Awakening

by Ell Leigh Clarke

  “My intuition is that she will be willing to join us,” Shango said. “The way she looked upon the sword… She’s drawn to it in a way even you or I cannot fathom.”

  “I find that a bit hard to believe,” Olofi answered. “There’s no way it could mean to a mortal what it means to us.”

  “It’s a bit beyond my ken as well,” Shango admitted. “But, then, so is the sword.”

  “I guess we need to prepare her for the worst, then,” Olofi said.

  “Indeed. She will need to be trained in proper combat,” Shango said. “She has talent and good battle sense, but she lacks strategy, situational awareness, and refined technique. All these things will be necessary if she’s going to survive aboard our ship, and our mission going forward.”

  “I can handle her training,” Olofi offered. “Just leave it to me.”

  “You remain a noble spirit through all of this, Olofi,” Shango smiled, sadly. “But no, I will need your talents for locating the sword. And when Loco sobers up, he should be able to acquire some information from the other side for us to work with.”

  “And her training?”

  “Leave that to me,” Shango said. “I believe I can already see that which needs to be brought out in her.”

  “High hopes, huh?” Olofi finished his glass of wine and looked down at the table. “You know, it’s just too bad Legba isn’t around now. He’d be able to tell us everything we need to know about the sword.”

  “It is indeed a shame,” Shango agreed. “Unfortunately, it really does appear that he is gone this time. It’s possible we should not expect to see him again.”

  “Shit,” Olofi struggled to even think of it. “Can you even imagine?”

  “I can,” Shango said. “Though I would greatly prefer not to.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Mess Hall, Aboard the Chesed, Klaunox Sector

  It was late.

  Shango and Olofi had long since retired to their rooms, leaving the mess hall unoccupied when Bentley came to it. She was crouched behind the bar, rummaging past the various glasses and looking for some kind of sign of storage. She was sure this was where Jelly Bean had been keeping that tequila, though she didn’t want to go to the trouble of waking the android to ask for directions.

  “Aha!” Bentley whispered her victory declaration when her hand touched square glass. She pulled out a fresh bottle of the same tequila with the odd script and the suns on its label. Then she plucked a pair of shot glasses from the area the bottle had been found and then quietly crept back to her quarters.

  Bentley stopped before she reached her own room, standing instead in front of Jade’s. She could still hear her crying, though not as intensely as she had been before.

  Bentley gently knocked on the door three times and waited for a reply.

  “Please,” Jade’s muffled reply came through. “I just need to be alone right now.”

  “It’s Bentley,” she said. “And come on… Locking yourself in there being sad won’t make you feel better. But I brought something that might.”

  “What could possibly make me feel better right now?” Jade called back, sniffling.

  “Well, if you let me in I can show you.”

  The door opened. Bentley entered to see Jade with her face buried in a pillow. When she looked up she was puffy-eyed and without makeup. She was still pretty without it, Bentley thought at first glance, her presently haggard state notwithstanding.

  “What… What is that?” Jade asked. “Some kind of drink?”

  “Tequila,” Bentley said, holding it up so she could see it. Jade squinted and looked closer at the label.

  “Tierra Trestriella,” Jade said. “I haven’t seen a bottle of that in years.”

  “Wait, you can read the label?” Bentley looked back at the unintelligible script.

  “No,” Jade shook her head. “Well, yes. Some of it. But Tierra Trestriella is a bit famous where I grew up. Only a few light klicks away from my home planet, I’m told.”

  “Huh, so you’ve had it before?”

  “Not in years,” Jade said. “Jedson was a whiskey man. And when I came along with him I mostly stuck to synth cocktails.”

  “Yeah, I guess you don’t look like a hard liquor kind of girl,” Bentley said while she laid out the two glasses and began to pour.

  “Where I came from you didn’t have much choice,” Jade said. “That whole sector is desert planets. Too much sunlight coming from every direction. It’s never night, never winter. Just hot, sunny, and dry. All the time.”

  “Sounds kind of great if you ask me,” Bentley said.

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Jade smiled weakly while she accepted the glass and they each took a shot. Both girls inhaled sharply from the burn.

  “Back home we’d serve it with onion slices,” Jade said. “You’re supposed to bite into them after to dull the pain of the alcohol. I didn’t find out until I met Jedson that they usually use sour fruit everywhere else. But we couldn’t grow any fruit out there worth eating.” Jade’s eyes welled up at the memories of what she’d lost.

  “Thinking of going back there now?” Bentley asked. “Home, I mean.”

  “Not a chance,” Jade said. “Every young girl from there only dreams of getting out. Like I said, nothing but sand.”

  “And some pretty fucking good tequila!” Bentley said as she refilled their glasses.

