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.
While Lt. Diaz had been arguing with Risqua, making sure the reptile-bird understood her place in their little hierarchy, Lt. Lee had been turning his understanding of the Zakonraptor research — illuminated in new ways by Lt. Diaz’s perspective — over and over in their shared mind space, and he was pretty sure he knew what they needed to do.
It was a ridiculous plan.
But if it worked — and it might work — then it might actually get them a lot closer to home.
It might make this whole ordeal worthwhile.
Lt. Diaz didn’t really like hoping anymore. After half a year on the far side of the universe mourning her childhood friend, topped off by Risqua betraying her, something deep inside the Xolo-Lupinian was unable to risk the vulnerability inherent to hope. It was better to brace her heart against possible future impacts, because as far as she could tell, the hits just kept coming. And as long as she was still living, she didn’t have a choice but to keep rolling with them, no matter how deep into a ditch of despair they carried her.
For all her wolfy bluster — and wolves can be pretty good at huffing and puffing — Lt. Diaz wasn’t at all sure that she and Lt. Lee working alone could take back the Wanderlust, rescue Lys, rescue everyone on the surface, and get out of here. Even if she did seem to have strong-armed Risqua into halfheartedly helping them for the time being. The Xolo-Lupinian felt like she was building a house with walls of straw and a ceiling of bricks, ready to tumble down on her bat-like ears at the worst possible moment.
In simple terms, Lt. Diaz fully believed she’d live out the rest of her days surrounded by Zakonraptors, trapped in the Tetra Galaxy, but she wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Life is a fight, a constant fight, a constant struggle. Every second, you fight to breathe, to keep yourself fed, to simply keep living in the chaotic soup of entropy that wants to run your body down, break it down into its constituent parts, and return you to the dust you miraculously arose from. And so you keep fighting, because life doesn’t know any alternative.
The plan started simple: offer to help the Zakonraptor scientists with a glitch they’d been encountering in one of their projects. Lt. Lee had spotted the problem when the Zakonraptors had been showing off the microscopic, armor-clad creatures they’d been developing by shrinking normally-sized crab-like animals that presumably came from either their homeworld or the world below. Either way, the crab-like animals weren’t faring well once they’d been shrunk, kind of fraying around the edges like the matter they were composed of didn’t know how to retain its usual cohesion once plunged into an environment that functioned on a vastly different scale.
The microscopic crabs started out fine, but the longer they stayed shrunk down and out of scale with the rest of the matter surrounding them, the blurrier they looked, like they were coming out of phase with reality. The Zakonraptors had tried to hide this detail as they proudly showed off their work, but the Papillon had eyes like a hawk. And as soon as he suggested that he had an idea for helping them, the Zakonraptor tour guide lost all interest in showing the Wanderlust officers to whatever accommodations had been fixed up for them. The Zakonraptors here were more than happy to immediately put Lt. Lee and Lt. Diaz right to work. And the Zakonraptors didn’t seem to care what Risqua was up to, as long as she didn’t get in the dogs’ way.
After fiddling with the device that the Zakonraptor scientists had constructed for shrinking creatures for a few minutes, Lt. Lee declared that his solution would be easiest to implement by taking the device aboard the Wanderlust and hooking it up to the anti-noise defrag couplers which would provide a smoothing effect on anything shrunk by the device.
Except, of course, there was no such thing as anti-noise defrag couplers. But they sure did sound good, and the Zakonraptors scientists swallowed the lie hook, line, and sinker, happily packing up their device to take it aboard the Wanderlust. So far, so good. The plan was working as intended. Of course, as Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee were playing at being helpful, cooperative scientists happy to be working with the Zakonraptors, they were also listening in on Lys’s growing terror as other Zakonraptor researchers began preparing her for their ministrations.
