Galaxia

by Kevin McLaughlin

  The young android seemed very uncomfortable with that. “It wouldn't be right for me to just sit around and do nothing when everyone else is working, you know? Plus, it's not like there is a lot else for me to do. Surely I can be of some help somewhere?”

  Shango sent the list of duties to Sven's corteX. “You can be 'at large.' See who needs help and how you can make all these duties go faster.”

  Svend turned to Bentley, and for a moment it seemed like Bentley was not going to get her alone time to consider how to handle her relationship after all. She was saved by Loco, who took Svend by the arm and led him off to help him collect the trash. “Come on, the quicker we get this done, the quicker Shango will give me my booze back.”

  Bentley found that Shango had not been exaggerating the state of the kitchen. They really had been getting lazy lately. The sink was piled high with dishes, the counters were covered in some sort of sticky substance Bentley couldn't identify, and there definitely was some kind of mysterious smell coming from somewhere. She supposed having saved an entire race from certain destruction wasn't a good excuse for living like a slob.

  For around an hour she cleaned, starting with the dishes and moving on to the counters. Unfortunately her time alone wasn't magically giving her the answers to her problems. Life seemed so much simpler when the only things she had to worry about were lost memories and the wrath of vengeful fallen gods. Why'd she have to make things so complicated by throwing a strange new romance into the mix?

  Jade’s voice came over her corteX, “Hey, guys. I'm getting some weird readings down here in the Engine Room. It's probably nothing, but I could use a hand to take some measurements while I run some tests. Any volunteers?”

  Olofi's voice chimed in before anyone else got a chance, “Yes! Please, yes! I'll be right there.”

  Shango's deeper voice came next, “How are the bathrooms coming, Olofi?”

  A long pause. “They're… half done?”

  “Uh huh. Anyone closer to finishing their job?”

  Bentley took a look around the kitchen. There was still some work to be done, and she still hadn't been able to identify the source of the smell, but it was looking leagues better than when she had first come in. “I can come, Jade.”

  Olofi's voice was heartbroken. “But… I could… please?”

  Jade sounded amused by all this. “Thanks, Bentley. I'll see you down in the Engine Room.”

  Bentley left the kitchen and made her way down the hall towards the ladder that would drop her into the Engine Room. The Chesed was spacious enough for the small crew to be comfortable but it wasn't large by the standards of space travel. Bentley had walked its halls enough to navigate them by memory so she wasn't really paying attention to her surroundings as she went, lost in her thoughts about the events of this morning.

  Which is why she didn't notice the floor was wet until she slipped on it and landed right on her rear. She groaned and rubbed her sore tailbone. It seemed fitting for the way this day was going.

  Jelly Bean came up to her, the face on her monitor displaying concern. “Bentley, are you injured? Do you require assistance?”

  Bentley managed to pull herself back to her feet, though she did a bit of slipping and sliding along the way, nearly winding right back on her rump. “I'm fine, Jelly Bean. Why are the floors all wet?”

  The android gestured over at the mop bucket at the end of the hall. “Shango instructed me to mop all the floors on the ship.”

  “Did he also instruct you to leave out the 'wet floor' signs?”

  “He did not. Should I add that to my instructions?”

  The back of Bentley's pant legs were completely soaked. “Might be for the best.”

  Jelly Bean produced a cloth and tried to wipe down the back of Bentley's legs, though she only succeeded in spreading the water around. “Would you like me to perform a spinal readjustment? It may help with the soreness from your fall.”

  Bentley pulled herself from Jelly Bean's attempt at help. “No, I'm alright. Thanks, Jelly Bean.”

  Carefully making her way across the wet floor, Bentley finally made it to the access ladder. Down in the Engine Room Jade was already deep into her work, rushing from console to console, tapping a few buttons on a screen in her hand, then moving on to the next. Jade was very attractive, almost intimidatingly so, looking more like a model than the brilliant engineer she actually was. Even the plain overalls stained with grease she was wearing couldn't really distract from her figure.

