Lucky, he thought.
The passengers themselves looked fine. The only thing they seemed to ail them was fear and anxiety. Nothing else.
Looking at the patients reminded Q of the people who looked after them. Where are all the doctors? he thought. Maybe they’d had their own emergency evacuation procedure.
And then of course, there was the big question of Nigel, that Corein giant.
He’d just seen that guy a day ago, on EARTH. Considering he was a pretty powerful extra-terrestrial you’d think he’d have better things to do than harass young girls.
And the only thing more incomprehensible than him being on Earth was Taylor being able to knock him down in seconds. Either the giant had gone easy on her, which seemed unrealistic, or Taylor was way stronger than Q could even imagine.
After a while he couldn’t stand the waiting and headed towards the front of the ship, into the pit. He figured he might as well explore the parts he hadn’t seen yet.
“You must be Q,” a voice said.
He looked around to see who was talking, and was completely clueless, plus a little scared, until the tall chair in front of him swiveled around. An Asian kid, probably older than he, smiled almost devilishly, his black eyes sparkling mischievously.
“Sorry, I just love scaring people like that,” he said.
“Umm, Okay.”
“I’m the pilot, Kai. You’re Carlos’ brother, eh?”
“Yeah,” he looked at the flames in front of the ship, “Shouldn’t we get out of here soon?”
“As soon as your brother finishes surveying the area.”
“How long will that take?”
“Depends,” he pointed to the burned building, “How many people do you think will survive in that situation?”
“Not many.”
“Then I guess your brother will come back soon.”
Q kept quiet for a while, half wondering what else to say, and half wondering if he should go back to the passengers’ area.
“How are you holding up?” Kai asked him.
“I think I’m okay. Just really confusing to understand all this stuff.”
“Understanding this stuff doesn’t make it any less confusing. Trust me. But I guess you’ll ease into it better than the average person. When were you initiated?”
“Excuse me?”
“Initiated; when did you find out about all this?”
“About six hours ago maybe?”
Kai’s eyes widened. “Six hours?” he laughed. “Dude, you honestly look like you’ve been here for days. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I guess.”
A huge crack shredded Q’s ears. At first he thought the pit’s glass view screen had cracked.
Then he saw the ball of fire swing past the ship, and a small shadow jumped high into the air.
“HOLY,” Kai swiveled his chair around and started adjusting dials on the screens around him. Q could tell he had complete control of everything he was doing, as though the ship were an extension of his very consciousness.
“What happened?” Q asked.
“Your brother is really crazy,” he chuckled.
“What?”
“See umm…let’s see…ugh…it’s probably best he explains it to you. And based on that fireball we just saw, I’m guessing he’ll be back on board real soon.”
A glare of light caught Q’s eye through the view screen. It was coming all the way from within an adjacent building, probably two hundred yards away.
“What’s that?” he pointed to it.
“What’s what?” Kai squinted. “Oh that. I have no clue. It looks oddly,” his eyes widened, “familiar.”
His hands moved around the screens even faster than before, and the ship started to twist around, changing direction and picking up speed.
“We haven’t got any time left. We need to get out of here. I need you to go to the rear and open the hatch for you brother. Oh, and alert the passengers on your way there.”
“What should I tell them?”
Kai chuckled, “It’s time to party.”
***
Carlos’ throat was dry, which tends to happen if you’re dancing around in torrential flames.
Q threw the lever back up after Carlos entered the ship and the hatch slammed shut.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“Does it look like I found anyone?” Carlos snapped. Q backed away a little and sat down in the corner of the deck with his back against the wall. Carlos rubbed his eyes, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
“No it’s fine,” Q said. “You don’t have to apologize.”
He sighed, “How’s Taylor doing?”
“She’s still asleep. I think seeing Dr.Haze die seriously affected her.”
“I guess that’s reasonable. Did the pilot say anything?”
“He’s going full throttle heading away from this place.”
“Good.”
He sat in silence for a while before getting up, “I’m heading for the pit. You keep watch on Taylor. There’s no telling what her emotional state will be when she wakes up.”
“I don’t think it’ll be that.”
“She just saw a man’s body crumble to nothing. If I were a teenager who’d never seen that kind of death before then I’d be shook up.”
“You’ve seen this kind of thing before?”
“Do what I asked you to do,” he said and walked to the pit.
Kai was in his usual position, completely hidden by the chair. The constantly controlled screens were the only thing that indicated someone was sitting in the chair.
“I’m sorry we had to pull out so early, sir,” he said.
“I’m sure there was a reason for it.”
“There’s a pretty big one actually,” Kai turned his chair so that he was half-facing Carlos. He brought up a feed on the screen and paused it.
“What am I supposed to be seeing?”
The screen zoomed in on the picture.
“That,” he pointed to a bright white glare on the frame.
“Another one,” Carlos muttered,
“That isn’t half of it.”
The pictures zoomed to a few yards above the glare. Around twenty or so similar glares lay in a straight horizontal line, as though strategically placed to attack.
