“Are you sure it was a good idea to not tell them everything?” Burke asked.
Carlos turned his chair around. “You mean the transmission that we found right before that?”
“Q mentioned that he felt something familiar about the anomaly,” he said. “And Taylor didn’t exactly deny it either. What were they talking about?”
“Who knows?” Carlos said, his lips curling into a small smile, one of sadness rather than amusement.
“Fine,” Burke puffed his cheeks out. “If that’s how you wanna play it then so be it.”
Carlos chuckled dryly, “Shouldn’t you be getting back to work now?”
“Well, if someone approved Project Z then I-”
“Not gonna happen, Burke,” he said firmly.
“Fine,” he sighed. “Anyway, I’ll keep you updated on everything we find after this. The telescopic team is trying to get better images, and the radar team is trying to gain contact with our probes and see what we can find from them. Based on the black box’s record logs, the Endeavor dispatched the second probe into the anomaly, but lost contact with it almost immediately. We may find conclusive data if we get a hold of that probe.”
“Very well,” Carlos said. “Keep me updated.”
“Will do,” Burke said as he got up and left the room.
Carlos rested still in his chair, the dark chambers of the council room suddenly appearing darker than before. He honestly didn’t know what to feel at the moment. He wondered if it was his fault for sending out Taylor and Q in the first place. He wondered if this anomaly was more of a threat than he’d made it out to be. It certainly seemed that way.
The person he was most worried about was Taylor. She was in a weird situation at the moment. Taylor was something called a NOVA warrior, and a weird one at that.
A NOVA Warrior was a form that warriors permanently transformed into. It gave the warrior a much greater life energy, allowing them to nearly rival the mage class. The transformation itself was an extremely rare occurrence though.
It was believed to only happen to warriors who had a potential to carry more life energy than they were born with. The rules for setting off this transformation weren’t really well known. So far all they knew was that it happened when a potential NOVA warrior underwent a massive psychological or emotional change.
Elizabeth, Chris, and Kai were all NOVA warriors. Carlos didn’t worry about them much though, since they were regular NOVA warriors. Taylor on the other hand was a completely different. Her NOVA transformation had caused all sorts of astonishment. In the history of space itself, no warrior had every transitioned from a warrior all the way to a sorcerer.
But Taylor had.
She had actually pulled her way through to becoming even stronger than Q.
But this is where the problem started. Carlos feared that the sudden change would play into Taylor’s mind. He wasn’t worried that she would become a power mongering scoundrel. Rather, he was worried she would start becoming over sensitive to everything, that she would begin to change the way she saw the world.
With great power, comes greater demons, he thought.
Because of her immense strength, Taylor had already begun to blame herself for things that she might have stopped if she had known about them in the first place. Carlos could see that the bold and defiant warrior was slowly becoming a nervous, self-blaming sorceress.
Taylor never showed her weaker side to anyone else. Not even Q. But Carlos had seen enough secretive people to discern everything from just the look in their eyes.
He sighed and rested his head on the table. “Let’s just hope this ends before something unnecessary happens.”
He wished he could believe that.
***
Kai glanced at the towering silver ship that stood in front of him.
“Hey, buddy,” he smiled.
“The Orion seems in tip top shape,” Elizabeth walked up to him alongside Chris.
“That’s because I’ve been working to keep her that way,” Kai chuckled and climbed up the stairwell, and into the ship.
The hatch door was connected directly to the main deck, which was a beauty of a control room. The deck was split into two halves - a higher, larger platform at the back of the room, and a lower, smaller platform at the front.
The lower deck had one chair on it facing a large glass viewscreen. A few panels were positioned on either side of the chair but that was all. The upper deck had plenty of screens and panels attached to the walls, and served as the supplementary control unit for the ship.
Kai closed his eyes and concentrated. C’mon Orion, he thought. Start up. He felt a click in his mind, and he heard the sound of the ship’s engines roar to life.
This was Kai’s special ability. Well it wasn’t exactly a special ability per se. As soon as he entered his NOVA form he found out he actually controlled the Elementa of Metal. And this Elementa gave him the cool ability of controlling almost any form of technology as long as he knew enough about it.
“Is the medical unit on the ship still fully supplied?” Chris asked, obviously interested because she was a healer.
“I’ve upgraded it all to the best medical equipment Aliea has to offer,” Kai grinned.
A small, rare smile curled onto Chris’ face, and she ran through the door leading out of the main deck and deeper into the Orion.
“You need me to set anything up?” Elizabeth asked him, her red hair blazing even brighter against the silver walls of the deck.
“I’m good,” he said.
“I’ll be in the bunker then. I need to catch up on my sleep before we get to the wreckage.” And with that she walked off as well.
Kai turned to the circular machine at the center of the upper deck, the Holographic Positioning System, or HPS as Q liked to call it.
The thought of Q reminded Kai of the grim situation they were in at the moment. He didn’t engage in it though and instead diverted back to his work. A small hologram opened up atop the device, displaying a large galactic map, and Kai pinpointed the site of the wreckage.
