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.
Captain Carroway took her time in the multi-purpose room, synthesizing herself a cup of coffee. Well, as much as one can take one’s time with doing that. She punched in the order for coffee, then altered the order to make the coffee be hazelnut flavored, then changed it back to normal. As she kept changing the order, before actually synthesizing the drink, Captain Carroway found herself wondering about whether The Wanderlust would need to start conserving energy or supplies during the coming voyage. Could synthesizers run out of the types of raw matter they needed for synthesizing useful things like coffee? If they could, would it be possible to find replacements on planets or asteroids they passed?
Captain Carroway had never studied those aspects of shipboard life. Back in the Milky Way Galaxy, none of it had seemed important. A ship was never too far from a space station that could refurbish it, tune it up, and make sure all its needs were met and then topped off.
Finally, Captain Carroway finished punching in the order — for normal coffee. Perfectly normal coffee. She didn’t need a single other weird thing today, even a special flavor in her drink would be one thing too many. For a moment, she’d thought it would make a nice treat, but she didn’t really want treats right now. She wanted something much harder to come by: normalcy.
With her paws firmly wrapped around the warm, aromatic mug, Captain Carroway worked at pushing questions of conservation out of her mind. That wasn’t the problem at paw right now. And she couldn’t believe that a single cup of coffee more or less right now would make a big difference in the long run.
After a few sips, Captain Carroway’s head felt much clearer and sharper. The first matter of business had to be figuring out what The Wanderlust was dealing with when it came to this turtle-thing. She couldn’t let herself get overwhelmed by questions of what it implied about the Tetra Galaxy. One matter at a time. That was the way to move forward.
“Alright,” Captain Carroway meowed to Lt. Lee, who was looking like a very tired dog, as soon as she stepped back onto the bridge. “Walk me through your findings. Tell me everything you’ve figured out about this big space turtle we’re chasing.” Instead of returning to her captain’s chair, the Norwegian Forest cat stood beside her lieutenant, looking at the station in front of him and all the charts, graphs, lists and other readings flickering over it.
Staring at all that data, suddenly, Captain Carroway realized: she’d never been far enough away from Earth — from home — that Sol wasn’t even a star in the sky, somewhere in the sky.
It wasn’t just that there were no stars in the sky.
That one specific star was gone.
The Norwegian Forest cat shivered, in spite of her thick, fluffy fur.
Captain Carroway struggled to follow all the information as Lt. Lee explained it to her, but it mostly seemed to amount to the fact that the turtle shape was a single giant organism, approximately the size of a small moon. The way it was flying through space apparently created something like a hyperspace slipstream around it, meaning the turtle actually had a small bubble of atmosphere collected over the back of its shell, and readings suggested there might be more lifeforms — though mostly vegetative plant lifeforms — collected on its back. So, it was indeed a world turtle, like Captain Carroway had seen in old mythology books. She wondered if a turtle like this had passed close enough to Earth in the distant past that an astronomer had spotted it, and that’s where the myths had come from.
Also, the whole thing was accelerating away from the Tetra Galaxy, picking up speed as it flew. If they’d arrived a few days later, The Wanderlust would have had no chance of catching up to the mysterious turtle.
“It’s really too bad that it’s heading away from the Milky Way instead of towards it,” Captain Carroway mused. “With the way it’s picking up speed, it could have taken us home much more quickly than we can fly there ourselves.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” Ensign Risqua squawked suddenly, inviting herself into the conversation. “Could we convince the turtle to turn around somehow? Travel in the right direction for us?”
“Is it safe?” Lt. Lee woofed. “I mean, we don’t know hardly anything about it. What if it… I don’t know… eats spaceships? And leading it to the Milky Way would mean mass death and destruction?”
“We need to get closer to it,” Captain Carroway concluded. “So we can gather more information. We simply don’t know enough yet, from this far away.”
“If we could convince the turtle to carry us home,” Ensign Risqua continued, pressing harder on her idea, “then maybe we could spend the trip on its back. The smaller life signs on the back could be trees, right? Trees and other plants? It might be a paradise. I’d rather travel in a paradise garden on the back of a turtle than this cramped little Tri-Galactic Navy ship.”
Captain Carroway caught a flash in Lt. Lee’s eyes that said the Papillon wanted to defend the comfort and quality of The Wanderlust. He’d been working on The Wanderlust — tuning her up, upgrading, and retro-fitting her — for longer than anyone else aboard. But Ensign Risqua had a point. No one actually wanted to live on a small ship like The Wanderlust long term. This ship was built for short missions, not the kind of voyage they were facing now.
“It’s an interesting idea, Ensign Risqua,” Captain Carroway conceded, hoping to cut off Lt. Lee’s desire for an argument. “But we still need to learn more.”
Then sizing up the Papillon, noting the redness in his eyes and the greasiness of the long fur around his pretty ears, Captain Carroway asked, “When does your shift end, Lt. Lee? I’m guessing soon?”
