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.
Down below on the planet’s surface, Captain Carroway had been trying to contact anyone aboard the Wanderlust for hours. The Norwegian Forest cat had gathered up all seven of her crew on the planet’s surface — thanking her lucky stars that they’d decided today to all teleport to locations close enough together to reach each other by foot — and they’d set up something of an improvised camp for handling the dark night rapidly descending upon them. Her emotions had looped from confusion to irritation through anger and right back to confusion several times over by now.
None of them on the planet’s surface knew what was happening in the sky. They only knew that Ensign Risqua had disappeared from her foraging party in the woods with Commander Chestnut and Korvax without explanation, and Lt. Diaz had stopped answering calls for her to teleport up supplies. And then everyone aboard the Wanderlust had stopped responding to comm-pin calls entirely. And Ensign Risqua was still gone.
Captain Carroway kept staring at the sky ever since the stars had come out. Ensign Mike helped her identify which star was the Wanderlust flying above them in geosynchronous orbit, and the Norwegian Forest cat stared at it as if it were a mouse she could catch in her paws if she simply held still, patient, for long enough.
Except when the star that was her vessel suddenly started moving, shooting across the sky, her paws couldn’t reach it. “It’s moving,” the Norwegian Forest cat growled, a deep, unhappy sound that rumbled at the base of her throat.
By this time, the seven stranded crew members of the Wanderlust were all gathered around a campfire where Korvax and Ensign Melbourne had been competing to see which of them — alien hedgehog native to this galaxy or smart aleck white cat — could cook something more delectable using the ingredients they’d gathered during the day.
Lt. Melbourne had been roasting fishes he’d caught, speared on sticks and held over the fire like marshmallows. They tasted more like marshmallows than a fish should too. But still, they weren’t bad.
Korvax had taken a few of the shellfish Lt. Melbourne’s fishing group had found and mixed them with a bunch of herbs and vegetables in an improvised cooking pot made from a very large, curved shell that Cmdr. Chestnut had found in the woods. It looked a little like a gigantic snail shell, and for the moment, it was holding up to the heat of the campfire. The tricky part of Korvax’s soup proved to be eating it without easy access to utensils. Fortunately, Cmdr. Chestnut managed to also dig up some large nuts whose shells worked passably well as soup cups in a pinch.
When Captain Carroway pointed out that the Wanderlust was moving, all of the other six stopped what they were doing to turn their eyes toward the sky. That tiny pinprick of light was their only way home. For now, it was their home. And all they could do was watch it, hoping it wouldn’t fly away without them.
All seven of them held their breath.
Ensign Melbourne wouldn’t have minded living out the rest of his life on this alien planet. It was rich in resources, and he’d far rather forage and hunt for food for himself than mine ore for a prison warden on a desolate asteroid penal colony back in the Milky Way. But he would miss piloting a starship, and furthermore, he couldn’t help thinking: being stuck on a random planet, living out his life here would be so much better if Barry Lee were down on the planet with him. He’d grown really fond of the handsome, painfully competent, and deeply sensitive Papillon. More fond than he’d realized. The white tomcat wasn’t sure he could be truly happy without that bright-eyed little dog anymore.
Korvax also wouldn’t have minded staying on this random planet for a few years or maybe even the rest of his life… but only if Lys were with him. He couldn’t stand not knowing if his adopted daughter was okay up there on the incommunicado vessel, and he’d been throwing all his twitchy, itchy, restless energy into fiddling with the soup just to survive the uncertainty so far. He didn’t know how much longer he could last or how he’d possibly handle it if the star his daughter was on flew away into the depths of the sky.
The rest of them just wanted to get home.
“Look! It’s stopping!” Ensign Werik exclaimed, his rabbit-like ears standing so tall they were like arrows pointing at the sky.
“What do you mean?” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, the other Morphican, asked bitterly. “It just flew behind that rocky moon. We can’t see where it’s flying.”
“No,” Ensign Werik insisted. “It flew into the moon.”
“Into the moon?” Captain Carroway snapped, sounding both annoyed and delighted at the same time, like she was fascinated by the idea but also still overridingly angry about her current powerlessness. Her voice softened as she turned her green eyes hopefully toward Ensign Werik. “Are you sure?” She wanted nothing more than to believe this Morphican officer who she’d only known a few months and didn’t know terribly well. She wanted to believe that her spaceship was still in orbit, close enough to catch, if she could just find a way off this planet. Which, of course, she couldn’t do. But it would still be better than watching the Wanderlust fly away entirely.
“I’m sure,” Ensign Werik said. “My eyes are very good.”
