“Do not worry,” the lady said. “Your friends are all right. Aliea is the only one that is on the brink of extinction.”
Elizabeth lay down again. Her brain went haywire. What could she do to save her home? She was willing to put everything on the line if it meant she could save Aliea.
“The question you should be asking is why all of this is happening to Aliea,” the lady said. “Not what you can do to save your academy.”
Elizabeth stared at her. The lady smiled, “I’m sorry if I startled you,” she said.
“So you can read minds as well,” she mumbled. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Remember. You must find out why all of this is happening,” the lady’s voice faded away. She floated away from Elizabeth, a calming smile on her face.
“Who are you? What is your name?” Elizabeth yelled but the lady did not reply. She traveled further and further away with every moment that passed.
The lady made a gesture with her hands, and darkness emerged from beneath the water. It swept Elizabeth into its void, leaving a million questions unanswered in her mind.
***
Kai left Chris and the enemy’s battle camp. His ‘maintenance buddies’ led him outside to a bunch of solo-rider hovercraft, which looked a lot like flying snowmobiles, and boarded them.
“You do know how to operate one right?” a guy asked him.
“We’ll just lead the way and you follow,” another said. “I’m guessing you’ve never been to the mothership before?”
“Never,” Kai shook his head.
The two guys looked at each other and started laughing.
“You’re really something, man,” he said.
“Now,” a deep voice came from behind, and Kai quickly swiveled around.
A cadet pointed a laser blaster dead-straight at his head. “Why don’t you tell us where you really are?” he smiled.
Kai raised his hands instinctively. The first thing to do was to show them that he was surrendering. The rest he could plan later. All four of his ‘maintenance buddies’ surrounded him, and trained their laser blasters at his head.
“Where are you really from?” the tallest one asked.
Kai kept quiet, trying to find an answer from within his muddled thoughts.
The cadet pushed him to the ground, “YOU ANSWER WHEN I ASK YOU A QUESTION.”
“Forget about questioning him,” another said. “Just take him out.”
Kai panicked. He needed to find a way out of this. He needed to help his friends. He needed to keep his promise to Chris.
“Any last words?” the cadet smirked.
“Yeah. Eat this!” Kai yelled but nothing happened.
The boy desperately tried to control his laughter, “Should I wait for something to happen or-”
A hovercraft exploded, knocking one of the guys unconscious.
Kai smiled, “Looks like I can join in on the fun now,” he said.
A cadet shot at him with a laser blaster. Kai dodged and just thrust his hand out, using his Elementa of Metal to shatter the gun to pieces.
“My turn. Any last words?” Kai asked.
“N-n-now listen, bud,” they pleaded. “We were just following orders, we’re just henchmen, trust me.”
“Fine then. I’ll let you go, on one condition. If I ever find out that you told on me, or if I ever see your faces again, then that’s what’s going to happen,” he pointed to the unconscious guy.
The boys nodded furiously, “We won’t do anything. You have our word,” they said and ran off as fast as they could, carrying the unconscious cadet with them.
Kai un-froze his face from that terrifying expression. Acting tough sure is difficult, he thought,
He got onto the hovercraft.
Now where is that mothership, he looked around.
A large pointed top rose from the horizon. That had to be the mothership, no two ways about it. He headed off in that direction with his hovercraft on full throttle. A gust of wind hit him hard in the face, its drafts cold and heavy. He was confused. Winds weren’t possible in Aliea. The force field sealed off the possibility completely.
A deafening blast sounded, summoning a terrible tremor. Kai was thrown to the ground and his hovercraft exploded. The blast deafened him, leaving his mind filled with nothing but the sound of his own thoughts. He looked at the glowing white light that raced towards him.
Sorry, Chris, he thought as he watched the growing hemisphere of light. He rolled into a ball and lay on the cold surface, waiting for bright light to swallow him up.
***
Kai found himself on a bed in a large room. He had no clue as to where he was, and he had no recollection of what had happened. All he remembered was a blast and an intense light engulfing him. He tried focusing his mind, trying to remember what had happened after that. A piercing pain cut through, making him groan in pain. He held his head and the pain slowly subdued.
“Ah, I see you're up,” a voice said.
A girl, about the same as he, walked up to the bed. She was quite tall and had short raven hair, her eyes matching the dark black of her locks. She wore rimless glasses, which, along with her long white overcoat, made her look like a researcher. Kai opened his mouth to talk but his voice was too soft for even him to hear.
“Don’t try to speak,” she said. “Your wounds have not fully healed.”
Kai looked at himself, and then he screeched. First of all, he realized he had no shirt on, which for a thin kid like him was a horror situation. Second, there was a long scar stretching from his neck all the way to his navel.
“That’s the only wound I haven't treated yet,” she said. She joined her fingers on both hands and pointed them at Kai. A green channel flowed from them and into the scar, creeping around like a ghost.
Kai felt like a hot white flame was burning him. He gripped his bedding, trying as hard as he could to bear the pain. When the pain finally receded, he looked at himself. The scar had vanished. His body felt more energetic, as though he were back to normal.
