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.
In a single stroke, the round, silvery moon had become both more and less of a god, answering Lt. Diaz’s prayers at the same time as breaking apart, revealing itself to be nothing but a hollow shell, housing a creature inside who the half-Lupinian would have never thought to howl or pray to in the first place — a baby world-turtle was a wonderful thing, but it wasn’t the kind of moon she’d been taught to revere as a pup.
And then Lys’s voice echoed strangely in her mind but not her bat-like ears. Lt. Diaz splayed her ears and looked at Lt. Lee, only to see his butterfly-like ears had splayed as well.
“Did you hear that?” Lt. Diaz asked.
“Yes,” the smaller dog woofed.
“Hear what?” Risqua squawked, looking from one dog to the other, trying to figure out what they could be barking about, but neither of them was inclined to share information with her anymore.
“Would it help if the two of you could hear each other through me?” Lys asked in Diaz’s mind, and presumably also in Lt. Lee’s.
“Yes,” Lt. Diaz thought as hard as she could without speaking, and suddenly, Lt. Lee blinked at her like he’d heard her thought.
“I don’t know how long I can I do this for,” Lys’s mind voice said, “but for now, the Waykeeper’s child seems quite taken with me and is letting me use the power of their mind. We must make the most of this opportunity while we can — before the Zakonraptors come back and begin their experiments on me.”
By this point, the two dogs had grown oddly quiet, entirely focused on the caterpillar’s voice echoing inside their minds, and Risqua was watching them both very suspiciously.
“We need a way to get back onto the Wanderlust,” Lt. Diaz thought, trying to keep her thoughts clear and focused in the hope that it would ease the strain on Lys’s mind. “And then we need a way to break the Wanderlust out of this base.”
Lt. Lee’s butterfly-like ears flickered up and down as he listened to Lt. Diaz’s amplified thoughts. It was strange for both of them to be talking with each other without actually voicing the thoughts they shared. When the Papillon sensed the Xolo-Lupinian was done thought-speaking, his voice responded in her mind, “If we tell the Zakonraptors we need to go back to the Wanderlust to help remove a particularly delicate and important system that will help with their research, I think they’ll take us back without too many questions. As long as they continue to believe we’re on their side.”
“But how do we overpower them and get them out of our way once we’re there?” Lt. Diaz wondered.
“I don’t know,” Lt. Lee uncannily answered her wondering. “You probably have more real world experience with fighting than I do, having been in the Anti-Ra.”
Communicating this way was so strange and unfiltered. Lt. Diaz worried about accidentally thinking something too loudly and having Lys pass along thoughts she didn’t intend to share.
“I will try not to share anything I overhear that doesn’t seem like you want it shared,” Lys said in Lt. Diaz’s mind, and based on Lt. Lee’s expression, also in his. It wasn’t actually the most comforting thing the caterpillar could have said at that moment. Sometimes silence is really what you most want to hear.
“What is going on with you two?” Risqua squawked, tilting her head so far to the side that it really highlighted how different bird necks are from canine ones.
“You look like an owl,” Lt. Diaz snapped, not sure if it would feel like an insult to the reptile-bird or not. She hoped it did. Then focusing on her thoughts very carefully, she thought the words, “I couldn’t make sense of the hodgepodge of different research topics the Zakonraptors are pursuing here. Can you read their minds and make any sense of it?”
“Hodgepodge? Is that how you think? With words like that?” Lt. Lee replied uselessly in her mind.
“Yes, shut up,” Lt. Diaz snapped again, forgetting to keep her words in her head.
Lt. Lee laughed and shook his head, thinking, “Somehow it just doesn’t match your Tough Badass image is all. But that’s okay. I like it.”
Risqua was staring at the two dogs like they were both completely out of their minds by this point. But she still wasn’t running off to tattle on them to the Zakonraptors. She was probably trying to figure out whether the Zakonraptors would be grateful to her if she tipped them off to Diaz and Lee’s potential betrayal beforehand or if they’d simply blame her, and it’d be a better bet to play on their sympathy when the dogs betrayed both them and her.
