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.
The baby world-turtle and the Tri-Galactic Union spaceship flew towards each other, each shrinking, becoming smaller targets for the Zakonraptor vessels pursuing them. The Waykeeper’s child’s hyperspatial slipstream shrank in proportion with their body, but also, the ship and tortoise flew closer and closer, making up the difference. Like in Zeno’s famous paradox, they halved the distance between them, over and over, never quite reaching the other.
All around them, the asteroid base seemed to grow and grow like Wonderland after Alice tasted the mushroom. Except, of all the beings aboard the Wanderlust, their fungal officer — currently busy playing custodian to a lot of potted plants — probably had the least to do with this particular wild adventure.
The space inside the hollowed out asteroid grew more and more cavernous until it wasn’t even on a meaningful scale with the Wanderlust anymore. The main viewscreen continued to show the Waykeeper’s child flying toward them, staying a constant relative size now, but everything else seemed to fall away so far into the distance that the asteroid base couldn’t even be seen anymore. The curved walls and ceiling were too far away, too large to see, simply a distant backdrop. And as the Wanderlust continued to shrink even more, specks on the viewscreen bloomed outward growing from meaningless flecks of dust to boulders to be dodged. Ensign Melbourne’s reflexes were severely tested, and Lys cried out several times, overcome by sensations of surprise passed to her by the baby world-turtle as it shrank too.
Droplets of water, imperceptible moisture in the atmosphere, expanded to look like entire shimmering globes of quivering crystal, refracting the light into complex rainbows, and the specks of dust that had grown to be boulders expanded out to be whole desert worlds, stark and vast.
The tiny ship and nearly equally tiny world-turtle spun around each other in a strange dance, almost like the Wanderlust had become the Waykeeper’s child’s moon. They made sure to stay together as they shrank, even as the currents in the air inside the asteroid base swept ship and tortoise far from where their shrinking had begun. Eddies in the air swept them on a swirling journey through whole solar systems composed of planets that in reality were mere motes of dust and drops of water.
“I can’t even tell where we are anymore,” Lt. Diaz woofed in frustration, her paws hovering over the control panel in front of her uselessly. “Our scanners can’t reach far enough to find any part of the asteroid base… let alone the edges of it.”
“But you can still scan for the Zakonraptors’ life signs and teleport them down to safety on the planet?” Captain Carroway growled fiercely, clearly in profound denial of what she was being told.
“We haven’t even begun to refill our energy stores,” Lt. Diaz woofed despairingly. “How could we? The explosion meant to power us back up hasn’t started yet.”
“Then we need to reverse the shrinking,” Captain Carroway insisted pragmatically. At least, her tone was pragmatic, but the suggestion wasn’t even close.
Lt. Diaz looked at Lt. Lee helplessly, but all the Papillon did was shrug. After a moment, he said, “By the time we were large enough to make our scanners and teleporters usable on the scale of the moon base, the explosion would be too far along. We would be lucky to escape with our own lives, let alone rescue any of the Zakonraptors.”
“But…” Captain Carroway hissed. “We have to do something!” The Norwegian Forest cat’s paws were gripping the arms of her captain’s chair so tightly, her claws extended, that it would definitely leave scratch marks in the upholstery. Captain Carroway didn’t care. She wanted to undo all the decisions she’d made since getting back onboard her ship. The Norwegian Forest cat didn’t want to be responsible for more lives lost. Wilder and Maple already weighed heavily on her. Even though she’d never met them, the Norwegian Forest cat thought about them every day. She didn’t want to kill these Zakonraptor scientists who she’d never met. She didn’t even know how many of them there were…
Lt. Diaz knew. She’d done the scans, and the Xolo-Lupinian knew exactly how many Zakonraptor life signs were inside the asteroid base at the time when she’d fired the electron torpedo. That number would weigh heavily on her for a very, very long time. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to admit to knowing that number, that she’d ever be able to say it out loud, but it would be etched in her heart like a recrimination. She’d tricked the captain into ignoring those lives, counting them as saved, when the chances of saving them had, in truth, been ridiculously, vanishingly small.
The Xolo-Lupinian hadn’t foreseen how the scale of the ship would interfere with using their scanners and teleporter to save the Zakonraptors… but she should have. If she’d cared, she would have. If she’d had more time… but she hadn’t had more time, had she?
But it wasn’t just a question of scale. There was also the question of whether the hyperspatial slipstream around them would interfere with the teleporter beam passing through it. She didn’t know if it would, but any responsible scientist would have at least raised the question. Lt. Diaz had thought of the question… but she hadn’t raised it. She hadn’t wanted to raise doubts. She’d wanted to pursue her plan. She wanted to get home.
