by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Prodigy of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, or return to the previous chapter.
While the other animals cleaned up the remnants of the party on Sojourner’s back, Mike and Lys returned to the Wanderlust together. The toadstool helped the caterpillar pack up her few belongings from her space in Barracks Room B, and in turn, Lys helped Mike move the few things of theirs that had been stowed away in Barracks Room A to their new bunk.
All the while, Ensign Mike worried about what and whether and how to tell the captain about the possibility of the Hyphaic helping the Wanderlust to get closer to home.
Well, the Milky Way.
Mike was already home.
And for that matter, so was Lys. And Korvax. And Solace with its clutch of eggs — nearly ready to hatch! — on Sojourner’s back. All of them had made homes here, and while that might be changed in some ways by getting back to the Milky Way, Mike supposed that it wouldn’t change everything.
A second generation of tardigrades would soon populate Sojourner, and surely, neither Lys nor Korvax would abandon that society they were working so hard to build the foundation for. So, even if the Wanderlust itself was requisitioned for different missions by the Tri-Galactic Union, and the rest of the crew scattered to the winds of the Milky Way… There would always be a home for Mike on Sojourner’s back with the best chef they’d ever met and the kindest telepath.
“I can tell you’re worrying about what to do,” Lys said softly, as she helped Mike spread their weighted blanket over their new cot.
Once the blanket was properly smoothed out, the toadstool sat down on top of it and patted the space beside them with one of their four hands, inviting the caterpillar to sit down beside them.
“Do you ever worry about what will happen when we get back to the Milky Way?” Mike asked mushily.
“That’s a long time in the future,” Lys said.
“What if it isn’t?” Mike asked.
Lys didn’t answer that question; she just leaned close to Mike, curving her long worm-like body so that her head nestled cozily under the toadstool’s mushroom cap head like it was an umbrella. The warmth of the caterpillar’s body was a comfort, and the words she said were even more so. “You already know that you’ll always have a home on Sojourner’s back with Korvax, Solace, and me. And you already know what you need to do.”
The toadstool and caterpillar sat together in comparative silence — Mike listening to the whispers of the Hyphaic in the back of their mind, and Lys listening to the whispers of Mike’s mind.
“I want to put it off,” Mike said, eventually. “But the clock is ticking. The Hyphaic grows quieter in my mind all the time. Besides, even if the Wanderlust weren’t going to outrun the Hyphaic’s reach, I don’t think most of the crew would forgive me for keeping something like this a secret for very long.”
“I’ll go with you to tell the captain,” Lys offered. “I think she’s back on the bridge by now.”
Mike didn’t question how Lys knew where the captain was. The caterpillar could probably sense the Norwegian Forest cat’s turbulent mind.
The toadstool wondered what the minds of different crewmembers felt like to a telepath. Each animal’s voice was different; surely their minds would come with different flavors too.
Mike would have to ask Lys about that sometime. Even if the clock was ticking on asking the Hyphaic for help, there would be plenty of time to talk to Lys in the future, no matter what happened.
“Alright,” the toadstool agreed. “Let’s go together.”
Ensign Mike and Captain Carroway talked on the bridge for a very long time about the possible advantages and disadvantages of asking the Hyphaic for help. As the two of them discussed the topic from every angle, more and more of the crew quietly gathered around the edges of the bridge, pretending to check their stations while actually listening in. Eventually, the only officer missing was Korvax, who’d stayed behind on Sojourner’s back to talk with Solace.
“When it comes down to it,” Captain Carroway meowed eventually, “it just doesn’t seem that different from asking some trickster god for help. You know, like that omnipotent Cheshire cat, energy being, thingamajig who caused the starship Initiative so much trouble back before the Archidopteran war. How do we know the Hyphaic will really have our best interests at heart?”
Ignoring the fact that a mycelial being doesn’t actually have a heart, Mike insisted, “Because I’m part of the Hyphaic, and I saved the Hyphaic. If it weren’t for me, it would still be slowly dying.”