  Jade looked up from her screen just long enough to give Bentley a nod of recognition. “Thanks for coming. These readings are really – well, weird doesn't begin to describe them. They keep changing… one second showing normal, the next displaying something completely out of whack. Like, fish swimming through air weird. I think there must be something wrong with the sensor system itself, a bug that's causing it to give inaccurate readings, but I'm having a tough time tracking it down.”

  Bentley was passably tech savvy, though she was definitely out of her element here in the Engine Room. The walls were covered in thick pipes she could only guess the purpose of, the consoles all read out letters and numbers that might as well have been Sanskrit symbols, and the large metal housings of the engine's main components looked alien to her. “Well, I'll help in whatever way I can. What do you need?”

  Jade moved over to one of the metal housings and set down her screen. “I'm going to run some tests, and you are going to watch the readouts, on the panels I direct you to, for fluctuations. We're going to see how long it takes for the anomalies to occur, which should point me in the direction of the bug. You ready?” She didn't wait for Bentley to respond before speaking into her corteX. “Captain Shango, I need to drop us to sub-light to run some tests on the engine. Shouldn't take more than half an hour.”

  Shango's voice came over the cortex, “Understood. Let me know what you find.”

  The engines hummed as Jade made the switch to sub-light thrusters. She directed Bentley to the first console, situated on the wall between a green pipe with a bunch of letters on it and a red pipe with a bunch of numbers on it. “What does it say now?”

  Bentley had to lean in to the screen to read the small yellow numbers. “Uh, looks like, 170–262.”

  Jade was rushing between the metal housings with the energy of a jack rabbit. “Are you sure that's a '1' and not a lowercase 'l'?”

  “Uhm...” Bentley got as close to the screen as she could without pressing her face against it. It was hard to tell. “Maybe? Does it make that big a difference?”

  “Very much so, yes. A lowercase 'l' there would be good, a '1' there would be a big error.”

  “That's confusing. Why wouldn't they just use an uppercase 'L'?”

  Jade chuckled. “Oh no, that would be an entirely different thing. We'd all be dead if there was an uppercase 'L' there.”

  The screen in front of Bentley flashed and the numbers changed. “Hold on, it says something new. p81–173.”

  “What, already?” Jade's face scrunched up in thought as she tapped rapidly on her screen. “That makes no sense. Come on, let's check another one.”

  One after another Bentley helped Jade check the various readouts as she ran tests and tried to find some commonality between all of them. Like the first, each panel would begin with a normal reading and suddenly change to something that made no sense. Well, made no sense to Jade. Neither of the readings made any sense to Bentley.

  Jade was slowly growing more and more frazzled by her lack of ability to make sense of the errors. Grease stains on her arms and face had joined the ones on her clothes as she reached into the metal casings to make adjustments. At some point she started accusing Bentley of giving the readings wrong just to mess with her. After a somewhat heated exchange, that misconception was cleared up.

  As they were preparing to start from the beginning again, a call came over their corteXes. It was Shango. “We have a situation up here. Everyone get to the bridge immediately.”
>
  Bentley and Jade made their way carefully past Jelly Bean's slippery floors and got back to the bridge in time to see the rest of the crew gathered closely around the captain's chair, looking at a screen projected directly in front of them. It showed what looked like a storm, vortexes of dark clouds lit up briefly by flashes of blinding lightning, all swirling rapidly together in a chaotic fury.

  “What planet are we looking at?” Bentley asked as she maneuvered herself closer to the screen.

  Shango's face was hardened with concern. “Not a planet. This is right in front of us. All around us, actually, surrounding us. We're about to fly right into it.”

  Olofi, still wearing thick blue scrubbing gloves, stared. “That shouldn't be possible. How can there be a storm in the middle of space?”

  Shango shook his head. “I don't know, but I don't like it. Better not take any chances. I'm going to turn the main engines back on and we'll jump past them. They ready to go, Jade?”

