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aloud.
    ‘Why should they?’ Runner asks. ‘They kill, move on, and let the people rot where they fall.’
    Kat coughs and points to her screen with the live-stream of Ben’s plane. Another settlement. There’s a large hole in the centre, huts have been blown aside. We get the full view a few moments later when Ben pulls the machine around.  
    ‘Still no visuals of the BSA camp,’ Ben says.  
    This settlement is largely destroyed, but we don’t see corpses anywhere here either.
    ‘Large amounts of explosives might have been used.’ That’s Yi-Ting’s voice. My stomach goes all fluttery.
    ‘What do you mean by “might have been used?”’ Runner asks.
    ‘No scorch marks.’
    Before us, the huts lie flat on the ground, ripped wide open, pieces strewn away from the centre of the village, away from the crater.
    ‘Hmm,’ is all Runner says, tapping his index finger against his lips.
    Kat takes two steps back, her face a stiff mask. She flicks off our mic and says to Runner, ‘It doesn’t match the satellite images.’
    He looks up at her. The silence in the tent is deafening.  
    I flinch when Runner speaks. ‘I’m going in tonight. I want you to analyse all data you have on your hard drives, all satellite images of the weeks since before the BSA cut off our comm to Taiwan up until today.’
    ‘What am I looking for?’ she asks.
    ‘Any activity between the BSA’s entry point and the observatory during these past weeks. If you don’t see anything, and I mean nothing at all, no movements, no people, not even the faintest trace, I need you to run an image analysis on overlays or brush-ups of the area. If you find any, you know what to do.’
    She nods pressing her mouth to a thin line, then reaches out to flick the mic back on. I gnaw on my cheeks. This is fucked up.
    Half an hour later, we get a live-stream of the nuclear power plant. It, too, appears untouched.
    When Yi-Ting and Ben return, things begin to happen faster and more quietly than usual. While we cook and eat lunch, Runner appoints tasks.
    ‘Ben, you get your machine ready at nightfall, not a minute earlier. What’s the reach without sunlight?’
    ‘Four hundred and fifty to five hundred kilometres, tops.’ Ben wears a frown. He doesn’t like to fly his machine without the fuelling sunlight. It doesn’t give him much manoeuvring space for the unforeseen.
    ‘You could get to the continent?’
    ‘If the winds are good, yes.’  
    ‘Ah!’ Runner says and presses a hand against his forehead. ‘Doesn’t work. They’ll see the plane is missing.’
    ‘Are we all on the same page?’ Kat asks. When Yi-Ting and Ben shrug, she says, ‘Walk them through, Runner.’
    ‘What our satellites show us is not what you two showed us today. Neither of the two villages should exist. The last comm of the Taiwanese Sequencers stated that the observatory was under attack. After that, Taiwan was cut off. We have to assume they took control of our satellites, and have been feeding us fake images to conceal their activities.’
    Ben leans against the tent’s wall, stumbles a step back when the fabric doesn’t carry his weight, and almost drops to his butt. The rice spills from his bowl. ‘Well, fuck,’ he mutters.
    ‘Now, the bad news,’ Kat adds. ‘They seemed to have also hijacked the Taiwanese satellite control. Taiwanese satellites are part of the Chinese satellite cluster. Problem is…’ She looks at every one of us. I feel the taste of metal on my palate. I always feel that when shit is about to hit the fan. ‘I didn’t use the Chinese cluster in the past couple of days. I used satellites of the ESA.’
    ‘They hacked the ESA, too?’ Ben whispers.
    ‘Can someone please tell me what the heck this ESA thing is?’ I demand.
    ‘European Space Agency,’ Runner says. ‘I don’t need to tell you that the consequences are far-reaching. We might lose the war before the end of this year. Do you all understand what that means?’
    We all