“I can’t read the Zakonraptors. Your minds are the only ones here I can read at all,” Lys said. “Sorry. And it seems to be taking all of my concentration just to function as a conduit for the two of you to speak to each other this way, so I hope it’s helpful. I guess it is keeping my mind off of how tight these restraints are and how soon the Zakonraptors might come back and what they’ll do to me when they get here…”
The Xolo-Lupinian and Papillon shared a concerned look, both of their pairs of brown eyes deeply troubled by the rising panic in the caterpillar’s voice in their minds. They needed to figure this out fast.
“I think I know what the Zakonraptors are doing with their research,” Lt. Lee thought, “but I feel weird saying it, because it just doesn’t make any sense…”
Fortunately for Lt. Diaz and Lys, they didn’t have to wait for Lt. Lee to get over his compunctions about saying something that might sound silly, because the telepathically-boosted caterpillar was able to pick the whole theory out of the Papillon’s head and relay it straight to the Xolo-Lupinian’s without even having to translate it into words.
“Woah,” Lt. Diaz woofed.
“You two have lost your minds,” Risqua squawked.
The idea now filling the invisible space in Lt. Diaz’s mind that overlayed the physical world around her was full of complex, moving pieces — all the different pieces of research they’d seen during their tour, arranged in positions relative to each other that made them fall into a pattern she’d been looking for but couldn’t find.
The Zakonraptors were studying biology, physics, and engineering here. They were studying both macroscopic and microscopic scales. They were trying to figure out how to convert between those scales — how to imitate a world-turtle by beginning with a normal animal and enlarging it into something massive enough to function as a world; how to fortify existing creatures against the extreme pressures of living in the vacuum of space or how to alter extremophiles to become more hospitable to potential inhabitants who require more mild habitats; and how to shrink down a pre-existing world-turtle to a more manageable, controllable size.
Lt. Diaz had seen all the pieces she would have needed to put this pattern together, but she hadn’t seen it. The gigantic corpse hanging above them in the docking clamps wasn’t a space whale — it was a tardigrade, recognizably so, except that a tardigrade should never have been the size of a spaceship. Such creature belonged on microscope slides. And correspondingly, many of the minuscule creatures the Zakonraptors had shown them on microscope slides had clearly not been designed naturally through evolution to be that size. Their shapes were complex in ways that simply couldn’t arise naturally at that size, and many of them had been fortified with metal alloy armor that was a sadly comic attempt at mimicking the effects of a turtle’s shell.
The Xolo-Lupinian marveled at the sharpness of the pretty, little Papillon’s mind as she let her own mind trip its way around the different corners of this thought-shape she’d been gifted. No wonder he was depressed stuck out here in the Tetra Galaxy — he wasn’t just missing his family and the familiar places in the Milky Way. His brilliance was being wasted. There weren’t interesting enough things to keep his mind properly occupied and busy on this endless, repetitive trek.
Lt. Diaz wished she’d known this about Lt. Lee before. They should have been working together all this time. Challenging each other, building on each others’ ideas, and seeing what they could discover by bouncing their different perspectives off each other.
Lt. Diaz saw the skin inside Lt. Lee’s butterfly-like ears blush bright pink as her reactions to his thoughts got relayed to him. Their minds were blending a little more closely than either of them were comfortable with right now, but it was extremely helpful for working out the puzzle of how they would escape this situation.
Straight off the bat, Lt. Diaz saw the Zakonraptors’ research from a different angle than Lt. Lee, now that she had his understanding of it. Her background as a resistance fighter caused her to see how the Zakonraptors were clearly angling to build worlds that would be fierce enough to fight and defend themselves, maybe even attack other worlds. If they couldn’t take the world-turtles by conquest with their fleets of spaceships, then maybe the Zakonraptors thought they could build their own world-creatures who could dominate the world-turtles. They were trying to build a fearsome, violent future.
The Waykeeper’s child deserved better than to stay here and be studied by the Zakonraptors, getting swept up into their violent plans. This thought was so tender and caring that Lt. Diaz immediately recognized it wasn’t her own: it came from Lys. The caterpillar alien was already deeply attached this baby world-turtle. It had bonded to her, and she was bonding right back to it.
Lt. Diaz began to idly wonder what had caused the Waykeeper’s child’s hyperspatial slipstream to flicker in and out of existence as the Wanderlust had approached this system. Was that a natural phenomenon for a hatching world turtle? Or was it caused by something the Zakonraptors had been doing to the unhatched tortoise while still growing and developing inside its egg?
