The Terran Representative Read Free

list. One more round of shaking. The klaxons died and the wavering air that kept me in my room disappeared.
    The red lights stayed on. Everything looked shut down. The air was okay but had a faint crackle of electricity and bitterness left from something burning.
    “Roile?” I said.
    No response.
    I reached forward with a shaking hand. Nothing prevented it from passing the threshold of my room. I heaved a sigh of relief. In the back of my mind I worried about secondary security systems. I was a prisoner in this scenario. Even with whatever had gone wrong there still might be fail-safes in place to keep me from escaping.
    Live wires shorted and spurted around me as I clambered from my cell. Some sort of exhaust system belched foul smelling air into the room. One of the fire suppressant nodules sprayed foam at random intervals. I tamped down my fear by telling myself it was just a test. There wouldn’t be any real danger directed at me.
    I found Roile in the corner of the room. Its long neck was bent at a nearly right angle in three different spots. I’d be learning nothing new from it anymore.
    The floor was slick with the fire suppressant foam. Explosions could be heard thundering farther somewhere down the ship. Protrusions that would have normally been on the ceiling tripped me as I walked along sending me sprawling into the foam more than once.
    Without knowing the layout of the facility I knew I wandered aimlessly. At the first fork I took a left. At the next fork I took a right. At an intersection of four hallways I continued straight ahead. During this entire time I didn’t see another living soul. There were corpses buried in the foam, creating hillocks of fire suppressant that looks like berms of snow, but not one had the spark of life.
    I continued my shuffling into a large room. Boxes or crates of some sort were tumbled about the space. They looked like great boulders thrown around, some with their contents strewn everywhere. Above me others were still fastened to their anchors. The realism of the room caused my heart beat to race as I entered.
    The wall seemed the safest place to traverse, so I stuck my back against it and slid around the edges until I came to the first crate blocking my path. There were no crates attached to the ceiling above it, but I felt the room start to tilt a little bit to the side. The crate blocking my path groaned, and I heard it grate against the floor.
    My breathing came in short, rapid bursts that I couldn’t control. I tried several times to slow down my breathing and keep it measured. It didn’t work. If I didn’t continually think about it I’d lose control of my breathing, and it’d go back to its panicked pace. At this point my biggest fear, next to being squished like a bug, was passing out due to hyperventilation.
    As I started moving around the crate three balls of golden yellow light appeared off to my left. I held my breath as the light disappeared and three figures materialized. It looked like they had on some kind of exosuit with full face helmets with lights attached to the sides. The lights flicked on and as the three looked around the blue-white light illuminated the nooks and crannies of the room at quick intervals.
    One’s light played across me as I tried to scoot away as quietly as possible. The light moved on, and I exhaled thinking they’d missed me, but it came back. The being pointed at me and the other two looked my way. Their headlamps painted me in a spotlight so bright I held my hand up in front of my eyes to shield them.
    “Don’t move,” yelled the one that found me. Its voice came out tinny and canned. It sounded like someone yelling over a loudspeaker.
    The three ran towards me. On instinct I tried to backpedal, but I lost my footing in the foam and fell backwards. The air was knocked out of me as I hit the ground but continued to try and scoot away from them.
    In no more than five great, bounding steps the three crossed the space between