“Okay then, get up, we’ve got work to do,” the girl said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re part of the maintenance crew right? That’s the infirmary.”
“Wait, the maintenance crew is a healing team?” Kai asked, realizing that Chris would have fit right in with this bunch.
“Maintenance to the cadets on board,” she raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”
Kai could feel his heart in his throat. The girl was clearly suspicious of him. The question wasn’t if she would find out, it was when.
“Dr. Trisha,” a guy entered the room. “We’ve got some serious cases on level 3.”
“Very well,” she said while looking down at her desk. “I’ll be there.”
“I’ll inform them,” the man said and left.
Dr. Trisha looked at Kai, “I don’t think the rest of the crew is going to get here anytime soon,” she said. “So it’ll just be you and me.”
Kai recalled frightening off the other maintenance guys when they had tried to threaten him.
“We’d better run along then,” Trisha said.
“Y-Yeah,” he stuttered.
Trisha glanced at Kai again, but glance was an understatement. She looked like she was trying to pry into his soul. Thankfully she didn't ask him any questions. The door slid open and they stepped out into a circular hallway. Kai looked out of the nearest window. His brain went haywire, fear and happiness setting in, both at once.
Why? One may ask. How can fear and happiness exist at once? Well here’s the answer. The good news was he was inside the mothership. He hadn't really thought about it before, but he must have been brought back into the mothership when they found him in the snow. He was finally right where he wanted to be, hence the happiness.
The bad news was he could see the raging storm going on outside, and it didn’t take him too long to realize this storm wasn’t a regular one. It just seemed a little
too destructive to be a natural disaster. And if it wasn’t a natural disaster, it didn’t take a genius to see what the storm was trying to achieve. Annihilating Aliea.
“One heck of a storm,” Trisha said. “Too much destruction. A pity Jake wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Wait, Jake?” he asked.
Must be a coincidence, he thought, Can’t be the same Jake.
“The guy who’s leading this mission, don’t you remember?” she asked.
Kai looked at her nervously. He thought he would blend in but he was getting blended instead.
“Oh well. You must've had a minor concussion. It seems to have messed up your memories.”
Kai sighed in relief. That was science, always stepping in to make a hypothetical conclusion, even if it was terribly inaccurate.
“I’ll fix you up when we get back,” she said and walked to the main bridge.
“So how exactly did I get here?” Kai asked, hoping he wouldn't arouse any suspicion.
“We had the drones search for any of our men caught in the storm,” Trisha said “You’re the only one we found though.”
Pangs of guilt sunk into Kai. I hope the other maintenance crew guys made it back safely, he thought.
He and Trisha walked through another door into a huge room teeming with people. There was a lot of commotion going around, and people were walking all around the place, chatting and muttering non-stop. Kai saw four huge screens hang from the center of the ceiling, each one facing outward in a square-like pattern. Below the screens were high tech computers arranged in a larger square, each one with a cadet about Kai’s age working on it.
“I thought we were supposed to heal some cadets,” Kai said.
“The entry to the bay is through that door,” she pointed to a metal door in the corner of the room, “This, on the other hand, is the main deck.”
Kai compared this huge room to the deck on the Orion. He liked that cozy space much better. He hoped the Orion had escaped the storm somehow. It should be fine since he had programmed it to orbit around Zygrade in case of dire emergencies, but that still didn’t shake off his uneasy feelings.
Trisha walked to the end of the room and placed her hand on the scanner next to the door. It slid open with a hiss, letting them through into the main bay.
“Dr. Trisha,” A stout man walked up to them. “We have a batch of cadets that are coming in for maintenance.”
Trisha scoffed, “You treat the cadets like they’re things, Corporal,” she said.
“You treat them how you want to, and I’ll treat them how I want to,” the man smirked. “Just fix them up.”
“Very well,” she stormed out of the bay with Kai trying hard to keep pace with her. “What I would do to take these stupid people down a peg,” she muttered under his breath.
Kai smiled. He had found a weak link on this ship.
Line. Hit. Sinker.
***
Chris didn’t have any time to worry that Kai had left her all on her own.
The enemy General walked to the middle of the camp, “Cadets! Fall in line!” his voice blared.
She picked herself up and scampered to join the file the cadets had formed. She noticed that there were close to five thousand of them. That was already much superior to the strength Aliea Academy had, and she didn’t even know if this was the only camp the enemy had stationed. It was highly likely there were more camps of the same kind. Aliea might be up against a force of twenty thousand for all she knew.
She noticed that the metal sphere wasn't at camp anymore. She took confidence in the fact that no one had made a big deal out of it, and convinced herself it wasn’t a nuclear bomb. Kai must have been wrong. All that did though, was remind her that she couldn’t talk to Kai until the activity at the camp ceased. Her communication line to him was open at all times, but she decided to talk to him only when she could guarantee no one else would eavesdrop on them.
