by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Nexus Nine. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
The tension aboard the shuttle was palpable. With every minute they waited, Mazel expected a Hiviiarchy warship to find them. When an answering message from Bataille finally came, the Morse code translated to: “Sending probe. Standby.”
With bated breath and scanners running, Mazel waited for the probe. Finally, bright lines of color flashed across the shuttle’s main viewscreen, dimmer than they’d been before but recognizably an opening to the nexus.
A small, un-crewed probe emerged from the colors, like a silver egg being laid by the universe.
Neera breathed, “The Sky Nest. Unhatched lead us home.”
“It’s too small to fly through,” Grawf reported.
But they’d gained a great deal of data by scanning the nexus’s reluctant opening. For one thing, the nexus was still open in their own galaxy, even though it was closed here.
That was actually good news.
“The Nexus passageway is only working in one direction,” Mazel said.
“But… we got our probe back,” Unari said. “When we tested the nexus before coming here.” The black cat’s tail was lashing wildly. “What changed?”
“Maybe nothing changed…” Mazel had the shuttle’s computer download all of the data that the probe had gathered while flying through the nexus. Then she transmitted instructions to the probe to try to return. “Perhaps, we can’t pass through because Star-Skipper 1 is bigger than the probe.”
But the probe failed to pass back through, sitting stubbornly in the black sky like a silver egg that was mocking them, refusing to hatch.
Before Mazel could come up with another idea to try, she heard a wailing cry like a cello being torn to pieces. Omoleura came limping down the shuttle’s central corridor, limbs flailing in a way that distorted zir bird-like appearance beyond anything Mazel had seen before. Zir body tilted backward, showing zir multi-faceted eyes more clearly and making the faux-head above them look like a hood that had been pushed back. Zir antennae which were usually hidden, laid flat against zir body, pointed straight toward Mazel.
“Are you having a vision?” Mazel asked, reaching her paws out to take hold of two of Omoleura’s talons. She felt even more cut off from her own self now, but then she hadn’t been allowed to experience the previous two visions either. But this time, she could see that the insect was in the throes of a powerful experience. “What do you see?”
Neera wrapped a wing protectively, gently around the thrashing insect. Perhaps she would forgive zim after all. “What are the Unhatched showing you?” Or maybe she just wanted to feel close to her gods.
“Send the Apex!” Omoleura screamed, zir entire body vibrating with the words. “Send him! Send the Apex!”
Mazel shook her head and stepped away, letting Grawf take over restraining the maddened insect. “Be gentle,” Mazel instructed the bear.
Mazel stared at all of the data in front of her. She didn’t see how sending Captain Bataille through the nexus would make a difference. But the cryptic message from Neera’s supposed gods was all they had to work with, and Mazel needed to get her team home.
What could the captain have that would make a difference? And what could have changed the nexus since the original probe had passed through it?
As far as Mazel knew, the only significant event to have happened to the nexus since the test probe returned to Nexus Nine Base was when Star-Skipper 1 flew through the passageway. But there was nothing special about Star-Skipper 1 — it was a standard Tri-Galactic Navy, short-term mission, science vessel. The strangest thing about Star-Skipper 1 was that the Rheun chip was aboard it.
Mazel turned and watched Omoleura flailing, seemingly suffering a seizure as zhe was held steady by Grawf’s firm, large paws and Neera’s engulfing wings. The bird had wrapped both wings around Omoleura now.
For a moment, Mazel wondered if the nexus would open for them if they left Omoleura — and more importantly, the Rheun chip — behind. Perhaps the presence of the chip was somehow suppressing the nexus passageway from opening.
Would Mazel make that sacrifice? She knew that the Rheun chip was a huge part of herself… but it didn’t have to be. She could stay as she was. Leave those memories behind to rot away in the Ennea galaxy. And clearly, Omoleura would be well taken care of here. Zhe had an entire society of worshippers waiting for zir with open arms.
Except if the Rheun chip was what suppressed the nexus, then the nexus would open for a fleet of Hiviiarchy warships, as long as they left Omoleura behind. And Omoleura knew the location of the nexus. Zhe could not be left behind in this galaxy. No matter how much Mazel trusted the insect’s intentions now, there was no telling what difference a few years of living among the Hiviiarchy — being celebrated as a god — would do to Omoleura Rheun and zir loyalties.
For goodness sake, Mazel didn’t even know how much she could trust Rheun. She couldn’t remember who Rheun was… She knew, in an abstract way, that Rheun was a chip who’d lived many lives, passed down from one host to the next… and Rheun had chosen her. But she didn’t remember the internal intricacies of those lives. Why, she couldn’t even remember the names of any of Rheun’s hosts before Darius.
Maybe… leaving Rheun behind was a kind of freedom.
