Captivate (Alien Cadets Book 2) Read online

  Captivate

  Book 2 of the Alien Cadets

  Corrie Garrett

  Copyright © 2014 Corrie Garrett

  All rights reserved.

  ASIN: B00N8CF98K

  ISBN-13: 978-1502461704

  ISBN-10: 1502461706

  Thank you for reading!

  Click here for a quick recap of Book 1.

  Click here for the back of the book blurb for this book.

  Character Glossary

  (Each returning character is linked to their glossary entry at the first use of their name.)

  CHAPTER 1

  Akemi’s brain had only been installed on the alien space station for a few months, but she was already having a blast with it.

  She’d realized only two weeks ago that she could flash the external lights at people on Earth when they waved at her. She could process all kinds of satellite data simultaneously, and so she made sure to wink at anyone who took the trouble to stay up late and watch her sail across the dark sky.

  Occasionally Akemi still had bad days, when the loss of her family and physical body weighed on her like a literal ache she could not rub away, but mostly she forced herself to be grateful. Only months ago she’d been an extremely ill Japanese girl living in the preserved section of New Tokyo. Now she was cutting-edge alien technology. She’d even begun hosting the first alien fashion blog, as she got to see all the visiting aliens when they came to the space station.

  But sadly, the secret of her new existence was still so little known that no eyes were turned towards her tonight as she streaked across the sky blazing with enemy fire.

  ***

  The escape pods burst out of Akemi’s skin like boils, and smoke roiled through her halls, blinding her view from the cameras.

  She frantically monitored water systems and airlocks, trying to isolate the fire from the few people still aboard; but so much of the space station had been damaged in the initial explosion that her options were limited. Most of the station’s protections were automatic as well, so there was little to do but watch and wait. The station’s heat censors (which usually would tell her where people were located, by body heat) were overloaded with fire, and told her nothing. The video monitors were obscured by smoke. The only way to calculate how many aliens and humans were still on board was with the escape pod records. So far there were twenty-one of twenty-two pods away, and nearly a hundred and fifty souls accounted for.

  But the two souls she cared about the most were still on the space station. Her sister, Nat, was trying to get to Akemi before the biocomputer was destroyed by the flames. Sam was with her, as he was one of the only other humans who really believed that Akemi still existed in the computer.

  Akemi knew Sam and Nat were coming for her because she had a direct link to their computerized glasses, and from the tiny camera embedded in the frames. She could see that they were both still running through the smoke filled halls.

  She couldn’t see much else, but she knew they were getting near the engine room, where the computer that housed her brain was located. Occasionally she caught a glimpse of Nat’s ashy face when Sam glanced at her, but that was all she could see. Now she heard Sam’s hacking cough over the whine of warping plastic and the wail of alarms.

  Are you breathing through your shirt? Stay low. Akemi put the words in the heads-up display on Sam's glasses where they transparently overlaid his vision.

  “I know, I am low,” he said. But she saw him crouch lower still and put a hand on Nat’s back to push her lower as well. “We’re almost there. Don’t let the last pod go,” he added.

  Akemi wouldn’t. Half her attention was on that last escape pod. There were four people on board already, she wasn’t sure who, and they were pounding on the release button. It was like a fingernail on a chalkboard – release, release, release – squealing each time they whacked the button. But the pod wasn’t going anywhere yet, she’d put an override hold on it. Whoever was inside surely thought it was broken, and they must be panicking. Unfortunately there was no display panel in the basic pod, so Akemi couldn’t reassure them.

  She felt bad for their undoubted terror, but there were two more people to get on that escape pod and there was no way she was letting it go without them. And, not to be selfish, but she didn’t want to die here either. She might only have half a life, or less, but she did not want to give it up.

  Just then Sam and Nat came out of the thickest smoke, and Akemi got a better view from their glasses. They were at the engine room. They stumbled across the room to the biobank, the portion of the computer that connected to the biological operating system (in this case, her brain). It had a small door, like a miniature air lock, and Sam twisted it open with a hiss of decompressed air.

  WAIT WAIT! Akemi shouted into his glasses. When you take me out I'll be disconnected from you.

  I’ll leave the hold on the escape pod, but you have to know how to release it...

  Akemi told them both exactly what commands to use.

  That’s it. Hope this works... :-/

  Akemi knew she could still exist without connection to a computer. It had happened twice now, and she’d stayed aware the whole time. However, both those times the shutdown had been done carefully, with a slow, sequential process. There was no time for that now, and Sam unceremoniously yanked the spherical biobank out of its sophisticated housing.

  Akemi felt a flash of nerve tingling pain. If she’d had a mouth she might have cried out. With a sizzle and a flash of light, she lost consciousness.

  ***

  星

  Moon.

  I see the moon.

  Akemi slowly became aware again, like a computer rebooting without enough RAM to hold its whole operating system.

  For some reason, the only thing that filled her muddled mind was a poem.

  Holding back the night

  with its increasing brilliance

  the summer moon.

  Earth orbit, she finally thought. The space station ejected us in a stable earth orbit, roughly a fourth of the way between Earth and the moon’s orbit. She realized with a shiver of unease that the poem in her mind was a jisei, a death poem, by one of her mother’s favorite artists.