By the time the two canines were actually back aboard the Wanderlust — unfortunately, accompanied by several Zakonraptors and Risqua — Lys had been removed from the restraints that had been wrapped around her like a straightjacket and was instead splayed, naked across a metal table with all of her many short arms spread wide and tied down. The Zakonraptors studying her had also begun drawing marks on her head in a way she wouldn’t have understood if both of the dogs she was telepathically tied to hadn’t immediately reacted with horror. They both recognized that the Zakonraptors were potentially marking Lys’s head for where they intended to cut it open in order to directly access — and possibly simply remove — her brain. If they could’ve kept this thought from Lys, the dogs would have. But with the overpowered telepathic boost provided by the Waykeeper’s child, their three minds had begun to blur together to a troubling degree.
They needed to hurry. They needed to implement all the pieces of their plan before the Zakonraptors sliced Lys’s brain open. Lt. Lee cared about beating this ticking clock of a time limit for noble reasons — saving Lys’s life and all that principled Tri-Galactic Union mushiness. Lt. Diaz begrudgingly admired the Papillon’s nobility, but she was far more practical about the situation: she cared about getting their plan underway before the two dogs lost the benefit of the telepathic communication Lys was providing for them, and even more, she cared about not finding out what would happen if a brain she was telepathically connected to was suddenly sliced into pieces.
Lt. Diaz did not want to vicariously experience Lys’s dissection. Not at all. Not one bit. Right now, the Xolo-Lupinian was motivated by fear of the impending pain that Lys might telepathically share with her as by any kind of desire to escape the Zakonraptors so they could all get back to journeying home to the Milky Way.
Lt. Lee wasn’t particularly impressed by Lt. Diaz’s self-interest, but he didn’t disagree with it either. He also didn’t like the idea of finding out what it would feel like to share the feeling of being dissected. Fortunately, the Zakonraptors bustling around the prone caterpillar seemed to have a lot of prep work that was keeping them very involved. The two dogs tried not to let themselves be too distracted from their own work by worrying about it. There was nothing they could do for Lys directly, not until they had control of the Wanderlust’s teleporter. All they could do was involuntarily, vicariously flinch along with her every time a Zakonraptor stepped too close to her prone, vulnerable body.
Fortunately, now that the Xolo-Lupinian and Papillon were working together, it wasn’t too hard for Lt. Diaz to strategically distract the Zakonraptors just enough to give Lt. Lee the chance to secretly type a few lines of code into the Wanderlust’s computers here and there, just like she’d hoped he’d been doing before. The Papillon’s delicate paws moved fast, his blunt claws barely clicking on the controls as his paw pads pressed against them.
Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee could probably have pulled off this gambit by exchanging meaningful glances now that they knew they were on the same side, but it was even easier with Lys linking their minds together. The caterpillar’s intense desire for them to succeed — relayed straight into their own minds — kept them focused. It felt a little like being a pup again with their parents watching and delighting in every success, cheering them on in ways that adults simply don’t get to experience as much.
It felt good to be working as a team.
And when the Papillon struck the final keystroke, launching the program he’d written for the teleporter while pretending to have been fiddling with the nonexistent anti-noise defrag couplers, the shared joy and relief that all three of them — two dogs and one caterpillar — felt was so electric and palpable that it almost seemed like their emotions were mirrors pointed towards each other, reflecting back and forth to infinity. But in this case, infinity wasn’t an abstract concept, it was the unfathomably large mind of a baby world-turtle who had no real concept of what was happening.
The baby world-turtle had begun circling slowly around the craggy asteroid moon, fascinated by the thoughts and feelings emanating from Lys and the two dogs inside it. None of them in the four-way mind-link knew the history of how Ollallans had come to live on the back of the Waykeeper originally. Sure, there were legends told by the Ollallans, but they ranged from clearly metaphorical origin myths to chaotically contradictory versions of oral histories. So, Lys didn’t know if her people had evolved on the Waykeeper’s back or emigrated there from a more traditional planet. She didn’t know if there were other world-turtles who also hosted Ollallan societies. She didn’t know if their two species — world-turtle and Ollallan — were inextricably linked all the way into their past, but even if they weren’t, it was clear they were connected now. Lys’s bond to this new world-turtle was so strong, so overpowering, she wasn’t sure if she could even imagine ever leaving it.
Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee exchanged a look as their minds filled with Lys’s thoughts about the world-turtle. It was a little hard to concentrate on outwitting the Zakonraptors crawling all over the Wanderlust, beginning to take it apart, preparing to strip it for parts, with the frightened, overwhelmed caterpillar’s thoughts taking up more and more of the space in their minds. Fortunately, the program Lt. Lee had written finished compiling and immediately executed…
Every Zakonraptor on the Wanderlust fizzed with golden, quantum energy, phasing out of existence inside the small Tri-Galactic Union ship and presumably, moments later, phasing back into existence on a random island on the planet below. Lt. Diaz had wanted the Zakonraptors to be teleported into the vacuum of space… Lt. Lee had been planning on going with the cafeteria inside their own base. The two dogs compromised.
This way, none of the Zakonraptors who had been aboard the Wanderlust would be giving them any more trouble for the time being, but they also weren’t actually murdered in cold blood. Lt. Diaz felt it would have technically been self-defense, not cold blood. But Lt. Lee didn’t agree. They were both kind of looking forward to not having to share their thoughts quite so honestly anymore when this was over. Because, sure, it had started out as forming coherent, verbal, composed thoughts in their minds and having Lys pass them back and forth like notes, but the longer it went on, and the more tired and scared Lys got, the more their minds were just all washing up against each other, getting mixed up and confused.
Lt. Diaz never knew when she’d suddenly find herself confronted with a surprising sensation like looking forward to seeing Ensign Melbourne again because that white tomcat just had the most bewitching blue eyes… and now the Xolo-Lupinian knew more about Lt. Lee’s romantic feelings than she’d ever wanted to. Correspondingly, she kept being slapped in the muzzle — metaphorically speaking — with sudden judgy reactions from Lt. Lee when her feelings floated unwanted into his mind.
The Papillon didn’t think much of her ongoing grudge match with the captain. He wasn’t impressed by how she wallowed in her grief over Wilder while assuming that Cmdr. Chestnut and Werik weren’t mourning Wilder and Maple, who they’d both been close to, just as much, simply because they didn’t wear their pain like bright shining jewels decorating their fur all the time. Honestly, the Papillon’s disapproving reactions to nearly every one of Lt. Diaz’s emotions were quite sobering. She’d never been forced to see herself from the outside so clearly before, and it was especially galling that this subtle condemnation was coming from a fancy little uplifted dog who looked like he should wear bows in his long-furred ears.
And then it all stopped. Lt. Diaz was alone in her mind, and the silence was so startling that her own breathing and heartbeat sounded like the roaring, booming noise of a battleship at war. “What happened?” Lt. Diaz barked.
The Xolo-Lupinian and Papillon were alone on the Wanderlust now, in the engine room where they’d been pretending to work on the nonexistent anti-noise defrag couplers.
“I don’t know,” Lt. Lee woofed, staying focused on the control panel in front of him. His paws were working fast, scanning the rest of the interior of the asteroid base, looking for Ollallan life signs.
Lt. Diaz saw what he was doing and bit back any worried words she might say about what could be happening to Lys right now — they’d both been too overwhelmed by the way their minds had been sloshing together to keep track of what had been happening to her. Or maybe… had the caterpillar started blocking out her own experiences to stop the two dogs from being distracted by what was happening to her?
Had the Zakonraptors already begun dissecting Lys? Was that why their mind-connection had suddenly broken?
Lt. Diaz didn’t know, and she couldn’t make the Wanderlust’s sensors scan any faster. So, instead, she stayed out of Lt. Lee’s way and started working on the next step of their ridiculous plan.
The truly, utterly ridiculous part.
Continue on to Chapter 15…