Maybe… it was time for the long-lived chip to die.
But could she sacrifice Omoleura?
“I’m going to ask Captain Bataille to send Doctor Jardine through the nexus on another shuttle,” Mazel said, typing the message out in Morse code as she spoke. “I believe the Rheun chip may be interfering with the nexus in some way. If the squirrel doctor can remove it from Omoleura’s brain, we can discard it, and then we might be able to safely pass back through the nexus passageway.”
“Might?” Unari asked uncertainly. “I don’t like those odds.
Neera squawked, “The Unhatched aren’t asking for some bushy-tailed squirrel doctor. They’re asking for the Apex!”
“I don’t see how Captain Bataille coming through the nexus will make a difference,” Mazel said. The message was already sent.
“When a god asks you for a favor,” Quincy said, “you don’t pick and choose what parts of the favor you want to do.” He crossed his arms over his bright green synthesized shirt. The whole top of his body was bright green to match the synthesized shirt, but his legs blended into the colors of the shuttlecraft around him. He looked like a genie, hovering in the air with nothing below his torso. He hadn’t participated much in the previous conversations. He had less of a science background than any of the others and seemed well out of his depth whenever they discussed physics and space-time ruptures.
But he had an opinion when it came to obeying gods that — as far as Mazel knew — he didn’t believe in.
Bright lines of color flashed across the shuttlecraft’s main viewscreen: sky blue, lemon yellow, auburn, brown, honey gold, every shade of green that appears deep in a forest on Earth, and the silver of a new moon. All of them so bright and brilliant that they looked like the platonic ideal of colors, more real than any color Mazel had ever seen before.
“What changed?” Mazel asked, but none of them knew.
Regardless, another shuttlecraft appeared in the flashing colors, smaller than Star-Skipper 1, not a science ship, just a simple two-person transport vessel.
“Fly through!” Quincy cried. His neck swelled up like a balloon.
Grawf dropped her hold on Omoleura, and the insect fell to the shuttle’s floor, still thrashing, still embraced by Neera’s blue and red wings. But before Grawf could return to her pilot’s seat, Mazel had already powered up the engines.
Star-Skipper 1 sailed through the flashing colors, and the other shuttle changed direction, following them back into the mouth of the nexus passageway.
Time and reality dilated around them. And suddenly Mazel was a tiny kitten again. She was no longer on a shuttle. She was no longer in space. Instead of her Tri-Galactic Navy uniform, she was wearing a cozy flannel robe and pajamas with spaceships on them. She was back in her kittenhood home, holding a wrapped present on her lap.
The present was wrapped in silver paper that reflected her face with its lopsided splotches, and on top of the box, ribbons curled in a colorful tangle. She kept pulling the coils of ribbon out, stretching them with her fuzzy paws and then letting them boing back into place. She couldn’t decide if she should open the present or not.
A big dog approached her. A German Shepherd wearing a Tri-Galactic Navy uniform. He kneeled down beside the small calico kitten. “You don’t have to open it,” he said.
“But it’s a present,” she mewed. “I love presents.” Her claws caught in the ribbon and cut off one of the colorful curls with a satisfying zing.
“It will change you,” the dog said. He looked familiar, like an old friend she hadn’t met yet.
“Everything changes me,” the kitten mewed. “Every day I’m taller. My fur keeps getting less fluffy. As I grow, the stretches of white between my patches of orange and black grow, but the orange and black patches seem to stay the same size. So more and more of my fur is white. But I’m still me. Nothing can make me not me.”
“Then you should open it. It’s very valuable.”
The kitten ripped open the silver paper with her claws, tearing a gash down the middle of the reflection of her face. The torn reflection spoke to her, saying, “Always remember: you have a choice.”
When she finished tearing the paper away, she opened the box inside and found a toy shuttlecraft. Wait, no, a real shuttlecraft, flying through a ripple in space-time that looked like a river. Time and space flexed outward; inside became outside, flipping along an axis that Mazel had never considered before.
And she found herself on the Star-Skipper 1 again, fully grown, wearing her Tri-Galactic Navy uniform, and watching the chaos of colorful lines on the main viewscreen. The colors dimmed back into nothing, leaving the blackness of space, broken only by scattered stars and the blue-green gemlike sphere of Avia, orbited by Nexus Nine Base.
An incoming message from the shuttlecraft behind them replaced the space scene on the viewscreen with an image of Captain Bataille and Lieutenant O’Neill. The two dogs were sitting beside each other inside the small shuttlecraft that had come through the nexus to rescue Star-Skipper 1.
“Captain Bataille here,” the captain said. “Is everyone aboard Star-Skipper 1 all right?”
Mazel turned to her crew: Grawf, Unari, and Quincy seemed fine. Neera was on the shuttle floor, kneeling over Omoleura who was twitching, convulsing lightly, and seemed to be halfway covered in chrysalis silk that was still dribbling out of zir mandibles.
