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 interior of the asteroid had been hollowed out and reinforced with beams and latticework that broke it into a honeycomb-like structure with several large bays. The Zakonraptor piloting the Wanderlust flew the small ship into one of those bays, and docking clamps locked it in place. Trapped. Ready to be stripped for parts. Lt. Diaz didn’t know how she and Lt. Lee — assuming he ever realized they should be working together — would ever get their ship out of here.
Two of the other bays inside the asteroid housed Zakonraptor vessels, familiar in form from when the Wanderlust had squared off against them to protect the Waykeeper. If it came to a firefight between the Wanderlust and two Zakonraptor vessels, Lt. Diaz would bet on the Wanderlust. Though, even if the Wanderlust did win such a fight, they’d probably sustain heavy damage.
Another one of the bays held a large, vaguely organic-looking shape. Bulbous, blubbery, and the size of a spaceship. Lt. Diaz wasn’t sure what to make of it. Some kind of carcass? Maybe some sort of space whale that had died? She wondered if it had died from natural causes and been brought here for studying, or if it had died from experiments inflicted upon it. The Xolo-Lupinian felt a pang in her heart, wondering what the Zakonraptors had in their plans for Lys. An image of the sweet, innocent, caterpillar-like alien as a corpse flitted through her mind, unbidden and unwanted. Negative, violent imagery was flitting through her mind more and more often as this day stretched on. It was making it hard for the Xolo-Lupinian to concentrate or think of viable plans.
“Excellent! Excellent!” the lead Zakonraptor declared. “Now the real work can begin.”
“Uh…” Lt. Diaz began, trying to figure out how she could possibly get off the rails that were leading her and the Wanderlust directly toward destruction. It would really help in making an effective plan if she knew more about this research base — what did they research here? Was there any way she could use their research against them? She needed more information. “Could… we maybe get a tour of your base? I mean, we’ve been teaching you all about our technology. I sure would like a chance to learn about some of yours.”
The lead Zakonraptor tilted its spade-shaped head, feathered plumes twitching in a way that reminded Lt. Diaz of someone nervously tapping a paw. “Yes, yes, we would like to know what you experts from the Meelky Why think of our research. Maybe you can fix the problems we keep running up against.”
Lt. Diaz didn’t want to help these Zakonraptors fix any problems. Still, she was glad to hear they were running up against problems. The less functional this research base was, the better it would be for her and Lt. Lee when they tried to break the Wanderlust out of it. Assuming she could manage to communicate to Lt. Lee that they were on the same side before the golden good boy of the Tri-Galactic Union single-pawed rescued Lys, broke the Wanderlust out of here, and left her to rot in the Tetra Galaxy with Risqu and a bunch of feathery dino-aliens for the rest of her life.
“Not him,” Risqua squawked, pointing a talon-hand at Lt. Lee. “He will betray us.”
The Papillon responded with the best poker face Lt. Diaz had ever seen. His pretty, butterfly-like ears with their cascades of long fur didn’t flicker in the slightest; his brown eyes didn’t flinch away from the lead Zakonraptor for a second. His posture didn’t shift at all. He did absolutely nothing to give away the truth that both Risqua and Lt. Diaz knew for absolute sure: he would betray the Zakonraptors. He was pretending to work with them, and he would turn on them the moment they gave him any leeway at all.
But the Zakonraptors didn’t know that. They didn’t know him. All they’d seen was a very cooperative, extremely clever mammal who’d been vouched for by someone who Risqua had vouched for.
“I don’t care one way or the other,” Lt. Lee woofed eventually when the tension got too thick. “As long as I get my share of the spoils, I don’t mind kicking back and not actually working for them.” The comm-pin on his breast automatically translated his words for the Zakonraptors to understand.
The lead Zakonraptor snorted, seemingly in amusement. “You all work. You all come on the tour.” Then turning to one of the secondary Zakonraptors, it added, “Fetch the Ollally-one from where we left her bound and take her to the team working on hatching protocols.”
Lt. Diaz didn’t like the sound of the phrase “hatching protocols.” Were the Zakonraptors trying to breed Ollallans as slaves? The pudgy, worm-shaped, caterpillar-like people didn’t seem like they’d be very effective slave laborers, but then, Lt. Diaz supposed that most cultures that traded in slavery cared more about the control and cruelty involved than actually building an effective, sustainable society.
One of the Zakonraptors headed down the central hall of the Wanderlust, presumably to fetch Lys from the barracks as requested and whisk her away to who-the-hell-knows where, which would just make breaking out of here harder — Lt. Diaz would now have to convince Lt. Lee to work with her, locate and rescue Lys from wherever the Zakonraptor took her, and then break the Wanderlust out of this asteroid base. Her to-do list was getting longer and longer, and she wanted to start checking items off of it. She wanted to start by punching Risqua’s smug, lying beak right off her feathery face.
