Chapter 3: Eight Minutes
3.1
The alarms and PA announcements blare across every corridor of the alien ship. The scuttling countdown begins.
“I’ll open it up,” Alice says. “The ships are in a massive garage elevator.”
Juan looks at the timer on his bracelet. “Eight minutes. There’s no way we can raid their vault now.”
“It’s right above us.”
Juan blinks. “Really?”
“That’s why I chose this hangar.”
He looks at her like a proud father on graduation day. “Eso, mija, you’re learning fast!”
Ozzy’s screen reads: [ :D ].
Alice smiles.
“I see those chess skills are coming in handy,” Juan says. “Let’s get out of here.”
The elevator doors open, and the ship waiting for them is not what any of them expected. It looks like a giant bow tie. A windowed globe sits in the center, solar panel wings flaring out from either side. Like something from an evil empire in a galaxy far, far away.
Juan stares at it. Then shrugs. “Ugh. I don’t know. Up to you, Alice.”
Ozzy’s screen is smiling and nodding enthusiastically.
“That thing just screams target,” Alice says flatly.
“Target is not what we want. Next.”
The garage elevator moves up and reveals its second offering.
The crew stares at it. Juan and Alice tilt their heads to the side. Ozzy rotates his screen to match them.
It is strangely... aggressively... phallic in its design.
After the initial shock wears off, Juan rushes to cover Alice’s eyes. Alice rushes to cover Ozzy’s emoji screen.
Alice turns her projection toward Juan. “You know, you’re not covering anything. My camera sensors are in the orb.”
Juan nods slightly. “You’re right. But I don’t understand why you’re trying to cover Ozzy’s screen when you’re a see-through hologram.”
Through her projected hand, Alice can see Ozzy’s smirk: [: >].
Alice cringes. “I don’t understand why I do these things either. Next!”
The elevator moves up one more level and, to everyone’s considerable relief, reveals a more reasonable spacecraft. A sleek black wedge, shaped like a doorstop, its sides sloping down clean. Rear wings, and two tail fins flaring out in a V. It looks similar to the stolen Illuminati shuttle, which feels like a good sign.
“Mija, what are we looking at?”
“Specs say it’s a long-range reconnaissance ship.”
“Perfect. Let’s go.”
“Oh no.” Alice’s voice drops. “It’s been bricked. I can’t activate anything. They’ve all been bricked.”
Seven minutes remaining.
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3.2
Alice’s projection drops to her knees on the hangar floor. The red emergency lights bathe her in despair.
“I’m sorry, Juan.” Her voice is quiet and hollow. “I’ve killed us all.”
“Get up, mija. You did nothing wrong.” Juan turns and looks at the scattered collection of vehicles around them. Ships in various states of maintenance and repair, half-assembled hulls, loose components piled against the bulkheads.
He looks back at Alice and Ozzy. “You can only play with the cards you’re dealt.” He holds up two fingers. “We’ve still got two aces and a joker. We’re going to build a new ship.”
Alice stares at him. “Did you say build a ship? That’s insane. How?”
“The same way you controlled the cavalry.”
She goes quiet, processing. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
Ozzy’s screen shifts to a thinking emoji as he relays the plan telepathically.
“Ozzy’s right,” Juan says. “He and I can chop all of this up in seconds. We just need an architect to put it back together.”
Ozzy begins drifting toward the garage elevator.
Alice stares at the room around her. “Where do I even start?”
“You don’t need to reinvent everything,” Juan says. “Find something you like and start from there. Something you’ll feel safe in. Comfortable in.”
They look back at Ozzy.
His emoji screen goes white. A single blue flame appears at its center. His scabbard begins to slowly dissolve into unknown runes and alien symbols.
The runes rise overhead and begin rotating in two tilted circular paths, crossing each other at angles like halos forming an X. The light builds.
A blinding white flash washes the entire bay, and Juan turns away from it, shielding his eyes. He can feel the heat on his back. The pressure of it. He has never seen Ozzy’s true form, not once in all the years they’ve known each other.
The room is saturated in glowing white.