Captain Carroway narrowed her own green eyes skeptically, but then Ensign Mike chimed in, speaking with his mushy voice, “The computer implant at the core of my brain is able to make brief recordings, play them back, and sometimes enhance them. I’ve checked the record I made of the Wanderlust flying up to the moon several times, and I do believe Ensign Werik is correct. A hatchway opened in the surface of the moon, and the Wanderlust flew inside.”
Captain Carroway’s heart jumped. She had only known Ensign Mike for the same few months as Ensign Werik, and she had a general distaste for the mushroom officer. However, the computer implant the toadstool had grown around was originally Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s, and she’d known and trusted him for almost all of her adult life. If Ensign Mike said the computer implant showed her ship was still here, then she believed her ship was still here. “That’s excellent news, Ensign Mike,” she said. And then, making sure to be fair, she added, “And you really do have good eyes, Ensign Werik. Thank you both.”
Playing the part of a good captain was going to get very old if they were stuck on this planet for a long time. Being the captain was hard enough on Carroway back aboard the Wanderlust where she had her own private quarters to escape to… down here… well, she supposed she had an entire world she could escape to by simply going on a walk alone. But she wasn’t happy about it.
Commander Chestnut caught her eye from across the fire, and somehow, the golden-mantled squirrel managed to communicate to her with a single look that he understood what she was thinking and would go on a walk with her.
The two commanding officers politely excused themselves from the others around the campfire and strolled away into the darkness of the night, just light enough because of the three moons in the sky at this point — the big, round, silver one; the craggy one the Wanderlust had just disappeared into; and a yellow-gray, oblong moon that had just begun to rise. As the Norwegian Forest cat and much smaller golden-mantled squirrel strolled silently into the darkness, they heard their remaining five officers behind them begin squabbling over what kind of campfire songs to sing to make the night pass more amiably.
“I don’t know what happened,” Captain Carroway meowed, her voice small and miserable, once she knew they were out of earshot of the others.
“We grew complacent,” Cmdr. Chestnut chittered in answer.
“There was no one here,” Captain Carroway insisted. “We scanned the system thoroughly.”
The golden-mantled squirrel shrugged. “We missed something.”
Captain Carroway stopped walking and turned to look at her first officer, green eyes glowing in the moonlight. She didn’t say what she wanted to say, but she knew he could hear the words anyway. He could guess them. She wanted to question the loyalty of his officers who had so recently been Anti-Ra, sworn to fight the Tri-Galactic Union and never happy about being forced to join it.
“You want to ask me if Risqua or T’lia betrayed us,” Cmdr. Chestnut said, taking the burden of the words off of her. But then he turned them around: “Should I ask you whether Barry Lee betrayed us? He’s up there too.”
Captain Carroway almost laughed at the idea of Barry Lee committing mutiny and betraying the ideals of the Tri-Galactic Union. But this situation was too serious, too heavy to admit any real form of levity. “The dog would never betray his uniform.”
The golden-mantled squirrel shrugged again. “He’s clearly been struggling. But, yes, I agree with your assessment. He wanted to get home to his mother. I’ve heard him talk about her.”
“So what about Diaz and Risqua?” Captain Carroway pressed now that the topic was properly broached. She needed to know what he really thought. She needed to know what they might be facing.
“T’lia wants to get home more than any of the rest of us, except for Lee,” Cmdr. Chestnut said.
“She doesn’t act like it,” Captain Carroway meowed.
“No, she doesn’t act like she likes you or believes you’re a necessary part of returning home,” Cmdr. Chestnut corrected. “She acts like a rebellious, petulant puppy who’s mad at Mamma because she’s hungry and dinner isn’t ready yet, without realizing that scratching drawings into the walls with her claws out of boredom will just slow Mamma down at getting dinner on the table.”
Captain Carroway couldn’t help herself. She laughed at that. It was too perfect. “You had that metaphor all prepared,” she meowed. “I’m guessing it’s something you pulled on your mother as a child?”
The golden-mantled squirrel smiled, making him look especially handsome. “Maybe,” he admitted. “I could be a pawful when I was a whippersnapper, and I did go through a phase where I believed I would be an artist. And, well, walls look a lot like big, empty canvases from some angles.” There was an impish quality to his grin, but then he sobered up and said in a much more serious voice, “But there’s a big difference between acting like a child when you don’t get what you want and actually committing mutiny that goes against your own best interests. I don’t believe Lt. Diaz would ever do that.”
