by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Voyage of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
“Are you sure?” Captain Carroway asked, already feeling hollow inside. The Norwegian Forest cat wanted her Morphican first officer to say he wasn’t sure, that he might be wrong. But he wouldn’t say that. And she didn’t doubt him. So, Carroway asked another question, instead of waiting for a confirmation she didn’t need and wouldn’t like hearing. “How? And why didn’t that bastard just say so?”
The Norwegian Forest cat scowled down the empty central corridor of her new ship — a giant space coffin, apparently — at where she’d last seen the scoundrel of a German Shepherd who had so cheerfully informed her of the facts necessary to send her and her ship’s crew to their deaths. A crew she mostly hadn’t even met yet, but she already felt responsible for them.
“I don’t believe the captain knew,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie said. His voice sounded as hollow as Captain Carroway felt. “I only know because I happen to have an obscure interest in the physics of super dense nebulae.”
Even with the specter of her death thrown over her, Captain Carroway couldn’t help smiling at Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s confession. He had a lot of obscure interests. It was one of the things she liked about him. She never knew what kind of obscure trivia he might share with her. Obscure trivia proved very useful — sometimes life-saving — more often than most people seemed to expect.
“So, what can we do?” Carroway asked.
“We can hope that Tim Melbourne is as good of a pilot as he was when he got thrown into jail.”
“Anything else?”
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie shrugged his narrow rabbity shoulders. “I can hole up in my new quarters and do some research, but basically, we’re supposed to set off a bomb deep in the middle of a nebula that will lead to a collapsing chain reaction which we’re very unlikely to escape alive. Our vacuum bomb will turn the Dirt Cloud into a brand new black hole, and it’ll neatly take out the entire Anti-Ra resistance with it. But unless Tim Melbourne can slingshot this little ship off the growing gravity well as it expands…” Vossie shrugged again. “I don’t have any other tricks up my sleeves.”
“You’ll find something,” Carroway said, fervently believing it.
The tip of Vossie’s long left ear twitched, and his prim mouth quirked into half of a smile around his buck teeth. “I will do my best,” he said. “What will you do?”
“Get to know our new crew,” Carroway said. If she was going to lead them to death, she should get to know them as much as she could first. “We’ll meet back here in the evening.”
“I will synthesize a bottle of cream wine and appropriate, new rank pins for our collars,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie said, anticipating his captain’s request.
“Exactly,” Carroway agreed. “We’ll have our own little promotion ceremony, just the two of us on our new ship. Then we’ll discuss what we’ve learned and figure out a plan to make the best of this mission.”
With that, Vossie retired to his new quarters, and Carroway grabbed a tablet computer with the manifest for her new crew on it and headed out to explore Nexus Nine Base. It didn’t take her long to find the esplanade in the middle of the station, lined with shops and stalls where merchants sold local goods. The real hub of activity, though, seemed to be Scharm’s Bar, so Carroway got herself a table, ordered the local specialty which seemed to be a fruit juice called Jumaria nectar, and settled down to study her crew manifest.
When the bartender — a Sliggurm who was basically a giant slug-like alien with rows of tiny hands all along each edge of his translucent body and four bulbous eyestalks on the top of his head — brought Carroway her order, she put out the word with him that if anyone on her manifest showed up, he should send them her way. A gray squirrel at a nearby table overheard and invited himself to join her. He turned out to be the station’s doctor — a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and fast-talking fellow who seemed to know everyone on the station. Which made sense… as the doctor, he’d do regular check-ups on everyone, and given his extremely friendly demeanor, it wasn’t surprising that he seemed to think of practically everyone he’d ever met as a close friend.
Captain Carroway learned more than she’d wanted to know about the two cats and a dog who’d be reporting to her tomorrow morning alongside Ensign Kim. They were all junior officers; the highest ranking was the canine lieutenant. All four of them were young, green, untested. And most ominously, it sounded like none of them had much in the way of close family members nor any obvious romantic partners. Both cats had been orphans raised in catteries; both dogs had come from rare one-puppy litters and had already each lost at least one of their elderly parents.
Maybe Captain Bataille didn’t know he was sending her and her crew on a suicide mission, but she would have bet her fluffy tail that whichever admiral dreamed up this plan knew exactly what they were doing. Which raised all sorts of questions. For instance, if the Anti-Ra were hiding all of their forces in the Dirt Cloud — including low level officers who weren’t necessarily responsible for the policy choices of their commanders — then wasn’t it a war crime to simply destroy the whole nebula too fast for anyone to escape?
Or it would be a war crime. If they were at war. And if the admiral who ordered the firing of the vacuum bomb would admit to understanding what it was going to do.
Captain Carroway didn’t want to be the Tri-Galactic Union’s fumbling, “accidental” assassin. She was a throwaway officer who’d caused trouble with Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s help, and now the higher ups were going to get rid of her, along with her accomplice and a handful of young officers who’d been deemed disposable. All of Carroway’s thoughts were dark, dismal, and horrible, in spite of the effervescent Jumaria juice buzzing through her veins like strong coffee, making her mind feel bright and far too awake.
If it weren’t for the looming specter of her suicide mission, Carroway would have had a lovely time chatting with the pretty little squirrel doctor. He was very handsome and flirty, and Carroway had always had a soft spot for pretty little squirrel men. But as it was, after a few rounds of Jumaria juice, she excused herself and went back to The Wanderlust.