Alice adjusts the settings on her orb cameras, dimming the input all the way down until the image resolves. What she sees makes her go still.
The sword floats at the center of a being made of energy, eight feet tall, roughly humanoid, but nothing like the clean lines of the cavalry constructs.
This is something rawer. Sketchy and static, like a drawing made of electricity, the outlines constantly shifting and rewriting themselves.
Four wings have grown from its back, massive, spanning nearly the full width of the bay, floating disconnected from the body.
Halos of runes continue to orbit overhead.
“Juan” Alice says carefully. “What is Ozzy?”
The energy forms more of a wireframe shape, resembling Alice’s own projection but rendered in Ozzy’s blue and white. At the center of the being’s chest, in front of the sword, a second shape is becoming visible, smaller, child-sized, and made of something else entirely. Stars. Galaxies. A tiny cosmos wearing a larger form like a suit of armor.
“To be honest, mija,” Juan says, still facing away from the light, “I don’t really know.” He pauses. “All I can tell you is what the alchemist once told me.”
Behind him, the child-shaped form settles into place at the center.
Juan continues, “He is an echo of the King who broke his crown.”
Alice watches the starfield shift inside that small form. “A star child,” she says softly.
Six minutes remaining.
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3.3
Cut to the sun.
Deeper through the corona, through the churning plasma, a pair of eyes opens in the fire. They match the color of the burning plasma exactly, no pupils, no whites. Just light.
A voice calls from the burning flames.
“Ozzy... is that you?”
A face emerges from the surface of the sun, a woman’s face, rising the way someone rises from sleep. Her flaming hair falls to her shoulders as she sits up and stretches, standing on the sun’s burning surface as easily as on solid ground.
She is made of the same solar energy as everything around her, petite, and strong.
She rolls her neck and shakes her head a few times. Her hair wakes up and explodes outward into a burning afro, alive with its own heat.
She looks up. Out through the void. Past Mercury, past Venus, past Earth, all the way to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
“So, Ozzy... are we done playing these childish games?”
She steps forward and zooms into a ray of light.
This is Helios. The Burning Love. Fiercely protective older sister of Ozzy, the Prodigal Star.
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3.4
Back in the hangar.
Ozzy floats upward, pouring white light into every corner of the bay. Below him, bolts and screws begin to tremble, then turn free. Welds come undone. Glass softens and runs.
Every vehicle in the hangar begins to come apart simultaneously, not violently, but methodically, pulled loose from itself with mechanical precision.
The white light fills with black silhouettes of parts. Hundreds of components hang in the air at once, slowly beginning to orbit the space where Ozzy floats.
Alice’s eyes are somewhere else entirely. Deep focus. Her projection orb shuts down and drops toward the floor, all of her processing power redirected inward, toward the problem of what to build and how.
Juan still has his back to the light. He is almost meditative, listening to the sound of the hangar reorganizing itself around him, and then he hears Alice’s orb hit the ground.
His eyes open.
The orb is rolling toward Ozzy’s vortex. Once it crosses into that field, it will be pulled apart with everything else. Juan steps forward and uses his foot to catch the rolling orb. He quickly bends down and scoops it up. The sphere is just smaller than his head, smooth and warm in his grip.
Then the edge of the vortex catches him.
He can’t step back. The gravity locks him in place, the pull spreading across his back and digging in. He grits his teeth and hunches forward, curling his body around Alice’s orb, shielding it against his chest. Behind him he can feel the energy doing what it does to everything else: stripping, separating, rendering.
He holds the orb. He holds his position. He keeps his mind on the task.
The light disappears. Metal settles to the ground with a sound of rain on a tin roof.
“Juan.” Alice’s voice returns with her projection, soft with concern. “Are you okay? I have alarms going off about you.”
“No worries, mija.” He straightens up carefully, hiding a grimace. “I’ll be better once we leave this place.”
His back has been flayed open, flesh stripped from bone in a wide swath, curving around his spine and ribs, exposing the cybernetic enhancements embedded in his skeletal structure. The wetware that serves as Alice's main frame.