Captain Carroway nodded, accepting her first officer’s assessment. She didn’t know if he was right, but she trusted him. And he trusted Lt. Diaz. That would have to be good enough for now.
They continued walking together along the edge of the forest, bathed in the light of three moons. When the silence between them had stretched out thin enough to snap, Captain Carroway meowed gently, “I notice you didn’t say anything in defense of Ensign Risqua.”
“I would like to,” Cmdr. Chestnut chittered ruefully. “She was a good officer for me back on the Last Chance, and she’s been nothing but competent during the rocky six months we’ve spent together in this galaxy.”
“It has been a rocky few months,” Captain Carroway agreed, staring up at the sky. She wished she could still see her spaceship, but she would have to settle for looking at the moon it was hiding inside. She could tell that Cmdr. Chestnut had something he needed to tell her, something he knew about Risqua, and she wanted to push him into saying it. But she sensed that waiting would work better. So she waited.
“Risqua tried to cover it,” Cmdr. Chestnut said, each word coming slowly. “She only said it once, and she made sure to say it mixed into a whole, wide-ranging conversation reminiscing about Maple and Wilder, planning out what we’d all do when we got home to the Milky Way… It was only a few words. And there was so many other words about so many other things, so I didn’t think it meant anything.” Cmdr. Chestnut got quiet in a pensive kind of way, a deeper kind of way than when he was just looking at the stars and enjoying walking beside a Norwegian Forest cat large enough to protect him from any stray predators that might come out of the forest at night. “No,” he said, eventually, “that’s not true. I did think it meant something. I just didn’t want to believe it at the time. And I still don’t.”
“What did she say?” Captain Carroway meowed as softly as her deep voice could, sensing that now was the time to press.
“Risqua asked if it would really be so bad to stay here, to track down the Zakonraptors and see if there was somewhere in the Tetra Galaxy worth living.” Cmdr. Chestnut stopped walking, his brush of a tail flitted and whipped behind him like a reed in a strong wind. “I don’t remember the exact words. I just remember… I remember thinking that no one who had put their life on hold to risk their life fighting for the freedom of Lupinia could possibly feel okay with the idea of never trying to get home to it. I remember feeling like… she was testing me, feeling me out, and I didn’t pass her test, so she didn’t bring the topic up again.”
What Commander Chestnut was saying was a big deal. If Captain Carroway understood him correctly, he was questioning whether Ensign Risqua had ever really been Anti-Ra or a true part of his crew at all. He was wondering if she’d always been a double operative. Most likely, a Reptassan spy. And he was wondering whether she’d covertly reached out to the Zakonraptors during the last few months.
Captain Carroway drew in a sharp breath between her even sharper teeth. “That’s heavy,” she said. “I wish you’d mentioned this earlier.”
“I wish that now too,” Cmdr. Chestnut agreed. “At the time, I wanted to believe it was small. I wanted to believe it was nothing.”
The Norwegian Forest cat and golden-mantled squirrel stood together in the darkness of night on an alien world, sharing a pensive silence. They both had regrets. Neither of them could do a thing to take those regrets back. Not now. Right now, they’d simply have to wait and see what happened next.
“We need to be ready,” Captain Carroway meowed. “Maybe there was a shipboard failure, and all of our officers up there are doing everything they can to fix it, and this conversation will feel like a lot of unnecessary worry by tomorrow.”
“But if that’s not true…” Cmdr. Chestnut didn’t finish his thought. He didn’t need to.
Captain Carroway finished it for him, “We need to be ready. If we’re dealing with a turncoat saboteur–”
“And possible Zakonraptor assistance,” Cmdr. Chestnut threw in.
“–then we need to be ready to support our loyal officers at a moment’s notice if they manage to rescue us. We don’t know what they could be up against, how much they might need our help.” The Norwegian Forest cat’s ears flattened, imagining keeping her crew of seven, including herself, constantly prepared down here while also keeping themselves fed and beginning to build shelter. It was a big task. It would be hard not to give up hope, and it might be even harder to eventually let hope go, if rescue never came.
Captain Carroway could think of worse things than building a log cabin beside a forest with this handsome squirrel, and maybe someday letting go of the pressures of rank that kept them at arm’s length from each other. But she’d rather do it in the Milky Way. She’d rather visit him on Lupinia than be stuck with him here.
“We’ll set up shifts,” Cmdr. Chestnut chittered. “We’ll be ready.”
Captain Carroway nodded, and the two of them turned back toward camp, continuing their stroll in silence now that they’d finished discussing what needed to be discussed. They would keep themselves ready. But Captain Carroway didn’t know for how long.
Continue on to Chapter 9…