A sudden memory of pain washed over Lt. Diaz, strong enough to black out her vision and block out her hearing. For a moment, she couldn’t tell if her paws were still underneath her. She couldn’t tell if she was still herself, because she wouldn’t have thought her canine body would be capable of holding a pain so large. The pain disappeared as fast as it had come, but it left the Xolo-Lupinian shaky in its wake, unsure if such a thing would happen again.
She didn’t want it to ever happen again.
“Okay, so the Waykeeper’s child is coming with us when we leave... We can’t leave them here for the Zakonraptors to experiment on more.” The Papillon’s thought-voice sounded quavering and weak in Lt. Diaz’s mind, like he’d been knocked flat by the same wave of pain and was only barely pulling himself together, afraid of being knocked down again.
“I’m sorry,” Lys said into their minds. “The Waykeeper’s child is part of this conversation, since they’re the one amplifying my abilities, and clearly, they don’t understand how much bigger than us they really are. They didn’t mean to hurt all three of us like that… They just wanted us to understand.”
Risqua narrowed her eyes at the two dogs who were both panting from the sudden pain which the reptile-bird knew nothing about. All Risqua knew was that Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee had both started acting extremely strangely, and if they were going to betray her and the Zakonraptors, the best thing she could do was to distance herself from them as much as possible. So, she took her tray of food — mostly finished by now — in her talons and prepared to leave the two strangely behaving dogs behind.
“Hold on,” Lt. Diaz snapped at her former friend. “You’re not going anywhere. We might need you.”
“Why would I help you?” Risqua hissed. “You’re planning on betraying me.”
“You don’t have the right to say the word ‘betrayal,'” Lt. Diaz sneered with enough menace in her snarling, wolfish expression to stop the traitorous reptile-bird in her tracks. “And you’ll help us, because you know we’re going to succeed at reclaiming the Wanderlust, and when we do, you don’t want me to teleport you back aboard as our final act before racing out of here. You’d rather stay here than risk ever being aboard the Wanderlust with me again.”
Lt. Lee pointed out quietly by thought that Captain Carroway wouldn’t look kindly on Lt. Diaz murdering Risqua, even if the bird was a traitor. And Lt. Diaz responded out loud, “I don’t even care what Captain Carroway would do to me if I murdered you. But I wouldn’t murder you right away, because, see, I’ve figured out that you were never truly Anti-Ra. You were always a Reptassan spy, and that means you might have Reptassan secrets we could torture out of you.”
“Captain Carroway wouldn’t stand for torture either,” Lt. Lee pointed out silently.
Lt. Diaz responded through mind-speak, “Shut up.” And out loud, she said, “I may not be a big fan of the Tri-Galactic Union, but I like Reptassans even less. The Tri-Galactic Union sold out my homeworld, but the Reptassans tried to destroy it. And if the Zakonraptors do somehow manage to stop us from escaping from here with the Wanderlust, then things will be even worse for you. Because I will have nothing left to live for other than making you suffer.”
Risqua and Lt. Diaz stared at each other for a long time. Long enough that the Xolo-Lupinian almost wished she could hear what the reptile-bird was thinking. Only almost. It was weird enough sharing the space inside her mind with a well-behaved, genius Papillon; a kind-hearted Ollallan; and a baby planet. They were at least on her side. Lt. Diaz really didn’t want to blend her mind with someone who would disrespect Wilder’s memory by using it as a smokescreen, lying about writing an opera for him while actively working towards stopping his friends from getting home to where they could at least tell his family what had happened to him.
Risqua deserved to be left here to rot in the Tetra Galaxy.
“Fine,” Risqua twittered, unhappily. “It’s become pretty clear that the Zakonraptors don’t see the Wanderlust as something I’m trading to them anyway, and instead merely think it’s something they plundered on their own. So, why not help you get out of here? Maybe it’ll teach them a lesson about respecting me.”
Lt. Diaz practically bit her own tongue off stopping herself from pointing out the logical flaws in Risqua’s thinking. “Great,” the Xolo-Lupinian woofed instead. “Because I think we have a plan.”
Continue on to Chapter 14…