by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Nexus Nine. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, or skip ahead to the next chapter.
The deck they’d come to was wide and open, as large around as several city blocks and two stories high, with arching windows around the perimeter and even more windows worked into the floors, all looking out at the stars or the planet Avia below.
An expansive stretch of lacy white clouds shrouded the turquoise and jade crescent of the world currently in daylight. The wholesome brightness of the planet in its gemstone shades of green, blue, and pearly white only made the esplanade itself look shabbier. Outside the windows was natural wonder, large enough to spend lifetimes exploring; inside was a cramped, dingy space. Scorch marks seared across the window frames and marred some of the windows. Rubble was strewn about, including broken pieces of the esplanade itself — stairwells and walkways that should have provided a second level, wrought of some dark metal, had twisted and crashed to the floor.
At another time, in another condition, the esplanade might have been stunningly beautiful. At this moment, in this condition, it was only stunning for the story it told. A story of destruction.
And yet, Tri-Galactic Navy and Avioran officers worked together, clearing away the mess, repairing what they could.
“The captain wants to grab dinner here?” Mazel mewed. “How??”
Neera waved a wing apathetically at Mazel, gesturing for the cat to follow. The bird hopped her way through the rubble, between pillars and broken walkways. Mazel did her best to follow, staying light on her paws. They worked their way to the far side of the esplanade where a bar had been jerry-rigged together. Pieces of rubble had been arranged like chairs and tables.
Behind the bar itself — which looked like it might have been an actual fixture of the esplanade, that had only been scorched and not fully destroyed — a creature like a giant slug with tiny hands all along each of its translucent edges and four bulbous eye-stalks sprouting from its head seemed to be fixing drinks. Mazel recognized the creature as a Sliggurm.
“That’s Scharm,” Neera said, perching on one of the pieces of rubble. “When the food-synthesizer in your quarters malfunctions — and it will malfunction — Scharm’s Bar is your best bet for something edible around here. Not good, mind you. But edible.”
“Good to know,” Mazel said, but she didn’t take a seat. “Anything else you’d like to show me on this tour? Like the science labs maybe?”
Neera twittered, the chirpy avian of laughter. “Science labs? What kind of space station do you think this is?”
“One that the Tri-Galactic Union has requisitioned for studying Nexus Nine,” Mazel answered primly. She was moved by the signs of what Neera’s people must have faced in reclaiming this space station from their oppressors, but she was tired. She had traveled a long way and faced a challenging reunion. She wanted to return to the safety of something she knew, and what she was best at — what she had trained for — was studying unusual spatial phenomena like the nine nexuses.
Rheun had already visited and analyzed the previous eight nexus passageways that the Tri-Galactic Navy had discovered during previous lives. Mazel hoped to learn something new from this one. She hoped and had reason to believe this one would be different.
“Sit down, cat,” Neera squawked. She whistled something in a high pitch that Mazel couldn’t understand, and the slug-like Scharm responded by slurping its way over with two glasses.
Scharm set the glasses down in front of them, and Mazel sniffed the pink concoction. It looked like cough syrup and smelled like burnt sugar. “Is it alcoholic? Psychotropic?”
“Just nectar from the jumaria tree,” Neera said. “The other Tri-Galactic Union officers have been lapping it up since they got here. It gives you energy. But no other effects.”
“I could use some energy,” Mazel observed. The drink had a sticky thickness on her tongue, like honey, and the flavor left an aftertaste of melon and lavender. It was fruitier than Mazel’s usual milk-based choices, but she could probably grow to like it. A few moments later, the buzz of new energy hit her, and she revised her estimate: she already liked it. “Jumaria nectar,” she said. “I’ll have to remember that.”
“No you won’t. It’s practically the only thing to drink up here. Half of the time you can’t even get plain water.”
“Why is the station still in such bad condition?” Mazel asked. “From the reports I read, the Reptassans abandoned it more than a year ago.”
“They abandoned nothing,” Neera said. Her voice seemed to have sweetened with the sweetness of the drink. She sounded almost like a songbird now. “We–”
“–kicked their scaly asses out. Right, right, I remember.”
The bird’s eyes twinkled in a smile. “That’s right. But just because we kicked them out didn’t mean we had the resources to make use of an orbital space station ourselves.”
“But–” Mazel started. She stopped herself before she’d shoved too many paws in her muzzle though. Instead of arguing, she took another sip of the jumaria nectar and changed the subject. “I’m here to study the nexus that orbits your sun, just beyond the second gas giant. Can you tell me what you know about it?”
