“Delayed?” Shango arched a greying brow. “By whom?”
“Well…” an unfamiliar female voice came from the doorway, and all three of the warriors turned quickly to its source, a young woman in the doorway. They could only stare with their mouths agape when she confessed: “By me, actually.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Bridge, Aboard the Chesed, Klaunox Sector
A second after she’d announced her presence, the girl felt a pang of regret that she knew she couldn’t let turn to panic.
Fuck! she thought to herself. Why did I have to go and let them know it was me?
She kept her eyes on the three handsome-yet-roughshod looking men before her to gauge their reactions. The two younger ones had a decidedly more hostile look in their eyes, but seemed to be waiting on the elder one who had done most of the talking as she’d been eavesdropping.
“Hmm,” the older looking leader-type mused while examining her. There was something disarming in his gaze. It was as though he were looking straight through her, seeing things imperceptible to common eyes. “And who might you be?”
“I could ask you the same thing, you know.” The girl tried her best to deflect from a question she had no answer to.
“I’m Shango,” the man replied curtly, as though he’d anticipated a response like this. With a slight motion of his left hand he motioned to the other two. “These are my travelling companions, Loco and Olofi.”
Though the girl opened her mouth to answer the introduction, Shango spoke right over her, continuing: “Now that I have made the requisite introductions, you shouldn’t have any problem answering my initial question.”
“Right.” The girl’s eyes moved as inconspicuously as she could manage around the ship as she tried to come up with an answer.
I need a name, she thought. Fuck! If only I had any kind of memories. The only goddamn names I can remember right now are Marshmallow and Jelly Bean, for fucks sake! Her gaze fell upon the first piece of writing she could see: An imprinted metal tag above the console to her right.
“Bentley,” she read the tag, while making a point to look away from it and at Shango. “My name is Bentley.”
“Bentley?” the one who Shango had identified as Loco, repeated with a sneer. “As in the vacuum avionics manufacturer?”
“Yeah, I got that a lot growing up,” Bentley answered quickly. “Kind of gets old after the first thousand times, you know.”
She mentally patted herself on the back for that quick bit of improvisation.
Loco turned his attention back to his original question. “Alright, fair enough. So then, Bentley, mind telling me what the hell you’re doing on my ship?”
There was a pause while Shango and Olofi turned their eyes to their companion in what, gauging by the way he reacted to it, was a mild rebuke.
“Alright, Alright!” Loco said after a few moments had passed. “Our ship. Happy?” he refocused on Bentley and continued: “What the hell are you doing on our ship?”
“Honestly?” the word felt awkward coming from her mouth; she hadn’t been honest with them so far, after all, but saw no harm in telling them the truth about this. “I really don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Loco pressed her. “Somehow I don’t believe that. Shango, can we just jettison this girl out the portside airlock already so we can get back to business?”
“What?!” Bentley shouted at the casual assertion that she should be murdered. “Are you fucking serious?”
“Loco!” Olofi seemed alone in being taken aback by this.
“I don’t see the benefit in that,” Shango said, the matter-of-fact tone he took in it making it clear that the sanctity of human life was not his underlying reason. “This girl is, near as our scans can tell, the only organic being still left on board our ship.” His head turned a little towards Jelly Bean when he emphasized organic. “With our having just reclaimed the Chesed, her debrief has to be of some value.”
“She could be a LaPlace agent,” Loco said.
“I don’t even know what that is!” Bentley countered in protest.
“I don’t imagine they would have left one of their own on a ship with an active self-destruct sequence,” Shango said.
“Well, maybe she works for Legba,” Loco argued. “She could be planning to bring the ship right back to him.”
“Oh, come the fuck on!” Bentley interjected forcefully. She’d had quite enough of these two casually discussing her as though she weren’t there. “Look, I’ve never heard of a LaPlaza or a Legba or Lambada or whatever the fuck you think I’m working for! I’m not working for anyone, okay? I’m working for myself. And I’m sure as flying fuck not getting thrown out of any airlocks!”
Bentley took in a deep breath.
Shit, she thought, Maybe yelling at the guys talking about killing me isn’t the best plan of action…
Loco smiled widely at Bentley’s outburst, baring his teeth almost as though he were an animal looking at a piece of meat. Olofi’s forehead wrinkled a little and he looked at her with a bit of sympathy. Shango’s expression hadn’t changed at all through the whole exchange, and when he finally spoke, it was with the same even, logical cadence that he’d spoken with before, as though completely sidestepping Loco’s suspicions and Bentley’s indignation.
“Please elaborate,” Shango said. “If you don’t know how you got here, then what do you know of the events surrounding your arrival?”
“Not a whole lot,” Bentley said. “I kind of just woke up in the med bay.”
