Saturday Centus

OK, we've got a more conducive prompt this week, thank God! Apparently Jenny Matlock selected a snippet from a song lyric. I didn't bother listening to the song for inspiration, though -- that's what coffee is for! It's inspiration in a cup.

But anyway, here's my tale, which may well establish me as the science fiction geek of the Saturday Centus crowd. But I'm pretty much already a science fiction geek, so it's fine by me!

Here's my tale, with the prompt in bold.

James and William crouched on opposite sides of the open door to the control room of Mars’s mightiest battle cruiser. Alarms were still blaring; smoke choked the corridors. Martian troopers were searching for the intruders, to no avail. Two men, seconds away from winning the war for Earth.

“Before we do this,” James said, “I gotta say you’ve been a hell of a partner, man. I’d catch a grenade for ya.”

“OK,” William said as he tossed James a live grenade and ran away.

“Martian double-agent,” James said, stunned. “Son-of-a--”

Boom.

And Mars conquered Earth.

By the way, I've just figured out that Google Docs's word count function somehow counts HTML tags as words! I always write them into my text, as is my habit for writing online, but I experimented a bit: I wrote the tale, checked the word count, then I went back and deleted the HTML tags (italics and bold, actually), and checked the word count again -- which had gone down. Interesting.

Anyway, enjoy!

(And as always, or at least until I finish answering questions, Centus participants are invited to Ask Me Anything!)