Neera’s voice turned reverential, like she was singing an ancient song: “The Sky Nest has blessed our world with its protection for as long as we’ve recorded history.”
“But have you studied it?” Mazel pressed.
“Constantly.” The bird looked smug. “It is the home and voice of our gods, all in one.”
Mazel was irritated. “That’s a beautiful belief. But I mean, have you studied it scientifically?”
The cat and bird stared at each other over their sticky sweet glasses of nectar. A stand-off. Finally, Mazel decided to take a risk. She had lifetimes of Rheun’s experience telling her to be cautious about extending friendship to new people and all of Mazel’s confused youth — she was practically a kitten still — telling her that she needed to reach out. If she didn’t reach out, then Neera couldn’t reach back.
“Do you want to know why the captain told you to go easy on me?” Mazel asked, working hard to keep her ears from flattening against her head. Sharing private information about herself made her feel vulnerable and nervous.
“He told me,” Neera squawked.
“He did?” Mazel asked, confused. When had the captain had time?
The bird shrugged. “You’re friends. Like the captain said.”
“Oh, no, that’s not it,” Mazel said. The small cat started shaking slightly. She hoped Neera didn’t notice. “Actually, that was the first time I’ve ever met Captain Shepherd Bataille. At least, in this lifetime. I’ve now talked to you more than I’ve ever talked to him. But I remember talking to him…”
“What do you mean?” The bird tilted her head, cautiously intrigued.
“Up until a few months ago, I was Mazel Tabbith. Just a cat in the Tri-Galactic Navy. Only a few missions under my belt since graduating from the academy. Then my commanding officer, a dog named Darius Rheun, died during a dangerous mission, and my ship’s doctor told me that his will had selected me to be his successor.”
“Successor?” The bird looked skeptical now, but she was still listening.
“Turns out the old dog had a neural chip implanted in his brain — that’s Rheun.” Mazel touched her paw to the base of her skull where she thought of the Rheun chip being. Then she moved her paw away quickly, as if she’d been breaking a social taboo by picking at an unsightly scab or maybe like her subconscious movement had revealed the location of a hidden treasure. She extended a claw and traced it around the rim of her jumaria nectar glass, trying to gather her thoughts. “Before my previous captain was Darius Rheun, he was Darius Benson. But I don’t remember being Darius Benson… at least, not the same way I remember being Darius Rheun.” She was babbling. “It’s more like a memory of a memory…”
“What are you talking about?” Neera squawked. “Are you trying to distract me from something with this gibberish?” The bird twisted her head about, looking all around them, examining the other patrons of the haphazard bar. Her neck was far more flexible than a cat’s or dog’s. And her feathers danced in color between purple and blue as the light shifted over them.
This bird might not seem to like her very much, Mazel thought, but she liked this bird. Neera seemed tough and practical. She’d be a good ally if Mazel could only figure out how to connect with her.
Mazel tried to speak plainly, shoving past her jittery nerves: “The neural chip implanted in my brain has been passed down from one host to the next for many lifetimes. Part of me is the same young cat I was a year ago, but part of me has lived dozens of lives — some of them as other cats and also dogs. But also…” She trailed off. This was where she was taking a risk. The rest of her past was sure to become common knowledge around here, if she stayed long. But what she wanted to tell Neera next was a secret.
“Look,” Mazel said, leaning forward, conspiratorial again, “have you heard the Tri-Galactic Navy dogs around here talk about the First Race?”
Neera didn’t cooperate with Mazel’s conspiratorial tone. The bird leaned back, stretched out her wings, and squawked in a louder voice than usual, “First Race, sure. That wizard, O’Neill, barks about the First Race all the time. What is it?”
“That’s our religion — the most popular one on our home world.”
Now Neera tilted her head, showing real interest. “Go on. All the dogs around here pretend like religion is beneath them, and they’re somehow better than us Aviorans who believe we can see the home of our gods.”
Mazel’s muzzle quirked into an amused smile. She didn’t usually hear dogs accused of thinking they were better; that insult was generally saved for cats. “The First Race is a phrase that refers to the first species on our home world to gain sentience — a breed of naked-skinned primates. They uplifted a variety of furry mammalian species to sentience after them.”
Neera blinked her beady eyes. “You didn’t evolve sentience on your own? You needed help? All of you?” Her voice was twittering with laughter by the end.