“So it owes you,” the Norwegian Forest cat grumbled pensively. Her ears were decidedly skewed. “It’s still a risk. A big risk. And I can’t choose to take such a big risk all on my own.” The cat captain smoothed down the fluffy fur that flowed out of her collar and spilled over her shoulders. Then she stood up and turned slowly, looking at each member of her crew. “I may be the captain, but this ship is small. I want everyone to be involved in this choice. I won’t take a risk like this unless everyone is onboard with it.”
One by one, the other officers chimed in: all of them wanted to see if the Hyphaic could help shorten their journey home.
Even Korvax offered a vote by way of comm-pin, saying, “I don’t know what the big deal is about this Milky Way galaxy, but I’m excited to find out! So, if Mike wants to ask their extended family for a hand–” The hedgehog’s voice broke off, choked out by him chuckling preemptively at the joke he was about to make. “–in addition to the two new ones they already got, then I’m all for it!”
Captain Carroway stepped up to the front of the bridge and turned away from her crew to watch the stars streaming past on the main viewscreen. At least, ostensibly, the cat was watching the stars. She was really taking a moment to collect herself before committing to a decision that could have far-reaching consequences. The crew knew her well enough by now to see that, even if most of them weren’t telepathic.
The crew of the Wanderlust had started their journey as enemies and strangers. By now, they were a family. And while being a captain is a big responsibility, taking care of a family is an even bigger one.
When Captain Carroway turned back, she meowed, “Alright, Ensign Mike, you are free to contact the Hyphaic on our behalf and ask for help getting us home to the Milky Way.”
The toadstool closed all of their slit eyes and concentrated on the whisper they could hear in the back of their mind. Several strands of the Hyphaic still reached out this far, staying close to the metallic-blue thinness created by Mike’s new neural implant and its subspace pulses.
Those rose gold strands of mycelium heard Mike’s thoughts and answered them like a fairy granting a wish.
On the other side of the veil between subspace and normal space, a creature so ancient and massive that it easily spanned both centuries and lightyears stretched and flexed, bending and warping the very fabric of space around it.
The stars on the Wanderlust’s viewscreen vanished, and for an impossibly short flash, something else passed over the screen. Later some of the crew would swear they’d seen a confusing mass of tangled, twisting threads, glowing brightly in a field of dark, dark, metallic blue. Some of them even thought it had looked uncannily like a number of Mike’s crayon drawings from the earlier festivities. But they were never able to find a record of it in the Wanderlust’s computer system.
When the stars returned, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie audibly gasped. “The constellations…” the rabbit breathed reverently. “We’re home. Or at least… close enough that some of the stars are arranged the same.”
Ensign Werik took the helm and quickly confirmed, “It’s true. We’re back at the edge of the Milky Way. We should be close enough to contact…” The other Morphican trailed off, not finishing his sentence. When this voyage had begun, Werik was Anti-Ra. Whereas the Wanderlust was a Tri-Galactic Union ship. If they were truly home, then those differences in political alignment — which had mostly melted away over the last year — would begin to matter again.
“Wait…” Vossie said, speaking again, but slowly. “There’s something wrong. One of those stars…” The neural implant the Morphican wore — which had so recently been an integral part of Mike — gave Vossie the ability to assess the star field he was looking at with a far keener analysis than would be possible without some form of computer aid. So, he knew exactly what had happened. But he didn’t want to believe it. And he wouldn’t say it. Not out loud. He didn’t want to participate in making it true. “Something is very wrong,” the rabbit finished darkly. “Ask the Hyphaic to take us back.”
But the whispers of the Hyphaic were gone from Mike’s mind, too far away to reach them anymore.
The toadstool was alone. An individual person who would have to reckon with what had happened the same as everyone else in the crew.
“I can’t,” Mike said. “The Hyphaic dropped us through a temporary wormhole, launching us as far toward the Milky Way as it was able to, and it doesn’t exist here. I can’t communicate with it anymore. We’re too far away.”
The rabbit looked stricken and turned away.
Before encountering the Hyphaic and being changed by it, Mike would have felt Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s disappointment like a knife to their metaphorical heart. But now that the Morphican’s neural implant was back on his brow where it belonged, twinkling furiously like it was working very hard to keep the rabbit emotionally steady, the toadstool was free to look around and see how everyone else was reacting.