“Oh my god,” his eyes widened.
“Yeah. Lucky the kid pointed it out to me. They were perfectly hidden behind the flames and the smoke.”
“To go this far…”
“If the enemy is using Tier-10 weapons to take down a place like this then, either it wanted to waste its resources and finish it off quickly or…”
“They were making a statement,” he said. “If they can use tech this high on taking over hospitals imagine what other kind of tech they could have?”
“You know, I find it weird that not one of those weapons fired at us,” Kai said.
“Are you sad they didn’t?”
“No I mean, we were clearly the enemy, and they had us outnumbered easily. Heck I didn’t even notice the other glares until I reanalyzed the picture. And that only happened AFTER we left the place.”
“So what are you saying?”
“That something is fishy about all this. It feels as though they let us get away.”
Carlos bit his lip. Kai had a point, and a pretty big one at that.
“We remain clueless for now. Head towards the next possible stop.”
“That would be the shuttle base next to Kryptos.”
“Plot a course and let me know the ETA.” He leaned against the wall and covered his eyes with his hands.
What in the world was going on?
***
2-4
When Taylor opened her eyes her first thought was, not again.
In a span of twenty four hours, she’d been left clueless several times and every time she woke up the situation around her had changed completely.
“Oh you’re finally awake,” Q walked up to her.
>
She still hadn’t regained her past memories of this guy, but at least she didn’t forget anything from the present.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
She stretched herself out wearily, “I think I’m fine.”
“That’s a relief,” he said.
“Yeah. I’ll just get checked up by Dr.Haze,” she said.
Q’s face froze, “Dr.Haze?”
“Yeah. I know it isn’t really necessary but wouldn’t it be okay to just have him take a look at me?”
“Umm Taylor, the thing is-”
“-Dr.Haze is dead,” Carlos walked in.
Taylor stared blankly. That wasn’t right. This had to be some sort of joke.
“This isn’t the time for practical jokes you know. I’m… ”
“He’s dead, Taylor!” he shook her. “Don’t you remember?”
Her head started to ache, and bright lights obscured her vision.
She remembered her leg becoming numb, she remembered Carlos jumping in and saving her, and then she remembered Dr.Haze. Tears poured down her face as the memory registered into her brain. She couldn’t stop, she’d lost all control. Carlos pulled Q away and gave her some space.
Taylor remained where she was, tears running down her face, her mind playing the same scene over and over again.
***
“That was really unnecessary,” Q told Carlos as they entered the pit.
“Do the two of you have to have your brotherly fights in here?” Kai asked while watching some television show on one of the many screens.
“Her mind was in a haze,” Carlos explained. “Any longer and she’d have completely forgotten the memory. She’s still not fully recovered from the coma we woke her up from prematurely.”
Kai swiveled his chair around, his eyes focused on Carlos and Q.
Q looked at him, waiting to see what he was going to say.
“Oh, I just figured this was better than the shows I was watching,” Kai chuckled. “You guys can go on.”
Q ignored him and turned to Carlos, “I still don’t think you had to yell at her.”
“If I hadn’t done that her mind would have completely lost that memory. Who knows how many more would follow?”
“Round one goes to big brother,” Kai said.
“Shut up!” both of them said in unison.
“Fine,” Kai rolled his eyes.
“I really need to see what’s going on with her brain,” Carlos said. “And as much as I’d hate to say it, the best way is to treat her as a test subject.”
“So you’re going to play with her emotions?”
“We’re going to leave her alone and see what emotions her brain conjures up in an isolated environment.”
“Brother’s right, kid,” Kai said,
“Fine,” Q mumbled.
He knew he was over reacting. But he really didn’t see any way to argue against it. For as long as he could remember, Taylor had never broken down like that. And seeing her do it for the first time made him feel a bit, well, insecure.
She’d always stuck up for him in tense situations, however stupid or silly they’d been. He really didn’t know if he was even remotely capable of being there for her, especially since to her he was just a stranger now.
“So, we have a few hours until we get to the shuttle base, why don’t we educate your brother on what he doesn’t know yet?” Kai asked.
Carlos hesitated a bit, then a lot, then calmed down. “We’ll have to do it sometime I guess,” he said. “Where should we start?”
“Let’s go with Zyxians” Kai said.
“The what now?” Q asked.
“Dude, that was just the first word. If you’re going to get confused on things like this we’re going to need more than a few hours.”
Carlos laughed, “Give him a break, he hasn’t even finished spending a day in this kind of thing.”
“Fine,” Kai said. “Tell me when you get to the cool part.”
With that he swiveled his chair around and went back to watching his episodes.
***
“Let’s see,” Carlos began. Then he stopped. “Boy this is going to be hard,” he muttered.
Q was raring to start understanding everything that was going on around him, and his brother was trying hard to be a proper teacher, or have a proper conversation for once. He really didn’t know which one it was. Probably both.
“Let’s do things this way,” Carlos said. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re curious about and I can explain it from there.”
