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 Wanderlust sped away at an unthinkable speed, so far beyond the speed of light that ancient human physicists who’d had epiphanies caused by falling apples would have never believed it possible. They flew away with a large turtle riding piggyback on them. They left the binary star system and the planet where Risqua was now stranded far behind in the blink of an eye. Down on the planet’s surface, the traitorous reptile-bird was watching the sky, and she saw the asteroid base explode, or rather it began as an explosion, but after the fiery beginnings breached the base’s containment systems, the entire craggy, asteroid-like moon quickly crunched in on itself, filling the hollow space inside.
Anyone watching could see that there couldn’t possibly be any survivors. Risqua and the handful of Zakonraptor scientists with her who had been stripping the Wanderlust for parts only an hour ago were now more thoroughly stranded than when Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee had teleported them down to the surface. They were entirely alone in their binary star system, but at least, they had a lush planet to make their new homes on, much like Captain Carroway had feared she and her officers would have to do. Perhaps, if you wouldn’t want to be teleported down to an uncolonized planet and abandoned there, don’t do that to someone else. Risqua and the Zakonraptors were going to be learning the golden rule the hard way.
Even though Risqua stared at the sky as hard as she could with her sharp, avian eyes, she didn’t have a chance of seeing the Wanderlust fly away. She thought she was the last survivor of a doomed ship, and everyone she’d traveled with for the last six months had just died. None of them on the planet’s surface saw the streak of light that was the Wanderlust escaping at unthinkable speeds with a world-turtle clinging to them; it was far too small. Thinner than the edge of a piece of paper. Thinner than the unaided eye can see. And it would be a while before Risqua and the Zakonraptor scientists would be able to develop a high enough level of technology on their own to develop telescopes, let alone a telescope-microscope hybrid.
Continue on to Chapter 20…