Bermuda

The Boredom Engine

“I’ll raise you...” Teff drummed his fingers on the on the table while he examined his hand and pursed his lips. “Two. I’m in.”

Megs growled at him under her breath, “I fold.” She threw in her cards and cracked open a beer.

I dug through the pouch in my lap and flicked ten Rizla papers towards Teff, along with a sizeable heap of ‘baccy. “You sure about that?” I grinned - my hand was good; three of a kind and I wanted those smokes.

Whoever said that space travel was exciting clearly didn’t know the meaning of the word. The destination is exciting, the rest? Well, to be honest, it’s boring as fuck - hell, just look at our idea of entertainment.

He was torn, I could see it in his eyes. C’mon Teff, fold. You know you want to…

“Incoming!” Megs shouted from the bridge. Teff and I discarded our cards and hastily split the pot fifty-fifty before the makeshift poker table tumbled from the impact.

I took the steps three at a time. Megs had clearly missed her calling in life - she should have been a bloody acrobat. She was pulling some freakish version of a crab-stand with one booted foot on the floor and the other extended as far as she could stretch, toeing the throttle while her hands grabbed the nav-sticks way out behind her head.

“Bloody show-off,” I muttered with a smile as I took control of the throttle, easing it back and blasting the forward thrusters. The ship shuddered with the sudden loss of momentum, a chorus of curses echoing upwards from the lower decks as bodies were shaken from their beds.

Time seemed to slow around us like treacle; the gigantic lumps of rock and space debris blocking our path tumbled and churned lethargically on the other side of the view-pane while we hung unmoving in the vacuum, searching for a way through.

Teff’s voice crackled over the radio to let us know that the shields were at seventy-three percent and holding - nothing to be concerned about there, the boat’s hull would already be covered in a nanobot swarm. We were good as long as the shields didn’t drop below twenty-one.

“Why’d we stop?” Hadi, our expedition leader and historical expert stumbled onto the bridge wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.

Megs pointed a thumb over her shoulder at the view-pane, “big-ass asteroid field.”

“And you didn’t see it coming?”

I shrugged at him. “It’s not on the scanners. You know as well as I do that the alert system would have had you out of bed long before you got tossed from it if it had been.”

Hadi grunted in response, brushing a stray lock of hair out of his eyes with his tattooed fingers. “If you can’t find a path, just blast ‘em. I’m going back to bed.”

*

We stared out at the asteroids as they bumped against the hull one by one before spinning off on a new trajectory.

“I guess we could see how the shields are holding up and take it slow, we should be alright if they stay this size,” I ventured.

Megs nodded her acknowledgement, the bags under her eyes making them seem far too large for her pale, pixie-like face. The whole crew was tired; space has no night, no day.  Only the movement of the clock proved that time was actually passing,  and we’d been up here for almost eighteen months. Even Hadi’s caramel coloured skin was unusually pale.

“Acacia!” Megs waved a hand in front of my face.

 I mentally shook myself. “Sorry, I was…thinking.”

“Yeah, I could tell. You were miles away.” She rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Teff says the shields are good, so we can go play bumper-cars with the space rocks.”

“Awesome, let’s go. Oh, and Megs?”

“Yeah?”

“Only my mum calls me Acacia.”

She chuckled and gave me a mock-salute, “sorry Ace.”

I stuck my tongue out at her in response before returning to the throttle, setting the rear blasters on a slow burn to inch us further into asteroid territory.

It occurred to me that, until I had made my first trek into deep-space, I’d never known the true meaning of darkness. Even under the ship’s powerful floodlights, the asteroids were the only things separating us from the impenetrable void and the complete absence of light which dwelled within its emptiness.

We fell into a routine as we worked, relying on our eyes to guide us instead of the now useless scanners, targeting the smaller obstacles.

It was painfully slow progress for a ship capable of travelling faster than the speed of light. Teff had put in an appearance to run diagnostics on the console’s circuitry, but found nothing that would cause the systems not to warn us of the asteroid field until we were actually in it.

We were flying blind.

Hadi took over the nav-sticks from Megs as soon as the digital timepiece above the view-pane flickered from 06:59 to 07:00.

“G’night Ace,” she bobbed her head towards me before heading for the stairs. I waved absently at her retreating strawberry-coloured curls, wishing I had a pair of matchsticks to hold my drooping eyelids open while I waited for Kymani.

I heard his heavy footsteps approaching before his huge hazel coloured hands wrapped around my own where they rested on the controls. His dreadlocked hair fell over my shoulders as I relaxed into his warm chest. Old habits die hard.

Ky had once told me his name meant ‘adventurous traveller’, and he was. He still is. We had something once - something good, but our need for exploration and discovery sent us down different paths. The day we boarded this ship was the first time we’d seen each other in almost ten years.

My eyes started to drift closed. Mumbling my goodnight’s, I dragged my heavy limbs to my quarters and fell to the mattress face first, fully clothed, and straight into a dreamless sleep.