission would not make it into the records.

Staying out of sight of the cameras as much as possible, more due to paranoia than anything else, she hastily made her way towards the security room. With Blaze's card, she got in with no hassle. She found the display screens, and in the corner, she found the giant metallic box that served as a storage unit of some kind. She placed the device on top of the unit and pressed the button on top. It glowed blue. She pushed it again, and it started to blink. Behind her, the camera screens faded to black for a full minute, then came back on. There was no way to test if the device had worked. She could only put her faith in Blaze. She had to.

She set a timer on her watch and went about searching for the command room. From the security room, she found it already, so it was just a matter of navigating her way straight there.

She found the room with twenty minutes to spare and got in with no difficulty. She did not locate the key chamber—according to Blaze's description, it was like some sort of cabinet with an electronic access panel.  There were two doors left and right of the room. She chose the door on the left, swiped the card, then walked through it.

On the other side was a small room with a table, a chair, and a holographic display in the center. She went close to it, and it lit up. It was clearly not the cabinet she was after, but she was curious. There was no keyboard, but when she sat down, the table lit up with rows of keys.

There was no authorization in sight. Perhaps they imagined no unqualified person would make it this far. She went through the records out of curiosity, unsure of what she was searching for.

After a while of rifling through, she found that it contained confidential records of Helian science and research department and that only served to heighten her interest.

A folder titled Project XX caught her attention, and she opened it. What she found within boiled and chilled her blood at the same time and sent shivers down her spine. The maternal problems that affected Helian women...it was not some mysterious plague. Not only that, Earth had not been the first choice of a solution, and the planet that had first been considered to scout out it's inhabitants and then destroyed after failing to meet their needs.

Alyssa stilled herself past the horror as she scrolled down, and then she realized exactly what she had to do. It was disturbing, but it was evidence against Boman, and evidence like that would definitely come in as leverage. She transferred it into her cellular device and closed all the folders she had opened.

Still in shock from what she had seen when she left the room but she had not forgotten her objective. She found the chamber in the next room and retrieved the key with ease. It was a strange blue injector with a serum that appeared to spark when she held it to light. Alyssa slipped it into her pocket and let out a sigh. Blaze had warned her not to use it on herself but did not say why.

A glance at her watch told her she had two minutes to spare. She had spent too much time searching the project files. But it was worth it.

Hurrying back to the room, she made it back in with ten seconds left on the clock, right on time. It was then that she let out a huff she didn't know she held onto and began to breathe easy again. She was safe.

Securing the bio key and her phone, she reached into her pocket and took out a sleeping pill she had saved up from her last medication from the doctor. She swallowed it dry and climbed into the pod. She was hyped up and afraid that something might have gone wrong that she didn't yet know about, but she hoped sleep would take pity on her and come soon. Her children were her last thoughts before drifting to sleep as it did.