“Forward march!” the General yelled and the formation walked up to the main door. “Open the doors!”
The heavy doors slowly opened, and light, something that Chris had not seen for a long while now, entered the camp like a ray of hope. But instead of feeling buttery warmth on her skin, she felt cold piercing needles dig into it. She looked at her arms and saw small crystals of ice buried in it. She brushed them off with her hand, her fingers almost freezing from touching their coldness. But then it got worse.
Gusts of wind, hail and rain burst into the camp, washing and blowing everything away. The scenery turned into a pure white canvas of snow. A huge blizzard had started right inside Aliea. Chris could feel her hands trembling, whether it was from fright or from the cold she didn't know. She couldn't understand how a storm like this got inside Aliea Academy in the first place. It wasn't possible. The force field was supposed to prevent things like this from ever happening.
Did these people take the force field down? she wondered.
“Close the doors! Close, close, close!” the General yelled.
Chris couldn't help letting out a chuckle after watching the short stocky man run around in a fit. She had originally planned to ditch the camp and rendezvous with Kai back on the mothership but that seemed a pretty bad idea right now.
“What’s with this weather?” A girl came over and asked Chris. She, like most of the other enemy cadets, was around the same age as her. Chris found it unsettling that people this young would sign up for such a cause, but she was pretty sure none of them even knew what they were fighting for in the first place.
“You there?” The girl asked.
Chris snapped back, “Yeah, I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
“It’s nothing,” she shook her head. “I’m Lisara, by the way.”
“I’m Chris,” she smiled.
“I haven’t seen you around a lot, did you just enlist?”
Chris panicked, but she made sure her face didn’t show an ounce of it. “I was on the maintenance team for a long time. Just got shifted to camp,” she said.
“Wow, from maintenance to the battle sector. What were you doing in the maintenance sector anyway if you had enough skill to end up in this place?”
“Must have been some assignment problem.”
“Yeah, we do have a big bunch of idiots,” she chuckled.
Though everything seemed cheerful and normal, Chris worried about how long she would be able to keep her identity hidden. At some point in time, these people were going to find out who she really was and she wasn’t betting on receiving a warm welcome after that.
***
Chris looked through one window at the world outside. No, she couldn’t even call it a world anymore. It was a nightmare of disasters. It was a piece of land left to be tormented by nature’s devils.
“Afraid?” Lisara sat next to her, her red hair drawn into a ponytail. Her grassy-green eyes darted between the window and Chris.
“No, I just think it’s kind of sad to see something like this being ripped apart by nature.”
“Don’t worry about it too much, if I were you, I’d be more worried about what’s for dinner,” she said.
Chris raised an eyebrow.
“Seriously, some of the stuff is downright poisonous,” Lisara sounded grim.
Chris smiled. This girl was like a little kid; excited, bubbly and had absolutely no sense of the seriousness of the situation.
“Well, at least I saw you smile,” she said happily, “Lots of people were wondering if you would ever smile.”
Chris blushed. She hated embarrassing moments like these. People always said she never smiled.
The General interrupted, “Everyone, attention please,” he said. “I want you all in a single file.”
“What’s his deal?” Chris mumbled. “Are we going to try to get out again?”
“Hopefully not. This weather would probably kill us.”
The girls formed one line with the boys doing just the same on the opposite side of the General.
“Cadets,”
the General’s eyes scanned everyone in the room, piercing through their very being, “We have an intruder.”
***
2-1
Taylor prepared herself as the Orion approached the Dark Knight’s sub-territory, Dryke.
The planet had a shade of terrifying black, its very color radiating a sort of warning to all those who wished to tread upon it. Streams of red and blue ran across the darkness, radiating intense colors over the surface.
Lava streams, she realized.
Dryke was littered with volcanoes, and so the planet had many lava-filled rivers and lakes. Lava was traditionally red of course, but if it got hot enough it could turn bright blue.
She programmed the Orion to land on the planet. The ship shook a bit as it changed course and then dived down. A few minutes into their descent, the surface of Dryke came into view. It was rocky and coarse, like a jagged piece of earth. Large rocks littered the surface and sharp spikes sprouted out everywhere. Landing would be close to impossible. If the Orion were to land in one piece that is.
Taylor was pondering the landing issue when she heard a few blasts. She looked outside the window to see red laser beams from the Orion blast the rocks and pillars. It blasted away until there was a patch of land all smooth and level.
Automated landing system, Taylor thought. The Orion sure had some cool software. The ship touched down onto the temporary landing site and the door slid open.
She set the Orion to ‘Fortress’ mode, which meant it was allowed to use any attack mechanism to protect itself from invaders.
Taylor walked out the door and down the stairwell. She took a few steps on the smooth temporary landing surface. The Orion had made it powdery and fine, like the sand on a beach. The planet itself was quiet and calm and the air around Taylor was completely still, not a trickle of wind brushed past her armor.
AcQuest: A Space Opera Military Technothriller (The Quest Saga Science Fiction Adventure Series Book 3) Page 7