ConQuest (The Quest Saga)

by Dhayaa Anbajagane

  “Flames of ice,” she said. “Ice so cold that it burns.”

  Q was having trouble saying anything. He just opened his mouth and closed it. No words came out. He tried to get up but his leg made him fall again. The pain was too much. He cried out in pain, not being able to bear it any longer.

  “You okay?” Taylor asked Q.

  “No, I’m not okay! I want to go back home. You enter and exit portals, kill giants. I have no idea what is going on here! How could I be okay?” Q said. The experience had been too much for his mind to handle.

  “Whoa... hold on what’s this about monsters?”

  He opened his eyes. “You perfectly know what I’m…” He stopped.

  He wasn’t at the football field anymore. He was back at the hospital. It was then that he realized that it was all a nightmare.

  “Relax, you just had a nightmare. What happened?”

  Q told her everything from the giants to her making scary gestures and of course ‘Flames of Ice’.

  “I don't know, Q. I have no idea what this means,” she said.

  “But…” Q started to feel faint.

  “C’mon. You need some food,” Taylor said.

  She helped Q onto his feet and they went to the cafeteria. Q needed to take in a little bit of food to get his energy back. Carlos joined them as well.

  Q told him about his dreams. Carlos listened to him with concern.

  “It was probably just a random nightmare,” he told Q.

  Q felt a little more confident. If both Taylor and Carlos felt the same way then there was probably nothing to worry about.

  His imagination had probably come up with some sort of story to feed into his mind.

  All of a sudden, the alarms went off. The whole cafeteria went into panic mode.

  “Pilot mishap?” Q joked.

  “I’ll go check. It’s probably nothing,” Carlos said and left for the bridge.

  The people ran about like they were a rampant army of ants. People bumped into each other, falling to the ground. Q wondered if there had been this much commotion the first time he heard the alarms.

  He stood up and looked around at all the people. He had to do something. He couldn’t just sit still and watch from the sidelines. Maybe some hidden talents would emerge this time just like the force field did.

  “Q, what are you.......” started Taylor.

  “No time,” he said and ran to the exit.

  Suddenly the door blasted open. Q flew ten feet back and fell hard on the ground.

  He gazed at the demolished entrance. It was covered in smoke. He could make out a few large forms emerging from the smoke.

  When the smoke finally cleared, there stood the monsters Q had seen in his dream! They dropped a limp body on the floor. Q looked closer. It was Carlos!

  The largest monster of the lot came out of the smoke and smiled with his crooked teeth. “Hello, lovebirds,” Nigel said.

  Annihilation

  The people in the cafeteria froze in reaction to the sudden intrusion. Their eyes looked towards Taylor and Q, desperately pleading for help.

  Taylor analyzed the situation. They needed a strategy. She looked around her. All the doors and windows had been shattered into pieces. All the people in the cafeteria seemed to be either navigators or healers. That made sense since all the warriors had practice right then.

  But that meant that they effectively didn't have any warriors to fight with at all.

  Carlos lay unconscious on the floor and Taylor hoped he was still breathing. Q got onto his feet and tried to take Nigel one-on-one.

  Nigel bellowed loud and clear. Fear rang through the cafeteria. All the cadets unfroze and ran out screaming and tumbling.

  Nigel pushed Q hard. Q lost his footing and went tumbling down. Even though he was hurt he managed to get up quickly. He charged at Nigel but Taylor caught his hand and stopped him.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” she said.

  She talked into a transmitter that she pulled out from her suit.

  Instantly, a huge ship crashed into the cafeteria. The door opened and Kai was standing in the doorway.

  “Get in. All of you,” he shouted.

  Q stared at Taylor. “What...How...?”

  “Broadcasted a S.O.S.” she related quickly. “Spacecrafts usually respond immediately”.

  Q ran to Carlos and carried him to the ship. Taylor guided all the others to the ship as well. He looked around to see where Nigel was.

  He heard a monster-like groan. He looked around. There he was!

