The Quest Saga Collection: Books 1 - 5

by Dhayaa Anbajagane

  “C’mon, Q,” Taylor said. “You’ve got nothing else to do.”

  “I’m really tired.”

  “You sure? We’ve got an amazing tech lab,” Jake said “It’d be a shame to not visit it.”

  He paused for a bit, then the tech lab part fired his enthusiasm all the way to max. “I guess that’d be good,” he smiled.

  “Follow me,” he said and led them towards the outer regions of the city.

  They walked and talked for a while, with Jake telling them about things Q never really listened to. The guy shut up only when they reached a wall at the end of the pathway. The wall was not tall but it was extended a long distance on either side, curving away as it disappeared.

  A circular wall, he realized. When he got closer he saw that a section of the wall had a huge, grilled gate that was closed.

  “I’ll be back,” Jake said and walked towards the gate.

  “Nice of him to help us out like this,” Taylor said.

  “Yeah. Real nice.” Q responded in a monotone.

  Jake walked back to them in a flash. “Sorry about that. It’s after visiting hours so the academy campus is closed, I was able to pull a few strings though.”

  Seriously? Pull a few strings? he thought.

  The gate creaked open and let them inside. The roads were made of the regular gray with highlights of neon-purple, while the buildings stuck to the matte black pattern the city followed.

  Jake raised his hand. Q had no clue what he was doing until he noticed a car coming their way. At least it seemed like a car at first sight. On closer inspection it was clearly a hovercraft painted green and blue.

  “It’s the president’s edition,” he beamed. “It recognizes its user through bio-metric sensors,” he continued explaining. “This is actually a cool piece of machinery.”

  “It sucks in the air from the top of the craft to create a vacuum above it so that the air pressure under the hovercraft is more than the pressure above it. And so the air under it lifts it up,” added Q.

  “He’s a tech addict,” Taylor said, her voice sounding a little embarrassed.

  Jake, though, just stared at Q and he didn’t seem pleased about being interrupted.

  They got into the hovercraft and took off. The thing travelled almost as fast as the hover-bus, so the scenery turned into a blur as they sped past buildings. It didn’t hurt too much though, since night had fallen, which meant the dark buildings were all hidden perfectly. But at the same time, the neon-purple highlights glowed beautifully against the dark, mesmerizing him a bit.

  In a few minutes they reached a fairly large dome-shaped structure.

  “So what do you think of our lab?” Jake asked Q.

  “Well, you judge a lab based on the inside don’t you?” he said.

  “About that….”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re not exactly allowed in here right now. They’re working on some sort of a project, so I couldn’t get permission for a tour.”

  “You couldn’t pull any strings?” Q raised an eyebrow. He wondered if Jake was doing this just to irritate him, though his face wasn’t showing anything of the sort.

  A loud scream came from inside the lab. Jake and Taylor immediately rushed to the door, leaving Q far behind.

  “I thought the lab was off limits!” he yelled as he tried to catch up.

  The door was closed and had no handles but a number pad hung on the wall next to it. Jake went down on one knee and pressed buttons on the pad. A few seconds later the door clicked open. “Easy pickings,” he smiled.

  Q wondered why the door to a stronghold like this could be hacked so easily. Seemed like an efficiency problem. A pretty big one at that. Or maybe Jake just knew the combination anyway, and was just showing off.

  They stepped into the building. The entire interior was pitch black.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?” Q asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, there’s nothing here,” he mumbled.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder, “Go upstairs and look around.”

  “You could try to be a little less creepy you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Also, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go up there.”

  “There are four different main circuits in the building. If even one of them is turned off the entire system shuts down. The lab equipment could get seriously damaged if we don’t turn it back on.”

  “You should go Q,” he heard Taylor say.

  Well, if she felt the same way then he had no doubts about going up there.

  “What does this main circuit thing look like?”

  “It’s a small white box on the wall. There’ll be circular light on the front. If it’s red then yell for us and we’ll come. If it’s green just come back down.”

  “Got it.”

  “Taylor and I will check the other three on the lower floors. You check the one on top.”

  “Roger,” he said and waved his hands around, scrambling his way towards the stairs and scurrying up the steps. Once he reached the top step he felt around for some sort of a wall.

  Nothing.

  He stumbled and fell towards the floor. His ears picked up on the sound of soft footsteps.

  A researcher, he thought. He lifted himself off the ground, “Hello? Anyone there?” he yelled. “We need to turn on the main circuitry.”

  Someone charged into him and knocked him onto the wall. Q groaned as he got up.

  At least now I know where the wall is, he thought. “I’m a friend,” he said. “I’m just trying to help.”

  “Sure you can help,” a voice whispered in the quiet. “Right after I take you out.”

  ***

  Q felt around the wall. He couldn’t find any switches or circuit boards. “Darn these lights,” he muttered.

  “Activating lights” A voice said and the room flooded with bright white light.