“Now,” the lead Zakonraptor hissed at Risqua, leaning over the smaller reptile-bird’s shoulder at the station she was manning, “use that fancy, fizzy teleportation device on us all again. Send Gr’ch’ch’k and the Ollally-one to here–” The Zakonraptor pointed with a talon at a map of the asteroid base that was on the screen of Risqua’s station. “–and the rest of us to here.” The Zakonraptor pointed again, now at a different spot.
Lt. Diaz really wished she could surreptitiously take a moment to study that map before being teleported away, but it was proving impossibly hard to do anything surreptitious with Risqua and two Zakonraptors still around to notice any misstep. And of course, every bit of energy that she put into convincing the enemy she was on their side was just going to make it even harder to win Lt. Lee over when she finally got a moment alone with him. If she ever got a moment alone with him. Because it was feeling more and more like she was going to end up trapped in the Tetra Galaxy for the rest of her life, living among Zakonraptors who would hopefully forgive her for murdering Risqua.
If Captain Carroway were still running this show, anyone who wanted to be teleported would have needed to stroll down to the far end of the ship and stand properly on the teleporter pad. To save energy. But the Zakonraptor leader had no such compunctions about conservation when it came to the Wanderlust’s energy, so Risqua punched in the necessary commands to the teleporter right there on the bridge.
The Zakonraptor giggled happily — a frightening, hiccoughing sound — when the quantum energy from the teleporter kicked in.
The fizzy, tickly sensation of quantum energy disassembling her whole body down to a sub-atomic level frissoned through Lt. Diaz from the tips of her bat-like ears down to the limp end of her whip of a tail. Her tail hadn’t done a lot of wagging recently. It was hard to imagine feeling happy enough to ever wag her tail again. Or giggle, carelessly carefree like the Zakonraptor had. It was infuriating that a plundering pirate like that Zakonraptor got to feel happy. Also, it was a little bewildering to feel infuriated whilst in the process of disassembling and reassembling at a quantum level. What did that mean for the nature of existence and consciousness? Lt. Diaz wasn’t sure.
As the glittery, golden haze of quantum energy cleared from her vision, leaving just the few squirmy artifacts that would take a few minutes to clear, Lt. Diaz found herself in a mad scientist engineer’s fever dream of a laboratory — tons of large, complicated pieces of technology and equipment that weren’t quite like anything she’d seen before. It made her think of dreams she’d had, where her sleeping brain clearly couldn’t quite perfectly conjure the engine rooms and equipment she worked with while awake, but it did its best, creating strange hybrids that looked familiar but confusing at the same time.
The engineer in Diaz wanted to push aside everything about her life in that moment and just spend several weeks, completely alone, unbothered by anyone else, trying to dig through and understand every piece of technology within sight. But that wasn’t an option for so, so many reasons. Instead, she had to play the complicated game of being led around by a Zakonraptor, introduced to other Zakonraptors, and listening politely to their explanations of their research. And while Lt. Diaz couldn’t shake off a certain amount of intrinsic interest in their work — cats aren’t the only ones who get curious — the whole experience was completely spoiled by continuing to have to play the game of placating her enemies while being watched by her one hope for an ally.
The Zakonraptor tour guide — Lt. Diaz had lost track as to whether it was one of the same Zakonraptors who had originally boarded the Wanderlust — led Risqua, Lt. Lee, and Lt. Diaz on a winding path through the gigantic laboratory. All the while, the Wanderlust, the two Zakonraptor vessels, and the giant space whale corpse hung above them in their docking clamps, always visible from everywhere they went, since the only ceiling seemed to be the faraway side of the hollowed out asteroid.
Lt. Diaz really wondered what Risqua’s plan would have been if she’d sold out to the Zakonraptors entirely alone, since the reptile-bird wasn’t a scientist or engineer. Risqua had been the navigations officer on the Last Chance, and she didn’t have the benefit of a Tri-Galactic Union academy education to fall back on. Lt. Diaz could easily see her former-friend was in over her head here.
Risqua clearly had no idea what most of the Zakonraptor researchers were talking about as they rattled off science concepts. Maybe the dino-aliens couldn’t see that, but Lt. Diaz knew Risqua well enough to see how discomfited the reptile-bird was getting. Now that Risqua had handed over the keys to the Wanderlust, as it were, she didn’t have anything else left to make her valuable here, and the Zakonraptor scientists were increasingly addressing all of their explanations to Lt. Diaz and Lt. Lee who could actually understand them.
The two dogs might not speak the dino-aliens’ tongue, but they shared the language of science. And Risqua simply didn’t get it.
Maybe, Lt. Diaz thought savagely, it would be a good enough punishment for her betrayal to leave Risqua here, forced to sleep in the bed she’d made — completely unremarkable in a faraway galaxy.
Unfortunately, Lt. Diaz could feel the same trap tightening around her. She might understand much of what the various Zakonraptor scientists were explaining to her, but she couldn’t figure out how it all fit together. The Xolo-Lupinian kept trying to piece together the disparate research projects she was being shown into some sort of over-arching story, or even just a patchwork quilt, any way of making them hold together, but they were too all over the place.