  Jade fidgeted nervously. “Yes! I mean, they should be? I haven't actually found the problem, but it’s probably just the sensors. I think. The engines were working earlier, so they should be fine for a short time.”

  Loco, who had found something else to fill his cup with, was being his usual self. “Oh, good. The engines are 'probably' fine. So we'll only just 'probably' not die when we turn them back on.”

  Jade scowled and looked like she was about to retort when suddenly the ship began to shake. It rocked back and forth like it was caught in the grip of a giant angry toddler. Bentley was thrown off her feet and slammed into the center table. She saw Svend rush over to try to help her, but he too was lifted from his feet before colliding with the captain's chair.

  Shango was gripping the base of the chair with white-knuckled fists. “We entered the storm! But why aren't the Inertia Dampeners working?”

  Jade had somehow gotten herself tucked into a corner, feet pressed up against the wall to stabilize herself, and was tapping away frantically on her console. “They are working! The ship is shaking itself apart from the inside! The storm must be messing with the important systems – the engines are all online! We need to go!”

  Shango growled but the controls refused to heed him. “I'm trying! We can't make the jump, nothing’s working!”

  The frantic engineer continued to struggle, beating at her console as if force would make everything work. “It doesn't make any sense! The engines are all online! Why won't it…”

  Whatever she was going to say was cut off as the bridge cracked apart, metal and glass flying around, sparks from torn wiring raining down upon them. Everything went dark as the power failed.

  The world spun around Bentley as she tried to find any purchase in the darkness. A light in front of her momentarily illuminated the remains of the bridge. It took a moment before she recognized the light as flames, flames that were quickly approaching her.

  So this is how it ends, she thought. Surviving all those battles just to be killed by a random storm in the middle of space. Well I guess that's just how it goes.

  She prepared herself for death as the explosion of the ship consumed her.

  It turned out that exploding felt very much like being smacked in the face.

  Actually, that was a smack to the face.

  Bentley rolled off her bed, landing on her back and quickly springing to her feet in panic. On the bed, Svend was sleeping peacefully, blissfully unaware of how his hand had once again slapped Bentley awake.

  What the hell is going on?

  Chapter Two

  Had it all been a dream? It had all seemed so real, and yet there was no evidence of what had happened. The ship was peaceful and quiet, just like on any average morning. She was pretty certain she had gotten a nasty cut on her head when she had been sent flying, yet the only ache she had now was from Svend's slap.

  Speaking of which …

  She jabbed out and punched Svend in the side, not gently. He flipped over with a feminine shriek and rolled off the bed. “Wait – what? Who? What's going on?”

  Bentley was not feeling particularly merciful this morning. “You hit me again, you jerk.”

  “Again?” Svend picked himself up off the ground groggily. “Wait, I hit you? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to – you know, I wouldn't ever intentionally – I'm not used to sleeping next to anyone, I think.”

  This all sounded awfully familiar to Bentley. It was not a conversation she wanted to repeat. “Hey Svend, what do you remember about yesterday?”

  Svend blinked, clearly disoriented by the sudden change in the conversation. “Uh, not much happened yesterday, I think? You did some reading and I had Shango teach me a little bit about the ship. Why?”

  It was seeming more and more like what Bentley remembered was a dream. “Do you recall Shango calling us all together to do a cleaning of the ship?”

  Svend sat back down on the bed. “No, I don't think so. Though that probably wouldn't be a bad idea. Have you smelled the kitchen lately?”

  Bentley's head was spinning so she collapsed back onto the bed and buried her face in the pillow, trying to get it to stop.

  She felt Svend's supportive hand on her back. “Did I really hit you that hard? Should I go get Jelly Bean to take a look at you?”

  “No, that's not it.” Bentley felt like she was losing her mind. “Have you ever had a really realistic dream? One that's so real that it leaves you shaken when you wake up?”

  “Well, androids don't dream. Not in the same way that humans do, anyway. We get … more like a reflection of the last day's events. I've heard human dreams can be very intense, though.”