“All of us from the planet Earth,” Mazel said. “And if you ask any dogs about it, they’ll insist that humans — our First Race — probably came to your world by spaceship and placed the seeds for your sentience some time far back in your history.”
The bird snorted. “Not likely.”
“No,” Mazel agreed.
The bird eyed the cat. Mazel imagined Neera was trying to figure out if she’d been drawing a parallel between dogs and their irrational beliefs and Neera’s own statements about the Sky Nest. The bird must have decided it didn’t matter, because she said, “What happened to these humans? Why haven’t I seen any of them here?”
That wasn’t the part of her history that Mazel wanted to talk about, so she kept her answer vague: “They’re gone. But what I wanted to tell you is — my Rheun chip is ancient. So ancient. I don’t even remember how far back the memories go… They get hazy…” She needed to focus. It was far too easy to get lost in reminiscences. She was too young to be this old. “But I remember being human once. Several times, actually.”
“You remember being your own god?” Now Neera seemed really interested.
“They weren’t gods,” Mazel said. “They were just… people.”
Mazel clasped her paws around the jumaria nectar glass. She downed the last of the nectar, and licked a few drops from her whiskers. All the while, Neera watched her carefully.
Finally, the bird said, “Oof, that’s a big burden.”
“I haven’t told anyone in a long time,” Mazel said. “Lifetimes. It doesn’t usually go well when I do. They treat me differently. Especially dogs. Shep… the captain, that is… he doesn’t know.”
“You keep this a secret? Why did you tell… me?” The bird looked aghast.
“I wanted you to understand why I’m here,” Mazel said.
“Okay…” the bird said. “I’m not getting it. Connect the dots for me.”
“I have this neural chip in my head, and it’s… who I am. I look like a naive young cat, but I’m also ancient, so ancient, I can’t remember where I came from. Who built me? Why?”
Neera didn’t say anything, but she looked entranced. She shook her head, opened her beak to speak, closed it again, and shook her head again. Finally, she said, “Those are big questions. Why did they bring you here?”
“One of my earliest memories involves traveling through a nexus passageway.” The memory was dim, and only a fragment, but when Mazel focused on it, she could feel her tentacles coiling around her as she watched through a spaceship window — the space outside blossomed like a midnight orchid with velvety black petals, then exploded like fireworks. She knew viscerally that she was leaving her home behind and going somewhere new. That was it. The whole memory — tentacles, space bending outside her spaceship, and the sensation of leaving home.
Mazel pulled herself out of the memory and continued: “I’ve been to the previous eight nexus passageways that the Tri-Galactic Navy has discovered, looking for evidence that they’re where I came from… But none of them matched up. I’m hoping whoever created me came from the other side of your Sky Nest.”
“Lucky number nine, huh?”
“Lucky number nine,” Mazel agreed. And she found it profoundly restful that Neera wasn’t familiar enough with Earth culture to make a joke about cat’s having nine lives. Mazel had lived a lot more than nine lives by now. Going by the old wives’ tale, she should be long gone. And she’d simply heard the joke so many times before.
Mazel still cringed at the memory — very recent and fresh compared to so many others — of meeting herself for the first time. That is, when Mazel Tabbith met Darius Rheun — a memory she could recall from both sides now — her singular cat self had said, “With all those previous lives, shouldn’t you be a cat?” Her neural-chipped dog self had sighed wearily. At the time, her cat self had felt clever, but now she regretted the easy, ill-considered joke immensely. Now she could feel directly how very little Darius had thought of her for it — just another snarky cat or dog in a long chain of them making the obvious joke when they first met him. Of course, Darius had gotten over his poor first impression of her. He must have, since he’d picked her to become him.
Mazel wished she could figure out how to access those memories, the memories where he’d changed his mind about her, but she couldn’t seem to recall how Darius had come to think highly enough of her to select her as the next carrier of the Rheun chip. She could remember in painstaking detail spending hours worrying over which color of suit best flattered a coat of curly brown fur that she hadn’t had in several lifetimes… but she couldn’t find the memories she was specifically looking for.
Memory could be so frustratingly slippery and elusive. And memory had become such a big part of her life. She had more memories now than Mazel Tabbith would have ever been able to accrue during her one lifetime without the Rheun chip. With the Rheun chip, as far as Mazel knew, she was essentially immortal.
The bird finished her own drink, slammed the glass down, and said, “I can’t tell if you’re a lost youth who needs my help or a tired old elder who I should be coming to for wisdom.”