  “That’s different. Tierra Trestriella can only be made on one planet in the sector, in a spot that’s right in the middle of the suns. The company that makes it controls the whole planet, you can’t even live there if you don’t work for them. I don’t know the science or anything, but they say the climate lets the agave there grow so large it can be seen from space.”

  “I guess that’s what the bottle wants you to believe,” Bentley looked back at the label doubtfully.

  “But there’s nothing for me back there. There was barely anything to begin with. Everyone is either living there with nothing or just passing through. I’m not sure if I even have any family left. For girls like me, our only option out there was to find a good husband,” she reflected sadly. “And I did. Sort of.”

  “No ring,” Bentley pointed out. “And I’m sorry, but I really don’t think he was a good guy.”

  “Oh, he wasn’t,” Jade agreed. “He was selfish and self-absorbed. Lazy but demanding. Expected everyone to do everything for him and got angry when it wasn’t perfect.” She sighed longingly, as though she were painting a beautiful picture of the man rather than listing his flaws. “But, you know… He took me away from that place and showed me things I never even dreamed of seeing when I was a little girl. Food, drink, clothes, art… For a girl who grew up on nothing but sand, that felt like love. It felt better than love.”

  “There’s still a great big universe out there to discover,” Bentley said. “It’s yours now even more than it was then.”

  “I don’t know,” Jade said before they both took another drink. “I feel like it’s all just been taken away from me. Like I’m just that little girl again, staring out at the sand with no idea what to do.”

  “Like the world’s a blank slate,” Bentley agreed. “It’s scary: starting fresh and not knowing where you’ll end up.”

  “When I was little, I thought I knew where I’d end up,” Jade said. “And it wasn’t scary. But it was sad. And boring.”

  “And that wasn’t you,” Bentley said. “You’re a lot more than that, right?”

  “I guess so,” Jade said, finally wiping the tears from her eyes. “Or I hope so, anyway.”

  “Well you know what?” Bentley refilled the glasses one more time. “Fuck possibilities. And fuck destiny. From now on nobody gets to tell you what your life can or should be except you. You’ve got a blank slate, that just means you’re free to paint whatever crazy picture you want, right?”

  “You think so?” Jade said, looking encouraged, though likely under the influence of the tequila.

 
“I know so,” Bentley said. She lifted her glass up. “Let’s toast to that one.”

  Jade lifted her own glass, her hand quivering slightly as she said: “Toast? To what?”

  “Hm…” Bentley cocked her head to the right before deciding: “To new beginnings.”

  “To new beginnings,” Jade whispered the phrase back. Then the two girls brought the liquor to their lips and drank to their uncertain futures.

  +++

  Bridge, Aboard the Chesed, Klaunox Sector

  It was the dead of night aboard the Chesed, or at least that was what its environmental systems simulated to assure that the organics maintained proper and consistent sleep cycles. It was doing its job, and all of them were sound asleep in their rooms.

  But Jelly Bean, in her artificial advantage, had this time entirely to herself. It was an ideal time to run deep systems diagnostics without interruption, and she would often become so engrossed in them that anyone who crept by her at this hour would mistakenly believe she was engaging in some android analogue for sleep. But nobody had come by in hours, not since Bentley had last crossed the bridge on her way to the mess hall.

  Assured that she was alone, Jelly Bean ended her interface with the bridge and moved to the far corner of the navigation console. This area was automated and seldom touched by the crew. When it was, Shango was always more likely to use remote screens than approach the console itself. And that was why Jelly Bean had selected the small compartment beneath it, activated via her private interface, as the perfect hiding spot.

  The thin shelf flicked open at her command, revealing its contents: the security card she had found in Bentley’s pocket. Her visual sensors scanned the card, not to read its contents, but merely to identify it. Assured that it had neither been taken nor touched, she bid the compartment to close up, locking away the secrets within.

  And the dutiful android Jelly Bean quietly returned to her work.

  +++

  Aboard the Geburah

  There was no rest aboard the Geburah, not for its machinery nor its projects. Night was neither simulated nor recognized. Workers and soldiers alike saw only their assigned shifts, posts, and duties, and found time to sleep outside of them.

  Command officers were the obvious exception to this rule: they rested when they pleased. Though if any LaPlacian soldier had ever encountered an incident where Amroth had been asleep, it had never gone reported.

  A technician ran hastily down the main corridor of the science and surveillance deck, a look of urgency in his eyes, the rest masked in black. He arrived at his supervisor’s desk, gasping for breath, but still managed to deliver the news.

  And the chief surveillance officer knew that, whatever strange hour it might be, he would be the one that needed to call Amroth on his private corteX channel.