Was she any better than a cat who had simply wanted to stay in good standing in the organization she’d devoted her life to? Lt. Diaz wasn’t sure anymore. As the asteroid base began to explode in a massive, fiery conflagration all around them, Lt. Diaz really wasn’t sure. People were dying, and it was her fault.
Or was it?
Lt. Lee was at least as smart as her, and he hadn’t objected to her plan. Lt. Cmdr. Vossie hadn’t objected. And Lt. Diaz didn’t know a single person in the universe more kind and moral than Cmdr. Chestnut, and the golden-mantled squirrel hadn’t hesitated to go along with her plan. Had all three of them simply been holding back, letting her take the blame? Or maybe… had they really believed her plan might work?
Lt. Diaz didn’t know, but her body felt almost unreal to her as Lt. Lee woofed, “It’s working. Our plan is working — the energy stores of our ship are completely full, and–”
Lys spoke over the Papillon’s technical jargon to say, “The Waykeeper’s child has wrapped their flippers around us, so we should stay together.”
“Tell that big baby to hold on tight,” Ensign Melbourne meowed, his ghost-white paws dancing across the control panel at his station as deftly and gracefully as if he were playing concert piano. “We’re about be fired like a bullet from a gun.”
“Not too tight,” Captain Carroway grumbled. Her tufted ears were flattened, but that probably had more to do with the situation regarding the Zakonraptors than any genuine worry about the Waykeeper’s child crushing her ship. “The Wanderlust wasn’t designed to withstand pressure exerted on the hull from the outside. We’re in a spaceship, not a submarine.”
“What’s happening on the viewscreen?” Lt. Diaz asked, still feeling strangely floaty and divorced from her body. Zakonraptor scientists danced through her mind, accusing her, pleading with her, begging her to go back in time and care more about their lives. But when she could see past the ghosts in her mind, her eyes saw the main viewscreen showing a crenulated, vibrating, swooping scene that she couldn’t make any sense of at all. The planet-sized flecks of dust and drops of water had blurred beyond recognition, their solid surfaces becoming nothing but a blur, like the way that the sharp lines around a puffy white cloud dissolve into a gradient of grays, nothing but fog, as an airplane flies into it.
“We’re still shrinking,” Lt. Lee explained. “We’ve shrunk down much smaller than I thought was possible…” The Papillon looked troubled, the fur between his pretty brown eyes creased with concern.
“How small?” the captain growled.
On the viewscreen, the blurry smears of light and color coalesced and crested, crashing apart and then harmonizing together like waves, except instead of a single ocean, this was oceans all around, each of them orbiting a dense, blobby, roiling mass. It was unlike anything any of them had ever seen before.
“We’re the size of a subatomic particle,” Lt. Lee answered. “Like a proton or neutron. I think those masses we’re seeing scattered across the distance like stars are actually atomic nuclei — clusters of protons and neutrons.”
“So…” Ensign Melbourne meowed. “These waves we’re surfing on now… these are electrons?”
“Yes,” the Papillon answered primly.
“Cool,” the white tomcat answered. “I always wanted to try surfing. It never occurred to me to do it this way, somehow, but I’ll take it.” Nothing seemed to faze that cat. Even descending to the quantum realm was just another adventure to him.
“Will this affect our ability to return to a normal size?” Captain Carroway hissed, her concern for her own crew finally subsuming her concern for the Zakonraptors who she’d inadvertently decided to sacrifice.
“It shouldn’t,” Lt. Lee answered.
“No,” Lt. Diaz agreed, finally finding her voice again. “Everything is going perfectly according to plan except for–” Her voice broke off, failing her, before she could actually say anything about the Zakonraptors. There had been so many of them. Certainly, some of them would have worked with the Wanderlust if they’d been given the chance, if they’d had the situation explained to them… And all of them, every last one of them, had families and lives, people they cared about, things they’d wanted to do before dying…
The Xolo-Lupinian shook her head sharply, flapping her bat-like ears, trying to jar these thoughts from her head. She needed to not think about this. Not now. Maybe not ever.
“Here we go!” Ensign Melbourne yowled excitedly, his white paws flying even faster over his control panel. He looked like he was having the time of his life piloting the Wanderlust through the shifting, shimmering wave patterns of the great sea of electrons around them, coasting from one valence shell to the next. Under his skillful control, the Wanderlust with the Waykeeper’s child riding piggyback easily swooped around the more solid masses of protons and neutrons globbed together like gooey, melty chocolate nut clusters.
They let themselves be carried by the currents of energy in the electron sea, and then, the full power of the exploding asteroid hit the carefully arrayed force shields that had been carefully calculated to funnel all possible excess energy into blasting them in exactly the right direction: straight toward the far side of the Tetra Galaxy, straight toward the Nexus that would eventually take them home to the Milky Way.
Continue on to Chapter 19…