She arrived on the bridge to find a scene that was disturbingly familiar: the rest of the crew gathered around a screen that displayed the swirling clouds and lightning flashes of the storm. It was the same as the last two times, just before the ship had been destroyed.
Bentley rushed up to Shango, who was futilely inputting commands into his console. “What happened? I thought we weren't going to leave hyperspace!”
Shango's teeth were grit in frustration. “We weren't. The ship just dropped out on its own, and now it refuses to go back. None of the controls are responding.”
Nearby, Jade tapped busily on her screen. “It doesn't make sense. The engines still show they are running. There is no reason we should have dropped to sub-light, much less why we shouldn't be able to get back into hyperspace right away.”
Bentley felt her panic begin to kick back in. “Maybe we can dodge the storm with the sub-light thrusters? Can we get around it?”
Shango shook his head. “No good. It's already completely surrounded us, and closing in. Even if we could stop dead in our tracks it would have us soon.”
True to his word, a moment later the ship began to rock violently as the storm consumed it. Everything seemed to slow for Bentley as a scene she was beginning to grow quite familiar with played out for a third time.
“We entered the storm! But why aren't the Inertia Dampeners working?”
“They are working! The ship is shaking itself apart from the inside!”
She crouched down, tucking her head between her legs, and waited for the inevitable. The shaking grew worse, there was shouting and the sound of metal tearing, darkness …
Then the smack.
Somehow this repeated wake-up call was even more frustrating than constantly dying. She slapped Svend's wayward hand away from her face, causing him to roll over and sleep on his other side, a stupid smile on his face. If she didn't know better, she'd think he was having pleasant dreams.
She pulled herself out of bed and decided on her next course of action. Loco remembered but he was completely useless. Bentley wasn't sure what Loco was playing at by refusing to help her in saving the ship, and decided it was probably best she didn't know. It was undoubtedly a selfish and stupid reason.
There were so many unanswered questions. How many more times would this happen? Would they continue to repeat the same day over again until they saved the ship, or could any loop be their last? If she failed to save the ship this time, might they all remain dead? What was the problem with their engines? What was the mysterious storm that was destroying their ship?
It seemed she was no closer to answering these questions than she had been on the first day. She needed help, but who could possibly figure this out?
It was going to have to be Shango again, if she could repeat her performance convincing him of the upcoming danger. His first plan had failed, but Shango was the wisest of the three Iwa and captain for a reason. If anyone could figure out a way out of this cycle of destruction it was him.
“So remaining in hyperspace didn't work?” Shango asked after Bentley had pled her case, updating the story with their latest failure.
“The ship dropped out of hyperspace on its own, right in the middle of the storm.” She was grateful that Shango was hearing her out on this again. Though they had yet to come to a solution, just knowing that Shango believed her and was putting the power of centuries of experience behind them made her feel more confident in their odds.
Shango became quiet, thoughtful, as he tried to process all this information. Bentley could almost see the wheels turning in his mind as the experienced Iwa considered all the possibilities. “It would seem our problems lie in our engines somewhere. They either fail us in getting away from the storm, or drop us right into the middle of it. If we can diagnose the problem in time to prevent our engines from locking us out of hyperspace at the critical moment, we should be able to get out of there.”
Bentley remembered her and Jade's failed attempts at diagnosing the engine problems. “I don't know. We always run out of time before Jade has even a clue about what the problem is.”
Shango wasn't deterred. “That was just with the two of you. This time she'll have the assistance of the entire crew. It is the top priority.”
A short time later the entire crew was gathered and Shango tasked them with the sole mission of diagnosing the problems with the hyperspace engines. He was right: more hands made faster progress. Jelly Bean interfaced with the ship's AI, getting Jade more direct and up-to-the-moment measurements, as well as a history of the strange fluctuations that had recently occurred. Svend and Olofi were on manual labor, helping Jade get under the heavier parts of the metal housing and pulling off bits of copper piping so that she could inspect inside of it. Bentley continued to do what she had done previously: running back and forth between consoles and giving Jade readings that she couldn't understand. Loco … well, he stayed out of the way, at least.
The extra hands helped, and more than once Bentley heard Jade make an “ah-ha!” or an “I see, very interesting”, things she had not heard when it had just been the two of them. Bentley had dared to get her hopes up that they would be able to figure this out after all.
And they might have, too, if they didn't run out of time. Shango's voice came over their cortex, “The storm is here. Tell me you have something, Jade.”
Jade scratched her nose, leaving a grease stain across it. “Yes! Well, kind of. The hyperdrive is behaving strangely because it seems to be trying to operate in multiple states. It's hard to explain … it's like the drive is on in multiple different modes at the same time, but because it can only function in one mode at a time it ends up locking itself up. That's why we're getting so many weird and conflicting readings.”
Shango's voice came quicker as the storm approached. “Can you fix it?”
Their engineer sighed and shook her head, dejected. “Maybe if I had more time. Days, maybe weeks. This is a strange case, our engines theoretically shouldn't be doing any of this, and there's a lot of stuff to sort through to figure out why and how to solve it. I'm sorry.”