The Papillon nodded, suddenly looking even more tired, as if Captain Carroway’s question had finally given him permission to admit his own tiredness to himself. “Ensign Melbourne will be replacing Ensign Risqua at the helm soon, and then Risqua is supposed to take over my post until Ensign Diaz’s shift begins.”
Captain Carroway nodded. She’d made sure to arrange the shifts so that The Wanderlust wouldn’t be entirely run by former Anti-Ra officers for as long as possible. Eventually, with such a small crew, it would be inevitable that they’d end up with only Anti-Ra officers on the bridge at some point, but Captain Carroway wanted to put it off until the crew had melded together more thoroughly. She’d tried not to be too obvious about what she was doing while arranging the schedule with Commander Chestnut and Ensign Diaz, but they were both sharp officers. Captain Carroway had no doubt they’d seen right through her ruse about wanting officers from the different crews to get to know each other better and understood exactly why she didn’t want the bridge run by only Anti-Ra yet. She didn’t fully trust them. How could she? They’d just met, and their organizations didn’t share any of the same foundational principles.
Fortunately, Commander Chestnut had been cooperative. That squirrel was a good egg.
Over the following hours, officers came and went, their short shifts meaning they could rotate on and off of the bridge, taking time in the multi-purpose room to eat and chat, getting to know one and another. Captain Carroway listened, but she tried to look like she wasn’t listening. She tried to look like she was deep in thought, musing over their options and her plans for the days to come. In actuality though, she was listening for signs of trouble, seeds that might grow into full grown problems between officers, or anything among her crew that needed looking into.
Captain Carroway wasn’t an expert on interpersonal relationships, but she’d had to learn how to pay attention to the officers around her in order to work her way as high through the ranks as she had. And so far as she could tell, the assortment of crew members who’d been thrown together on The Wanderlust for this fateful voyage was a remarkably lucky mix. She could picture true friendships developing out here in the wilds of the Tetra Galaxy before they all managed to make it home. That said, she could also tell that her subordinate officers were all going to start getting pretty twitchy if The Wanderlust didn’t start flying in the right direction to take them home pretty soon. There was only so far she could stretch their patience before people started to snap.
It was bad enough being a long way from home. It was even worse that they were heading in the wrong direction.
And yet…
The turtle on the viewscreen was growing brighter by the minute now. The rumpled, crenellated quality to its back had started to look like treetops — a whole forest spread from one edge to the other of the turtle’s back, and the trees glowed. Phosphorescent green. It must be beautiful underneath them, looking up at a sky filled with shining leaves, fluttering in the breeze, capping off the ceiling of a traveling world.
How far had this turtle traveled? How far did it still have to go?
Was it going somewhere specific? Or just migrating across the universe, seeing where the tides of the stars took it?
Captain Carroway couldn’t imagine a more beautiful existence than that. The uplifted cats, dogs, squirrels and such of Earth had needed to build rockets and a space elevator to escape the gravity of their world, and then they’d needed to design crafts capable of supporting them while traveling between stars before they’d been able to truly explore. Anyone who lived on this turtle would be born an explorer, always exploring, because their very world was designed to carry them across galaxies and from one galaxy to the next.
Captain Carroway hoped fervently that someone lived on the back of this turtle. It would be such a shame, such a waste if no one did.
On the bridge, where the officers would come and go, the viewscreen was now almost entirely filled by a turtle shell. Captain Carroway stared at it with her green eyes as if by focusing hard enough, she could make sense of the entire universe — from the suicide mission she’d been sent on to the chaos she was now trying to crystallize into a single crew, bound together by a single mission. A better mission. Because taking her crew members home was a much more wholesome purpose than the one some random admiral had saddled her with when she’d been given this post on The Wanderlust.
Somehow, it felt like Captain Carroway had been called here, like the turtle had pulled her across the universe. It didn’t make sense. But she couldn’t let the idea go.
“It’s nice to have something on our viewscreen other than the endless darkness between galaxies,” Captain Carroway observed, trying to lighten the mood on the bridge.
Ensign Diaz at the helm post resolutely refused to turn her head and acknowledge the captain’s unearned optimism in any way. The set of the canine’s broad shoulders, though, seemed to slump a little more, like she found the captain’s positivity in such a dire situation exhausting.
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, who was back at his original post, looking a bit shaky and worse for wear observed, “If we were flying toward the Tetra Galaxy instead of away from it, then we’d have a glittering expanse of stars for you to look at. There are stars out here, captain, they’re just not in the direction you’ve been looking.”
It hurt for Captain Carroway’s best friend to make a point of using his considerable skills at snarkiness against her. She would have liked to have his support in the choices she was making for The Wanderlust, but she had to remember that he was still suffering from the loss of his computer implant. Though, if Mike’s personality was anything to judge the implant by, Captain Carroway couldn’t imagine how it had been helpful for Lt. Cmdr. Vossie to always have the thing whispering straight into his brain. She’d barely been able to stand being in the same room with Ensign Mike, let alone imagining what it would be like to share the same head.