“Neither can I,” said Mazel.
Neera twittered in laughter. “Alright, well, we don’t have science labs on this station — the Reptassans built it as a military base. Besides, I don’t think those cold-blooded scale-tails are all that interested in science anyway, not unless it can build a better weapon. But I can set you up with some empty crew quarters as a work space, and you’re welcome to try to requisition equipment from the Tri-Galactic Navy. If they sent you here to study the Sky Nest, then they’ll probably support your research. I may have my doubts about Avia joining the Tri-Galactic Union, but one thing I have to admit about you triple-galaxy folks: you sure do love sending supplies. So, that’s probably not the kind of science lab you’re used to, but it’ll be something.”
“Thank you,” Mazel said.
“Don’t thank me yet; I’m not done,” the bird snapped. “Besides, all of that is just what the captain clearly expected me to do for you anyway. I was just making you wait for it.”
Mazel had known it was a good idea to get this bird on her side. Life on Nexus Nine Base would be a lot easier with her as an ally than as an enemy.
“Here’s what you can thank me for — if it works. I’m going to talk to the Vee on this station — that’s one of our religious leaders — and see if I can convince her to give you access to one of the Broken Twigs.”
“Broken Twig?” Mazel asked.
“A broken fragment of the Sky Nest,” Neera explained. “They fall to Avia sometimes. We’ve collected several dozen over the centuries. Several more have been found floating in space since we began exploring our star system. We store them in protective force shielding, and the faithful make pilgrimages to see them. Coming into contact with a Broken Twig has been known to cause visions. Our gods speak to us through them. The Broken Twigs are very important to us. Sacred. They must be treated reverentially.”
Mazel raised a paw, pads toward Neera and claws carefully sheathed. “Reverential. Got it. I’d offer nothing less.”
Neera nodded solemnly, accepting Mazel’s promise. “Still, setting up a session for you with a Broken Twig could take some time, getting the proper permissions for an outsider and all. What I can do right away is introduce you to Omoleura. I think you two will have a lot in common.”
“Omoleura!” squeaked a voice nearby. “Why would she want to talk to that bug?!”
Mazel blinked at the space the voice had come from and realized there was a frog-like creature with bulging eyes crouched on a piece of rubble at the next table over. The creature’s skin and clothes were tinted to match the background behind him, making him very hard to see, but as Mazel watched, his color shifted to green. His chameleon-like skin was a standard evolutionary trait for some species; however, the suit to match must have been very expensive. He stuck out a hand with bulbous fingers.
“Quincy, at your service,” the frog galumphed. “And anything you want done by Omoleura, I can get done for you half price.”
Mazel shook Quincy’s hand. The bulbous fingers looked slimy, but they just felt smooth.
“Get outta here, Quincy!” Neera squawked.
“Your wish, as always, is my command.” Quincy’s wide face split into a smile that Neera looked like she wanted to claw off with her talons. “But you should know this isn’t the best place for sharing… secrets.”
“How much did you hear?” Mazel asked.
“Oh, nothing,” Quincy said, oozing insincerity.
“Unless he wants to blackmail you later,” Neera said. “This guy is all ears and bad deals.”
“Ears?” The frog looked affronted. He gestured at his own face — all bulgy eyes and wide smile. No ears. “What do I look like? A Pollengi?”
Mazel laughed. She was familiar with the Pollengi — an avian race, halfway between turkeys and chickens, with large feathered crests on either side of their beaked faces. Their feathered crests did look a lot like giant ears, and those crests would look hilarious sticking out of Quincy’s froggy face.
“But seriously,” Quincy said, “I am a good listener, and if the pretty kitty needs someone to talk to later, I’m easy to find.”
Neera glared at Quincy.
“When I want to be found, anyway.”
Neera didn’t stop glaring, but Mazel smiled as she watched the frog hop away.
“You weren’t seriously charmed by that slime-ball, were you?” Neera asked.
Mazel shrugged. “A little. When you’ve lived as many lives as I have, you spend most of your time being too old and intimidating for anyone to risk flirting with you like that. Besides, I’ve never met one of his species before, and that’s unusual for me.”
“Long life with lots of memories, right.” Neera shook her head. “Well, if you found meeting a Phiboon interesting, then you’re going to love meeting Omoleura. There are hundreds of thousands of those conniving amphibious chameleoids from the swamp world Phibious hopping around the galaxy. There’s even a half dozen of them right here in the Viper’s Perch. Sorry, Nexus Nine Base.” Her voice changed as she said, “But there’s only one Omoleura.”