  Apparently Kai had slammed the ship into Nigel and knocked him unconscious!

  “All aboard,” Kai ordered loudly and took off as soon as everyone was in.

  Once he was inside, Q could not believe what he was looking at. The inside of the ship was awesome! Everything around him was tech beyond his imagination. Even his video games couldn’t feature something like this.

  As Q put Carlos down on one of the seats, he groaned.

  “Thank god he’s alive,” mouthed Q silently.

  Taylor glanced through the window. The sight she saw sent shivers down her spine. The whole academy was being wrecked by insanely huge giants. Even Godzilla would feel dwarfed!

  Q walked over to her. “What are those things?” he exclaimed.

  “Indiff giants,” Taylor mumbled. “They’re from the same planet as the Corein giants.”

  “The what now?”

  “The Indiff giants are the large ones destroying the academy. The Corein giants are Nigel’s species. They’re both from the same planet, Ing.”

  Q looked through the window.

  Cadets were helplessly fighting them. Some of them escaped in their space ships; others lay on the cold ground, lifeless.

  Kai put the ship on autopilot and came over to the passengers’ area.

  “Welcome to the Atlas!” he said, trying to make his voice as cheerful as possible.

  For a small guy he had quite a loud voice; deep too.

  “Where are you planning to take us?” a cadet asked.

  “Well. I’d like to say I have it all figured out but honestly I didn’t think we’d make it this far.”

  Taylor and Q couldn’t help smiling. This guy sure was a goof off.

  “Anyone care for my opinion?” groaned a voice.

  Carlos sat up, still in a daze. Taylor and Q ran over and hugged him.

  “You’re not dead!” Taylor sounded relieved.

  “You can't get rid me that easily,” Carlos smiled.

  Kai saluted. “High-Commander sir!” he said.

  “Take me into sector Alpha. There’s a place I know,” Carlos said.

  BOOM! They heard a loud explosion.

  Everyone fell flat on the floor. The ship swayed about violently.

  “What was that?” Q asked nervously.

  “Pilot, sequence gamma-niner-niner,” Carlos said.

  Kai immediately ran to the pit. Taylor stayed in the passengers’ area to help calm the cadets down.

  “Q, you’re with me,” Carlos said and ran towards the back end of the ship.

  Kai entered the pit. The most high tech part of the ship. It was quite small. Five people could probably stand in it at the same time. There was a tall seat in front of a huge panel. A thousand buttons glowed on the panel. Each one told the pilot something about the ship. Kai walked past the two additional seats in the pit and strapped himself to the main one. He looked at the enemy. It was the giants!

  Not the Larger-than-Godzilla ones. It was Nigel and his gang.

  They had taken control of the academy’s ships and were right on their tail.

  “They don’t know who they’re dealing with.” Kai had a smirk on his face. He put the ship into a nosedive.

  He could hear the cadets screaming at the sudden drop.

  The battle had begun.

  Predator

  Q and Carlos strapped themselves to the chairs at the back just as the ship became completely vertical. Q looked
in front of him. There was a huge gun there with rolls of ammo next to it.

  “What kind of sci-fi gun uses rolls?” Q asked Carlos.

  “Take a closer look.”

  Q reached out and lifted them up. A label on it said ‘Nuke’. He dropped them back immediately.

  “No way,” Q said.

  “We just decided they were much cooler than round metal bullets,” Carlos laughed madly.

  All of a sudden there seemed to be more danger inside the ship than outside. Q loaded the rolls carefully into the gun. Carlos just shot at the enemy. He hit every single one of those ships and roasted them; without wasting a bullet.

  Kai waited till the point of no return and pulled the Atlas up from a nosedive. Any further and the ship would’ve crashed into the surface of the planet. The ships that didn’t get mauled by Carlos’ freak fireworks act went on straight and crashed into the ground below.

  Carlos walked into the cockpit followed by Q.

  “That was some awesome shooting!” Q was amazed at Carlos’ potential.