  A figure in a black body suit and mask stood a few feet in front of him.

  Definitely not a researcher, he thought.

  The intruder looked straight at Q, “You’ll love the present I left you.”

  A girl, Q thought. The voice was definitely feminine, unless there was some weird tech-voice-changer stuff going on.

  “You can’t escape,” Q said. “I’ve got comrades to pull a lock-down on this place.”

  “Yeah, I’ll go have a tea party with them later,” she pulled out a black remote and hit a button.

  A beeping noise came from his right.

  There were several people in white coats tied together, but that wasn’t the problem. Next to them was a large black box with a pulsating red light.

  That can’t be good, he thought.

  “Bomb voyage,” she said and charged to the windows,

  Q shot behind her, grasping onto her mask in a flash.

  She detached her headpiece and let the momentum from his pull cause him to crash to the floor. The girl jumped onto the window sill, her brown hair flowing in the wind.

  “See ya around,” she said and dived.

  That was when Q realized he hadn’t even gotten a good look at her face. She’d been clever enough to keep her back to him after he removed her headpiece. He rushed to the window and looked out but there was no one on the ground.

  The beeping behind him became louder.

  “The bomb,” he muttered.

  He realized he couldn’t make head or tail of the box and the unconscious scientists were not going to help anytime soon.

  Taylor, he thought.

  He needed to find her, and soon. His legs shot down the stairs, but he tripped halfway down.

  Thanks legs, he thought and looked at what had tripped him. The color drained from his face.

  Strands of blond hair covered the girl’s pale face.

  “Taylor!” He lifted her limp body up.

  He looked around, but Jake was nowhere to be seen. Probably ran out scared, he thought.

  He ca
rried her up the stairs and put her down next to the scientists. This way, if she came to, she could help him defuse the bomb.

  But until then the whole thing lay in his hands.

  For such a high tech box the lid seemed easily removable. He snapped off the cover and looked inside. A complex system of wires and lines ran through a single large dial. He hoped the dial wasn’t the timer because that would mean they had only two minutes left.

  120…..119……118…..

  Definitely a timer, he thought, and time was running out. He looked at the wiring and tried to figure something out.

  Nothing.

  It was as if a monkey had built the thing.

  The timer meanwhile kept on going. One minute left.

  He stared at a thick red wire and finally decided to take a guess. They were going to get blown up anyway so he might as well take a chance. Plus the red wire was usually the one they cut in all those action movies he’d watched.

  He found a blade in of the scientist’s coats and brought it close to the red wire. His hands held steady as a mental countdown ran through his head.

  3…..2…..1….

  “Whatever you do, don’t cut that wire.”

  He instantly turned around.

  It was Taylor.

  He silently wondered what would’ve happened if Taylor hadn’t woken up.

  “We would’ve been blasted to bits,” she said as if she’d read his thoughts. She steadied herself, “Remove the insulation and connect the red wire to the black one.” She explained everything slowly and carefully and Q made sure he got every tiny detail.

  He carefully removed the plastic that covered the red and black wires.

  “I don’t have any wire,” he said.

  “You don’t need it,” she took the blade from him.

  She made a loop using both the red and black wires and then proceeded to pull out the metal part of the blade. She tethered the loops of wire to either end of the blade, making sure she didn’t cut it.

  The beeping immediately stopped.

  The timer was dead on seven seconds. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if he’d wasted seven seconds doing something else. He didn’t want to think of what’ would have happened if he’d cut the red wire.

  “The blade is a conductor too, so you can always use it as a wire,” she said.

  “I hope I don’t face a situation where that would be useful to me,” Q chuckled.

  He walked up to the still unconscious scientists, “We should get them to a hospital.”

  “I’ll ring up a hovercraft to pick them up. Medical personnel will be here in no time. I’ll tell them about the bomb too.”

  She walked down the stairs and punched in a few numbers on a screen on the inner wall.

  “You know that bomb was pretty well designed,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Usually there are a ton of fake wires and we have to find the real one. This one had two real ones, and even if we tried to cut one off, the other one would instantly blow it up. A pretty clever method if you ask me."

  “What happened to you though? I found you collapsed on the floor.”

  She stared hard, “You know I’d like to answer your question but I have no clue what happened. I heard something and then everything went blank.”

  Q figured she didn’t really want to talk about it for now so he let it go.

  “Should we go search for Jake?” he asked her.

  “Medical crew is coming in. They’ll find him,” she said. “What happened up there?”

  Q told her all about the woman he’d seen and how she’d set of the bomb.

  By the time they headed back out a large hovercraft had reached the place and emergency personnel started helping the scientists.

  “How are we going to get home?”

  “We could use Jake’s hovercraft,” Q suggested.

  Taylor looked him, “Well, I guess we have no other option.”

  Q found the hovercraft parked just as they left it and started it using the keys still in the ignition.

  Yeah, Biosensors, he rolled his eyes.