Mazel wasn’t sure what she was hearing in Neera’s voice — reverence? Fondness? Something good though.
“I’ll take you to zim,” Neera said.
“Zim?” Mazel asked.
“Gender neutral pronoun.”
“Oh, sure,” Mazel said.
“Come on.” The bird hopped up from her perch of rubble and set out, away from the bar. Mazel followed.
“Should we pay for the drinks?” Mazel asked.
“I have a tab with Scharm,” Neera replied. “Don’t worry about it. By the end of tomorrow, you’ll probably have a tab with him too. Everyone here does.”
As they forged their way across the esplanade, dodging work crews and especially dangerous pieces of fallen rubble or exposed wiring, Mazel noticed something happening in the sky, just beyond the horizon of Avia. The blackness of space bulged, sparkled, and then exploded in a series of brightly colored flashes that cut through the blackness in straight lines. The sight reminded Mazel of playing pick-up sticks as a kitten. She could see how the Aviorans had come to think of Nexus Nine as a nest in their sky made by gods and composed of mystical broken twigs.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Neera chirped from beside Mazel. The cat hadn’t realized that she’d stopped walking, too awestruck by the nexus’s beauty to do anything but stand and stare.
“It’s different than the eight other nexuses I’ve seen,” Mazel said. She glanced at Neera and saw the bird’s feathers puffing up in a decidedly unhappy way. “Yes, I mean, it’s breathtakingly beautiful. Of course. I just… I wonder why it’s so different.”
Neera looked mollified by Mazel’s praise of the Sky Nest. The bird shrugged. “The Unhatched don’t live in the other nexuses, I imagine. So, of course they’re different.”
“I suppose they don’t,” Mazel said, her whiskers rising in a smile. There was something peaceful about being friends with someone whose religious beliefs weren’t directly contradicted by her own lived experiences. For all Mazel knew, there actually were trans-dimensional beings living inside the hyperspace folds of the nexus, and those beings did care about and speak to the avian lifeforms on the planet nearest to them. There really might be gods in the Sky Nest.
Truth be told, Tri-Galactic Union scientists knew very little about the nexus passageways. They’d sent dozens of unmanned probes into Nexus One before creating one with the proper shielding to survive the passageway all the way through to the other side. When the probe finally emerged on the far end, it had sent back readings through the nexus showing a newborn galaxy, burning far too hot and too dense to be safely explored. A dead end.
Mazel had been a different cat back then, also a scientist specializing in spatial anomalies. Karianne Rheun. She had a dim sense that Karianne had remembered more of why they studied the nexuses than Mazel knew now. Something she had forgotten during the intervening years. But she couldn’t put her paw on what it was. Though she did remember the disappointment, the extreme disillusionment Karianne had felt when the far side of Nexus One turned out to be dangerously uninhabitable.
For a couple of lifetimes, Rheun had moved away from studying the nexuses directly, not wanting to feel the same disappointment. Instead, each incarnation of Rheun kept up on the literature, eagerly reading about the discovery of Nexuses Two and Three, but being only mildly amused and disdainful when the passageways turned out to lead to each other. The same happened for Nexus Four and Five. By Nexus Six, the Tri-Galactic Union had come to think of the strange hyperspace passageways as a series of freeways to be discovered for the purpose of traveling within the three inhabited galaxies more efficiently.
Rheun continued to hope for more, and when he became Darius, the dog returned to studying the nexuses directly. He uncovered a subatomic distortion created by traveling through a nexus passageway; an unmistakable trace, a fingerprint, that uniquely identified whether any particle had ever traveled through a specific nexus.
In this way, Darius knew for certain that the Rheun chip had not originated in the turbulently youthful galaxy on the other side of Nexus One and that his fragmentary memory of leaving home through a nexus had not taken place in the passageway between Nexus Two and Three or Nexus Four and Five. The Rheun chip showed no trace of ever having traveled through any of them.
When Nexuses Seven and Eight were discovered and found to lead to entirely unexplored galaxies, Darius joined in the joy of the scientific community. But he experienced the same personal disappointment as Rheun had with all the others — none of the first eight had left their fingerprint on the neural chip. None of them led to Rheun’s forgotten origin.
