by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Nexus Nine. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
Once Mazel and the captain were alone on the sandy shore beside the Temple of Yunib, the German Shepherd climbed into the rowboat, sat down, and stared up at the sky. “What does it mean, Big Dog?” he asked. “Am I a messiah in a religion I’d never heard of until three weeks ago? What would that even mean?”
Mazel sat down on the wooden plank seat beside Bataille. Her head only came to his shoulder. His physical presence, now that he was so much larger than her, had a comforting, anchoring quality that she didn’t remember when she’d been Darius.
Mazel had a lot of thoughts on the subject of what it meant to be a god in a religion she didn’t quite believe in. But she wasn’t sure how many of them to share with her friend. She wanted to ease his burden, not drive a wedge between them. It was already surprising that their friendship had survived the last year of upheaval in her life with so little changed.
“Maybe this will all go away if I ignore it,” Bataille said. “Focus on the job, and don’t worry about the local beliefs.”
“I don’t think it’s going to go away,” Mazel said. “From what I’ve read of the Avioran beliefs regarding Twig visions…” She drew a deep breath. “If Neera hadn’t been there, then maybe it would all go away.”
“Why does Commander Neera’s presence matter?” Bataille asked, looking down from the sky to focus on Mazel.
“Descriptions of every Broken Twig vision are recorded and shared among all of the Vees on Avia — they’re seen as sacred wisdom shared from the gods.” And yet, the Vees carefully curated every Broken Twig visitation, creating a false sense of scarcity, apparently to make the visions more valuable. Although, if the visions truly were words from their gods, then Mazel wasn’t sure why they needed to be made more valuable.
“What if the vision… reveals something personal?” Bataille was clearly thinking about all of the people he’d seen in his vision, all of the people who’d died, all of the people he’d lost. “What if it’s something too personal to share?”
Mazel shrugged. “I’m not an expert. I’m just a fast reader, and I spent a day reading up on the Sky Nest and Broken Twigs. Maybe they write down a vague description? I mean, it’s not like you gave the Vee very many details to work with. But you did say that you’d been called the Apex. And you said it in front of Neera. I don’t think Vee Wya can afford to leave that out of her record, and that means she can’t simply disappear what happened here.”
“No wonder she was angry,” Bataille said. “She doesn’t want to believe I’m this mythical figure that she believes in… but the rest of her religious order might. And she won’t be able to stand against them if enough of them do.” He shook his head. “So what do I do? Renounce my words? Tell them I don’t want to be the Apex? I don’t even know what the Apex really is!”
“I don’t think it’s up to you,” Mazel said. “The Aviorans will believe what they believe. All you can do is be the best Tri-Galactic Union delegate that you know how to be.” Mazel knew that her own advice rang somewhat hollow when she told it to herself, but perhaps it meant more coming from someone else. Regardless, it was the best advice she had to give.
Bataille grinned wolfishly, apparently comforted. “Yeah, I know how to do that.” His grin wavered when he caught sight of Commander Neera and Lt. Unari approaching.
The black cat’s arms were full of leafy cuttings, piled high in a flat, shallow box. The bird looked dazed, wings folded tightly behind her, and tail feathers splayed widely. Her eyes locked onto the captain, but she said nothing, staying uncharacteristically quiet, as she climbed into the boat and took an oar between her wings.
Unari set her box of cuttings under the plank seat and joined the others. She spent the boat ride back excitedly discussing everything she had learned about the bonsai trees, how they had been gathered and cultivated from every continent on Avia, and their individual botanical histories. She seemed unconcerned by the others’ silence as they rowed across the lake. Mazel tried to engage with her. Unlike the black cat, Mazel was not a botanist, but she had been one in past lives.
During the shuttle flight back up to Nexus Nine Base, Unari told them everything she had learned from Isstis about the difficulties faced by Reptassan-Avioran hybrids. The occupation had lasted long enough that there were hybrids of all ages, some of them second or third generation.
Many of the hybrids had turned to the Temples of the Unhatched for shelter and livelihoods. By and large, they were not well-accepted on Avia, but most of them — from what Isstis had told Unari — felt they were better off among the Aviorans than the Reptassans. Especially the ones who couldn’t or didn’t want to undergo cosmetic surgery to look like full-blooded Reptassans. Artificial scales, apparently, were far easier to construct than functional, believable artificial feathers. Yet, very few of the hybrids wanted to give up whatever natural feathers they had in order to pass for being fully reptilian.
“Feathers are blessings from the Unhatched,” Neera muttered, mostly ignoring Unari and focusing on piloting the shuttle. She’d had surprisingly little to say regarding the Avioran-Reptassan hybrids as Unari had talked about them. She wasn’t usually a bird who held back her opinions.