The toadstool was free to feel their own reaction.
Ensign Melbourne shouldered his way past Ensign Werik to claim his favorite position at the ship’s helm. And after a brief analysis, the white cat announced, “I don’t see how this is possible, but based on the comm traffic I’m seeing coming out of the systems ahead of us… well, there’s good news and bad news.” The white cat wheeled around to look at everyone else on the bridge and said, “Yes, we’ve crossed the massive distance between the Tetra Galaxy and the Milky Way, but… we’ve also traveled back in time.” The white cat’s ears flattened. “Substantially back in time.”
“How substantially?” Captain Carroway asked. The Norwegian Forest cat looked aghast and like she was trying to suppress that feeling as well as she could for the sake of her crew.
“Longer than I’ve been alive,” Ensign Melbourne meowed sardonically.
Captain Carroway lost her composure and began swearing under her whiskers about grand-kitten paradoxes and Tri-Galactic Union prohibitions on time travel.
When it became clear that nothing was going to be settled about their new situation right away, Mike slowly edged their way out of the bridge, back to their new space in Barracks Room B.
The toadstool sat on their cot, thinking about the day. It had been a very busy one. Only a few hours ago, Mike had still been dead and also part of a multiplicity of fruiting bodies sharing their consciousness across the great reaches of subspace in the Hyphaic’s grand mycelial designs.
Of course, those fruiting bodies still existed in subspace. But Mike wasn’t part of that interconnected, enmeshed civilization anymore. Mike was part of a small crew — only seven mammals, Lys, and Solace — on an interminable journey that kept going wrong, now trapped in the past of where most of them wanted to be.
Would the rest of the crew be furious with Mike for what had happened? The toadstool didn’t know. Even if the others were furious, would they be able to forgive Mike?
The toadstool hoped so. Mike had given up a lot to be here.
Before Mike could get too lost in the tangle of their own thoughts, Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee came bursting into the room, barking noisily at each other about all kinds of technical, scientific particulars — the curvature of space, the difficulties of sling-shotting around a black hole, Einstein-Rosen bridges, and Stephen Hawking’s lost theorem.
“What’s going on?” Mike asked, their curiosity piqued. Though given the circumstances, the toadstool half expected the two canines to refuse to acknowledge them at all.
But instead, Lt. Lee grinned widely with his diminutive muzzle and woofed, “We’d done about all we could to speed up our journey home across space, but now that it’s time we have to cross? You’ve given us a whole new puzzle!”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself there,” Lt. Diaz woofed at the smaller dog. “Puzzles have solutions, and we don’t know that this situation does.”
“Sure, if we had to travel back in time,” the Papillon dog agreed with the Xolo-Lupinian. “But come on. Traveling forward in time? We do that all the time anyway! The two of us have got this.”
Lt. Diaz’s wider muzzle quirked into a lopsided half smile at Lt. Lee’s enthusiasm. “Well, maybe,” she allowed. Then turning toward Ensign Mike, the Xolo-Lupinian added, “You’re good with science. You want to help us out?”
Before Mike could answer, Ensign Melbourne opened the door to the barracks room and leaned inside to meow, “Korvax just sent word from Sojourner — the tardigrade eggs have started hatching!” The white cat looked right at Mike and said, “I guess we’ll be having a lot more childhoods around here soon! It’s a good thing we got some practice in today.”
Lt. Diaz dropped the computer pad she’d been working with onto her cot and woofed, “Let’s go meet them.” Then she added with an ironic twist to her voice, “We have all the time in the world to work on this problem.”
The Papillon dog laughed brightly. Then the white cat escorted both canines to the teleporter pad, dragging Ensign Mike along with them.
The toadstool was caught up in the whirlwind chaos of life, and they didn’t know what would happen next. But Ensign Mike knew for sure, this was exactly where they wanted to be.
Thank you for reading Prodigy of the Wanderlust! If you’d like to read more in the same universe, check out Tri-Galactic Trek. Or if you’d like to pick up an e-book version or paperback to share, learn more here.