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A terrible last minute plan

Terra, 3109 AD

Alester's home 126 North Anexis Central

Zack and Ryan sat on their couch stumped. The entire house was looking like a tornado had gone through it.

"Man, just when everything started to come together." said Zack as he put a broken lamb back on its stand. "Where's the cylinder?"

"In Jas' pocket. Gone." said Ryan

"There goes our only lead."

"Unless..." Ryan's eyes opened wide in realisation. "Dude, holy crap! Hades, the lava moon! Is it coincidental that only we started talking about Hades, the kitchen went insane? Someone's watching us and needed us to be thrown off. And, I found this!"

Ryan picked up the waiver that he found and gave it to Zack.

"That makes sense! So Jas was somehow transported to Hades. But if someone wanted us to be thrown off, then why kidnap Jas?"

"I don't know. But now we know Jas' location!"

"How do we get there though?" said Zack.

They both thought in silence until Ryan had an idea. Ryan opened his mouth but was immediately cut off by Zack.

"No! No! Nope! It will not happen! N-"

"But you don't know what I was about to say!"

"You were planning to-"

"Yeah that was definitely my plan."

After gathering a backpack full of supplies and a laptop, they stood in front of the manhole with a military insignia.

"This is a bad idea." said Zack.

"Yeah." said Ryan.

They both stood at the foot of the manhole in constant mental denial.

"Then let's go back to the house." said Zack.

"No." said Ryan.

"Fine. Let's go over the plan."

"Ok, so we go in, hack into the M-612 space-plane hangar and trick it into detaching the space-plane, launch it to Hades using calculations that are probably wrong, find Jas, come back and put the space-plane back and hope no one notices. Yup, this is a terrible idea."

"Then let's go!"

"No. Dude we agreed that we'd do anything to get him back."

"But what about Sam and Alex? They're down there for most of the day. They'll notice for sure. What about the police? They know who we are and they're outside right now!" said Zack pointing at an officer.

"We just need enough time to get into the manhole. We'll close it as soon as we're through. So if we sneak from behind the house, we should have enough time. And Sam and Alex are not as hard to beat as the police."

"Agree to disagree. They found us every time we went down there."

"We'll do something."

They ran out of their house, locked it beforehand and tried walking towards the manhole while drawing as little attention as possible. As soon as the officer turned around, they forced open the manhole cover got in and closed it just as quick.

The pair climbed down to the base which they had started to become familiar with. They used their phone's light to navigate until they found the M-612. The plane was cuboidal in shape, about as large as four cargo trucks with two large wings on both of its longer sides. The wings had jet turbines to fly within the stratosphere and hydrogen fusion engines to fly in space. It's model was discontinued as an accident with an experimental version of a lightspeed engine failed and crashed the ship and the passengers into the Sun. Due to high expectations, the software was burned onto all models and all future models rendering the model unsafe. Hence the discontinuation.

The hangar had a computer that controlled its docking. Any unauthorised docking or undocking wasn't allowed. The brothers required the docking clamps to open or else it would never fly. Thanks to Ryan's programming knowledge, they made a program that could make the computer think that it was authorised by simply adding a new authorisation key. Ryan plugged his laptop into the hangar's computer and uploaded the code while Zack stood lookout.

"Alright, this will take a few minutes to finish. Make sure no one can see us."

"Alright, coo-" replied Zack, interrupted by a soda can hitting his head.

"You left that here." said Alex sitting on the wing.

"Ow! Why'd you thro- hold up." said Ryan sarcastically. "Great job, lookout."

"What are you doing? I told you to tell us when you're down here." said Alex.

"Oh hey Alex. Uh..." he turned his head to Ryan and said "What was our excuse?"

"I'm busy!" said Ryan barely looking up from the laptop. "Just tell them what happened."

"Them?" asked Zack.

"Hey guys!" said Sam from under the wing.

Zack explained the previous events as he had no choice.

"... and we arrive here to 'borrow' that ship to get Jas back."

"Cool."

"Yeah so can you leave us to do it now?" said Zack.

"Leave you to steal a plane and escape? We are totally dead if we do that!" said Sam.

"True. Ok, here's a deal-" said Ryan before being interrupted.

"No dummy, we make the deal. Do you have any idea how many cops are after you? We'll let you go if you let us come with you!"

"Why?" asked Ryan.

"Well we're interested now and we're bored. Plus both of our parents are out on work trips for the month." said Sam.

"We could get killed," said Zack.

"Or you could get arrested! So do we have a deal?" asked Alex.

"Fine." said Zack reluctantly. "We should have enough supplies for five."

Ryan finished hacking into the computer and opened the doors above him. On the surface, the road appeared to split open.

"We haven't got a second to lose."

Ryan ran with the laptop into the ship followed by his brother, Sam and Alex. They closed the airlock while Ryan ran for the controls. He read through the pirated manual and started the launch sequence. Zack piloted the ship since he was sixteen and was put through a year of military training which was a mandatory thing in Anexis. In that year, he was trained as a pilot so he knew how to fly the M-612.

The ships jet turbines pointed downwards and fired at full thrust launching the plane skywards and closing the road behind it.

The four inside shouted loudly as the ship approached orbital velocity. Ryan grabbed the controls and entered the desired velocity along with the burns required to get into orbit while using less fuel. The fuel burns completed with the map showing a blue circle around the planet Terra plotting the ship's trajectory. The police officers on the ground were left in confusion but then shrugged, and left the scene thinking that the late night shift had really got to them.