Playtime

“Your orders, Captain?” Jeremy asked, his voice cracking under the pressure. It was a question he was all too used to asking, but now that he was being forced to ask, he could hardly eek out the words.

          “Take me to that star!” the child behind him ordered from the captain’s seat.

          “W-w-which star, Captain?”

          “That one!” the child yelled, rushing up to the display at the front of the bridge and smashing the end of its tentacle-like tendril to the giant window overlooking the cosmos.

          “Yes, sir,” Jeremy said. Immediately he froze in his tracks, petrified as he realized his mistake.

          “Yes, what?” the child pressed, slowly approaching Jeremy’s pilot station. Something began to run along his neck. It was cold, painfully so, like dry ice scraping along his neck: the child’s touch.

          “Yes, Captain, is what I meant. Apologies, captain. I haven’t been sleeping very well, Captain.” With a fearful look in his eyes and a near-freezing tentacle wrapped around his neck, first officer Jeremy found himself shaking from the cold and the fear. The child halted for a moment, as if a computer loading, unsure of whether this was worth another tantrum. Before it could decide, his attention was pulled from the navigations officer.

          “Captain, we need to stop to refuel on the way. I’ve plotted a path for an intergalactic rocket refueling station between us and our destination.” Mara, quick to step in, had perhaps saved Jeremy’s life. Together, the other remaining crew members—Terry, Gwen, and Henson—let out a sigh of relief. Jeremy gasped for air, now free from his strangulation.

          “It’s been almost two goddamn years, Mara!” Henson yelled across the bedroom quarters. It was the ship’s night cycle now. The remaining four members of the ship Petrichor (formerly known as The Charon until the child had learned of the word petrichor and thought it sounded cooler, despite not knowing its meaning) were gathered in their single-room quarters. Upon embarking they each had their own rooms, but the child had decided that the crew would communicate better if they spent more time together.

          “She knows that, Henson. Stop yelling at her,” Terry interjected, putting himself between Mara and Henson. “She’s not the cause of this.”

          “My ass she’s not the cause of this! She let this thing on deck! And now we’re all hostages on our own ship!”

         Jeremy spoke up from the corner he was staring into, reeling from his near-death experience today and applying a cream over his freezer-burned neck. “I wish we were hostages.”

          “What’s that supposed to mean?” Henson asked, insulted by the notion.

          “Hostages are kept as collateral. We’re not collateral to anything. We’re entertainers under duress at best. We’re just toys.”

          Gwen began to cry. That part of the night again, everyone thought. Gwen used to be full of life, talkative. But ever since the child tore apart Captain Belrow, she didn’t talk much past the play they put on every night. Her post was at life support, a largely automated job that only existed in case of emergencies. Her days were spent mostly staring at a screen, reliving the traumas of the past two years.

          “I have an idea,” Mara uttered, her voice quieted with sorrow.

          “We kill ourselves?” Henson asked, chipper as ever.

          “Maybe,” replied Mara, much to his surprise. All eyes were on her now. “That thing, it regulates its body temperature to be cold the same way we keep ourselves warm. Except a thousand times more.”

          “Yeah, it sucks,” Jeremy chimed in, his neck white with cream.

          “What if we can heat it up? We tell it some exciting tale about enemy combatants off the starboard bow or something while Gwen cranks up the heat.”

          “How hot do you plan to go?” Henson asked.

          “I’m thinking eighty. Celsius.”

          “That’ll kill us in minutes,” Terry said.

          “But it might kill that thing faster,” Mara added.

“That’s a big gamble,” Jeremy said, already nervously picking at his burn.

          “One hundred,” Gwen said with a stoic quality her voice hadn’t had in months.

          “Gwen?” Henson questions, shocked.

          “We go to one hundred and get this thing,” Gwen said, more sure of this than anything.

          Mara turned to Terry. “Can we do a hundred?”

          “We can try. But no higher. The ships systems aren’t really built for that kind of heat internally. Some circuitry might get fried. The glass might even crack. And no more than five minutes.”

          “I don’t think we’ll have five minutes,” Henson says under his breath.

          “Five minutes it is then. On my signal.”