One minute, a Zakonraptor with blue feathers would show her and Lt. Lee a view through a microscope of minuscule organisms, being bred for particular traits, and then ten minutes later a Zakonraptor with bright red feathers would show them the plans for ultra-light, ultra-strong metal alloys, only to turn around and find a green-feathered Zakonraptor experimenting with hyperspatial slipstream pockets — albeit, not large enough ones to explain the signal which had originally drawn the Wanderlust to this binary star system.
There simply wasn’t a recognizable pattern to all the different research projects, and Lt. Diaz was beginning to feel like she was walking through a nightmare. Nothing made sense, and the longer it went on, the farther she got away from anything she cared about.
She wished Captain Carroway were here. For all that Lt. Diaz despised that Norwegian Forest cat, she knew somehow that the captain would find a way out of this. That’s what the cat did — she landed on her feet, even when the Tri-Galactic Union sent her on a suicide mission. Lt. Diaz needed to be like that. She needed to channel the captain’s annoying, relentless energy.
What would Janessa Carroway do, if she were the one who was here?
Surely, she wouldn’t stand for being run around in circles under the control of the Zakonraptors. That officious, demanding Norwegian Forest cat would put a paw down and insist on her own needs being met.
Feeling like she’d allowed the spirit of the captain to take her over, Lt. Diaz woofed, “We’ve been doing this for a long time, and I don’t know about the others, but I’d had a long day already before we even began. It’s time for a break. Some food. Somewhere to sit down. Show us a little of the hospitality that we’re paying for with the extremely valuable ship we just handed over and all of the expertise we’ve been so willingly sharing. Show us what a good choice we’ve made in choosing to work with you.”
Neither uplifted Xolo dogs nor wolf-like Lupinians are capable of purring; they simply don’t have the throats for it. However, Lt. Diaz could’ve sworn she heard the edge of a purr in her own voice as she channeled the captain’s demeanor. She even felt her whiplike tail give a tentative wag, as if by channeling the captain’s forceful graciousness, she’d tricked her own body into feeling a little lighter, a little more optimistic.
Risqua looked relieved, like she believed Lt. Diaz was still her friend, still on her side, and looking out for their interests together. The reptile-bird couldn’t have been more wrong.
Lt. Lee looked at Lt. Diaz for the first time since the Zakonraptors had hijacked them. His brown eyes caught hers, showing a mix of confusion and some other feeling that Lt. Diaz couldn’t make sense of… probably disgust, reprobation. Some kind of judgement. But the Papillon looked away too fast when he saw her returning his gaze for her to be sure.
A few hours ago, Lt. Diaz couldn’t have imagined how much her entire being would be hanging on any little movement or change in demeanor expressed by this small, pretty, union-loyal dog. A few hours ago, all she’d felt for him was scorn and derision, but now, she’d have given almost anything for him to look at her long enough for her to try — at least, try — to put all of her feelings and intentions into the expression of her eyes and hope against hope that he understood the two of them were still on the same side, in spite of her months of low-key insubordination.
If Lt. Diaz could go back and take it all back, right now, she would. She’d be a model officer for Captain Carroway if she ever got the chance again, because she’d rather work amiably with the crew of the Wanderlust and get home than wear her distaste for Tri-Galactic Union policies and procedures on her sleeve for the rest of a long life in the Tetra Galaxy.
The Zakonraptor tour guide narrowed its eyes and tilted its head. The plumes of feathers on either side of its face closed in tightly, but then it nodded. “Yes, we can discuss this all more, over a nice meal.”
Sensing that now wasn’t the time to back down — the Zakonraptor was already being accommodating, best to push that as far as possible — Lt. Diaz woofed, “And now that we no longer are stuck living on that cramped little ship, perhaps you could show us where we’ll be staying while we’re here. Also, I’d like to talk about how long we’ll be staying here, and what our options are after that. I’m more than happy to pay my way in this galaxy by sharing my knowledge, but this is a big galaxy, and just because this research station is where it was easiest to hand off our ship doesn’t necessarily mean it’s where my skills will be best employed or where I want to spend my time.”
The Zakonraptor tour guide blinked several times, seemingly out of its depth dealing with a foreign scientist who was standing up for her own rights. “Very well,” it said. “Follow me, and we’ll see what we can do.”
For a split second, Lt. Diaz was actually pleased with herself, but then she saw how delighted Risqua looked and the reptile-bird’s pleasure completely dashed her own. It would be a relief when Lt. Diaz never had to see Risqua’s smug beak again.
Except, in spite of herself, a shiver of coldness ran along the Xolo-Lupinian’s spine, reminding her that until only a few hours ago, Risqua had been her best friend. Even if everything went perfectly from here on out, and Lt. Diaz was able to get out of here with Lt. Lee, Lys, and everyone who’d been left stranded on the surface of the planet below, she was going to have a lot of mourning to do.
Lt. Diaz was tired of mourning. There’d been far too much of it lately, and she was ready for something else.
Continue on to Chapter 10…