  Bentley flipped over and looked her android lover in the eye. “Not helpful.”

  Svend shrugged apologetically. “Sorry. What did you dream about that's got you so shaken?”

  She sighed and hoped that she wouldn't come off like a crazy person. “A storm. In the middle of space. This ship being destroyed. All of us being killed.”

  “That's rough. But hey, it was just a dream, right? We're all fine, the ship is fine. We could go right now to prove it. I bet Loco's already up and half drunk.”

  “No that's alright.” She pulled the blankets back over her. “I think I just want to rest a little bit more. Join me if you think you can go thirty minutes without smacking me.”

  Svend laid back beside her. “I think I can manage.”

  She barely got the chance to shut her eyes before the knock came at the door. “If you both are awake, Shango has requested the crew gather on the bridge A-S-A-P. That means, 'as soon as possible.' If you are not awake, please awake now.”

  Jelly Bean's words sent a chill down Bentley's spine. She lay paralyzed in the bed, unsure of what to do.

  Svend groaned and rose. “We'll be there in a minute. Guess I need to get back to my room to change. See you on the bridge, Bentley?”

  Bentley didn't move besides a slight nod. “Y-Yeah.”

  She lay there for a while after he left before deciding that she was being silly. There was no such thing as prophetic dreams.

  Well, at least she thought that was true, but after meeting gods and techno-mages she wasn't so sure anymore.

  +++

  She arrived at the bridge to find a scene much like at the beginning of her dream: the three Iwa gathered around the captain's chair, Jade sitting at the Navigation console, and Svend standing by the viewport.

  As in her dream, Shango had on his commanding face. “Good, Bentley is here. Now we can get started.”

  Bentley could replay the entire conversation in her head. Next came Loco's complaint about his missing alcohol.

  To Bentley's surprise, Loco said nothing. He was drinking from the same silver cup she remembered from her dream, but he remained quiet. Perhaps her dream had been just a dream after all. She took a seat at the center table, much as she had done in the dream.

  Though Loco's comments were excluded, Shango's actions continued as they did in the dream, tapping a panel on his forearm
to give everyone the list of chores. “It's cleaning day. Look, I understand everyone needed some time to unwind after the last battle. I did, too. But we've really let the ship go to hell in the meantime. There's garbage everywhere, the kitchen is filthy, and I'm pretty sure something’s rotting in the fridge. That would explain the smell. It's one thing to need a break, but…"

  “Your ship is not a flying trashcan,” Bentley finished for him.

  Shango cleared his throat, surprised. “Why, yes. That is exactly right. Glad you get it, Bentley.”

  Loco snickered. Bentley remembered at this point Loco was supposed to make a stupid joke about the technicality of calling the Chesed a trashcan, but, other than his laugh, he remained quiet. It was strange that, other than Loco, things were playing out exactly as they had in her dream. Perhaps even prophetic dreams can't predict Loco's strangeness.

  Olofi picked up his point in the conversation. “I'm actually glad we're going to be cleaning up a bit. We've all just been kind of moping around…"

  Bentley jumped to her feet. “I'll take the kitchen.”

  She left the group of stunned Iwa as quickly as she could. Admittedly, jumping up and volunteering to clean wasn't really like her, but she needed to get out of there before they saw her in a total freak-out. Once she was alone in the kitchen she took a moment to try and reflect on what was happening and come up with a logical explanation for it.

  Maybe she had heard Shango complaining about the state of the ship yesterday and it had caused her to dream a scenario in which he called everyone together to clean. That wouldn't have been prophetic, just coincidence. And yes, he was using some of the exact same phrasing as in her dream, but what about Loco? Maybe Shango was just so predictable that her dream could guess exactly how he would demand the crew to straighten up.

  Still, there was only one way to know for sure, and that was to wait. She stood in the kitchen for around an hour, waiting for a call to come on her corteX that would tell her that the day was playing out exactly as she dreamed it. When she was convinced enough time had passed she let out a sigh of relief. It had been just a dream after all.