  “I’m not a High-Commander for nothing you know,” he grinned.

  “Well done, pilot,” Carlos congratulated Kai.

  “Thank you, sir” Kai trembled. Q wondered if Carlos was the sort of High-Commander who was feared by everyone.

  Suddenly the ship went into yet another nosedive.

  “Stop that, Kai. We’ve had enough.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” Kai said. His face tensed up.

  “The engine is malfunctioning!” Taylor said in alarm.

  “We’re going to crash!” Kai yelled.

  Then all hell broke loose among the cadets. Remember the classic problem of having three people on a broken plane with only one parachute? Well this was the same situation here, only that there were ten times as many people and no parachutes at all.

  Kai pulled hard at the wheel. Nothing happened.

  “Okay. I think we’ve had enough fun.” Carlos seemed perfectly calm.

  He closed his eyes and chanted an incantation of some sort. His body started glowing. He raised both his hands to his chest. He stretched them out in one fluid motion.

  “Adoris!” he said in a raised voice.

  The ship slowly came to a halt. They were still quite high up but with the speed they had been falling at, they would’ve crashed in seconds.

  Taylor stared at Carlos. She didn’t know that Carlos could do that!

  “Why didn’t you do this before?” she asked him.

  “Well, it isn’t easy to use. It’s quite complicated actually. I can use this kind of power only when I have a certain level of emotional build-up. It’s like crying. You cry when you’re sad and not whenever you want to. The same way, you can use these kinds of powers only when there’s a certain level of emotion flowing through your body.”

  “So what’s with the chanting? Magic?” Q asked. To him, the whole chanting thing looked too fantasy-like and not futuristic enough.

  “In a way, yes. We’re using our life energy and emotions as powers. We train ourselves to unlock these powers with a certain codeword. My codeword for this power is Adoris. I can stop all movements of a particular object. In simple terms I can freeze it,” Carlos said.

  So thanks to Carlos, instead of falling to their doom, they were floating like paper in the air. They floated all the way down and landed softly on the surface.

  Kai immediately put on the standard issue armor, which conveniently double-functioned as a space suit, and ran out of the ship.

  They all took reserve suits from the pit and got out of the ship. Q realized that these suits had an inbuilt helmet as well.

  Kai was running around the Atlas furiously, mumbling something in between. He was completely focused on fixing the ship.

  Q heard a crackle inside his helmet. “I’m going off to help Kai” he heard Carlos’ voice say.

  Q realized that the suits acted as communicators as well. He looked around himself. The planet’s terrain was peppered with rocks. The surface was sheer rock and the landforms that Q could identify were pointy rocks that grew out of the surface. The whole place was a barren wasteland. There seemed to be no sign of life.

  It looked like Taylor was already a step ahead of Q. She had already walked over to a huge crater about a hundred meters away.

  “Taylor! Wait up,” Q said on the intercom. No reply.

  “That’s odd,” Q muttered to himself. “Taylor never ignores another person.”

  Maybe her armor was defective.

  Not a good sign.

  Q ran behind her. Well you could say ran. But Q was floating like a balloon since the planet’s gravity was apparently very weak. . Taylor on the other hand was walking normally.

  Q wondered how she was able to do that. His top priority was to get to Taylor but it seemed like she was moving away from him. Something seemed wrong to Q. He needed another plan.

  He ran back to the Atlas. He searched for Carlos and Kai, but they were nowhere to be seen.

  “Carlos! Kai! You guys here?” he said on the intercom. The only reply he got was a bunch of static.

  Q ran to the hangar in the Atlas. He’d seen a rover in there. He was sure he could use that to catch up with her.

  How hard could driving a rover be, he thought.

  He started the rover. The hangar door opened up and a platform extended towards the ground. Q rode the rover down the sloping platform to the rocky surface of the planet. He couldn't hear the engine because of the lack of air. He stepped on the accelerator and the rover rolled forward.