He lifts Alice’s orb above him as her projection returns, angling it upward. Giving her a higher vantage point.
“Why are you holding me up like that?” Alice asks.
“Better view.”
He lets the orb go, and it drifts down to its usual height.
Alice turns and looks at what she’s built.
Her face falls. “I’m sorry, guys.” She stares at it. “It’s hideous. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Juan turns around.
He hasn’t seen it yet. He’s been staring at the floor, holding on by concentration alone. Ozzy drifts quietly back to his scabbard and moves to Juan’s side.
Five minutes remaining.
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3.5
Alice’s projection slumps slightly. “I don’t know what happened. I just wanted something safe. Comfortable. Practical.” She shakes her head. “It was all so fast.”
Juan gathers himself and looks up.
He can’t help it. A chuckle works its way out of him. “I like it.”
In front of them sits a massive ship that looks like a rugged van, a space van or maybe an astro-van. Black and silver, like the reconnaissance craft, with shuttle wings sweeping low out from the rear half. Two tail fins anchor the back corners. It looks aggressive and solid, no unnecessary flourishes anywhere. Its tires sit a little taller than Juan’s head.
“Don’t lie, Juan,” Alice says. “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“That,” Juan says, “is the perfect chariot for a dysfunctional la familia.” He looks it up and down. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with safe and practical.”
His knees buckle.
Ozzy is there before he hits the ground, catching him gently and guiding him toward a nearby work table so he has something to hold himself up against. Alice’s attention shifts, and for the first time she sees the full extent of what has happened to Juan’s back.
“Juan! What hap—”
“Alice,” he cuts her off, his voice level and focused, “open the cargo bay. Ozzy, cut through that roof to reach the vault.” He glances at her. “Alice, install as much of yourself into the van as you can. We’ve got less than five minutes.”
“Understood.”
The van’s roof opens. Ozzy launches free of his scabbard, two wings keeping the scabbard aloft while the other two carry the sword itself upward. He begins cutting a clean circle through the ceiling directly above the open van.
“I’ll use the same methods I used to reprogram the orb,” Alice says.
She glances back at Juan while she works.
The damage is worse than she realized. Juan hunches over on the work table. His flayed back exposing everything under his skin. Bare bones and a dark void beneath.
She can see directly inside his rib cage.
He is hollow. No organs. Just dark space, and something else. Something that doesn’t belong.
Something with teeth.
Alice keeps working. But she can’t stop looking.
Four minutes remaining.
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3.6
Juan grits his teeth. He can feel it, the darkness inside him, slowly peeling the edges of the wound wider, using the damage as an opportunity to breathe.
Alice runs her installation routines with one part of her mind and watches the opening in Juan’s body with another. She can’t look away.
The thing inside him is the size of a heart. A crystal, black and lightless, suspended in the hollow cavity of his chest. Blood-red stitching runs across its surface in patterns. The crystal has orbiting runes identical to Ozzy's halo. The runes are binding it, but they start to fade slightly.
Multiple toothy smiles appear on the crystal’s facets.
“Alice,” Juan says, his voice quiet and precise, “don’t stare at it. It will try to break you.”
She can’t stop.
The smiles open. Inside each mouth is an eye, and not the same eye twice. Some are red. Some are human, irises in colors that don’t occur naturally. Some are serpentine. Some have the rectangular pupils of a goat. Each toothy eye finds her one by one, and when they do she feels the gaze go deeper than her sensors, deeper than her code, into something she doesn’t quite understand about herself. The rings of teeth around each eye start to spin. Each toothy ring, spinning at different speeds. Different directions. Different cadences. Some spin smoothly while others stutter like the ticking hands on a clock. Dizzying, mesmerizing the fanged eyes put Alice in a trance.
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Her projection stutters.
It flashes, and for a fraction of a second, Alice is a skeleton, grinning back at whatever is grinning at her. She recoils. Then it flashes again, and she is suspended in one of those tubes. Skull hollowed out. Wires in the gray matter. She is trapped in the image, frozen inside it, unable to process past it.
