At first, it was like practice. Bella looked around carefully for several minutes. No guards. She located the ground scanners, sneaked between two of them to about the centre where Az had told her the signal would be weakest and scuttled past. No alarm! She scooted up to the door that Mathew told her would be the door to the barracks. She listened carefully as she had practiced. All quiet. She opened the door, slid inside and into a shadow. She froze in panic. They were all on the floor on bags! She had envisioned beds and hiding under the beds. There was nowhere to hide! One was only two feet away from her. If he opened his eyes he would see her.
Her heart was pounding so hard she was terrified he would hear it. Minutes passed. She stayed in her shadow. She shut her eyes. Then she started to think. She was in a shadow. They were unlikely to see her. How could she get the bugs onto all of them. She looked around. The best idea would be to put one of the blobs (the bugs were all inside little gooey blobs to keep them alive), on each bag/bed. She carefully unscrewed the container and picked up a blob. She threw it onto the nearest bag. One done. She threw a few more. Seven done. But the rest were too far away. She thought again. Carefully, she crawled down the row of sleeping creatures to another shadow where some equipment was. She stopped and threw again. Again she moved to a shadow. Again she threw blobs, careful to hit the bags not the occupant. She reached the end of the barracks. There was an open door and she looked inside. The Cleaner. Again she froze and thought. Would the Cleaner kill the bugs? Az thought it wouldn’t. He said he thought they would just be cleaner bugs. She stifled a giggle.
She sneaked into the Cleaner and through it. On the other side was equipment. All hanging on hook things on the wall. She was pretty sure all the Aliens would go through the Cleaner to pick up their stuff. It looked like flying stuff. Helmets and clothing. She scooted through in a rush scooping globs out as fast as she could and putting them inside every helmet she could reach. Then she carefully opened the door at this end, slid around and headed for a shadow. She froze and looked around. Nothing. At the end of her nerves, she scrunched and ran back to where the Cat should be and collapsed behind a bush. She shuddered. She startled as she heard a faint sound. It was the Cat. She hugged it in fright and buried her face in its coat. She wanted so badly to cry but she had to be quiet. She got onto the Cat and it padded softly away. The Cat told her how brave she was and how proud her mother was of her.
Several minutes later she reached her mother and then they both cried. But Bella was jubilant.
“I did it,” she said, “they’ll all be buggy. I threw some on their bed/bags and put the rest in their helmets. No one saw me. I stayed in the shadows.” She started to giggle in relief. “They’ll all be scratching!”
Mathew had told the children the bugs would make the pilots so bad tempered they wouldn’t be able to fly. It would make some of them think they had flu. He had been lectured by Kelly not to let the children realise it would kill some of them and make the rest too sick to fight. At least that was their hope. Kelly had told the children,
“All these bugs in the globs will get married and have lots of baby bugs and they have hundreds of babies. It’ll be like being bitten by hundreds of fleas or mosquitoes. You can’t fly a plane and scratch at the same time.” The children had all giggled at the thought.