“Well, first of all, where did these Zyxians come from?”
“Honestly, we don’t really know. Our best bet is that we’re all the last remnants of an ancient civilization’s attempt to survive and prevent its imminent death.”
“So we’re like part of a massive relocation program?”
“Well, I guess you could call it that.”
“So next, what in the world were those ‘I can jump on air’ moves you and Dr.Haze kept using?”
“Ahh. That is slightly harder but I’ll try to give you an answer that makes sense. We humans all have a life force. Call it a soul if you want to, but at its essence it’s pure raw energy within our body in a form we don’t fully understand.”
“So, magic?”
“Maybe. I don’t know for sure. But if it were magic you’d call it scientific magic maybe. We basically use our life force to control things around us. There’s this physics concept that says everything can exist both as matter and as waves. So if you look at the world as matter, magic seems weird. But when you look at it as waves, you realize magic is just another aspect of science. Looking at the world as waves means we’re not restricted to affecting things only within our reach. I could, say, burn something half a mile away just by affecting the wave aspect of the object.”
Q stared blankly.
“He won’t get it,” Kai said nonchalantly.
“THAT IS SOOO COOL.” Q yelled out so loud that Kai fell off of his chair.
“Jeez, I’m trying to watch something here,” he complained and as usual, got completely ignored.
“So, if you have control of your life force, it’s like you control your very own personal wave and you can use this wave to affect the wave aspects of other things around you. To the naked eye, this seems like magic.”
He continued, “When you saw me jumping on air, I had actually used my energy to compress the air in specific regions so that it became solid enough for me to use as a platform. I could break the glass windows by applying air pressure on one side and taking it away on the other. I generated those flame carrying winds by reducing the air pressure in certain regions which automatically creates wind.”
Q was stunned. All of this made perfect sense. And it seemed so simple. So perfect, so elegant, and so amazing.
“I did forget one part,” Carlos said. “Not everyone can practice that kind of magic.”
“What? But you just said-”
“-That you could do it if you had control of your life energy, yes. And everyone does have the energy. But to do things significant enough, you need to have a pretty large reserve of life energy and that’s up to how lucky you get.”
“Well, I guess that makes sense too.”
Kai laughed, “Don’t judge something based on whether it makes sense, else you’ll go down real quick.”
“Stop scaring him,” Carlos said.
“So, these life energy users are called mages?”
Kai stumbled a bit. “Where did you hear that?”
“That Corein giant called Dr.Haze a mage.”
“Dr.Haze was a mage?”
“No, he wasn’t,” Carlos intervened. “Dr.Haze had significant power so he could call out a useful bag of tricks, but he was just like me. He did as much as he could with what he had. A mage on the other hand...”
He took a deep breath. “Usually most life energy users depend on physical and weak wave-based attacks. A mage is someone who can stand
up against whole armies with just his wave based attacks, which we commonly call wave-skills by the way.”
Scary, Q thought, and pretty cool.
“I guess that’s about enough for now. You can pick up bits and pieces slowly now that you have the most important basics right.”
“Umm, guys?” A voice came from behind Q.
He turned around and saw a slightly red-eyed Taylor walk into the pit.
“Ah, so you’re feeling better now?” Carlos asked.
“Yeah, way better. I guess I needed that jolt.”
“Whoooaa, hold on,” Kai yelled. “You made that girl cry? All I knew was that you were mean to her. But sir, making a girl cry is a little overboard.”
Carlos sighed, “She’s in premature coma revival. Her memories would have stopped forming if I hadn’t jolted her emotions back to a normal state.”
“My crying was not caused by Carlos. It was residue from my last memories of Dr.Haze.”
“Oh,” Kai said.
“Maybe we could have saved him if we’d tried harder,” she said.
Q looked at her face. Sure she’d stopped crying but there was no way she was fooling anyone into thinking she was over that death. She obviously felt responsible for his death and getting her to think otherwise was going to be way harder than getting out of S.P.A.C.E. alive.
“Hey, I sent you guys the beacon and the makeshift missile. There wasn’t anything more anyone else could have done,” Kai said.
“Oh that was you?” Q asked almost surprisingly. He realized he’d never got around to figuring out who’d helped them out back there.
“Of course it was me,” he sounded a little offended. “You guys owe me one.”
“We’ll buy you lunch,” Carlos joked.
“Sure, I save lives for lunch. That’s what I do,” Kai swiveled around and turned on one of his shows.
“We could have used a portal and evacuated everyone.”
“First, you’d need powerful machinery to make those portals. Second, the portal wouldn’t hold out for that long since you’d need a big one for so many people. Third, that big a portal would run the risk of radiation explosions.”
“Yeah,” she mumbled.
“Anyway, we’ll probably take a few more hours to get to the shuttle base near Kryptos. It would do us all good to get some sleep,” He looked at Taylor, “Other than you of course, you’ve had plenty of sleep.”
The Quest Saga Collection: Books 1 - 5 Page 9
