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.
Sojourner burst out of the ocean first, splashing the blue-and-green algae-laced water aside. The Wanderlust followed, emerging from the alien ocean into the clear atmosphere of a world with a pale yellow sky. The turtle and ship continued flying and growing, upward toward the yellow sky, carried by the last dregs of their momentum from the exploded asteroid base just far enough to coast into orbit above this random world in the Tetra Galaxy.
“Of all the places to end up,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie observed pedantically, “a habitable planet was quite unlikely.”
“Lucky though,” Ensign Melbourne meowed. “We can go fishing again.”
“Aren’t you tired of fishing?” Ensign Werik asked, remembering the great piles of fish, plants, and game that had been left abandoned on the previous planet. So much work had gone to waste.
“Never,” the white tomcat mewed prettily. “And maybe this time, Barry, you’ll join me?”
The Papillon looked up from the work he’d still been doing at his console when the white tomcat said his name. Distractedly, Lt. Lee woofed, “Sure, Tim, this time you can teach me to fish.”
Something about this answer gave Lt. Diaz hope. The Xolo-Lupinian knew that — like her — the Papillon valued getting home to the Milky Way above all else, so if he was agreeing to go fishing… maybe he had good news about how far their shrunken journey had taken them. Quickly, Lt. Diaz started running her own calculations, checking the locations of distant stars against the computer’s databases, and finally concluding: “We did it; we flew more than halfway across this galaxy in one go.”
“Yes,” Lt. Lee agreed. “We should be much closer to the nexus passageway now. However, Tri-Galactic Union data on the Tetra Galaxy is very limited, so it still might take us a while to find it.”
Something tangled up and painfully knotted inside Lt. Diaz’s chest loosened and came untangled. They were closer to home. The fighting she’d done to shorten the length of their journey — discovering the hyperspatial slipstream signal that led them to Sojourner and the planning with Lt. Lee about how they could make use of shrinking the ship — had genuinely made a difference. They were closer to home — closer to Lupinia, her parents, her brother, and everything she knew — than they had been in half a year. For the first time, Lt. Diaz really believed this crew would get her home. And maybe, if it took a while longer to get there, it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe there were some things still worth doing while trapped in — that is, traveling through — this far away galaxy.
While Lt. Diaz allowed herself to feel the hopeful buoyancy that washed over her, the rest of the crew began planning their next moves. Most of them felt dispirited about the idea of doing a second hunting and gathering trip so quickly upon the tail end of the previous one being wasted. However, this planet was right here, and it simply made sense to make use of it before getting on their way again.
Captain Carroway and Cmdr. Chestnut worked out new sleep and work shift rotations, and soon enough, everything felt like it was going back to normal. Except, a little better this time.
Lt. Lee took a turn going down to the planet and let Ensign Melbourne teach him how to fish. When the Papillon and white tomcat returned with a heap of delectable-smelling marine life, they had a way of standing a little closer to each other, being a little more comfortable in each other’s presence that made Lt. Diaz wonder if their relationship had shifted to something more than just friends.
Lys and Captain Carroway argued about Sojourner’s role going forward — the caterpillar wanted to take the Wanderlust’s entire collection of potted plants and instead plant them on the baby world-turtle’s back. Eventually, Captain Carroway insisted that even if Sojourner planned to travel with the Wanderlust for now that it was simply foolish to give up their own internal arboretum that provided both practical fruits and vegetables as well as a more natural-feeling, mentally stabilizing environment for the crew. The Norwegian Forest cat put her paw down and insisted that while the caterpillar could take seeds and cuttings, the Wanderlust would continue to be half-arboretum so long as they were flying through a sector of space so far from home, without allies or safe places to take refuge and restock.
Even so, an entirely new realm of hobbies and potential escape opened up to the crew of the Wanderlust — as long as Sojourner continued to travel with them, they could always teleport to her back and work on the gardens Lys and Solace had started growing there. In fact, they had a whole new traveler to get to know: the tardigrade wasn’t invited to join the Wanderlust’s crew, but for a microscopic creature artificially magnified, Solace turned out to be surprisingly intelligent and seemed to have big plans regarding growing an asexually produced family for herself on Sojourner’s back.
And Lt. Diaz found herself faced with all the things she’d promised to improve about herself. The Xolo-Lupinian started by synthesizing several prisms and hanging them around the Wanderlust in places where she thought Maple would have liked the light. Cmdr. Chestnut was as delighted by the tiny rainbows thrown about the ship in Maple’s honor as Lt. Diaz had hoped he would be.