He sat back down on the pilot’s chair and started up the ship’s console. Even though he could control the Orion with just his mind, he really preferred to use a hands-on approach. It was more fun that way. Plus the mind control thing drained him a lot with every use.
His hands worked through the controls and soon the ship’s engine was pumping at full blast.
The comm system turned on, “Kai, this is Carlos. You are clear for take-off,” he said.
“Right-O, Commander!” he grinned.
“Good luck.”
Kai lifted the Orion off the surface and into the sky. In moments they had shot into deep space. It was still a long journey to the site of the wreckage though.
He wondered what exactly had happened there. Were Q and Taylor actually okay? Both of them were sorcerers so they should have been okay. Right? There was just too much uncertainty in their situation to even think about it seriously.
Kai sat still in his chair and looked far into the dark depths before him, “We’re coming for you guys.”
***
1-3
Kai stood at the HPS, watching as the Orion got closer to the wreckage point. Elizabeth had fallen asleep in the bunker, and Chris was testing out all the equipment to ensure that they were functional. That meant the deck was totally silent. But Kai really liked the occasional silence, even though he was a big fan of talking all the time.
Suddenly, a shrieking pain shot through his head and a terrible ringing sound burst into his ears. It felt like a thousand huge speakers were cramped around him and blasting at max volume. In an instant his vision blurred and his legs went numb, his sense of touch receding fast as well.
Damn it, his mind screamed. He tried to take a step forward but his legs were too weak. He crashed hard onto the floor, his lower limbs immobile and useless. His hands grabbed onto the surface and dragged him over it.
Need to get to the pilot’s chair, he thought.
His vision had gone completely blurry now. Everything around him seemed like a pixelated video from decades ago. He relied purely on his sense of direction and pushed forward.
He could feel his body shake as he started losing control of his muscles. His vision changed from a blurred mosaic to a blot of red and purple hues. He’d completely lost control. He lay there on the floor, his mind aware, his body immobile.
Suddenly, a hand pulled him up and a sharp pain pricked his neck. A cool liquid coursed through him, but his body felt like it was on fire. His brain jolted for a second and all his senses returned to him, as though his body had been rebooted. He felt the fiery sensation die away, and his vision returned to him.
Chris’ pain-struck face looked at him, her eyes filled with fear. Kai’s gaze lowered down to the syringe that she held in her trembling hand.
Damn it, he cursed silently. She knows.
Chris pulled Kai by the shoulders and made him lay down, his head resting on her lap. “How long has this been going on?” she asked, her voice quivering with an emotion Kai couldn’t discern.
“Just the last few days really,” he said.
“How long?” she asked again, her eyes looking right into his, anger and fear within them.
He paused for a moment. “Five months now,” he said quietly.
Her body trembled, whether in rage or something else he didn’t know. He held her hand, and she gripped his fingers tightly.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. “You can’t take care of yourself like this.”
“Of course I can,” he grinned. “I have my medication stowed all around the Orion just for situations like this. The closest one is the small storage space under the pilot’s chair, which was why I was trying to get there.”
She squeezed his hand. “You’d have never gotten there in the condition you were in.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Really.” he smiled.
“Goddamn it, Kai!” she pushed his head off her lap and stood up, a raging glare in her eyes. “You have radiation poisoning in your brain,” she screamed. “In what world does that make you fine?!”
She threw the empty syringe onto the floor, shattering it into shards. He watched as she stormed off, the air around her silent, but the aura around her screaming in a rage he had never seen her express before.
Kai lay back on the floor. He felt Chris’ warmth disappear as the cold touch of the Orion’s metal flooded his senses. He looked up at the ceiling, at the endless gray before him.
I can’t tell her, he thought. I can’t tell her I have just two weeks left to live.
***
Chris ran into the healing unit and shut the doors behind her. She didn’t even bother turning on the lights. She just sat herself by the corner, her hands around her legs, her head between her knees.
I can’t believe it, she thought.
Chris had always known this day was coming. She had never acknowledged it, but she had always known.
Before coming to Aliea, Kai had been a test pilot for the Area 51 unit back on Earth. Many small space military factions from the nearby galaxies gave Area 51 a lot of their spacecraft so that Earth could study them and develop its own. The problem though, was that most of these ships were broken or malfunctioning. But as a test pilot, and a nut job at that, Kai flew them the entire time he spent there.
Broken ships meant the nuclear engine would leak a tiny bit of radiation into the air around it. It was generally harmless, but Kai’s case was different. After flying so many of those leaking ships for months on end, enough radiation had seeped into his system to concentrate in his brain and give him radiation poisoning. And since the radiation was all concentrated in the brain, there was nothing anyone could do about it.
It was incurable.
Kai had told her about his condition back when they’d first met. But that had been nearly a year ago. Throughout this time he had never told her his condition had aggravated this much. She remembered all the time she spent researching, trying to come up with some sort of a cure, but now all of that seemed a pointless waste.
She knew what was going on. He specifically tried to hide it from her, but she knew anyway. The radiation had already seeped into the innermost parts of the brain. They were taking over his senses little by little.