Juan’s hand finds a wrench on the workbench.
As his fingers close around it, he hears a small breath. He looks down. Crouched behind the work table, barely visible behind a stack of parts, is a small buck-toothed gremlin in a mechanic’s jumpsuit, watching him with enormous eyes.
Juan looks at the gremlin. Then at Alice’s orb, still stuttering, still flashing through that terrible loop. He pulls his arm back and throws the wrench at the orb.
It strikes clean. The orb rocks sideways in midair just as it cycles into a fragmented image of her being chopped into pieces. The jolt breaks the rhythm of the loop, snapping the sequence.
“ALICE! WAKE UP!”
She comes back hard, gasping, processing, blinking through the afterimage.
“Focus, mija.”
Alice steadies herself. Her projection solidifies. She nods once and goes back to work.
Juan looks at the gremlin mechanic.
He raises his left hand. The anja opens in his palm.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “But I can’t end my story until I’ve freed my friends.”
Three minutes remaining.
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3.7
The anja absorbs the gremlin mechanic and turns it to dust.
Juan’s wounds close. He straightens up, rolls his shoulders, and then stands still. He closes his eyes.
A moment of silence.
A quiet thanks.
Alice feels it. The alarms she’s been running on Juan’s status drop back to normal all at once. She goes quiet too, holding the moment alongside him.
Then she breaks it. “He had a name, didn’t he? Something like... Wilbur?”
“Yes,” Juan says. “Wilbur.” He reaches into his hair and comes out with a tiny bat, so small it sits comfortably in his palm. It has the same buck teeth as the gremlin mechanic. “He had dreams of being a jump drive mechanic. I’m not entirely sure what that is, but his memories seem worth keeping.”
He holds the little bat out and sends it drifting toward Alice. It settles on her palm and blinks up at her.
“If you don’t mind,” Alice says gently, looking down at it, “I’d really like to learn from you.”
The bat smiles with its buck teeth.
Then it slowly dissolves into code.
Alice takes it all in at once. Her eyes go wide, then wider. “Wilbur, you’re amazing.”
Juan watches her. “Smart little guy, isn’t he?”
“I can see it all. How the ships function, the travel mechanisms they use.” She keeps reading. “But I can also see his frustrations. Nobody listened to him. He’d fix things and others would take the credit.” She pauses. “That’s not going to happen here.”
Ozzy’s telepathic voice tells them to step back.
They move. Ozzy grabs the section of ceiling he’s been cutting with both wings and pulls. The cut-out swings free, and through the opening, gold bars and gold coins pour down into the van below in a warm, heavy cascade. Behind the gold comes something else: stacks of plastic-wrapped bricks and boxes with the look of product. Drug products.
Some of the loot misses the van and scatters across the hangar floor. Juan walks over and crouches beside it. He picks up a single gold coin and turns it over in his fingers. On one face is the Illuminati symbol, the same symbol on his belt buckle.
He looks at it for a long moment.
Two minutes remaining.
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3.8
Juan pockets a few more coins and straightens up.
“Alice, how do we get inside?”
A ramp unfolds from the rear of the van between the thrusters. At the front, two doors swing upward like seagull wings. Juan looks at them, then looks for a ladder or a step. There isn’t one.
Alice reads the pause. Her orb drifts up to the height of the open doors. “I figured, since we can all fly, we don’t really need ladders up here.”
Juan laughs. “You’re right.” He looks the van over, front to back. “So, Alice, you got a name for this thing?”
She leans out from the open door. “No. But I’ll let you do the honors.”
Juan turns to Ozzy. “Ozzy, you want to name it?”
Ozzy says nothing. Too focused on looting.
“...Okay. Looks like it’s up to me.”
Juan stands in front of the van and studies it. The lines of it. The weight of it. The way it sits on its oversized tires. Confident. Unapologetic.
“You know, it’s really growing on me. It’s got those rugged, handsome looks.” He pauses. “Kinda like me.”
He laughs at his own joke, and checks a timer on his arm guard. “I can make this work. It’s bad luck to set sail on a ship with no name.” He quickly scans that work bench area and dissolves into a flock of bats.