Next, Lt. Diaz actually sincerely thanked Captain Carroway when the Norwegian Forest cat finally finished and foisted upon her a catnip mouse, stuffed with Lupinian lavender instead of actual catnip. The small plush object was strangely soothing, and the Xolo-Lupinian tucked it under her pillow on her cot in the barracks.
Those were easy changes. Superficial changes. The harder changes involved continuing to wake up every day and make herself really participate in the crew, try to get to know her crewmates, and even schedule a therapy session with Ensign Mike. Lt. Diaz still wasn’t sure that talking to a six-month-old mushroom-computer hybrid would really help her, but it also couldn’t hurt. And it would make it more convincing when she tried to convince the captain to be nicer to the fungal officer if Lt. Diaz could provide first-hand anecdotes about them.
Even so, even with all these positive changes aboard the ship and inside herself, Lt. Diaz still found herself some days sitting in the multi-purpose room after a shift, struggling with an overwhelming sadness and anger that ran just beneath the surface all the time. She missed Risqua, and whenever Lt. Diaz missed the traitorous reptile-bird that feeling made her angry.
Angry at Risqua for her betrayal. Angry at herself for falling for it. Angry at Cmdr. Chestnut for not realizing he’d had a spy among his crew on the Last Chance. Angry with the Tri-Galactic Union for selling out Lupinia so that the Anti-Ra had been necessary at all. And angry at Captain Carroway for representing the Tri-Galactic Union and following orders that had led to killing Maple and Wilder and to the rest of them getting stuck out here in the Tetra Galaxy…
But every time that Lt. Diaz felt angry at Captain Carroway for murdering Maple and Wilder these days, the Xolo-Lupininian felt like her whole stomach dropped out from beneath her when she remembered just how many Zakonraptor scientists she’d killed, and then, it felt like the guilt would completely consume her. It was too big to escape. Like a black hole, the guilt kept puling her back in.
One day, when Lt. Diaz’s mind followed this far too familiar pattern of thoughts, Lt. Lee interrupted her, asking, “Is something wrong?”
The Papillon sat down beside the Lupinian. The small dog had a mug of tea in his paws, something made from one of the plants Lys had been growing on Sojourner. His bright eyes looked genuinely concerned, and Lt. Diaz felt embarrassed that he’d seen her despair. She tried to hide it these days. It seemed better than the way she’d used to carry all her feelings on her sleeve, trying to make sure everyone inside the Wanderlust had to wrestle with them as much as she did.
“Do you remember the plan…” Lt. Diaz stumbled over the words, trying to make herself open up instead of clam up. “The one with the teleporters and the… the…” It was hard to even say their species name. She hoped the Wanderlust never ran into Zakonraptors ever again.
“Yes,” Lt. Lee answered, not needing Lt. Diaz to finish her sentence. The memory weighed on him too, even though he felt less directly responsible for it. He still wondered sometimes why he hadn’t thought harder about it. Why he hadn’t said something, because really, it hadn’t been surprising that Lt. Diaz’s plan to teleport the Zakonraptor scientists down to the planet hadn’t worked. “I remember.”
“Did you know… it wouldn’t work?” Lt. Diaz asked, her voice breaking in the middle.
“I don’t know,” Lt. Lee said, honestly. Neither of them thought to wonder whether a larger mind — one that had been tortured by the Zakonraptors for months before they’d even arrived — might have played a part in their surprising blindness to the holes in their plan.
“How many of them… were there?” The Papillon’s voice broke too. But quickly, he added, “No, don’t tell me.” He also avoided referring to the Zakonraptors by name. No one onboard the Wanderlust had referred to the Zakonraptors since their quantum travels had brought them halfway across the Tetra Galaxy and hopefully away from the Zakonraptors forever.
The two dogs moved automatically away from the uncomfortable topic, choosing instead to discuss the paper they’d been writing about Hawking radiation, a much easier subject. When they finished writing it together, Lt. Diaz thought she might try her paw at writing a Lupinian opera in honor of Wilder. Perhaps her departed friend had never secretly planned to write an opera, but that didn’t have to stop her from honoring him in that way. And when she mentioned the idea to Lt. Lee, the Papillon offered to help her with it. They worked well together as co-authors.
Captain Carroway came in, synthesized herself a mug of bitter-smelling coffee, and smiled warmly at the two dogs, working contentedly together. Maybe they still had a long voyage ahead of them, but the Wanderlust had started to feel like a home, filled with a family. And as they voyaged, a whole moon — green and verdant, soon to be populated by a bizarre species of macroscopic tardigrades — was following them home.
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