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.
Only one member of the Wanderlust’s scattered crew wasn’t watching as the great, silvery moon cracked, patches of its surface breaking off in shards. Some of the broken pieces of shell floated around the rest of the egg-moon, detritus that gleamed with reflected sunlight as the shards turned and twisted, and others flew away, caught in the gravity well of the planet below and spiraled down, becoming flaming meteors soaring across the sky. And in the middle of it all, a wrinkly green face, pressed against the crack, seeking the wider, open space beyond, liquid eyes blinking as they saw the brightness of distant stars for the first time.
Lys couldn’t watch, because she had been restrained and imprisoned in one of the Zakonraptors’ labs. One without screens or windows showing the sky. The gentle, harmless, warm-hearted caterpillar had been painfully bound with coarse fabric wrapped tightly around her, pressing her two rows of short arms against her body, almost like a straightjacket. Then she’d been laid out on a metal table, as if the Zakonraptors planned to dissect her. Maybe they did. She couldn’t read them. All she could hear was the deafening roar of static that pulsed like a heartbeat, like the pounding waves of an ocean, drowning out every other sound, even the sound of her own thoughts.
The static had been in her mind for weeks, as they’d approached the binary star system, getting worse and worse as they got closer. By the time they’d come into orbit of this planet, Lys had barely been able to function, leading to her staying in the barracks with Lt. Lee. She’d barely been able to choke out the words necessary to warn the Papillon that he would need to trust the angry but loyal Xolo-Lupinian, and when the Zakonraptors had come to restrain her? Lys hadn’t fought at all. There’d been nothing left in her but the crashing sound of the static, rising and falling, completely consuming her.
Until now. Until it finally broke, and her mind cleared, filled with an overwhelming joy. As she lay stretched out on a laboratory table, coarsely swaddled in too-tight fabric, her mind swelled with the sound and sensation of joy, and she was finally able to understand the pulsing static she’d been hearing. It had been the overwhelming, all-consuming urge of a baby world-turtle, instinctively driven to press outward against the eggshell holding it back, and break into the universe outside its safe, confining, natal shell.
Like a birthday present opening itself, the world turtle was finally born, and it felt the joy of stretching out a flipper, first one and then the other, the sensation of stretching and yawning and knowing the touch of empty vacuum against the wrinkly skin of its face and the smooth shell over its back that wasn’t nearly as insensate as one might guess. No, when this world-turtle was old enough to become properly populated, it would feel the creatures who lived on its back, and it would take joy in the crawling patterns of their movement. For now, its shell was covered only with the soft, dimly glowing, mossy beginnings of what would grow into a full forest over the coming decades.
Lys knew what the turtle looked like, even though she was laying prone on the metal slab of a dissection table, forgotten by the Zakonraptor scientists in their excitement over the world-turtle finally hatching, because the infant turtle’s mind had connected to hers, instinctively, and the massiveness of its mind was hugely amplifying her telepathic abilities. She could see the baby world-turtle through the eyes of both Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee. Their canine minds were open to her in a way that none of the reptilian-avian minds of Risqua nor the Zakonraptors were, and they were closer to her — being inside the same asteroid base — than any of the stranded Wanderlust officers on the planet’s surface.
Lys couldn’t reach out to Korvax and soothe his worries, promising that she was still alive. Not yet. But she could reach out mentally to Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee in a much more coherent, cogent way than she could have before.
Where she’d only heard the whispers of feelings and been able to maybe push or pull at those feelings a little, now Lys found she could speak right into the two dogs’ minds and say, “I’m here, and I can hear you. Help me, and let me help you.”
Continue on to Chapter 13…