Neera led Mazel back across the esplanade, pointing out useful landmarks like the Altar to the Unhatched — “It’s only temporary, something the Vee on the station threw together so we’d have a place to worship. Just a small room with a few pieces of religious art and incense to set the mood. But then, I guess most things on the Viper’s Perch are temporary. And sometimes temporary has a way of turning permanent.” Neera shrugged her wings. They passed a few other points of interest — restaurants and shops being set up, mostly created by local Avioran merchants, hoping to appeal to the Tri-Galactic Union officers stationed onboard.
“A few weeks ago,” Neera said, “this place was mostly abandoned — just a skeleton crew to keep it running. Then the prime ministers’ council voted for us to petition to join the Tri-Galactic Union, and suddenly, I’m no longer the captain around here, and the Viper’s Perch becomes Nexus Nine Base.”
“Sounds dizzying,” Mazel said. “I hope the captain has been listening to your input, since you clearly know this place better than any officer who only set paw aboard a few weeks ago could.” Of course, Mazel knew the captain had been listening. Shep Bataille wouldn’t be so foolish as to ignore a valuable resource — and potentially difficult thorn in his side — like Commander Neera.
Neera didn’t reply, but the bird looked pleased; she seemed to like having Mazel take her side.
Finally they came to a formidable pair of sliding doors built into an archway. The doors slid open in response to their approach, and on the other side, Mazel saw a spread of computer banks showing video feeds from small, empty, numbered rooms — probably prison cells. Behind a desk in the middle of all of the computer banks crouched a being that looked, at first glance, like another Avioran. But something about the creature’s smell was wrong — too sharp and zingy, not musty and sweet.
Mazel stepped closer and saw that while the overall shape of this creature was like an Avioran, the details were all wrong. Instead of actual feathers, the creature had thin fuzzy wings, and a coat of fuzz over its hunched body. Instead of a beak, it had a pointed pair of chitinous mandibles that mimicked the shape of a beak.
“Omoleura, I’d like to introduce the new science officer that the Tri-Galactic Union has sent over to poke and prod at our Sky Nest.” Neera flapped a wing in the calico cat’s direction and said, “Lieutenant Mazel Rheun.” Then she flapped her wing toward the strange insect. “This is Omoleura, zhe’s been the chief of security on the station since back before we kicked the Reptassans out. Sometimes the chief here was the only justice standing between the Avioran workers on the station and our Reptassan slavers.”
The insect straightened up from zir hunched posture. “The Reptassans liked to keep things orderly. Justice is orderly.” Zhe extended a many-jointed arm that had been folded against the underside of zir wing. The arm ended in a talon which Omoleura held out to Mazel. “I believe your people like to shake hands during introductions?”
“We do,” Mazel agreed. She took Omoleura’s talon in her paw. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Neera looked uncomfortable. The bird had not offered a wing for Mazel to shake when they’d met, and she tucked both of her wings behind her back now. Mazel hadn’t been surprised or bothered by the Avioran not offering her wing. In Mazel’s experience, winged sentients rarely liked shaking hands, even if their wings had evolved to have functional digits and work more like paws or hands than feral wings. At a deep level, a bird’s wings are for flying free, and they don’t belong clasped in a cat’s paw.
“Will you be sending missions through the nexus passageway to the galaxy on the other side?” Omoleura asked with a chittering, clicky voice. “If so, I’d like to join you.”
“Captain Bataille will be in charge of those decisions,” Mazel said. “I’ll be analyzing Nexus Nine’s subatomic distortion signature at first, and then the hyperspatial folding patterns.”
“Fascinating,” Omoleura chittered drily. Zhe didn’t seem to speak from zir beak-like mandibles, but rather by vibrating the many-jointed legs folded against zir wings.
As Mazel looked at the insect, she realized the dark spots she’d assumed were eyes were nothing more than dark spots of fur, and a cluster of large multi-faceted eyes hid beneath the beak-like mandibles.
Mazel wanted to ask Omoleura about zir physiology and species’ history, but they’d just met. And she didn’t want to be presumptuous. So instead, she asked, “Do you have a particular interest in the galaxy on the other side of Nexus Nine?”
“I do,” Omoleura replied, unhelpfully.
“Don’t be difficult,” Neera said. Apparently, being difficult was exclusively her job. “Omoleura believes zhe was brought to Avia by way of the Sky Nest.”