“Perhaps the Tri-Galactic Union should offer some scholarships specifically to Avioran-Reptassan individuals to encourage them to join the naval academy,” Captain Bataille said. “The Tri-Galactic Union might be a more comfortable place for them than either Avia or Reptiss.”
The captain’s words turned Neera’s head. She looked away from the shuttle’s main view screen, where Nexus Nine Base loomed before them like a child’s toy, discarded on the endless black sand beach of the sky. The space station was constructed entirely from interconnected hexagons and triangles, pointy and angular and complicated.
Neera stared piercingly at Captain Bataille, taking his measure without saying a word. Finally, she looked back at the main view screen and brought the shuttle in to dock at the corner of one of the hexagons.
Mazel was curious how the tension between Neera and Bataille would play out, but fundamentally, it was not her problem. And the data stored in her antique scanner called to her like a homing beacon. She was so close, possibly so close, to learning where she had truly come from.
As they exited the docked shuttle craft, Mazel asked Lt. Unari, “Do you have lab space for studying those plant samples?”
“Oh, yes,” the black cat said amiably. “They’ve set me up with a corner of the medical bay.”
“A corner?” Mazel asked, wondering if she should offer to share some of her own lab space. Not that botany and physics equipment had all that much overlap.
“The medical bay is huge,” Unari said. “Have you seen it? I mean, I do have that squirrel doctor rushing over all the time to chatter at me, but he’s had some surprisingly interesting insights for a medical doctor.”
“So, the station had no research labs but an extensive medical bay?” Mazel asked. As she said the words, the pieces fell together.
Neera squawked, “The Viper’s Perch was where Reptassans shipped any of their officers from the planet who we managed to seriously injure but not quite kill. They’d patch ’em up, and send them back to stand on our wings. If we were injured though? They’d just let us bleed.”
Mazel smiled weakly, not knowing how else to respond. Neera’s assertion confirmed her suspicions.
This whole space station felt haunted by its violent, horrible past. Its very physical structure had been determined by priorities and plans that centered on the subjugation and destruction of an entire people. Mazel felt sick being there. But she wanted to find her own history, and somehow, it was tangled up — by way of Nexus Nine — with the Aviorans.
As Mazel walked the halls of Nexus Nine Base, heading towards her ramshackle laboratory, she thought about how the history of uplifted cats and dogs on Earth was filled with violence and oppression too.
Dogs had tried to keep cats from space travel. They’d locked cats up for possession of catnip, which was a harmless, recreational drug, and thrown away the keys. Dogs had bullied cats, beaten cats, ignored cats, jailed cats, and at times, shot cats down in the street. Cats had fought hard to attain and defend their rights.
But Mazel was used to those forms of violence and oppression as part of a history book — it was easy to believe they were all in the distant past when she looked at how far the Tri-Galactic Union had come. Over lifetimes, Mazel had become used to tuning out the historical structures that still meant she had to fight harder to be heard as a cat than she had when she was a dog. (And she couldn’t imagine how much harder it must be for Dr. Jardine — squirrels had always had it worse in dog-run societies than cats did.)
But that was background noise. She tuned it out and went on with her life, as much as possible.
The history of violence and oppression on Nexus Nine Base — the Viper’s Perch — felt so raw and fresh; it chafed at Mazel, leaving her uncomfortable in her own fur, wishing she could be anywhere else, but knowing there was nowhere else she could be that would make the violence that had happened here untrue. Just less salient. And that made her feel guilty for even wanting to escape it.
If there was violence in the universe, why should she be free from seeing it?
But also: how would her observing it… help?
Mazel found the doors to her science lab, and when they slid open, she felt relief soak through her like warm sunlight on a winter day. Wizard O’Neill had installed every piece of equipment. The cot was gone, but the double room actually looked like a science lab. Small and cramped, but a real laboratory. Here was a place that Mazel understood, a place where she felt safe and knew what to do.
Mazel plugged her antique scanner into one of the computer consoles and began downloading the data. While it downloaded, she set up a search of the computer’s records of Avioran scripture, looking for anything and everything about the Apex. She wanted to be able to support the captain — her dear friend — better, but she could also see the potential for his vision interfering in her research.
If the Aviorans decided that the Tri-Galactic Union shouldn’t study the home of their gods, it could become quite difficult to proceed. If at all possible, Mazel wanted to find a way to keep the Avioran religion from interfering in her scientific research. And so far, it had proved invaluable to be able to quote Avioran scripture back to the birds who believed in it.