“The med bay,” Shango echoed her words. “Were you injured? In recovery?”
“I don’t think so. At least nothing I could see. There was this old guy there, and he was doing some kind of test, I think? Had me hooked up to computer equipment. Electrodes stuck to my head and everything.”
She considered mentioning the sword, but the old man’s words about protecting it rang through her mind. She was already being made uneasy by these three men, in particular the one who had casually suggested stranding her in space, and was unsure quite what she should be sharing with them.
“Curious,” Shango mused, stroking his beard. “Accompany us to the medical bay. I’ll need to see everything you did.”
“Uh, sure…” Bentley’s affirmation went to Shango’s back, as he’d already turned away back out of the door and down the corridor. Loco and Olofi followed.
Bentley, as she now knew herself, followed on after.
+++
It had only been moments since she’d last been there, but there was something about the prospect of returning to the med bay that sent a chill down her spine. Everything had happened so suddenly, from waking up with no memories to witnessing the death of the first person she’d met, to hiding out in a supply closet in fear of her life before finally leaving that room. It was, she considered, a place that made up the bulk of Bentley’s memories, and none of them were pleasant for her to think about. The slow, determined way they walked towards it was almost worse, coldly retracing the steps she’d hurriedly taken in an attempt to escape danger.
“So, just so we’re all on the same page” Olofi said to the others as they moved through the Chesed’s corridors. “This old guy in the med bay… We’re all thinking that was Legba, right?”
“That was my assumption,” Shango confirmed. “That is a fairly approximate description of him for someone unfamiliar with his less obvious specifics.”
“And way, way more accurate the more you do know about him,” Loco added.
“Perhaps,” Shango answered. “But I’m more curious as to what use he would have in bringing a stray girl on board at a time like this.”
“Maybe he got lonely,” Olofi suggested, a half-serious note to his voice. “Happens to the best of us.”
“He would have almost certainly had better options for such a singular purpose,” Shango said.
“Like a certain priestess, maybe?” Olofi glanced at Loco with a smirk.
“Hey, fu
ck you, man,” Loco answered his comrade’s ribbing. “Can we just let that one go already?”
“But there is an issue of much greater interest to me,” Shango said, forcing them back to the initial topic. “The manner in which she described her captivity. He seemed to be performing some kind of experiment. I’m curious as to what that might be.”
“I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it captivity. I wasn’t strapped down or anything. And really, all I got from it was a nasty headache,” Bentley told them, though none of them acknowledged her directly in the conversation, continuing to speak amongst themselves.
“I still say we should just space her,” Loco repeated, much to Bentley’s visible chagrin. “Like, what can she possibly tell us we can’t figure out on our own? Not worth the risk.”
“Wisdom is knowing the limits of your knowledge,” Shango chimed wisely. He glanced back at Bentley with a cold look that somehow felt more threatening than Loco’s repeated suggestions to throw her out into the vacuum of space. “And all of us, in this world and beyond, are limited by our own perspective. We were not there, and cannot have the advantage of that perspective without exploring it. To deny that would be foolhardy.”
“My perspective’s served me just fine, Shango-dango,” Loco shot back. “Well enough that I can tell when something’s gonna reek of trouble. We could nip this in the bud right now. And we should. Trust me on this.”
“I’m right behind you, asshole!” Bentley interjected in a rejection of their attempts to shut her out. “Maybe scale back on all the talk about fucking murdering me just a little bit?”
Unlike the other two, who continued to converse between themselves, Olofi turned his head to acknowledge Bentley, and slowed his stride until he was beside her following a few steps behind them. He gave her a warm smile.
“Don’t worry,” Olofi said to her reassuringly. “Whatever you hear, you’re not going to get hurt. That’s not our style. I won’t harm someone who isn’t trying to do the same to me. Loco can just forget his manners sometimes.”
“I remember my manners just fine!” Loco called back at them. “I just don’t like excess baggage. Especially when that baggage is almost definitely a spy.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to toss her out of an airlock,” Olofi countered. “We can just drop her off somewhere safe.”
“If she’s a spy, which she definitely is, then her dying in space is my definition of somewhere safe. For us.” Loco shot Bentley an absolutely merciless look.
“That’s enough,” Shango spoke sternly, demanding an end to their argument when the doors to the med bay slid open before them. “She’s cooperating. That’s all that matters at this moment.”
Peering through that open doorway into the med bay was every bit as uncomfortable to Bentley as she’d anticipated it might be. The area looked like a crime scene, complete with a bloodstained floor and the mess created both by Bentley and the earlier boarding party. Shango approached it just as meticulously as any detective might, standing just two steps in from the doorway, glancing back and forth at each area of interest in silence.
After several moments had passed, Shango looked back at Bentley with that same steely-eyed stare he’d been periodically dealing her. “So this is where you first awoke, then?”