  He slid it to a stop beside Taylor, “May I interest you in a ride?”

  She got on behind him, “I just want to sleep,” she mumbled, and leaned on his back.

  They rode back to Demon Riser, a sky full of stars accompanying them the whole way.

  ***

  3-3

  Taylor woke up to a ray of light shining on her face. She rubbed her eyes and looked around.

  The room was completely empty.

  She tried recalling last night but her recollection seemed vague. For an instant she worried about her failing memory but then she figured her exhaustion was just making her groggy.

  The door slid open, “Oh, you’re awake already?” Q walked into the room.

  “Yeah,” she sat up on her bed. “Where’s everyone else?”

  “It was crazy, the tower started blaring out alarms at around midnight. I have no clue how you slept through it. So Carlos headed out around then and Kai went to the hangar again. I don’t know when they’ll come back.”

  “We’re in an emergency?”

  “Well, not really. I went down to reception just now, and they told me the alarms were an emergency meeting signal for all the higher officials. So it isn’t like we’re under attack.”

  “For now.”

  “Yeah. For now,” he sat beside her. “I told Carlos about everything that happened last night.”

  She looked at him expectantly.

  “He said he’d send some people around to search the video feeds from the lab, but he said the results may not be too promising.”

  “Ah,” Taylor said. “The labs don’t really have proper video feeds. The equipment gets broken down frequently since they work with a lot of radioactive materials.”

  “So,” Q smiled “When are you going to tell me that you’re a part of this academy?”

  “That obvious?”

  “Kinda. You seemed to know your way around the Aliea Campus. Figured you’d been here before. So that would mean you’re a student here.”

  “Yeah I’m a cadet,” she said. “So I’m guessing you want to know what this place is all about?”

  “Totally,”

  “I don’t think Carlos is going to get free anytime soon, so I’ll explain instead.”

  He rested his chin on his hands, “Go on.”

  “We have intergalactic warfare at times, and more often than not we need people to regulate those kinds of battles. Sort of like an intergalactic justice force.”

  “And Aliea Academy serves that role?”

  “What? No! Teenagers aren’t expected to handle those kinds of things. Aliea is the best place for teenagers to train in order to get into the larger institutions.”

  “There are larger ones?”

  “Yeah. There are plenty of organizations that hold a high level of military power in galactic warfare. So Aliea is like a prestigious university that helps you catapult yourself to higher institutions.”

  “Last question. You guys said not many people know about Aliea or even Zygrade. How do you guys recruit people then?”

  “We’ve got an army of scouts looking out for potential students, or teachers.”

  “Thank you for the information,” he said. “I’m grateful for it.” he bowed to her.

  She threw her pillow at him, “You idiot,” she laughed. “You know what? I think I can take you to the academy today if you want to come with.”

  “Yeah sure,” he said. “That’d be pretty interesting.”

  “Okay then,” she said. “Get ready and meet me at the lobby in an hour,” she said.

  “Don’t make me wait too long.”

  “You’re the one who takes too long in the shower,” she laughed, and slammed a pillow into him before running off to get ready.

  ***

  The interior of the academy’s campus looked bigger this morning than it did at
sundown.

  The place was filled with greenery and the occasional purple-highlighted metal paths that ran through them. Apparently one side of the pathway was a moving walkway. Q didn’t know that so he fell face first the moment his feet landed on one.

  “The campus is too big to navigate solely on foot so we have to use these walkways to get around,” Taylor explained to him.

  “Would’ve helped if you’d told me earlier.”

  “But then, I wouldn't have seen you fall, would I?” she smiled devilishly.

  He punched her hand playfully. She was a devil all right. “We could have used these last night couldn’t we?” he asked her.

  “They shut down after working hours. Only researchers use the facility after sundown. All the students leave early in the evening.”

  The walkways were pretty fast and they zoomed past the scenery, catching short glimpses of green all around them.

  The academy campus itself seemed to be a large circle, and there were pathways in the form of concentric circles within that larger circle. Most of the outermost circles were filled with greenery, but about a hundred yards in the first row of buildings started to show up, growing in size the deeper they went in.

  When they finally got off the walkway, they were in front of a tall stone arch that led deeper inside the campus.

  “Entrance to the classrooms,” she said as she led him through it.

  The green lawns on the other side slowly stretched out into large trees, most of them dense enough to block out all of the light. The place though seemed to have an eerie silence that Q didn’t really find comforting.

  One of the cadets ran by.

  “Where’s everybody?” Taylor asked him.

  “They’re all at the battlegrounds. A girl picked a fight with Khan.”

  A blast sounded in the distance. “Oh god. That must be them,” she said.

  “Who’s Khan?” Q asked.

  “He’s one of Aliea’s best.”

  A huge sphere of blue light expanded into the sky, dwarfing everything around it.

  “Get down!” Taylor yelled.

  BOOM.

  The last thing he remembered was watching a sonic boom travel right at him, unwavering and powerful.

  ***