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.
On the surface of the planet below, huddled beside a dwindling campfire, Korvax took his turn watching the sky and waiting for his comm-pin to chime to life with the voice of his beloved Ollallan daughter — or one of the other Wanderlust crewmembers who was still on the ship when it flew into a hatch in the side of the craggy moon — telling him everything was better now and to prepare to be teleported back aboard.
Korvax had stuffed bits of moss that he’d gathered between his quills to keep him warmer, and he could hear the various other officers, curled around the campfire, snoring softly as they slept. But he kept his eyes on the sky. He kept watching the craggy moon. In fact, he almost missed the first cracks when they appeared on the surface of the larger, rounder, silvery moon, because his beady eyes were so focused on the moon where his caterpillar daughter had been taken.
The crack began small, a hairline fracture almost too fine to see in the glowing brightness of the moon. But it widened, forked, and drew Korvax’s attention to it. The alien hedgehog strained his beady eyes, trying to understand what he was seeing in the sky.
“Mx. Mike,” Korvax squeaked, shuffling around the cheery dregs of the campfire to where the toadstool officer was sleeping, mushroom cap head resting companionably on Vossie’s narrow, rabbit-like chest. “Mx. Mike! Wake up!”
Korvax shook the mushroom, also jostling the Morphican officer. Both of them groggily, reluctantly struggled their way awake.
“What do you want?” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie grumbled, running a paw smoothingly along the length of his long ears.
“I want Mx. Mike to do their fancy seeing thing like they did earlier!” the hedgehog squeaked. Then pointing at the sky, he ordered, “Magnify that moon!”
Ensign Mike blinked their row of slit-like eyes along the underside of their mushroom cap head, and while they stared upward at the bright, silver moon, they fiddled with blobby fingers, untangling the mycelian strands of their bushy beard. “The moon appears to be breaking,” they muttered, their voice like heavy raindrops plopping into a pond.
“Breaking!” Korvax squeaked, overcome with excitement, almost sure the he knew what was happening. In his heart, he was sure. “Or maybe… could it be…”
The crack had spread halfway across the moon’s face now, a dark fork of black lightning marring the bright, shining, silver.
“What is happening to it? Is that a volcanic fissure?” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie asked blearily, peering at the breaking moon, untroubled by how the hedgehog had trailed off. “Has the moon been struck by a meteorite?”
“A meteorite large and fast enough to crack a moon of that size down the middle?” Werik, the other Morphican said, rousing from his sleep and staring with bewilderment at the sky.
“I do not see any signs of impact on the surface,” Ensign Mike muttered. “No crater or scorch marks. And that’s definitely a chasm, not a river of lava.” By now, everyone around the campfire was awake and either straining their eyes to stare at the moon or watching the toadstool officer intently, waiting to hear what else they might say. “The breakage is more consistent with a powerful pressure applied on the surface from an internal source.”
“Internal… to a moon?” Captain Carroway rumbled, rubbing her eyes. Her fluffy fur was in complete disarray from sleep. “What could be inside a moon?” Although, as she asked the question, the Norwegian Forest cat remembered that her own ship was inside the other, craggier, less symmetrical moon right now.
Helpfully, the white tomcat, who seemed to be faster at waking up than the captain, meowed, “You know, the Wanderlust is inside the other moon, so…”
“Yes, thank you, Ensign Melbourne,” the captain snapped, now wondering whether there was a secret fleet of starships hiding inside every moon around here.
While the others blustered in confusion, the flustered hedgehog managed to gather himself together well enough to speak the words out loud that had already begun ringing like a bell in his heart, and as soon as he spoke them, all the others were stunned into silence, seeing that he must be right:
“It’s a baby Waykeeper.” Korvax’s paws clutched together under his chin like he was praying to the gigantic, moon-sized egg hatching in the starry night sky over their heads.
All seven of the stranded Wanderlust officers stared at the sky in awe now, watching the lightning bolt-shaped crack spread and widen across the egg-moon’s surface, watching eyes the size of small seas peer out through the crack and see the universe for the first time.
“Did you know the Waykeeper had laid eggs in this galaxy?” Captain Carroway whispered reverently, her green eyes staring possessively at the cracking moon like the baby world-turtle inside might somehow save her, even if she wasn’t yet sure how.
“Do you know if there any others?” Cmdr. Chestnut asked, joining the conversation.
Korvax shook his head with a mixture of sadness and wonder. “I didn’t know. Maybe the Ollallan elders–”
“The butterflies?” Captain Carroway interrupted to ask.
“–yes, them,” Korvax continued, untroubled by the Norwegian Forest cat’s intrusion. “Maybe they knew. But the young Ollallans and I — all of us living on the surface of the Waykeeper’s back — we were in the world, not watching it from the outside. I didn’t know of any eggs. I didn’t know we were leaving young, new worlds behind… to fend for themselves.”
The hedgehog had lived on the Waykeeper’s back for many years. The world-turtle had been more than an unusual planet to him. It had been his home. The Waykeeper had protected him, and he felt now like he should have been protecting these smaller worlds, left behind like scattered pearls, but he hadn’t even realized they existed. It was wrong for them to be alone in this galaxy, overrun by violent Zakonraptors who would burn down the bioluminescent forests on the Waykeeper’s back without a single thought for the pain it might cause the turtle.
Perhaps there was nothing Korvax could have done to protect any infant world-turtles left behind on the Waykeeper’s path. Perhaps this was how they were meant to be — hatching alone on the gravitational shores of isolated stars, long since passed by on the Waykeeper’s journey. But it seemed a lonely way to hatch to Korvax.
Continue on to Chapter 12…