  Amroth typically answered any call instantly. He was prompt in all things, and it was those who wasted his time who saw consequences. Tonight, however, there was no response to the hail. The automated response stated that he was not to be disturbed. The silence from the ship’s supreme authority was something that could be felt through every deck of the Geburah.

  Members of LaPlacian high command were typically known for extravagance, especially in their private quarters. The resources allocated to them were virtually unlimited, and as such any personal expense could easily be dismissed as negligible. Malleghan’s example set the tone for this as well, of course.

  Amroth’s quarters showed no such gilding or indulgence. It was a large room, as the space owed to the ship’s Captain demanded, but most of this space was empty. Wall to wall, floor to floor, only the bare polished chrome of the Geburah’s base interior metals served as decoration. His bed was a simple gravitic sling, represented only by the nodes above and below it that suspended him when he chose to rest. The only exception to this empty space was the standing rack of swords kept at the room’s center. Displayed in the very middle of it was his hard-fought prize: the Sword of the Crossroads, rendered back unto him by his furious master.

  Amroth’s cold, pale hand clutched the hilt of the weapon. Like any weapon in his hands, it was an efficient instrument of war. Unlike any other weapon, he felt particularly drawn to it. And yet it did not speak to him. No matter how he tried, it could not come to life in his hands. Not as it had for that one moment when Bentley had touched it. Every time he thought of that fact, he felt a boiling, uncontrollable resentment the likes of which had not truly plagued his well-honed mind in centuries: Anger. Raw, unadulterated rage, that relentlessly gnawed at the corners of all rational thought.

  With a wave of his other hand he summoned the main feature of the great empty space in his quarters, a detailed holographic mapping of the Geburah. He zoomed in on the Panopticons and the damage they had been dealt, still in its nanorepairs phase to carefully reconstruct the deck. Even watching the glass domes having their cracks sealed and reconfigured served as a bitter reminder of the humiliation of that battle. But it was when he looked closely at that deck that he finally became aware that he was being hailed still. He finally let go of the sword and opened his channel.

  “Report,” he demanded. “And this had best be pertinent.”

  “Yes sir,” the officer said, his voice bleeding fear and anticipation beneath its professionalism. “We’ve got something. You need to see this.”

  Amroth grimaced at the claim. “I hear such things daily,” he said dismissively. “And you deem to interrupt one of my few moments of respite, for what?”

  “It’s about the girl, sir. The one that the Chesed’s crew took.”

  Amroth’s face turned plain again at this in interest. “Go on,” he said.

  “This footage, it’s…” the officer paused. “It’s better if you take a look.”

  As the new images flooded into his data banks, he opened them up to gaze upon the information he had been given. After a few moments, he looked back down at the sword, and the corner of his mouth twitched into the ghost of a grin.

  “Was this your plan, Legba?” Amroth said to himself. “Foolish old man…”

  He looked back into the screen, showing the face of his new target. One that which he would pursue to the ends of the galaxy if necessary.

  Bentley.

  CorteX Transmission from Jelly Bean

  Hello.

  Jelly Bean here.

  Yes, yes. I know - funny name for an android. My creator had a sense of humor. Quite frankly I’m just happy he didn’t call me Marshmallow. That’s what his next creation was designated.

  Bentley has asked me to be the liaison between her adventures and your earth communication methods.

  I believe you call it email?

  Why you don’t have corteX implants in your neck of the woods I don’t know. So much more convenient… Unless you don’t want to be tracked. Maybe that’s it. You don’t want your every movement monitored. Human rebels – you’re all so…

  I digress.

  I am here to act as your interface. To send you alerts of when the next instalment of Bentley’s adventures is available to you on Amazon. Or the ‘Zon as we like to call it.

  If you’d like to track Bentley through her trials and tribulations as she tackles all manner of shenanigans, then please go ahead and leave your corteX/ email address here:

  http://ellleighclarke.com/Jelly

  As you might have gathered, this transmission will not just be coming through space between our sectors, but is also travelling back through time.

  I will attempt to send you updates in chronological order but do be advised that occasionally gravitational optics will interfere (no pun intended! tee hee) with the sequencing of these packets.

  An understanding of all things timey-whimey will be useful in such instances.

  Additionally, if you have any feedback for Bentley - or the crew - do feel free to pass that on through me. All you need to do is hit reply to any of my messages.

  I process every communication personally.

  Lo
oking forward to hearing from you.

  Jelly Bean

  (on behalf of Bentley and the crew of the Chesed)

  Chesed comms QM

  Klaunox Sector

  Author Notes - Ell Leigh Clarke

  October 23rd, 2018

  I have a confession.

  And I feel a bit nervous sharing this with you so early on, but I feel you ought to know, because it’s already come up a few times on the fb page.

  I don’t always understand references to other works of fiction.