At some level, Captain Carroway knew she was being unfair to the fungal officer, holding things against them that weren’t exactly their fault. They wouldn’t have chosen to hurt Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, leaving him shaken and struggling, if they’d had a choice. At least, Captain Carroway didn’t think so.
But part of her wondered. The same part that feared Commander Chestnut had been being so nice because he was trying to lull her into complacency. The same part that assumed Lt. Lee would turn on her as soon as he had a chance, because she wasn’t living up to being the kind of Tri-Galactic Union captain such a skilled and ambitious young officer deserved. The part of her that figured this would all end with everyone except her and — somehow — Ensign Melbourne dead, and the two of them would wind up back on that mining asteroid where he’d been incarcerated. Just two jail birds. Who happened to be cats. Jail cats. Reminiscing about how they’d gotten everyone else dead.
At least, Captain Carroway was sure that the white tomcat would be able to turn all of this into a funny story for his former jail mates somehow. She wasn’t sure how, but she was sure he could do it. She had faith in his storytelling skills.
Maybe it was because the Norwegian Forest cat’s outlook had gotten so dim and gloomy or maybe it would have happened at that moment either way, but Captain Carroway suddenly spotted movement over the far horizon of the turtle’s shell. Dark, dart-like objects whisked past the crenellated forest top, blocking the green light from below, zipping and zooming in a very familiar, very spaceship-like way.
“What is that movement?” Captain Carroway meowed, pointing at the viewscreen. “Can you get any readings on those things? Scan them, please, Ensign Diaz,” the Norwegian Forest cat ordered.
For a moment, the captain’s heart filled with hope: there really were spacefaring people living on the back of this turtle! Then she saw the black ships fire on the forest, red energy beams blasting at the treetops, causing the trees to burst into flame. The glowing green trees began glowing even more brightly, more redly, more horribly. Instead of the gentle glow of phosphorescence, this was the horrible glow of destruction.
Captain Carroway didn’t know what to think. But Ensign Diaz did. The canine snapped, “We need to get out of here!” The Xolo-Lupinian whirled around in her pilot’s seat until she could face her captain. “Those ships could attack us,” Ensign Diaz snarled.
But the canine didn’t lay in a course away from the turtle. Her brown eyes flashed with anger, but she didn’t take the situation into her own paws. She looked to her superior officer for orders — even though the ranking officer on the bridge at that moment was Captain Carroway and not Commander Chestnut — and that fact warmed the Norwegian Forest cat’s heart. It was only their first day as a blended crew, and the plan was already working.
“No,” Captain Carroway meowed evenly, firmly. “We can’t leave. There’s too much to be gained here. Besides, the turtle might need our help.”
“Or the turtle might be dangerous! We don’t know what’s going on here, and we don’t want to get caught in the middle of a conflict we don’t understand!” Ensign Diaz looked furious, but she was arguing instead of disobeying.
“Then we need to try to understand it.” Captain Carroway’s ears flattened, and she didn’t try to stop them. She wanted Ensign Diaz to see her anger — and that she was controlling it. Turning toward Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, the Norwegian Forest cat asked, “Are those ships a threat to us?” They looked small from this distance, but even a small ship can be well-armed. The Wanderlust was proof enough of that.
“Most definitely,” the rabbit-like alien announced after looking over the readings on his control panel. He looked surprisingly calm about the situation. It almost seemed like the presence of a clear and present danger was soothing his nerves — now that he knew where the danger was, and it was outside of his body, outside of his ship, he could handle it. Sometimes, the dangers that we only imagine are the scariest ones of all.
“Can you get a reading on how many of those ships there are?” Captain Carroway kept trying to count, but it was difficult to keep track of the fast-moving vessels, small and silhouetted as they were.
“The Wanderlust’s scanners are tracking six vessels attacking the turtle right now,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie stated. “Though, I can’t guarantee there aren’t others still hidden or out of range of our sensors.”
“But they haven’t seen us yet?” Captain Carroway pressed.
“Extremely unlikely,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie agreed. “They’re closer to the turtle than us — close enough that the hyperspatial slipstream should be interfering with their sensors and obscuring us from view. So, it’s not impossible that they’d notice us, but they’d have to look in exactly the right direction. I can’t tell you the exact probability of that…” The rabbit-like alien’s ears flagged, and his voice faltered. “Perhaps, if you wanted an exact probability, we could get Ensign Mike on the bridge to tell you one.”
“That’s alright,” Captain Carroway meowed. “Unlikely is good enough for me.”
Ensign Diaz snorted derisively and woofed, “Then maybe you should have higher standards. We’re being hailed.”
Continue on to Chapter 18…