“Omoleura seems to be having a seizure,” Mazel said. “We need to get zir to Nexus Nine Base immediately for surgery — including surgery to remove the Rheun chip.”
“We’ll follow you there,” Captain Bataille said. “And I’ll send word ahead to Doctor Jardine to prep for your arrival.”
Mazel nodded. “Thank you, Captain.”
Lieutenant O’Neill didn’t say anything, but his white bearded muzzle was split in the widest grin, and his short tail was wagging up a storm in his chair behind him. Out of the corner of her eye, Mazel saw the black cat wink at her husband, and his tail seemed to break the laws of physics by wagging even faster in response.
Grawf took over the shuttle’s controls and piloted Star-Skipper 1 back to Nexus Nine Base. When they were fully docked, and the airlock had cycled, a team of Avioran officers came aboard with a stretcher. They strapped the seizing insect, who was now more of a chrysalis than anything else, onto the stretcher and carried zir away.
As soon as the path through the airlock was clear, Lieutenant O’Neill rushed aboard, tail still wagging up a storm. Unari practically jumped out of her fur when she saw him. The black cat rushed into the white dog’s arms, and they spun around together, embracing tightly.
Unari and O’Neill left the shuttle, paw in paw, whispering excitedly to each other.
Neera and Quincy gathered the day-trip bags they’d stowed in the small barracks, and on her way out, the bird gently informed Mazel that their prisoner, the green praying mantis, had died. Neera said she would send another team of Aviorans with a stretcher to handle the body.
Mazel and Grawf waited for them to come, and once the praying mantis was gone, it would have made sense to leave the shuttlecraft… go back to living her life on Nexus Nine Base.
But Mazel couldn’t seem to muster the willpower and initiative to stand up. She felt overpowered by and lost in the implications of her dream. Why had she seen herself as a kitten, unwrapping a present? Did she not want the Rheun chip back?
Her life would be simpler without it.
“Are you okay, Lieutenant?” Grawf asked. The bear had been sitting quietly, patiently beside the calico cat.
“Just call me Mazel, for now,” Mazel said. When she’d inherited the Rheun chip, she’d only been an ensign. She wasn’t sure that she should be a Lieutenant without it. Not until she earned the promotion by herself.
“Are you disappointed by what we found in the Ennea galaxy?” Grawf asked. “It seemed like… you were looking for something specific.”
“It did seem that way,” Mazel agreed. “But I can’t remember what I was looking for. So, I don’t know if I found it. I think… the Rheun chip was looking for something. But I don’t know if I’m Mazel Rheun anymore. I don’t know if I want to be.”
“You don’t have to be,” Grawf said.
Mazel stared at the blank view screen of Star-Skipper 1. The screen was off and didn’t show anything — not even stars. Just the empty darkness of a screen that’s offline. A screen where she could almost make out her own reflection in the darkness.
“If I don’t take back the Rheun chip from Omoleura, then a creature — a technological creature, but still a creature — will die.” Mazel put a paw to her head. She felt dizzy with the weight of responsibility that Darius — no, Rheun — had laid upon her.
“Omoleura won’t keep it?” Grawf asked.
“No, zhe told me in no uncertain terms that zhe couldn’t wait to have it removed.”
“You could give the Rheun chip to someone else,” Grawf suggested.
“Who?” Mazel asked. “Who would take it?”
“Probably lots of people,” Grawf rumbled. “It’s a little bit like being immortal, isn’t it? That would make it very valuable.”
“A little,” Mazel admitted. “But it’s also like ceasing to exist at all. And… I can’t just give it to anyone who would take it. Anyone who values it for the wrong reasons. I owe Rheun better than that.”
“Why?” Grawf asked.
“Rheun picked me.”
The bear and the calico cat sat in silence together for a while.
Mazel knew that if she had the Rheun chip in her head, she’d be seeking Captain Bataille out for conversations like this one. She remembered that he was a big part of why she’d come to this station, and she knew how much it had meant to her when he’d called her Big Dog.
But she wasn’t Big Dog right now. And she wasn’t sure if they’d still be friends if she never became Big Dog again. She’d only known the captain for a week or so as Mazel. If she asked him what he thought, surely he’d want her to preserve the memories and strand of life that remained of his best friend.
Except… he had been in her dream, and he’d told her that she had a choice.
“Would you like to get some dinner?” Mazel asked. “Or breakfast? I’m not really sure what time of day it is… I’m not really sure of a lot of things right now.”
“Dinner sounds good,” the bear rumbled.
And so Mazel spent the evening with someone who had never met her as Mazel Tabbith and had barely known her as Mazel Rheun. Someone she could just be Mazel with. Lost, confused, memory-full-of-holes Mazel.