The computer chimed discordantly, announcing that it had finished downloading the scanner’s data. It spoke in an atonally raspy, hissing voice: “Resultssss ssshow the pattern isss a matsch.”
Mazel’s heart leapt, and she looked the data over herself. It was true. The subatomic distortion pattern from the Broken Twig of Foresight matched the subatomic distortion on her own Rheun chip perfectly.
Lifetimes ago, she had passed through Nexus Nine. Her origins lay on the other side. She was closer to her galaxy of origin than she had been since coming to Earth as an octopus in her distant memories.
Mazel wondered if the species who had created her Rheun half still existed and flourished on the other side of Nexus Nine. Was there a whole civilization of octopuses, enhanced by memory chips, waiting for her in the galaxy on the other side? The Ennea galaxy. She was from the Ennea galaxy.
If there was a whole civilization of enhanced octopuses waiting for her, would they understand her bizarre, patchy history of passing her chip from species to species? Or would they be ethnic purists, keeping their chips strictly inside octopus bodies? Would she be an outcast? Still not understood…
But perhaps, on the other side of Nexus Nine, she would find a whole society full of people who understood what it was like to pass their consciousness from one life to the next, existing in a state of seeming immortality. The idea took her breath away, but it also gave her oxygen, saturating her body with a sustenance she hadn’t known she’d been missing. She could hardly wait to board a shuttle and return through Nexus Nine.
Going home, Mazel thought. For once, those words had a meaning deeper than returning to a kittenhood residence where she’d spent the smallest fraction of her life.
The first step was to send an un-crewed probe through the nexus, to make sure it was safe. Of course it was safe. Mazel knew it was safe. Her earlier memory involved traveling through it… But it was better — it was scientific — to be sure, to double check.
There was always the possibility — unlikely though she thought it might be — that the nexus had grown structurally unstable over the centuries. In fact, Mazel realized with real concern, that the Broken Twigs might represent a form of instability that she hadn’t seen in the other eight nexuses scattered across the three galaxies.
Mazel felt a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
Nexus Nine Base was always plenty toasty for furry mammals, having been designed for cold-blooded reptiles. Mazel wished that Lt. O’Neill would apply some of his wizardry to that problem. Though she imagined it was low on the list of priorities compared to broken synthesizers and temperamental elevators.
Before heading to the station’s command center to look into dispatching a probe through the nexus, Mazel grabbed a quick lunch at Scharm’s Bar. She would have just synthesized something simple in the lab, but every possible outlet that could provide power had been plugged into one of the power-hungry pieces of equipment. Better to have hungry scientists than hungry lab equipment.
If Mazel had eaten alone in the lab, she would have missed out on a game of Chanster’s Claws with Quincy and Dr. Jardine. Both the bulgy-eyed amphibioid and the bright-eyed squirrel flirted with her mercilessly, and the calico cat found the distraction pleasant.
They both seemed so young and naive to her, especially the way that they seemed to assume that she was young and naive. There was nothing more naive in Rheun’s presence than assuming that the surface was indicative of the depth inside. Mazel Rheun was a well of almost unimaginable depth for creatures who lived a single lifetime.
Mazel had never played Chanster’s Claws before, but her Rheun chip was exceptionally good at calculating probabilities, and she had lifetimes of experience with reading other peoples’ body language. So she was quite surprised when Dr. Jardine won every round, bushy tail flipping excitedly behind him in his chair. The eager squirrel must be very bright, she thought. She’d have to take him up on his offer — enthusiastic request — that they have dinner together some time.
Belly full and brain rested, Mazel arrived in the three-tiered command center, ready to start work on programming an un-crewed probe. Her station on the lowest ring was in working order today, and she would need it. While most of her research required a laboratory space with dedicated computers, the programming for an un-crewed probe needed to be done on the station’s main computer system, in order to interface with all of the station’s command systems for remotely communicating with the probe.
Mazel was amazed that Lt. O’Neill had managed to both set up her laboratory and fix her station on the command deck in so little time. She would have to find Lt. O’Neill and thank him for all of his hard work, perhaps synthesize a nice rawhide for him as a thank you gift. She’d loved those when she was a dog.
As Mazel coded a program that would allow the probe to navigate the hyperspatial fluctuations inside of the nexus and scan the far side for as much information as possible, she found herself frequently distracted by the presence of the captain and commander within view on the highest tier.