“Yeah,” Bentley affirmed with a nod.
“And you’re certain it was this med ba and not the one on the lower deck?”
“Pretty sure,” Bentley answered. “Unless pools of blood on the floor is just how you guys decorate all your medical facilities.” Though speaking casually, she felt a chill in her body even referencing the blood on the floor, its source still so fresh in her mind.
“Not a bad idea!” Loco said with a wide grin. “Hey Shango, this that perspective you’re looking for? A new interior decorator for the Chesed?”
“And the exact spot you woke up in was…?” Shango’s eyes moved from the blood to follow Bentley’s arm motioning at the chair she’d come to life in, still strewn with electrodes and wiring.
“I woke up in that chair.” She moved ahead to point more directly to it, reliving her recent memories of this place to walk the others through it. Walking past the chair, she moved over to the closet she’d taken refuge in, with various supplies still scattered on the floor. “When the soldiers came, I hid up in here. Ah, a few things got knocked over when I climbed out, too.”
All three of them gave her a shaming look at the mess on the floor.
“...Sorry,” she finally said.
“And whose blood is it?” Shango asked, returning laser-focused on his train of inquiry. He kneeled to get a closer look at the fresh-drying sanguine pool. “Yours, Bentley?” Even through that calm, analytical pattern of speech, Bentley could feel something almost accusatory in the way he said her name.
“What? No!” she protested. She doubted she could survive the loss of that much blood in the first place. “It was the old guy. He was already wounded by something before I woke up. He was bleeding really badly.” Her head sank with her expression at the memory of his lifeless form in her arms. “He… He didn’t make it. I watched him die.”
“And so where is his body?” Shango asked, leaning in closer to examine the blood.
“No idea,” Bentley said. “He was right there in the middle of all this before. And now he’s just… Not.”
“Maybe LaPlace grabbed it?” Olofi suggested.
“No. Not from the way this blood pools,” Shango said while staring at it more closely, pointing at the ebbing mass and tracing the outline of it. “There’s no sign of a body being dragged or moved. Or getting up, for that matter.”
“So you still think it was Legba?” Loco asked, coming closer to Shango.
“I mean, it had to be,” Olofi said. “It was just her and him on board, right? Unless he decided to team up with some other mysterious old man.”
“Except this old man bled out and died if we’re to believe Bentley.” Shango stood up as though finished with the blood stain. “If such a thing could happen to Legba, that would be an… Interesting development.”
“Understatement of the century, I’d say,” Olofi concurred.
“I’ll fuckin’ say,” Loco said. “Not like Legba to bleed out from flesh wounds, much less actually die. Heaven knows I’ve tried my damndest more than a few times.”
“Perhaps he’s somehow been forced into mortality,” Shango speculated quietly. “The process of crossing over could have taken an unknown toll on him. We should even consider the possibility that he’s been placed in a similar predicament to us.”
“Yeah, somehow I doubt that,” Loco said. “With those moves he pulled on us earlier? If he can do that kind of shit while mortal, we’re going to need to seriously redefine what counts as mortality.”
Shango turned his eyes to Bentley, and the others followed suit. Since they’d stopped asking her questions, she’d been fixated on their conversation, trying to make what little sense she could out of the things they said from their back and forth. Their sudden awareness of her attention brought about an abrupt silence.
“We’ll discuss this further at a later point,” Shango finally stated. “We’ve spent enough time navel-gazing on these events. Now we need to plan our next move.”
“Well, I can tell you my next move,” Loco said. “Mess hall. If I don’t fill my belly soon, I’ll be chewing someone’s arm off for the fresh meat.” He gave Bentley a very specific look and bared his teeth, letting out a feral growl.
She moved back half a step, not comfortable with the sentiment irrespective of whether it was intended as a joke. Then Loco turned around and walked away with a self-satisfied chuckle.
“What the fuck?” Bentley muttered under her breath. “Did that guy just try to say he was going to eat me?”
CHAPTER SIX
Mess Hall, Aboard the Chesed, Klaunox Sector
The mess hall would have been easy for Bentley to miss. She considered that she might have eve
n passed through it more than once during the back-and-forth from the bridge to the med bay. It was all tables, chairs, and chrome-plated walls, making it look more like an excessively sterile meeting room than a place for eating.
By the time Bentley arrived, Loco was already there, interacting with a console on the wall. His furrowed brow told her he was frustrated. As she approached him, with Jelly Bean close behind her, he turned his head to scowl at her.
“Jelly, can you open this fucking thing already?” he asked, rattling at the panel. It became apparent to Bentley that the man was not looking at her, but rather through her, to the android in the doorway. “It’s not giving me access, someone must have busted the panel.”
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