Omoleura shifted zir wings in an unsettled way. As the thin fuzzy wings and the folded many-jointed legs underneath shifted, the difference between Omoleura’s insectile mimicry and an actual Avioran’s wings became more obvious. But then the difference melted away in stillness, and Omoleura looked like a bird again. Powerful camouflage. “I’ve never met another member of my species,” Omoleura chittered, “or anything like my species. In the three galaxies, I seem to be unique.”
Mazel could identify with that uncomfortable feeling.
Omoleura continued: “If I came, originally, from the other side of the nexus, then I would like to find my people.”
Could the Rheun chip have been created by an insect race? That was a possibility Rheun had never considered. Mazel didn’t remember ever having a chitinous shell covered in fuzz or many-jointed legs or seeing the world through a cluster of multi-faceted eyes. Was it possible to forget an experience like that? She had clearly forgotten a great deal about her time as an octopus — she remembered being an octopus in an aquarium, studying the human scientist who thought she was the one doing the studying. She remembered revealing herself to the human scientist and choosing to pass her Rheun-self on to the human when her octopus-self died.
That’s right — not only had humans not been the god-like beings dogs thought they were, they hadn’t even been the first sentient lifeforms on Earth. There had been a thriving octopus nation deep beneath Earth’s oceans for millions of years before humans came into ascendance on dry ground.
Mazel believed the Rheun chip had lived through millions of those years among the octopi, but she only retained a smattering of memories throughout them. And yet, in her memories the sensation of her own tentacles coiling, stretching, and clinging with their sucker discs held such a visceral, primal, powerful quality that Mazel had trouble believing she could have forgotten anything as equally strange as many-jointed legs and multi-faceted eyes.
Yet memory dims with time, and she could not be sure.
Perhaps Omoleura’s and Rheun’s origins lay in the same direction, but Mazel thought it unlikely that they were one and the same.
Before Mazel could say any of these thoughts — or rather, sort out her thoughts into which ones were safe to say — to Omoleura, the three of them were interrupted by the doors sliding open again. On the other side stood a gray squirrel in a Tri-Galactic Navy medical uniform, his bushy tail whipping around wildly behind him.
“Chief Omoleura!” the squirrel cried. “The medical bay has been robbed!”
Neera sighed dramatically. “Quincy,” she squawked. “What did he take this time?”
“Let’s not leap to conclusions,” Omoleura chittered. After a drawn-out, creaking sigh of zir own, zhe added in a voice like a tuning cello, “Though the sticky-fingered Phiboon seems to be behind most of the petty theft around here.” Omoleura turned zirself toward Neera in a way that must have been almost entirely decorative, since zir multi-faceted eyes surely had a wider view of the room than any of the rest of them. “Can we continue this introduction later?”
“Certainly,” Neera agreed. “I just wanted to make sure that you and Lieutenant Rheun crossed paths.”
The squirrel nearly jumped out of his fur. “Lieutenant Rheun? Lieutenant Mazel Rheun?” He rushed up to Mazel and looked the calico cat up and down. He was a big squirrel, and she was a small cat, so she was only a hair taller than him, pointy ears to pointy ears. He held out a delicate paw toward her, but he didn’t wait for her to take it. Instead he suddenly clasped both of his paws around one of hers and squeezed tightly. “I’m Doctor Elijah Jardine, and I’m so excited to meet you! Boy, I bet you could really tell some interesting stories!” His tail fluttered behind him.
Mazel didn’t know what to say to the pretty but overeager squirrel. Clearly, he’d read her medical record, and he knew about the Rheun chip.
“Oh, no, I’m sorry!” He covered his muzzle with both paws, and his tail straightened stiffly. “I shouldn’t be…”
“It’s alright,” Mazel said. “Commander Neera already knows about my… unusual history, and we were about to tell Chief Omoleura.”
The squirrel looked immensely relieved.
“Though I guess I know better than to tell you any secrets,” Mazel jibed.
Jardine’s jaw fell open, and he worked it several times, seemingly trying to come up with a response. Finally, he nodded demurely. “That’s more than fair,” he said. “I deserve that. Nonetheless, I would love to buy you dinner some time, and hear stories of the days of yore!”
“Days of yore?” Neera repeated with a tone of shock or disgust.
Mazel had to admit, the phrase was a bit much, but it amused her. Everything about the little doctor seemed to be a bit much. Though she supposed that a squirrel would have to be a determined fellow to work his way through the ranks of dogs and cats in the Tri-Galactic Navy.