Captain Bataille had his tennis ball in one paw, and he kept throwing it, catching it, fidgeting with it, in the way Mazel knew he did when nervous about an impending dangerous mission. Neera couldn’t keep her eyes off of the captain — she’d be deeply engrossed in the work on her console for a few moments at a time, but then her gaze would drift away into the mid-distance, seemingly lost in her own thoughts, and inevitably, her gaze would turn back toward the captain.
The German Shepherd was clearly aware of the bird’s distraction and grimaced every time he caught her watching him.
It is not easy working with someone who thinks you’re a god. Mazel couldn’t even imagine how hard it must be from the other side — working with someone whom you genuinely believe to be a god. Mazel felt deeply for both Shep and Neera.
The balance between Shep and Neera shifted over the next several days as rumors of the captain’s vision grew. Whispered birdsong lilted through the command deck, and every Avioran officer took to glancing at Shep, distractedly, while they worked. Shep himself grew more and more irritable.
Mazel was sorely tempted to tell the captain about her own experiences with First Racer dogs treating her weirdly when they knew about her past lives as a human. But a secret told cannot be untold, and there was still a chance that the captain’s vision would blow over. Worse, there was a chance that even if Mazel shared her secret, the captain wouldn’t find any solace in it — he’d become weird toward her, and there would be no new sense of communion between them. He might consider their experiences too different to learn from her. After all, the captain knew that his gods had existed — the First Race most definitely had walked the Earth and uplifted other mammals to follow in their footprints.
The older Mazel got, the less she understood the very idea of godhood. Why did so many people feel the need to deify and worship? Certainly it could be lonely walking through life, knowing there were no paws guiding your way, but Mazel couldn’t imagine finding comfort in an imaginary presence, too distant to see or feel directly. Only to be inferred.
Although, Mazel did have lifetimes of memories, so many voices, echoing in her head. She didn’t travel through life as alone as most creatures did. She had her past to comfort her, and a much longer future to look forward to.
Perhaps, without the Rheun chip, believing in gods was the only way to combat the frightening lack of history to call on when making choices and the terrifyingly limited future with which to enjoy the fruits of those choices.
Guessing in the dark, reaping one reward — one lifetime, however it might turn out — and then disappearing, losing the light of yourself in the eternal darkness of oblivion.
For not the first time, Mazel wondered whether the Rheun chip could be copied, built in bulk, and disseminated across the Tri-Galactic Union. Others could benefit from living more than one life at a time. And yet, she knew from experience, many people were deeply troubled by the idea of sharing their consciousness with people from the past who they hadn’t known. Hers was not an immortality that everyone wanted.
She had to admit, the transition from Mazel Tabbith to Mazel Rheun had been rough. It still was… Only a few days before, she had stood on the command deck, quivering, terrified that her most recent oldest friend would reject her.
But every lifetime is filled with fears, both fleeting and lasting.
So many of Mazel’s questions would be answered if she could only find the society she had come from. They would have thought these questions through on a societal level with many different minds, bouncing ideas off of each other. Instead of one individual, in isolation, thinking quietly to herself over centuries.
Coding the AI for the un-crewed probe took Mazel most of a week, cobbling together pieces of code from previous probes and accounting for Nexus Nine’s differences. During that time, she enjoyed several more games of Chanster’s Claws where Dr. Jardine played surprisingly well, met the Tri-Galactic Navy security chief for the station — a large, brown bear named Grawf who wore a chainmail sash over her standard issue uniform — and spent a lot of time listening quietly to the captain as he vented about the difficulty of leading a flock of birds flirting with the idea of worshipping him.
Most of a week was approximately the same amount of time that it took for the Council of Vees to announce an official statement regarding Captain Bataille’s vision: they withheld judgment, pending an interview with the captain.
Furious, Captain Bataille paced the halls with Mazel, bouncing his yellow-green tennis ball off the walls as they walked. “Should I do it?” he asked, over and over again.
Mazel’s answer didn’t seem to make much difference. No matter which answer she tried, he’d just bounce the ball violently off the wall, catch it a few paces farther down the hallway, and ask, “But should I do it, Big Dog? I just don’t know! Should I? Should I let them interview me?”
Finally Mazel tired of chasing her friend through the halls, listening to him agonize.
“The Tri-Galactic Union won’t care what you do, as long as the work here continues,” Mazel snapped, this time refusing to follow the much larger dog, pumping her legs twice as fast as he strode with his.
Captain Bataille paused in his pacing and turned to look at the little calico cat, fur fluffed out from the stress of confronting her old friend and superior officer.
“So tell them you need more time, and keep doing the work.” She added, self-interestedly, “You can start by authorizing my project to send an un-crewed probe through the nexus.”
