HOUR OF POWER

HEATROMITE HEIST

"This way! Hurry!" I screamed at the top of my lungs in hopes that the whole crew heard me.

But I couldn't stop to find out, I kept on dashing. The echoes of my steps were absorbed by the blaring alarms. The red lights didn't help matters either.

"Captain!" Andy's voice called from some distance behind. "I've signaled the AA-X mothership for support! No one," he puffed. "was on the receiving end!"

He was soon running at my pace, about to overtake me.

If only I didn't eat that mountain of breakfast. I cursed inwards.

"Andy!" I yelled over the alarms. "As long as you've signaled for backup, no matter how far out in the cosmos we are, they'll find us!" For obvious reasons I didn't believe my own words but it was my job as captain to make sure my crew maintained high spirits.

Andy changed the topic, focusing on the life-threatening 'now'. "How long till this ship blows?!"

A very loud explosion went off, drowning the alarms.

I clasped my ears as another one followed. "Do you still want me to answer that?!"

He mouthed something like "what?" But all I could hear was a ringing in my ear. That explosion wasn't from the engine room seeing as the whole ship hadn't been engulfed yet but I was betting the flames would reach the engine room in the next minute. In order words, we had less than sixty seconds to live.

Nonetheless, Andy and I kept sprinting. Whichever genius came up with the idea of not installing windows in a mega disc-shaped spaceship was who I'd haunt in the next life.

"We're not going to make it to the door in time are we?" Andy's voice was muffled, but the sadness in it was crystal clear.

"Only one door in a military-grade battleship, I don't think it was our fault, buddy." I gave him a wavering smile.

"You and Vee would have been great together, you know?"

I sniffed hard. "Yeah, I know."

My feet had started to fail me, and Andy's also.

"If only-" I sniffed back the tears as I fell to my knees. "If only I didn't accept that Ascension. Then she wouldn't be dead. Our first unsupervised mission... and I blew it."

The whistling sound of hoverboard engines reached my ears, followed by Vee's voice. "You grab Andy, I'll grab Marco!"

And suddenly, I was swooped off the ground and plopped down on a speeding neon blue hoverboard. The change in pace was overwhelming, I almost flew off the board but luckily I latched onto its edges for dear life. It was about two meters in area.

I looked up to see Vee in her white jumpsuit, her bright blue hair throwing caution to the wind as she surfed. "You're alive!" I jubilated.

She looked back down at me and rolled her eyes before turning towards Zara who also rode a hoverboard beside her. "Boys are idiots!"

Zara nodded and they both faced forward. Andy, who was clinging onto Zara's board, looked outraged but his comeback was cut short by what sounded like the mother of all explosions which sent a rumble everywhere, and then suddenly the ship began to slope.

The engine room!

"Hang on!" Vee warned before making a nasty drift that sent me halfway off the board and then back on it. My heart must have skipped some beats but I knew the worst was yet to come because now the huge metal door was in view and we were closing the gap by the seconds.

"DOOR!" Andy wrenched the words from my mouth.

Zara blew a patch of sleek black hair away from her eye before hurling a handful of diamond-shaped micro-mites; the trending explosive pocket grenades.