“Come, Doctor Jardine,” Omoleura chittered, “I think it’s time that you give me your report…”
With no further prompting, the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed squirrel launched into an in-depth, extremely detailed description of his discovery of the missing supplies, beginning with his breakfast that morning. He was a very handsome but overly loquacious fellow, Mazel thought.
Meanwhile, Neera gestured with one wing for Mazel to follow her, and with the other she made a sweeping gesture at Omoleura that seemed to imply she’d check back with zim later. Then the bird backed out of the chief’s office.
Once they were back on the esplanade, sliding doors shut behind them, Neera said, “That doctor has been one emergency after the other since he got here. Pretty tail though. Not quite like the tails on the rest of you Tri-Galactic folk…?” She left the sentence hanging, halfway between a statement and a question.
“He’s a squirrel,” Mazel said, filling in the blanks for Neera. “The rest of us here are probably all cats and dogs. There are a variety of uplifted species from the planet Earth, but cats and dogs are the most prevalent in the Tri-Galactic Navy.”
“Huh,” Neera said. “What about the really big fellow?” She arched her wings out and hopped on her talons, trying to look larger. “Kind of hulking and husky. Eh, I don’t know, maybe she’s a dog too. Just a really, really big one.”
“Could be a bear?” Mazel suggested. There weren’t any uplifted bears from Earth — humans hadn’t gotten to uplifting bears before the Dark Times and their disappearance — but there was a species of Ursines in the Tri-Galactic Union who’d evolved sentience naturally on their own home world of Ursa Minuet. Mazel remembered her time as an Ursine very fondly. It had only been a single lifetime, but oh what a lifetime! She would enjoy meeting another bear aboard Nexus Nine Base.
Mazel shook her head to clear it. Any bear here wouldn’t be “another bear,” because Mazel Rheun wasn’t a bear.
Neera led Mazel back into the malfunctioning elevator, and they rose several levels into the decks of crew quarters. As promised, Neera set Mazel up with a pair of conjoined, empty quarters for her to turn into a science lab to supplement the simple work station in command.
“There’s a standard computer bank, food synthesizer, and a cot that I suppose you won’t need,” Neera said. “We can have someone fetch that out of your way.” The bird looked pensive for a moment. “There’s probably someone else aboard who needs it… Reptassan living quarters tend to be spartan, especially, I imagine, on a military base. They were never much for creature comforts while they were busy subjugating and overworking us.”
“This is great,” Mazel said, hoping to extricate herself from the conversation before hearing too much more about the Reptassans. She wanted to be friends with Neera, but she’d had a long day full of new — and new to her — people. She needed a chance to unwind. Alone. Well, as alone as she could ever be now that her mind buzzed with memories of other lifetimes. Sometimes it felt like her previous selves were speaking to her, judging her, advising her, or just commenting on every little thing. She knew what each of them would have thought. Sometimes, it was hard to pick her own thoughts out of the mess. “I can get started with this.”
Neera left Mazel to her multiplicitous self, and the cat went straight to the computer. She spent a couple of hours researching the overlap between the scientific equipment she needed for her studies, the equipment that was readily available, and the equipment that was most likely to interface with the Reptassan hardware on this station. She’d never had to design her own science lab before. It was partly fun and freeing, like putting a puzzle together without any rules to follow for how to do it. But it was also daunting, and in the end, a little depressing.
Rheun had worked in first-class laboratories all across the three galaxies, and what Mazel was throwing together here would be a haphazard, jerry-rigged, stop-gap measure of a lab at best. But it would get the job done. And she supposed, even the world-class laboratories she’d worked in had had to start somewhere. It was a sign of respect for her scientific work — as both Mazel and Rheun — that the Tri-Galactic Union had put her in charge of this operation, entirely by herself.
Of course, it was also a sign of the political unrest in the system. The Tri-Galactic Union didn’t want to devote too many resources too quickly to a backwater system recovering from nearly a century of war. Technically, Nexus Nine belonged to the people of Avia, and their religious beliefs could interfere with the progress of scientific research if Mazel wasn’t careful.
Once Mazel’s requisition orders were sent off to the nearest Tri-Galactic Union base, she curled up on the thin cot that Neera planned to take away. The cot was beside a window looking out on the star-studded space outside. There was no window in Mazel’s personal quarters, but the cot was exactly the same. Besides, Mazel wasn’t sure she could find her own quarters without help right now, or maybe just some sleep first.
Continue on to Chapter 3…