Kai didn’t have long to live.
She shuddered to think of what might have happened if she hadn’t found him when she did. Emotions welled up in her, emotions that she had never felt before, emotions she had chosen never to feel. But now her mind felt them anyway.
The door to the infirmary slid open, and the lights turned on.
“What do you want, Kai?” Chris asked, her voice going back to its monotone pitch.
“Getting a little romantic are we?” Elizabeth walked in, her facing looking at Chris teasingly.
“No. Not really,” she replied, her face emotionless. She had no time to deal with things as petty as mild teasing. “Anyway, what’s wrong?”
“I’ve got a little discomfort on my back,” she said.
“Where exactly?”
A short burst of wind shot out from behind Elizabeth and two snow white wings opened up from her back. A normal person would have freaked out over something like this, but Chris knew better than that.
Elizabeth was a Seraphian who, by nature, were an angelic race. The Seraphians were born as beings similar to humans but when they matured enough, they went through a sort of metamorphosis. They changed the color of their hair and eyes, and more importantly, grew a pair of pristine, white wings.
Each of Elizabeth’s wings were about ten feet long, and they looked absolutely majestic when she flew into the sun set.
“I feel a bit of pain right around the base of my wings,” Elizabeth said, turning around.
Chris moved her gaze to where Elizabeth had mentioned. She could see that the skin around her wings was of a slightly redder shade.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a bit of soreness. Having you been flying more than usual?”
“A bit, yeah,” Elizabeth said.
“Spying on Q?” she laughed.
Elizabeth quietened immediately, and averted her gaze, her eyes looking at the floor.
You idiot, why did you talk about him? Chris scolded herself. She shifted the conversation. “Just take a bit of rest and your wings should be fine.”
“Cool,” Elizabeth said. She folded her wings up and they just disappeared.
Chris never really understood how those wings magically disappeared once they were folded up. To be frank, Elizabeth didn’t seem to understand it either. Chris reminded herself to research that a bit more when they got back to Aliea.
The very word ‘research’ reminded her of Kai, and that was not a good topic to get onto at the moment.
“Chris?” Elizabeth asked. “Are you okay? Your face just went pale.”
“What?” Chris forced a smile. “I’m totally fine.”
“Umm...Okay, I guess.”
“I’m fine, really,” she relaxed her smile and hoped it looked genuine.
“I guess I’ll go get some rest then,” Elizabeth smiled and walked out of the infirmary, closing the door behind her.
Chris slumped against the wall, and slid down to the floor once more. The image of Kai helplessly sprawled on the floor was engraved in her mind, running on an endless loop. The thought of losing him hurt her, the thought of never seeing him again made her feel like she was about to break.
Her hands covered her face as she fought back the tears. What am I supposed to do? she sobbed.
***
Elizabeth awoke to the sound of the ship’s P.A. system blaring loudly.
“Elizabeth, this is Kai,” Kai’s voice came through. “You need to get on deck. And fast.”
The first thing Elizabeth did was to make sure she didn’t panic. This couldn’t be a danger call or anything. It sounded much too passive.
She picked herself off her bed and walked to the mai
n deck. She headed through the door to see Kai and Chris stand on the lower deck, their faces peering out into space. Elizabeth could sense a bit of hostility in the way they were treating each other.
Are they both okay? she wondered. There wasn’t anything she could do about it though. Kai and Chris were the two most secretive people she knew, meaning they were people who preferred to keep things to themselves.
The two of them turned around, reacting to the sound of her footsteps.
“Ah, you’re here,” Kai said.
“How do your wings feel?” Chris asked.
“Much better,” Elizabeth smiled and then turned to Kai. “What’s up?”
He turned around and pointed to the right side of the viewscreen. “That.”
A small speck of light shone through in a concentrated beam, almost as though it were being reflected from somewhere. A fleck of metal entered their field of vision and then disappeared just as quickly.
The Endeavor, her eyes went wide.
“Yup,” Kai said, noticing the look in her eyes. “Those are the Endeavor’s remains.”
“That’s great! We found it!” Elizabeth said.
“Umm well…” Kai said. “I wouldn’t exactly put it that way.”
Elizabeth scrunched her eyebrows, her mind trying to figure out what he was implying here.
“You see,” he hesitated for a moment. “I made the Orion run a bio scan of the entire wreckage and see if it could pick up any forms of life.”
Oh dear god, Elizabeth could see where this was going.
“We found no traces of life. At all,” Chris said. “There is not a single sign of Q and Taylor’s existence.”
“That can’t be,” Elizabeth’s emotions plunged. She felt lost among the things happening around her.
Kai and Chris though, seemed to have everything under control. “I’ll go report this back to Carlos,” Kai said and headed for the upper deck.
“How accurate is the bio scan?” Elizabeth shot back, whether in anger or hope she didn’t know.
Kai paused for a moment, “Accurate enough to pick out even the smallest bacteria living among the wreckage.”
The Quest Saga Collection: Books 1 - 5 Page 79