The ship began to shake. Bentley knew what came next.
Shango's voice came again, “Everyone brace yourselves. This is going to get bad. And Bentley?”
Bentley could barely muster the will to respond. “Yeah?”
“We'll figure this out. If you get another chance, another time through, we'll get there.”
“Yeah.” She wanted to believe it.
The ship's shaking increased, and Bentley covered her ears and closed her eyes and waited for it to be over.
Smack.
In frustration, she kicked out, hard, sending Svend flying off the bed, sheets and covers coming with him. He landed on his back and flailed there like a fish out of water. His foot thwacked against the bedpost hard, and Bentley got a small amount of satisfaction in his grunt of pain.
He finally managed to get back to his senses and removed himself from the pile of blankets and sheets that had been wrapping him. “What the hell, Bentley.”
She shot him a cold look. “That's one. As far as I'm concerned, I still owe you four more.”
With that, she left a confused Svend behind as she marched out of her room and again made her way down to the bridge. She wasn't sure what would be different this time but what else could she do? Give up?
Loco answered that question for her, surprising her by meeting her halfway to the bridge. “Good morning, sunshine. Sleep well? Besides the whole, getting blown up again thing?”
Bentley was not in the mood. “Out of the way, Loco.”
He held up his arms in a gesture of surrender. “Come on, don't be like that. We are both part of an elite little club here, one in which we're the only two members. You're just cranky 'cause you haven't learned the club perks yet.”
“Perks?”
Loco's smile was so wide that Bentley knew whatever he had planned was going to be big. “We're going to have some fun, Bent
ley.”
Chapter Four
Bentley was not encouraged by the gleeful way Loco said 'fun' but she found herself following him nonetheless. Partly out of morbid curiosity, and partly because she wanted to put off having the same conversation with Shango she had already had with him twice, but now with an additional failure to explain.
Loco led her to the kitchen and had her wait while he dug around the fridge. His snickering the whole while was not comforting.
She grew impatient. “Do we really have time for this, Loco? You know as well as I do what's going to happen later.”
He pulled a panel off the bottom shelf, revealing a hidden compartment at the base of the fridge that Bentley had not been aware of. “We have all the time in the world.”
The smell hit Bentley in the face and it became clear that whatever the source of the rotting smell was she had been hunting earlier, it had been hidden in that compartment. “God, Loco, what is that? It smells like regurgitated rotten eggs!”
Loco's expression was filled with childlike mischief. “This is a little toy I discovered on our last pit-stop. The smell is actually from the liquid it's being preserved in, the substance itself is actually odorless.”
Bentley recoiled with a hand over her nose, trying her best to suppress her gag reflex, as Loco pulled out a glass jar of purplish-brown liquid. He took the jar to the sink and dumped its contents down the drain, catching two balls in his hands as they came out. After rinsing them off under the tap they revealed themselves to be clear orbs roughly the size of a quarter.
She let herself breathe again once the last of the liquid had disappeared down the drain, though she figured it would be days before the air scrubbers finally cleared the smell. “What are those?”
Loco remained frustratingly evasive. “The source of our fun. Come on, we need to brew some coffee, I bet Olofi and our dear captain could use the pick-me-up.”
Bentley watched with strange fascination as Loco brewed two cups of coffee and plopped one of the orbs in each. She could figure out what was going to happen next, clearly he was going to give these to Shango and Olofi to drink and have a laugh at whatever negative effect they had, and she knew she should stop him. But Loco's brazenness gave her pause. His attitude led him to frequent arguments with the others, particularly with Shango whose authority he didn't seem to entirely recognize, but to outright poison them …
Compelled to see this to its conclusion, Bentley followed Loco to the bridge, where Shango and Olofi were already gathered.
Shango broke off whatever conversation he had been privately having with Olofi when they entered. “Bentley, you're up early. And Loco… did you ever go to sleep?”
Loco smiled innocently. “What, can't a guy decide to get an early start to the day? Look, I even had time to brew up some coffee. Help yourselves.”
Shango eyed Loco suspiciously. “If this is related to your missing alcohol stash… ” He still took the cup. “A small coffee bribe isn't going to be enough to get them back.”
Loco shrugged as if he had been caught red handed and gave the other cup to Olofi. “Can't blame a guy for trying.”
Satisfied that he had determined the cause of Loco’s trickery, he didn't hesitate to drink from the spiked coffee. “You'll have a chance to earn them back. I was just about to call everyone to the bridge to assign cleaning duties for the ship. If you actually do the job I assign you without complaining, I will return your alchloho nad oyu anc rainmen durnk orf eht erst of eht ript orf lal I acre.”
It took Shango a moment to realize that had just vomited word soup. “Twah eht ellh?”
Olofi's eyes narrowed on the cup in his hand, which he had already drunk from. “Shango, are you alright? Loco you son of a bitch what idd oyu od? Rae oyu unts?”
Loco started laughing like a madman as his two fellow Iwa began to berate him in a nonsense language. Bentley had no idea what was going on. Had Loco's nonsense finally given Shango a stroke?
Bentley smacked Loco on the back of the head, knocking him out of his reverie. “What did you do to them?”