  “Akemi, can you hear me?” Nat’s voice broke into her thoughts.

  “Is she responding to you?” Sam’s voice replied. “I’m not getting anything.”

  “- and why in hell you had the gall to hold my escape pod. I could have you court marshaled for risking the lives of everyone on this pod, and yourselves too, just to retrieve a computer!” An angry voice.

  “Oh, shut up.” That was Sam again.

  It’s laright. Alright. I’m here. Akemi sent the message to their display.

  “Akemi, please respond if you hear us.” Nat was starting to sound frantic.

  Can’t you see this? I’m fine..

  From the camera on Nat’s glasses, Akemi could see Sam fiddling with a small, black sphere the size of a basketball. There were thin power cords running from it to the capsule’s rudimentary computer system. Sam held up the sphere to look on the bottom, running his fingers over several small inlets there.

  “It doesn’t look damaged,” he said.

  Her brain was in there. For all intents and purposes, that black ball was her. She felt a chill as she looked at it. She’d seen it before, but being joined with a ship or space station was one thing. Seeing the tiny container holding the remains of her real body, dumped like a broken TV on the floor of the capsule...

  You can’t see my words?

  Akemi realized what was wrong. The capsule computer was extremely simple. It could hold them in a stable orbit until it got within proximity of a Spo ship. Then
the capsule computer would automatically slave itself to the ship, which would handle docking and extraction of passengers.

  In other words, she was lucky she could think at all, or receive anything from their glasses. She certainly didn’t have the capacity to send data to them.

  She was trapped. That was unfortunate, but once a real ship picked them up, she’d be able to explain.

  Nat was running her hands over the cords, probably checking for breaks. “I don’t know. I don’t want to unplug and replug her more than I have to. It could cause errors.”

  Errors, indeed.

  Angry voice again, "I don’t appreciate you mucking around with the controls! How do I know you won’t make our capsule spin into the sun?”

  Sam and Nat finally looked at the man, and Akemi saw that it was Senator Fontley speaking – one of the newly elected representatives of humanity. He didn’t look particularly imposing at the moment, with his clothes thrown on in the middle of the night and his knees black with soot from crawling through the halls. And he was clearly in a foul temper.

  Sam shook his head. “We won’t spin into the sun, Senator, it’s hundreds of thousands of miles away. If we spin into anything, it’ll be Earth.”

  The senator’s hand twitched, like it was just itching to slap someone. “Well, then –”

  “We won’t do that either,” Sam said firmly. His voice was low and rough from the smoke. “This capsule couldn’t go off course if it tried. Right now we’re trying to save our friend, so if you could give us a minute–”

  “Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice. The Spo may think you’re an adult, but you’re not. This only proves my point. You risked all our lives just to save that hunk of meat.”

  Sam and Nat had turned away from him, but he was still talking. “I have seen no compelling evidence that it even has human intelligence. The human soul is a precious and fragile thing. It can’t possibly be housed in that damned black ball.”

  There were three other Spo with them in the capsule, but from their silence, she assumed they did not speak English. Akemi recognized one of them as a kind of handyman on the space station, the other two she didn’t know.

  The Spo were a large race, compared to humans. The adults were easily six to ten feet tall at their full height, though their slanted spines usually kept them a little closer to human eye level. They were shaped rather like praying mantises – with four legs, clawed hands and feet, and mandibles on their elongated heads. Their skin was mostly hard and chitinous, and at the moment, they were all a grayish-blue color of stress.

  Sam spoke in Spo to them, briefly. “I apologize for delaying the capsule. It is our responsibility to preserve this computer or else I would not have put you at risk. I’m sure our capsule will be retrieved as soon as possible.”

  They still looked stressed, but their color began to fade towards a more neutral yellow. “We understand,” said the oldest Spo. He gestured to Nat and the sphere. “Responsibility first.”

  Nat had taken off her glasses and was examining them.

  Sam fiddled with the ports in the wall of the capsule. “I think I should rewire her to this port. See this here? It should have at least half again as much capacity... I should have thought of that originally, but I didn’t. That might work.”

  Akemi did not want him to rewire anything. She still felt rattled from the last cold shut down, and if he did it again she might be seriously compromised. But she had no way to tell him to leave it alone.

  Almost all the equipment in their glasses was for her to monitor them. She could see their temperature, their head and eye movement, and of course, see everything they saw. But the only way she communicated with them was with the data display and she couldn’t use that.

  Oh, she mentally kicked herself, except for the anti-theft protocol. She could overheat the glasses so they would burn whoever tried to wear them without permission.

  Sam’s glasses were still on his face, so she focused on Nat, who was holding hers in her hand.

  Normally Akemi’s output to the glasses was as easy as talking, but now she had to focus. The capsule computer was so slow. She painfully made the connection to Nat’s glasses and sent the heating command.

  Nothing happened.

  Nat frowned and put her glasses back on her nose.

  Even in Akemi’s weakened state she felt a flare of pride at the glasses she’d chosen. They were designer frames, and they looked fantastic on Nat, highlighting her high cheekbones and perfect Japanese facial structure.