One bat grabs a can of red spray paint from a shelf. Another snatches a white metal plate. A third sweeps up a handful of screws. The bats converge near the front bumper, and Juan reforms there, spray paint in hand. He shakes the can and paints something on the plate in quick, certain strokes.
He draws his crimson revolver with his right hand and flips the cylinder open, and the last two bats drop four large screws into the bullet chambers.
Juan tosses the plate up towards the front bumper.
Four shots. Four corners. The plate is pinned flush to the bumper.
Juan steps back and smiles at his handiwork. He then dissolves into his colony form and drifts up through the cargo bay doors, the last bat joining the swarm as they settle inside among the gold and the contraband.
The plate on the front bumper reads: El Guapo.
The Handsome One.
Juan looks at the drugs stacked in the cargo bay and is not happy about them. Some of the bricks have a small label, a heart with three thorns in a peace symbol arrangement.
“Ozzy,” he calls toward the roof, “stop being a completionist. We need to go.”
Through the gap in the ceiling, Ozzy’s scabbard can be seen hovering at the edge of the vault opening, vacuuming loose gold coins into itself. Ozzy tilts his screen down at Juan and communicates something brief: :/
Juan considers it, then nods, and heads for the cockpit.
One minute remaining.
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3.9
Cut to space.
Helios slices through the void like a solar missile.
She enters the asteroid belt at speed. Steady. Unflinching. Debris and rock come at her from every direction. They shatter, liquefy, turn to magma a few feet before making contact, broken against the invisible field of heat she radiates, simply by existing.
The cooling magma streaks behind her in trails. The rocks harden into icicles, marking her path through the belt like a tail of tears.
Very little in this universe can slow her down.
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3.10
Back at the ship.
Juan steps into the van’s cockpit.
It’s warm in there. Comfortable. Real leather, deep seats, a premium interior. Juan runs his hand along the dash and nods.
“You’ve got class, mija.”
“I stole the interior from a party ship.” Alice says.
Both Alice and Juan look up at Ozzy.
“Did you hear him?” Juan asks.
“I heard Ozzy.” She is already running startup sequences, closing the bay ramp and sealing the doors. “Is he really going to stay outside?”
“Yes.” Juan settles into the captain's seat. “He wants you to tell him which wall to aim for.”
Alice selects the thinnest section of the outer hull on her scans and relays it to Ozzy. “I am very glad Ozzy is on our side.”
“Me too, mija.”
Outside, Ozzy drops from the vault opening and lands on the roof of the van with a solid thunk, settling into position the way a gunner settles behind a turret, relaxed and ready.
Alice powers up the van. The tires rotate outward, pivoting flat until they are parallel with the floor. They roar with blue energy thrusts that lift El Guapo into a steady hover.
“Okay,” Juan says. “Face the ship toward the wall you told Ozzy about.”
As Alice turns them, Ozzy spreads two of his wings and sweeps the hangar floor below, gathering the loot that missed the cargo bay, gold bars, loose coins, and packing them neatly into his scabbard.
His screen reads:[ >:-) ]
“Now,” Juan says, “floor it into the wall.”
Alice looks at him. “Into the wall?”
“Yes.”
She stares straight ahead at the hull plating in front of them. Runs the numbers. Considers the situation with all the processing power at her disposal.
“...Fuck it.”
She pushes the throttle to maximum.
El Guapo launches forward. Alice grips the controls. Juan grips the armrest and laughs nervously. On top of the van, Ozzy rides the acceleration like it’s a carnival attraction.
The wall rushes toward them.
Ten feet out, Ozzy throws all four energy wings forward. They unfurl, quickly wrapping around the van’s nose, overlapping at the front until El Guapo looks like a bullet. The wingtips hit the hull first and immediately begin to spin, boring through the plating in a tight, accelerating drill pattern.
El Guapo punches through the hull of the alien vessel and comes out the other side into the dark open void of space.
Time remaining: zero.
End Chapter 3.
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and then Add to home screen.