He smiled back at her while rubbing the back of his head. “What we did. You came along for the ride, making you just as guilty in this.” Seeing the daggers flying from Bentley's eyes he decided to explain. “It's a little treat called an ‘Anagram Bit’. It messes with the speech center of the brain and scrambles your words by rearranging the letters in what you want to say. It's used as a party favor in a game where you say a key phrase and everyone else has to guess what it is you are trying to say. It's actually pretty fun… until you get kicked out for coming up with overly sexual key phrases in a game played with children.”
Shango was not amused. “Uyo semmed thiw ym cheesp sa a koej!?”
Olofi seconded the statement. “Cool oyu pustid dastarb!”
“Wow, I can understand when someone is cursing me out even in gibberish.” Loco's smile couldn't get any wider.
Bentley could not believe she had let it come to this. How could she ever get Shango's help saving the ship now? “Wait, people intentionally mess with their brain just for a party game?”
Loco dismissed her concerns with a wave. “It's harmless. You just take one of the Unscramblers and your speech returns to normal.”
“Then give them the Unscrambler now!”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I didn't buy any. Didn't seem like a good investment when the effect wears off in a day anyway.”
Bentley grabbed Loco by the shoulders and shook him. She was angry enough she wished she could shake his stupid head off his body. “What is wrong with you? Don't you remember the ship is going to explode!? We are all going to die!”
Shango's eyes went wide. “Teh hisp si gingo ot plexode?”
Loco gingerly removed Bentley's hands from his shoulders. “It doesn't matter.”
“What do you mean it doesn't matter? We're all going to die!”
“Are we?” He reached out and pinched Bentley's arm, causing her to cry out and recoil. “Last time I checked dead people don't feel pain, and yet you've already 'died' four times.”
Bentley couldn't deny the logic, however much it made her want to punch Loco in his cocky face. “But shouldn't we be working to save the ship? How many more tries do you think we have?”
Loco shrugged. “I don't see why there should be any limit. The storm is clearly sending us back in time when the ship is destroyed. I don't know why only the two of us remember it, but who cares? Eventually you'll figure out a way to save the ship and escape the storm, but in the meantime… why not just enjoy it? We've been given all the time in the world to do whatever we want, why would you want to throw that away? I mean, it's not an ideal situation, it'd be much better if we got time-stuck on a half-casino, half-brewery planet, but I'll take it.”
Shango tried again to get some explanation. “Morst? Tens abck ni item?”
“Hmmm, now that I'm hearing it, this actually is kind of annoying. Probably should have bought the Unscrambler after all.”
Bentley spared an apologetic look for the long suffering captain before turning her anger back on Loco. “So what, you just intend to dick around until I find a way to fix all this?”
“No, I'm saying you should use this time to have some fun, too. Isn't there anything you wanted to do if you had more time? Or something you have not been allowed to do because of Captain Tightass's rules? Nobody is going to remember what you did tomorrow, so there are no consequences to what you do today. Curse someone out, play a prank, or just use the time to catch up on your reading. You're a nerd, you like reading, right? You have from the moment the day starts until the ship enters the storm to do whatever you want. And, you know, once you've had your fill of free time, then you can be the responsible one and save the ship from destruction.”
There was actually some logic in Loco's absurd argument. Bentley had been given very little time for personal stuff lately. Even the down time traveling to Legba's rock hadn't been exactly personal time for he
r. There was always something Shango needed from them towards the operation of the ship, a consequence of having such a small crew. And that was when he wasn't grilling her for the hundredth time about what she knew about Legba and his strange techno-magic powers. And when she returned to her room Svend was there, and while she wanted to be with him, sometimes their relationship was as stressful as being back on the battlefield.
Was Loco actually right? Could this extra time actually be a blessing? It wasn't as if it was hurting anyone to take a few extra times through the day. The destruction of the ship was certainly unpleasant, but no one would remember it the next day. And it was probably going to take several more attempts to save the ship, anyway. Shango had failed twice even with her warning, and he would almost certainly fail again. Maybe after she had some personal time to clear her head she would be more useful for finding a solution out of this.
Bentley was sold. “Alright, I'm in.”
Loco blinked in surprise. “Really? I thought it would take more convincing than that. I'm proud of you, Bentley. I knew there was someone who appreciated fun buried in there somewhere.”
“So, I can do whatever I want now without fear of the consequences?”
“That's right, because come tomorrow nothing that you did is going…”
Bentley struck out with a short jab to Loco's throat. He dropped back in shock, clutching his throat and wheezing. After the shock wore off he tried to laugh, a raspy, choking sound, and nodded approvingly.
Shango gave Bentley a pleading look. “Selpea ellt em hawt si nigog no?”
“Sorry, Shango. I promise I'll fix everything in a few days. In the meantime, uh… try not to stress too much about the storm. It'll all work itself out.”
With that Bentley left the Iwa behind on the bridge, ready to use her newly discovered free time to its fullest extent.
+++
“Are you certain Shango is okay with this?” Jelly Bean asked, the face projection on her monitor displaying concern. “Perhaps we should double check with him.”
Galaxia Page 50
