Ascendant Saga Collection: Sci-Fi Fantasy Techno Thriller Brandon Ellis (ebook reader for comics txt) 📖

space-age casters that were friction-free. If he’d been descending for that long—he checked his watch; it had been at least an eight-minute ride—he was a lot deeper under the warehouse than he had imagined. The elevator was no longer set inside a large column. Instead, it was inside a wall that extended the width of this giant facility, a door without a handle next to it.

He looked around. The lights here were different. Somehow they glowed, giving off more of a moonlight hue than anything else.

Rows of food, luggage, medical equipment, and outdoor supplies, such as shovels, pick axes, and hoes, lined the floor. Behind, were hundreds of dune-buggy-like cars along with a plethora of small aircraft similar to Jetson’s flying cars but with curved wings. The rows of aircraft went on forever.

He took out his phone and took a picture. He was about to investigate the Jetson-like craft, when he spotted the luggage.

Why the luggage? And, why so much luggage? Were thousands of people being evacuated? To where? And when?

He took another picture.

Att the edge of the room, on a side wall, were dozens of garage doors, all double the width of a normal garage, extending hundreds of feet up to meet with the domed ceiling. This place wasn’t just big, it was ginormous. He’d never seen a place so large. This dwarfed a football stadium and he imagined he was only seeing half of it.

He snapped picture after picture.

He walked away from the elevator, and the door next to it opened vertically. Drew jumped back, a sudden coldness hitting his core. His body tingled as he imagined a group of guys emerging with their guns drawn, aiming their weapons at his head. He wanted to move, but his feet pinned to the ground, waiting for the inevitable.

When the inevitable didn’t happen, he relaxed and peeked through the opening His eyes widened and his mouth gaped. “What the...” He needed a hit of weed about now.

Drew stepped through the doorway, seeing another side of the facility as large as the side he was just in. That, however, wasn’t what he was most focused on.

A plane, larger than any he’d ever seen, sat in front of him. He shook his head. This wasn’t a plane. It was too jet-like, twice the size of a 747 and double the height. Bulky and beautiful, like something from the future, aerodynamic, and with a large booster near the tail.

He grabbed his phone, again snapping as many pictures as he could.

He walked around the plane. On the side, in black letters, it read: SPACE SHAQ and JUPITER OR BUST.

Drew raced through everything he’d learned about Slade, GSA, and Callisto. Someone sure as shit planned to leave the planet. But who? And when? And where would they go? Slade. Slade had said, in Rock Magazine, that he was a firm believer in the imminent threat of global warming. Drew’s fingers went numb. He wasn’t an alarmist, but if Slade was getting ready to leave the planet, taking thousands of his pals with him, then Drew sure as shit wasn’t going to ignore that fact.

He walked under the ship, looking for a way inside. Thoughts of sneaking in and stowing away crossed his mind. He touched one of the wheels, looking at the ship’s underbelly, amazed at its size, width, and grandeur.

The ship, however, wasn’t large enough to take the miles of supplies on the other side of the facility, along with the number of people who needed those supplies, and the assembled buggies and small aircraft.

He took another picture.

Walking out from under the craft, he noticed offices in the distance. They needed to be photographed.

The first office was empty, items gathered up and placed in taped boxes. He went to grab for one of the boxes to rip it open, to look for anything that might give him a clue at what this place really was and what was really happening, and thought better of it. He needed to be meticulous and a ripped apart box would be a dead giveaway that someone had been here.

He went to the next office. It was the same as the last, except more boxes filled the room.

The third office was empty except for three filing cabinets in the back. He turned on the overhead light, opened the first cabinet, and rifled through contents.

Hundreds of files stared back at him. Perhaps thousands. Why hadn’t they been digitized? How old was this damned program? A name caught his eye. Couldn’t be. He grabbed the file and pulled it from the cabinet.

There it was, plain as day: Kaden Jaxx. Drew slumped against the wall. What were the odds? Here he was, in the bowels of a secret building, which housed some secret program to take people off-world and he’d found a file dedicated to his uncle. He opened it. Almost the entire file had been redacted. It was nothing but blackout and gibberish. Still, it meant his uncle figured—and figured big—in this enterprise, though he was still confused about the program’s goal.

Drew took a picture of the file number and put the folder back into the filing cabinet.

He walked straight ahead and pushed another door open, feeling yet another cool draft. He stepped through the doorway and onto clay-like soil. Lights glowed from above, lighting up a massive tunnel that a cruise liner could easily float through. He stared into the cavernous space, incredulous. “Holy shit.”

Four single rails, similar to the rails used for monorail systems, were parallel to each other and set far apart. The tunnel was wide, but why was the ceiling so high?

He walked down the tunnel, touching the monorail. Chilly, meaning it hadn’t been used in a while. He placed his ear on it, wondering if he could hear a distant sound of a potential train.

Silence.

A moment later, chaos.

The rail vibrated. And a sound like rushing water echoed through the tunnel, soft at first, then louder and louder. He eyed the tunnel, backing up as fast as