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.
During their time traveling at the nearly quantum level, the Wayfarer’s child had learned how to fly close enough to the Wanderlust to share her hyperspatial slipstream without having to cling to the ship with her flippers. She had also chosen herself a gender and with a little help from Lys, a name: Sojourner.
When Lys passed along the message to Sojourner that it was time to get large again, the baby world turtle was excited. She’d found the fizzy frothing of Hawking radiation tickly against the underside of her shell where it was softer, and she looked forward to the universe returning to a scale she could more easily understand.
The whole crew gathered together on the bridge once again now that their journey through quantum space was nearing an end. Everyone wanted to watch, but Captain Carroway didn’t like the crowd. She wanted order and structure, so she sent everyone back to the stations they’d had before. Except, of course, by now Korvax and Ensign Mike weren’t falling for the idea that all the potted plants needed to be carefully watched, so the Norwegian Forest cat had to ingratiatingly insist that what was really needed was a celebratory feast in the multi-purpose room after the re-sizing was complete, and would the two of them please go whip up something tasty? Captain Carroway almost managed to not wince as she described the requested meal as ‘tasty.’
Korvax fell for the Norwegian Forest cat’s flattery like a bowling ball rolled across paper-thin ice over the top of a lake. Ensign Mike, in spite of being only six months old, seemed more skeptical, but also, the mushroom officer could clearly tell the captain didn’t want them around. In fact, the toadstool and Norwegian Forest cat avoiding each other seemed to have become kind of mutual. So, when the hedgehog alien happily scurried away to his cooking, feeling very important and valued, the toadstool followed along dutifully, simply glad to be away from the fierce cat captain.
Watching them leave, from the same station as she’d had on the bridge before, Lt. Diaz found herself realizing there was actually something to be said for having Captain Carroway be so inexplicably, devotedly fond of her. The Xolo-Lupinian might find the Norwegian Forest cat bewildering and frustrating, but it was nice to have her benefit of the doubt. And maybe, since the whimsical cat seemed to listen to her, Lt. Diaz thought she should consider mentioning to Captain Carroway that she’d heard Ensign Mike had been doing good work as a therapist. Surely, if Cmdr. Chestnut had been talking Ensign Mike up to Lt. Diaz, he’d likely done the same with the captain. But the same words would probably mean something different to Captain Carroway coming from Lt. Diaz.
Cmdr. Chestnut stood up for everyone. Lt. Diaz hadn’t been taking a lot of stands lately, unless they were about getting the Wanderlust home as fast as possible. Maybe that was something she’d need to change going forward.
With everyone settled at their stations again, Captain Carroway gave the order, and Lt. Lee punched in the program to begin resizing the Wanderlust and Sonjourner. They couldn’t see the baby world-turtle on the main viewscreen, because she was following the ship’s lead, flying along in their wake like a planet following its moon.
At first, it wasn’t obvious that anything was changing on the viewscreen, but then slowly, the frothy, bubbly turmoil like an oil slick boiling soothed and smoothed itself out to a more typical blackness of outer space, merely dotted in the distance with the streaking light of stars. Except they weren’t stars. They were reflective bits of space dust, capturing and bouncing the light from stars trillions of miles away and unthinkably large compared to them still.
As the Wanderlust expanded further, it necessarily slowed down. Their velocity converted to mass, and the unthinkable speeds slowed to thinkable ones. Lt. Diaz caught herself holding her breath, realizing she was still worried that something would go wrong, and they’d get stuck at a microscopic size. She’d promised the captain that wouldn’t happen, hadn’t she? But Lt. Diaz had also promised she would save the Zakonraptors, and she hadn’t done that.
At a cosmic, karmic level, it felt like getting stuck at this size and slowly starving to death aboard a ship that couldn’t interface with the rest of the universe would only be fair. Recompence for a war crime T’lia Diaz had committed outside the auspices of a declared war.
Maybe the Xolo-Lupinian should give up and become a Tri-Galactic Union officer for real after all of this was over — assuming it was ever over — because she’d already started acting like one.
Before Lt. Diaz could get lost too deeply in her worries and self-recrimination, the viewscreen suddenly flashed blue-green so bright that all of the officers on the bridge covered their eyes. All of them, except Ensign Melbourne, anyway. As the pilot, the white tomcat knew he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off the road, as it were. So, his blue eyes squinted, and his ears with their hearing aids flattened in distress. But he didn’t stop watching where they were flying.