  His idea was working out quite well. He was able to regain sight of Taylor in a few minutes. She seemed to be following something. Q looked closer. He couldn’t make out what it was but it closely resembled a fly. A giant one!

  “Taylor! Taylor! Are you there?” He yelled into the intercom. She didn’t seem to hear him.

  The rover brought him closer to her. It was only when he got to her could he actually see what was really going on.

  There was a huge insect and it was carrying her!

  There was one more insect that was prancing around her. It was only because she was flying that she moved faster and that’s why Q did not see her float up in the air.

  The insects were completely grey in color and closely resembled bees. Their wings though remained invisible. Q wondered if it was because they were moving their wings at a very high speed. They had large black eyes. Q could see sharp teeth protruding from their mouth.

  He didn’t know what the insects wanted with Taylor but he was pretty sure that it involved the words ‘dinner’ and ‘menu’.

  Not gonna happen, Q thought.

  He drove the rover alongside the insects. They didn’t seem to hear the rover. Q was relieved now he had the advantage of stealth.

  Just then, ironically, an insect turned for some reason and saw Q. It rushed towards him. Q expected it to attack him but it just hovered in front of the rover. The longer Q looked at it the more bored and sleepy he got. He realized what the insect was doing.

  It was hypnotizing him! Its flying patterns were probably hypnotic.

  Q willed all his strength and jumped sideways. He crashed into Taylor and the momentum carried both of them over 30 feet away from the insects and behind a pointy rock.

  It looked like Taylor had been under the insects’ spell. She looked dazed. When she finally came out of her trance she didn’t seem to realize what was going on. She looked at him for answers.

  “Taylor, listen to me.”

  No reply. Her intercom was definitely broken.

  He got an idea. He pointed towards the insects and showed them to her. That seemed to send the message across to her. She looked at them and then she did the most stupid thing in the world.

  She jumped.

  They were well hidden behind some rocks, but when she jumped, the insects found them. Q realized that their only chance would be to get to the rover.

  But how do you get there when you have
two bloodthirsty Alien parasites after you.

  Q could only come up with a plan that involved one of them being used as bait. He knew he needed to be the bait.

  He didn’t know why but it just felt right. He also knew it would be hopeless trying to explain such a plan to Taylor. So he pointed to the rover and made a slow running motion.

  It looked like she understood. Q showed the countdown on his fingers. 3...2...1... Go! He and Taylor ran to the rover. Just as he thought, the insects spotted them easily and chased after them.

  But what Q didn’t expect was for Taylor to run away from the rover at the last moment. Q realized what she was doing. She was using herself as bait!

  They had to get out somehow. The insects were coming around fast and they didn’t even have a pocketknife to use as a weapon.

  Q’s attempts to call Taylor back were in vain. He started the rover and headed for Taylor. He drove alongside her. She immediately jumped into the vehicle. If any giant insect wanted to eat them up they’d have to catch them first.

  Q put some good distance between them and the insects. After a few minutes, Q saw the Atlas. He looked back. The insects were long gone. He figured that they had probably given up the chase.

  When he reached the Atlas, he saw Kai and Carlos standing in front of the ship with their arms crossed.

  Uh… oh, Q thought.

  You can imagine his surprise when Carlos and Kai patted him on the back!

  “Good job, Q,” Kai said.

  “Um.... Thanks? I guess?” Q was completely confused.

  “We heard you on the intercom but we decided to let you handle it yourself,” Carlos told Q.

  “Handle two carnivores on my own!??”

  “Who told you they were carnivores?” Kai said with a grin.

  That’s when Q knew he was going to win the comedian of the year award.

  “God... Don’t tell me...” Q mumbled.

  “Those are rock-eating insects. You could compare them to say..... Plants with wings,” Carlos said.

  “They were probably taking Taylor because they were curious. Those creatures are highly curious beings. Like puppies,” Kai finished.

  Boy, did Q feel like an idiot! They weren’t even going to kill them. They probably came after the rover because the colors appealed to them; pink and purple are definitely bright colors.