“Just let me know when.”
Bonnie and Tor walked in and spotted Jelly and Wool by the first bed.
“Thank God, you’re okay,” Bonnie looked from Jelly to Jaycee and clocked Baldron’s corpse on the bed, “Spare parts? A regular junkyard sale, isn’t it?”
“You know it,” Jaycee smirked and pushed the body onto its side by the shoulder, “We can get you that new battery you need.”
“Ugh. Maybe, maybe not,” Bonnie stroked Jelly’s hair and sniggered at Baldron’s frozen face of fear, “Thank God I don’t need a new brain.”
Everyone sniggered to themselves.
“What?” Bonnie protested.
“Nothing,” Tripp snapped his fingers and waved Manuel over, “Okay, listen up. Manuel has some information on what’s just happened.”
The holographic book opened up and landed three-quarters of the way through its tome, “The giant tree thing that we thought was going to kill us turned out to have bought us some time. It was trying to save us, by all accounts.”
“Save us?” Jaycee snorted, “From what? A tumble-drier death?”
“It threw us to the other side of Pink Symphony. Away from the Shanta. Bought us some time.”
“We could have been killed, Crash landing like that.”
“Well, it was either that or be outnumbered,” Manuel said. He projected an image of three suns floating together, “Pink Symphony has a heavenly body headed toward it. As you can see here, the three suns converged. It’s going to wipe everything out in an instant.”
The three suns melded together to form a solitary ball of white light.
“By my calculations, I figure we have around twelve Earth hours until it strikes.”
Jelly hopped off the bed and made for the hologram, “I want it.”
“No, Jelly,” Manuel swung his pages around and whipped the projection up against the ceiling, “It’s not a toy.”
“Miew,” she whined, knowing it was too far away to catch.
Tripp turned to Manuel, “You said something a while ago about one month here equals a period of time back on Earth?”
“That’s correct. One hour here equals one month on Earth.”
“How long have we been here?”
“A little over twenty hours.”
Bonnie ducked her head, “Ugh. Two years?”
“Almost, yes.”
Tripp folded his arms, “So, you’re saying we have to wait for twelve more hours until we’re scorched to death?”
“That’s if the Shanta doesn’t get to us first,” Manuel continued. The hologram of the sun changed to a live feed of the Shanta creeping from the ocean to the dunes.
“If Pink Symphony had a north, south, east and west, which it doesn’t… but if it did, then the ocean is due west. The dunes lie dead in the middle. The tree threw us to the east side. It tried to save us from certain death. It was successful, in that respect.”
“Shame about the apocalypse,” Tripp quipped.
“Yeah, that’s not the best news I’ve ever heard,” Manuel said.
The image zoomed out into a map of four quadrants against a perfect circle. The far east curvature lit up, indicating their position.
“Pink Symphony is, for all intents and purposes, a disc. It has a diameter of one hundred and eighteen miles exactly. The Shanta move quickly. They could be here in less than twelve hours. Before the sun strikes.”
“So if the sun doesn’t kill us, the Shanta will?” Bonnie thumped the wall and let out a long, exasperated wail, “Ugghh, for God’s sake, why? Why are we here?”
Manuel lowered himself to everyone’s head height and pulled the projection back between his pages. He turned to Jelly to see her crossed legged by the wall, playing with her claws.
She looked up, “What?”
“Whatever Pink Symphony did to her, we need to make sure she’s protected,” Manuel said.
“Protected?” Jaycee booted Baldron’s head off the bed. It hit the floor and rolled nose-over-skull to a halt in the middle of the room, “Protected from what? Certain death? Are you out of your crazy, Spanish mind?”
“Don’t start that again,” Tor ducked his head and whimpered to himself.
Manuel tried to calm the giant down and relax everyone’s nerves. An unlikely endeavor given the circumstances, “You’ve heard of the two Fs when it comes to conflict, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, fight or flight,” Jaycee twisted his new hand around and wiggled the thumb.
“Did you know that there is a third F?”
“No.”
“Well, there is,” Manuel spun around to the others, “It’s the worst F of all.”
Bonnie shrugged her shoulders, “French?”
Manuel spun around with despair, “Uh, no? How can you French your way in a situation?”
“Come here and I’ll show you, you useless tome-stone.”
“I’ll ignore that,” Manuel shrugged off the offense, “No, the third F stands for Freeze.”
Tripp scrunched his face, “I’m sorry, Manuel. Maybe I hit my head a little too hard when we crash-landed her, but… what the hell has this got to do with anything?”
“Ugh, you androids,” Manuel spat. “You’re so particular, aren’t you? What it means, captain, is that you can freeze on the spot in the face of adversity. If you do that, you’ll get killed.”
“You’re a bad liar, you know that?” Tripp spat.
Manuel slammed his covers together, “Oh, I’m not lying, I can assure you. If you were to run, well, you can’t run. Unless you want to fall off the edge of the universe. Are you getting my point, yet?”
“No.”
“We’ve established that you can neither fly nor freeze. Both will get you killed. So, which F does that leave?” Manuel asked.
“Fight,” Jaycee said.
“Exactly. Your only available course of action. Are you all ready for war? Or do you want to fall on your knees and beg for mercy?” Manuel shifted to the window and aligned his pages to the sandy ground, “Because I can assure you, those Shanta things out there haven’t shown very much of that so far.”
Jaycee clamped the buckles on his exo-suit together, “He’s right, you know.”
Tripp kept his eyes fixed on Manuel, “So we fight?”
“Damn right we fight,” Manuel realized something peculiar about what he’d just said, “Hmm, that rhymes. I must remember that.”
“Miew,” Jelly snuggled up to Wool. The pink glow from inside her belly sluiced around her infinity claws.
Tripp approached the bed and made eye contact with Wool. She seemed upset and very protective of the half-cat child resting against her bosom.
“We need to protect whatever is inside Jelly.”
Bonnie kicked herself away from the wall. Tor stood up straight and brushed himself down. Jaycee collected Baldron’s head from the floor and dislocated the jawbone.
The three of them stood together in solidarity.
“What do you want us to do, Tripp?” Bonnie asked.
“Taking no chances, and certainly no prisoners. We’re all war ready,” he pointed to Jelly, “But our little war mage, here, is not. We have about twelve hours to make sure she is.”
Jaycee and Bonnie fist-bumped each other.
“Leave it with us,” Jaycee ‘fist-bumped’ Tor’s face a bit harder than necessary.
“Oww.”
“We’ll toughen her up.”
“Good,” Tripp looked at Baldron’s body before making his way out of Medix, “Bring what’s left of the dead Russian with you. I think I’ll—”
“—Which one?” Jaycee joked as he looked from Baldron to Tor.