By the time Lt. Diaz had reopened her eyes, she already knew from the queasy, swooping sensation in her stomach that the ship had begun steering sharply around some series of obstacles. So, the first thing she looked to was Ensign Melbourne — once the Xolo-Lupinian saw the white tomcat still looked remarkably calm, she was able to look at the viewscreen itself.
Globby, translucent shapes moved across the screen, sliding away to the sides as fast as the Wanderlust could dodge them. Lt. Diaz’s bat-like ears skewed backwards, distressed by the confusion. “What size are we?” the Xolo-Lupinian helplessly asked. It frustrated her to not be in charge of the controls right now, but Lt. Lee had managed them before. So, he had more experience. Not much more, but enough that it might make a difference in a pinch.
“This is the size we were originally aiming for…” the Papillon woofed.
“What? Full size?” Captain Carroway meowed in bewilderment, since that clearly couldn’t be true.
“No, no,” the Lt. Lee clarified, looking and sounding so much calmer than Lt. Diaz felt. “The original cruising size we were aiming for — like a grain of salt.”
Lt. Lee was better at trusting his fate to Ensign Melbourne’s steering. There was a bond growing between the fussy little dog and cocky tomcat. The Xolo-Lupinian found herself feeling jealous of their bond, but as soon as she identified the feeling, Lt. Diaz realized the Papillon and tomcat would both welcome her as a friend with open arms. If she could just bring herself to be nice to them. That was something else she’d need to work on.
Lt. Diaz was accumulating a lot of things she’d need to work on. Maybe if the weight of those aspirational commitments got heavy enough, it would over-balance Lt. Diaz’s karmic debts, and they’d all manage to survive long enough for her to start needing to actually improve.
Lt. Diaz hoped so.
“And what’re we seeing here?” Captain Carroway meowed, waving a paw at the chaotic shapes on the viewscreen, ever fascinated by the scientific aspects of life-threatening situations.
Now that Lt. Diaz knew what size the ship was — approximately the size of a grain of salt, apparently — her mind snapped into focus, and everything on the screen made sense to her. “Cells,” the Xolo-Lupinian woofed. “Those translucent shapes… they’re cell walls. We’re somewhere with… life. And we’re functioning on a cellular level now, instead of a quantum one.”
“Well, that’s an improvement anyway,” the Norwegian Forest cat rumbled, leaning back in her captain’s chair.
“Sojourner likes it here,” Lys said, staring with her unblinking eye spots at the main viewscreen. Her cilia-like mouth parts were twisted up in her caterpillar-like version of a smile.
Lys looked blissfully happy, and why wouldn’t she be, if the baby world-turtle communicating with her telepathically was happy? That must be like an entire ocean of happiness, completely overwhelming and washing over her mind. It would be easy for one small caterpillar to lose herself inside the mind of an entire world, even if that world were shaped like a turtle.
“Can we tell where we are at a broader level?” Captain Carroway asked, still looking utterly fascinated by the images on the viewscreen. The Norwegian Forest cat truly seemed more interested in exploring the unknown than in ever getting home to the Milky Way. She wasn’t as obvious about it as Ensign Melbourne, but neither cat really seemed unhappy with being exiled to this incessant voyage.
But they were also both honorable enough that neither feline would undermine the best interests of the crew overall, and the Wanderlust’s stated mission — according to the captain — was to get home.
The Tri-Galactic Union probably had spies too, but Lt. Diaz couldn’t help thinking it would be harder to infiltrate their complex systems and rigorous layers of double-checking everything than it had clearly been for Risqua to call herself Anti-Ra and worm her way onto the Last Chance. And break her Xolo-Lupinian heart.
Lt. Diaz clenched her jaw and focused on the here and now as much as she could. She didn’t want to think about Risqua. She didn’t want to deal with mourning that friendship. That grief could wait. Ideally, it could wait forever.
Why waste time on grief, guilt, and other bad feelings when she could instead push them aside, keep working, and try to make her situation better? Maybe it wasn’t the healthiest way to handle her feelings, but hey, maybe it was. Maybe grief and guilt are simply feelings that need to be suffered through until they’re over, and anything you can reasonably do to weather them and get through to the other side is what you need to do.
