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.
All eyes on the bridge turned from the viewscreen — as fascinating as Sojourner’s fight with the outsized tardigrade was — toward Lys, since everyone knew the caterpillar had the best chance of understanding what was going on. Lt. Diaz expected the caterpillar to be doubled over, her squiggle of a body bent into the shape of a hook, as she wrestled with overwhelming feelings of fear or anger. Any kind of emotion that would make sense during a fight. But that wasn’t what the Xolo-Lupinian saw.
Lys looked blissfully, peacefully happy.
“What the hell is going on?” Captain Carroway yeowled at the caterpillar.
Lys answered with a simple statement: “Sojourner has made a friend. They’re playing.”
The Norwegian Forest cat turned her gaze back to the main viewscreen and tilted her head so far to the side trying to understand the scene unfolding in front of her that she started to look like an owl. “Playing?” she asked with bewilderment.
“Yes, playing,” Lys repeated. “After all, Sojourner only hatched a day ago. She’s a child still, and even planet sized children can enjoy making friends.”
“Not when it puts my ship in danger they can’t,” Captain Carroway grumbled. However, the gigantic tardigrade wasn’t tussling with the Wanderlust, and the two giant creatures — turtle and tardigrade — were keeping a respectful distance from the ship, even as they crashed through the ever-dwindling strands of plant life like a pair of playful puppies.
“I don’t think we have a say in this, Captain,” Cmdr. Chestnut chittered. The golden-mantled squirrel stepped up beside the Norwegian Forest cat who’d haughtily stood up from her captain’s chair, as if she could run up between the turtle and tardigrade and break them up for being too rowdy, even though they were both bigger than her entire ship.
The Norwegian Forest cat glanced at the golden-mantled squirrel beside her, and his presence seemed to ground her, calm her.
“I suppose Sojourner has been more than helpful to us already,” Captain Carroway admitted. “However, we need her hyperspatial slipstream a little longer, and it would simply be irresponsible not to return her to her proper scale. So, Lys, can you please tell her to stop wrestling with that tardigrade. It seems to be caught in the field we’re using to resize ourselves.”
True to the captain’s words, the tardigrade did seem to be growing in size apace with Sojourner and the Wanderlust. The strands of plant cells had grown so thin now that instead of looking like bamboo or kelp, they were simply tangled, gooey masses of green. What had looked like a forest now looked like little more than a patch of moss. The tardigrade would already be far too large to return to its previous life and would likely become another casualty of the Wanderlust’s voyage home.
“Sojourner says her friend is named Solace,” Lys said. The caterpillar was the smallest being standing on that bridge, the smallest member of the Wanderlust’s crew. And yet, Lys spoke right now with an authority that came from outside the vessel, an authority so large — albeit youthful — that no one inside their ship truly had the power to fight it. “And she says Solace is coming with us.”
“What are we supposed to do with a giant tardigrade?!” Captain Carroway exclaimed, furiously.
“Solace is going to be the first inhabitant of Sojourner,” Lys explained.
The Norwegian Forest cat captain looked gob-smacked by that answer but couldn’t come up with a word to actually say against it. Meanwhile, Lt. Lee woofed helpfully, “If Sojourner wants Solace to become an inhabitant, then Solace will need to briefly exit our resizing field before we get all the way back to full size.”
“Unless of course Solace wants to be a world-tardigrade,” Ensign Melbourne meowed wryly, flashing a winning smile before turning back to focusing on his piloting.
“I’ve relayed the message to Sojourner,” Lys said. “She would like it if we could help her get Solace to the right size.”
Lt. Lee’s eyes glazed over, like his brain was a computer that had encountered an impossible paradox and locked up. Lt. Diaz laid a paw on his small arm, and when the Papillon looked at her, the Xolo-Lupinian said, “We can figure this out.”
The Papillon nodded and pointed to the code for the program he was running on his console. “You can see the rate we’re growing at… How long…”
“For the tardigrade to shrink from world-turtle size to our size?” Lt. Diaz ran a few quick calculations on her own console, and soon the two dogs were passing numbers and equations back and forth, suggesting ideas with broken, unfinished phrases, and brainstorming.
They weren’t able to work together as smoothly as when Lys had connected their minds, but the two canines’ minds were still remarkably in synch. Soon they had a plan that involved teleporting the gigantic tardigrade and running its pattern through the teleporter pattern buffers for an extra three and a half seconds while the Wanderlust and Sojourner continued expanding, essentially putting Solace in stasis against the anti-shrinking process for just long enough to resize them.
When the plan came together, Captain Carroway waved a paw decisively and told them to go ahead with it. Lys nodded her and Sojourner’s agreement. Right away, Lt. Lee triggered the teleporter program they’d devised, and the gigantic tardigrade tussling with the world-turtle on their viewscreen shimmered gold and silver, faded, and disappeared, leaving Sojourner flying ahead of them on her own.
“Did it work?” Lt. Diaz asked, as soon as the three and half seconds had passed. The Xolo-Lupinian couldn’t tell by merely looking at the viewscreen. If the plan had worked properly, Solace should have reappeared in a shimmery cloud of quantum energy on Sojourner’s back.
Sojourner’s shell wasn’t covered with whole forests yet, but it was encrusted with a thick layer of bioluminescent mosses. One giant, curving, green hillside. And ideally, Solace should be a size similar to the crewmembers of the Wanderlust — not necessarily easy to spot from their distance, especially if the tardigrade had happened to teleport back into existence on the far side of the curving shell, just out of sight.
“Yes,” Lys answered, her cilia-like mouth parts wriggling in a satisfied way. “Sojourner and Solace thank you.”
Captain Carroway failed to hide rolling her eyes, which made Lt. Diaz smile. Annoying the cat captain without quite getting on her bad side seemed like a game that might be fun.
“Can we focus on more important things now?” Captain Carroway meowed, but before any of her crew could answer her, the view on the viewscreen shifted.
Continue on to Chapter 23…