Carroway and Vossie had a quiet little ceremony where they took turns pinning their new rank insignias on the other’s collar, followed by a solemn toast with stemmed glasses of synthesized cream wine. Then they spent the rest of the day reading everything they could about super dense nebulae, vacuum bombs, the growth patterns of artificially induced black holes, and the situation between Reptiss and Lupinia. It was a bleak way to spend one of their final days, but neither of them would give up hope that this suicide mission could be survived.
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie wouldn’t give up, because he truly believed that knowledge was salvation and had a chance to save them. Captain Carroway wasn’t so sure of that. But she couldn’t give up, because Vossie, Lee, another dog, and two cats were all going to be following her orders. She owed them her best attempt to save their lives, even if she felt ready to despair about her own.
Come night — or what served for it aboard a ship docked at a space station — Carroway was about ready to give up and hope that for the first time ever, Vossie was wrong, and this wasn’t a suicide mission. The two of them had read the situation entirely wrong. Clearly, the Tri-Galactic Union wouldn’t send them on a death march to murder an entire fleet of freedom fighters. She was on the verge of insisting that she and Vossie get some rest before facing their fresh-faced junior crew officers the next morning. When suddenly, Carroway received a brief communication from Captain Bataille on her tablet computer: her request to requisition Timothy Melbourne had been approved. The felonious feline had been released on a temporary, conditional parole and was already in transit to Nexus Nine Base. He would arrive, ready to join their crew, only hours after the other new officers would report to her in the morning.
Captain Bataille relayed the information with obvious surprise, and as soon as their conversation was over, Captain Carroway felt her heart breaking.
After reviewing the dossiers on her new crew members from Nexus Nine Base, Captain Carroway had looked up the records on Timothy Melbourne. He’d never even graduated from the Tri-Galactic Union Naval Academy. Not technically. He’d been a really promising student, part of an elite squadron on track to get plum positions as soon as they graduated and received their first postings. But he’d coerced several of his friends in that elite squadron to join him in performing an overly complicated and dangerous flight maneuver during a performance they gave to set off their year’s commencement ceremonies.
Tim Melbourne had pulled his part off flawlessly, but one of the students he’d coerced hadn’t been up to such a challenge. Two of the five shuttles involved in the maneuver crashed into each other, sending them into a spiral that took down two more. All in all, three students died. Of the remaining survivors, one student was dismissed dishonorably from the Tri-Galactic Navy with no further retribution, and Tim Melbourne had been serving hard for the last three years.
If the admiral who’d ordered this mission was willing to send Tim Melbourne to Carroway without even asking questions… There was no question here. Vossie was right. This was a suicide mission, and it was condoned by top brass. There was no way out. Any attempt from her to dodge this fate would just leave it to fall on another officer’s shoulders, while the dogs who didn’t like Carroway found another way to get rid of her and Vossie. She didn’t have a weighty enough voice to actually stop this mission from happening, and if she was honest with herself, based on what she’d been reading about the Anti-Ra’s terrorist tactics, she wasn’t sure it would be the right thing to do anyway. The Anti-Ra needed to be stopped.
All Carroway could do was figure out how to handle her singular tenure as captain gracefully. Maybe Vossie could pull a trick out of his sleeve, or maybe Tim Melbourne was a good enough pilot to beat the odds. But in case they weren’t… Well, Carroway had to do her best by her crew, and that meant dismissing as many of them as possible before the mission even began. She needed Melbourne, and Vossie was in this with her from the start. But did The Wanderlust really need six officers to crew her?
Carroway wanted to ask Vossie for his advice, but she also didn’t want to place this choice on his shoulders. She was the one responsible for her crew’s lives, not him. So, she studied The Wanderlust’s schematics, made a few judgment calls, and decided she would dismiss all but one of the additional officers assigned to her crew. It would be tight, but The Wanderlust could achieve this mission with only four officers at her helm: Carroway, Vossie, Melbourne… and one other.
Carroway’s first instinct was to dismiss Ensign Lee, but she knew that was only because she’d already met him. He was real to her, and the idea of bringing that cheerful, optimistic, young Papillon with her to die… It was heartbreaking. But as soon as she met the other officers, the idea of bringing them along instead would be heartbreaking too. Everything about this was heartbreaking. But Carroway didn’t have time to let her heart crack open and bleed right now.
So, she studied the dossiers on the four Nexus Nine Base officers who’d be reporting to her in the morning, looking for who she could most afford to spare while giving this mission every possible chance of succeeding, in spite of being designed to fail. At least, in the sense of being survivable.
No matter how many times she read through the dossiers though, Carroway couldn’t get around it: Ensign Barry Lee was the most qualified of the four officers who’d be reporting to her in the morning. He’d been working with The Wanderlust, installing her upgrades and working with her unusual systems for the last several months. And The Wanderlust did have some unusual systems. Many of the ship’s components were tied together with an organic, mycelial network of fungal tissue grafted onto the usual mechanical parts, meaning the ship could repair itself, and the AI algorithms in the computer could adapt much more quickly than with traditional inorganic hardware. And Ensign Lee was the only one of the officers assigned to The Wanderlust who’d had significant time training on those unusual systems.
It was either bring Barry Lee aboard as a crew member of The Wanderlust… or replace him with two other officers to do the same amount of work. And if this suicide mission ended as the higher ups intended… then one death was better than two.
Barry Lee was going to be coming with them.
Continue on to Chapter 5…