Lt. Lee woofed, “There’s still no way to measure our location at a galactic level — not until we’re larger and can properly see the locations of distant stars — so, we don’t know yet how successful our travels have been. But it does appear Lt. Diaz is right: we’re in an ocean, and the shapes we’re seeing are microscopic lifeforms.”
“Microscopic lifeforms!” the captain exclaimed happily. The Norwegian Forest cat jumped up from her captain’s chair and stepped closer to the main viewscreen, her fluffy gray tail swishing excitedly behind her. Captain Carroway looked like she wanted to reach out and touch the giant, translucent shapes with her paw, but she restrained herself. As a captain should.
“We’re still gaining size,” Lt. Lee woofed. “So, in a moment, we may be better able to make sense of these lifeforms.”
Even as the Papillon said it, his words became true. The translucent shapes kept growing smaller around them until some of the greener parts looked like kelp or bamboo — or, at this size, maybe just algae. Like long sticks of green bricks and occasionally walls or orbs. It was a little like a jungle, except far more alien and strange than they’d ever encounter at their usual scale. Moving and wriggling among the thick forests — for lack of a better word — of planet cells were pinky-brown shapes, vaguely tubular with regular, nubby protrusions ending in claws.
“What are those worms?” Ensign Melbourne meowed. Then after a quick glance away from the viewscreen toward Lys, who had a similarly wormy-shape to her body, the white tomcat added, “I mean, they’re kinda cute, but do you think they’re dangerous? I’ll pilot around them just in case.”
“In fact, Ensign Melbourne,” the captain meowed back, “you should be trying to pilot us out of this ocean entirely. The Wanderlust isn’t designed for functioning underwater.”
Speaking in a daze, Lt. Diaz said, “The hyperspatial slipstream combined with our mismatched size at an atomic level will substantially protect us from any ill-effects of the water on our hull for now.” Right now, it was easier to think about science and technical details than anything else, which almost made the captain’s fascination with the unknown make sense to the Xolo-Lupinian. “Also, I think those creatures are tardigrades, or else something very similar. They shouldn’t be dangerous, especially since they’ll soon be smaller than we are.”
“That’s good to hear,” Captain Carroway meowed, turning around and striding back to her captain’s chair, “but regardless, we should get ourselves into a more opportune position before we finish scaling back up to our normal size.” She sat down in her captain’s chair like she was concluding a great speech. It was amazing to Lt. Diaz how cats could make the smallest thing seem like a big deal simply by moving with a sort of fluid grace that seemed to escape all other animals.
“As you may have noticed,” Lt. Lee woofed, “we’ve lost most of our momentum at this point–”
“Yeah, I did notice that,” Melbourne meowed impertinently, leaning into his steering of the ship in an ostentatious way, showing off how hard he was working to keep them from crashing into any spires of plant cells.
“–so we’ll need to use our increasing size to help get us out of this ocean,” Lt. Lee concluded.
“We’ll end up orbiting a planet,” Captain Carroway said. “This planet.”
“Yes,” the Papillon agreed.
“Delightful, let’s make it happen.” The Norwegian Forest cat clapped her paws together.
By this time, other officers who’d been banished to the engine room or kitchen began poking their muzzles in at the back of the bridge, seeing what was going on. The way that the captain’s tufted ears flicked to the side suggested she could hear them, but she didn’t send them away. Emboldened by that fact, Cmdr. Chestnut led the pair of Morphicans, hedgehog, and toadstool onto the bridge. Though, they stayed near the back, out of the way, watching like they had when the Wanderlust had first shrunk down to quantum size.
“Everything is under control in the engine room,” Cmdr. Chestnut chittered. “And I know it’s not regulation, but this is such a small ship, and we’re undergoing such an unusual experience right now…”
The golden-mantled squirrel trailed off, and the Norwegian Forest cat waved her paw dismissively. “It’s fine,” Carroway meowed. “We’re almost done returning to normal size, isn’t that right, Lee?”
Before the Papillon could answer, a gigantic green shape smashed through the reeds of plant cells ahead of them. It was Sojourner, and the baby world-turtle was tussling with a pinky-brown shape. The thing looked a lot like the worm creatures Ensign Melbourne had been worrying about earlier, except much, much larger. All this while, the Wanderlust had continued increasing in size to where most of the tardigrade-like creatures were much smaller than it now. This one, though, was just as big as Sojourner, and it seemed to be fighting with her.
Continue on to Chapter 22…