  “Ow!” Nat flung her head forward and the glasses flew across the capsule. Akemi got a whirling view from that camera.

  “What happened? Are you alright?” Sam was bending over Nat whose hands covered her face.

  “What is it?” the senator demanded.

  “Injury? Assistance?” asked the Spo.

  Shoot, shoot, shoot! Akemi had never tried the anti-theft device before, which was clearly a major oversight, and now she’d burned her sister.

  Nat sat back, touching her nose gingerly with her fingers. “It’s fine. Ow. Yeah, it’s okay.”

  From the camera on Sam’s glasses, now very close to Nat’s face, Akemi could see a ridge of red across Nat’s nose, and two red ovals from the nose-piece. The skin around her eyes was tight and pink, like a bad sunburn, and the whites of her eyes were a little bloodshot.

  Nat started to laugh with relief. “Seriously, Akemi! Watch it. That might leave a mark.”

  Sam took a second.

  “Oh. Anti-theft. Well, I guess we know she’s okay.” He laughed somewhat shakily. “That was unnerving."

  Sam slumped back against the wall and rubbed his eyes, finally relaxing from the mad scramble through the space station. He tried to stretch out his legs, but the center of the capsule was largely taken up with all the Spo legs. Each Spo had four legs and in close quarters that made for a lot of limbs.

  Nat quietly explained to the Spo what had happened.

  Sam tapped his own glasses. "Akemi, I gather you can’t send data at the moment? No need to reply. We’ll get you all ship shape as soon as possible. I’ll have them bring a mobile unit to the capsule, and we’ll make sure you’re squared away with that one before unplugging you here.”

  Nat’s glasses were still on the floor, so Sam leaned over and touched the edge with his finger.

  “Just warm now.”

  He handed them back to Nat who folded them up and slipped them in her shirt pocket.

  “No offense, Akemi,” she said. “My nose is a little sore.”

  Sam looked at Senator Fontley, who was staring at them.

  “She’s not alive anymore,” Senator Fontley said, with visible rancor. “That’s a hunk of meat in there. You can pretend otherwise, but it only shows that you deal better with wishes than reality.”

  Nat frowned. “There’s no need to be rude. I know you were frightened, and I’m sorry you were delayed. But we all made it off the space station. She’s a valuable computer, you should be glad we salvaged her.”

  He smiled unpleasantly. “It’s not a she. It’s a thing, and I’m not convinced that it’s safe. It came from alien scientists, and you blindly believe it’s your sister. Frankly, I would have been happy to see it burn.”

  Sam sat up and looked the senator in the eye. “To clarify for the final time – neither you nor the Human Coalition Committee have the authority to tell us what to do with the computer. It is technically Spo property, and they have leased it to us personally. Plus, you don’t have the first idea what you’re talking about.” Sam took a deep breath. “However, as we’ve agreed before, I’ll try not to undermine you in public if you’ll keep that in mind.”

  The three Spo looked on with interest and one was flushed with a color of amusement. Perhaps that one did speak English, Akemi mused.

  ***

  They were picked up less than two hours later by a rescue ship, just as Nat had repeatedly assured the senator would happen. They were treated for smoke
inhalation and minor burns, questioned exhaustively, and eventually Nat was allowed to shower and change out of her uniform that still reeked with smoke.

  When she was clean, Nat put on an ill-fitting uniform that had been found for her, moving slowly and deliberately as she adjusted each button. This was the time when shock might set in, and she needed to stay alert and sharp. Her chest ached with every breath and occasionally an explosive cough ripped its way out. That was a small price to pay for surviving the explosion, though. When she'd first felt the shock of the explosions tearing through the space station, she'd been jolted out of a deep sleep. It had only taken moments for her to process what might have happened, and by then Akemi was commanding an evacuation.

  Nat shivered at the memory, and used one of the rough Spo towels to dry her dripping hair before it drenched the back of her uniform. When she'd realized the space station was going, Nat's first thought had been to get to Akemi.

  She'd stumbled into the loud, smoky hall and only made it a few feet before Sam flew around the corner. His black eyes looked wild until he saw her.

  "I was afraid you were caught in the first explosion," he yelled over the blaring alarm. "Let's go."

  "Akemi! We have to get her!"

  He hadn't argued with her. He probably realized at once that there was no way she would leave without her sister. That frantic scramble to the engine room and then to the escape pod had been the most awful twenty minutes of her life. And that was saying something. The station had burned with a ferocity that amazed her.

  Someone knocked at the door and Nat jumped out of her painful reverie. "Who is it?"

  "It's me," Sam said. He opened the door, and slipped inside, letting the door slide shut behind him.

  He also wore a badly fitted uniform. It stopped several inches short of his ankles and wrists, and he'd left it unbuttoned around his neck. Sam's hair was growing back from when it had been shaved several months before, and it was finally starting to lie down on his head instead of standing straight up.

  She and Sam had been working closely together since the trial, but they'd had very few private conversations. They talked constantly about humanity's future, the Rik's future, and the cadets’ future, but never theirs. They’d been in countless meetings and press conferences and negotiations. But they hadn't had a real conversation about themselves.