Grawf cooked a meal for Mazel in her quarters, and while the bear prepared the food, the calico cat looked at the bear’s belongings and asked her about them. Grawf had a whole set of curved swords hanging on her wall. They looked a lot like a curved sword that Mazel remembered hanging in her own quarters when she’d arrived on Nexus Nine Base.
Why did Mazel own an Ursine-style sword? Rheun would know.
Grawf told Mazel the history behind why the swords were curved, and the calico cat felt like the bear’s explanation was spackle over a hole that Rheun had left in her head.
When Mazel had accepted the Rheun chip after Darius’ death, she had been given a choice. She hadn’t been forced to take the chip. But she also hadn’t fully understood how much Rheun’s presence in — and blending with — her mind would affect her. Now she knew. But in some ways, it felt too late to change her mind.
Would she go through the rest of her life feeling like she’d forgotten something? Or would the feeling fade?
It would fade.
It would have to fade. Right?
Grawf didn’t prepare the meal with the synthesizer. Instead, she pulled a honeycomb out from a beehive in the corner of her quarters that was approximately the same size and shape as her with clear outer walls through which Mazel could see the bees working and buzzing busily.
Grawf claimed that O’Neill had helped her set up a pipe running from her pet beehive to the station’s arboretum — a new installation that Unari had begun.
Grawf fried the piece of honeycomb up with several paws’ full of wriggling white grubs from a terrarium in her quarters’ other corner. Apparently, the bear was an amateur entomologist in her spare time and kept a lot of insects in her quarters.
At first, Mazel was worried that Grawf would expect her to eat the grubs while they were still alive and wriggling. Mazel wasn’t interested in eating wriggling food. But once the pale white grubs were fried with honeycomb, they were quite delicious — a little crunchy on the outside with a very sweet sauce, and once she bit through them, the grubs’ insides melted onto her tongue with a rich, buttery flavor.
After dinner, Grawf told Mazel stories about her time as an officer on the starship Initiative and eventually worked her way back to her childhood on Ursa Minuet and her people’s mythology. The bear grew quite expressive, gesturing with her broad paws, as she told the wide-eyed calico cat about a beehive god who went unhinged when its queen died and a honey golem who battled with bears, testing them to see if they were worthy to enter the afterlife.
Mazel felt sure that she already knew these stories — not of Grawf’s life, but of her peoples’ mythology — as Rheun. But she enjoyed hearing them afresh. Even if she might remember them all for herself in the morning.
The more time she spent with Grawf, the less pressured she felt to take Rheun back. Grawf didn’t care if Mazel was Mazel Tabbith or Mazel Rheun. The bear just seemed to enjoy having the little calico cat listen to her. And whenever Mazel made a joke, Grawf’s laughter was deep, booming, and from the belly. Mazel loved seeing the bear laugh. It made her feel powerful to affect such a large creature so strongly.
And when Mazel didn’t feel pressured to become Mazel Rheun, she had space to miss the length and depth that the ancient neural chip had brought to her life. She remembered feeling confident, powerful, and like she would live forever. Her life had been bigger when she was Mazel Rheun, and she wanted that feeling back again. She wanted her Rheun memories back.
She wanted to be Mazel Rheun.
Grawf and Mazel stayed up late into the night with the bear teaching the small calico cat various martial arts moves. Most of the moves involved imagining bees flying around her and landing in different places where she was supposed to swat at them. Mazel wasn’t at all sure that swatting at bees seemed like a good idea, but since they were imaginary, she played along.
Mazel was surprised to discover that — since many of the moves involved using one’s opponent’s strength and weight against them — by the end of the lessons, she could regularly throw the giant bear to the floor.
Every time she did, the calico cat found herself purring. She couldn’t contain the purrs. They were too big for her body and overflowed.
Eventually, Grawf surrendered: “The student has surpassed the master… if not in skill,” she said, “then at least in enthusiasm.” The bear folded her giant paws behind her head and stayed on the floor.
“Aren’t you going to get up?” Mazel asked, itching to throw the bear on the floor again.
“No,” Grawf said, eyes closed. She started humming, a tuneless rambling hum that seemed to harmonize with her colony of bees in the corner.
Mazel grabbed one of Grawf’s hind paws and tried to pull her back up, but instead she ended up tumbled on the floor beside her. Grawf rolled onto her side, and crushed the little calico in place with a giant arm. “Ooh, you buzz like my bees,” the bear said.
“It’s called purring,” Mazel objected, struggling against the giant, bushy-furred arm. But she had to admit, the bear’s arm made a nice blanket. She felt safe and anchored underneath the steady weight.
Bear and cat fell asleep on the floor, cuddled together.
Continue on to Chapter 12…