Bataille tilted his head and smiled. “That’s your work.” He saw right through her self-interest. “Mine is conducting the peoples of Avia into joining the Tri-Galactic Union.”
“And if they are to join the TGU, then they’ll need to authorize scientific studies regarding the hyperspatial highway that they live next to.” Mazel’s tail lashed. She was too close to the Ennea galaxy to be held back by a bit of backward religious confusion.
“True,” Bataille agreed. “But what if it blows up somehow, all tangled up with this Apex business?”
Mazel had read as much of the scripture about the Apex as she could stomach, but she hadn’t found it very useful. The pretty prose and poetic parables had been pleasant enough at first, but they’d grown repetitive and hard to swallow, like too many sugary treats that sour on your tongue and bloat in your stomach. All sugar, no nutrition.
“I wish I could help you,” Mazel said. “But the scripture about the Apex is as vague and useless as…” She hesitated, barely catching herself before comparing Avioran scripture to First Racer scripture. She didn’t need to open that can of worms. “I don’t know. But honestly, based on what I read, you might be the Apex. Some of the similarities, some of the choice of language is uncanny. Maybe you were destined to come here. Maybe some of the Broken Twigs are actually rips in space time, and Avioran scripture is based on true visions of the future.”
Mazel wasn’t sure she believed any of that, but she couldn’t deny that Avioran scripture was surprisingly dodgy about referring to the Apex having actual physical wings. That alone was intriguing. On top of that, the Apex was frequently described as an outsider, a visitor, a traveler, and even the leader of a union. Nonetheless, she had her doubts that exposing oneself to a rip in space-time could lead to hallucinated visions that accurately foretold the future.
Even if the Broken Twigs were stitches in the fabric of space-time that occasionally connected the present to the future — in the same universe, a huge assumption given the infinite infinities of the multi-verse — then it would be shocking if an organic brain could make the slightest sense of that future from the barest glimpse offered through exposure to a Twig.
Although, Mazel realized, she didn’t have a wholly organic brain. Her brain was bimodal — organic and Rheun chip. Her Rheun chip would have had a much better chance of properly interpreting data from another point in space-time filtered through a broken, ragged-edged rip.
So why had she been the only person in recorded history to face a Broken Twig and not experience a vision? Mazel had checked the Avioran records thoroughly. Even sub-sentient animals when exposed to the Broken Twigs exhibited all the signs of having experienced a vision. She was the only being who hadn’t.
“I’ve got it!” Mazel exclaimed.
Captain Bataille blinked at her, passed his tennis ball from one paw to the other, and said, “You’ve got what?”
“Why I didn’t experience a vision!” The small calico cat rushed away from the much taller German Shepherd, but he followed after her. She heard his footsteps behind her as she hurried through the halls to her improvised laboratory.
As soon as she arrived, Mazel turned on the most powerful scanner and scanned her own head. “There it is,” she said to the captain who had followed her inside.
“Your Rheun chip?” he asked, looking at the scan of her brain that appeared on one of the screens. Most of her brain lit up in bright colors, but the Rheun chip appeared as a spot of shining white, too bright for a single color.
“I didn’t experience a vision, because the Rheun chip buffered it, firewalling my brain, essentially.” She typed at the console, running processing software over the buffered memories. She knew they must be from her experience with the Broken Twig of Foresight, because there hadn’t been any buffered memories only a few weeks ago when she underwent a full medical examination before switching assignments. Nothing else had happened in the last few weeks that would have led to a buffered memory.
In fact, Mazel couldn’t remember any time in her long history when the Rheun chip had buffered a memory to protect her from it. This experience was new and unique. That was exciting and also a little frightening.
“I’ve run the buffered memory through some software that should be able to reinterpret it into a video…” She leaned back from the console, a little afraid to proceed. “Should… I watch it?” She wondered if she should send the captain away. But it was probably too late now. He knew about the buffered vision. She couldn’t keep it a complete secret. And honestly, she was a little afraid to watch it alone.
“Alright,” Bataille said, placing a heavy paw on her shoulder. “Let’s watch it together.”
“What if it gets… personal?” Mazel’s voice squeaked, more like a mouse than a cat.
Bataille took one of her small paws in his big one. “You just squeeze my paw, and I’ll look away, okay?”
Mazel nodded, and she started the video.
Scattered colors appeared across the screen, like infrared vision, fuzzy, pixelated, and unclear. Figures with vague shapes but no clear details moved — several bodies, one crossing a room, and another rocking in a chair. They seemed mammalian and bipedal in shape, but that was about all Mazel could make out.
“Is there any sound?” Bataille asked. “And… can you make it any clearer?”
“I’m not sure.” Mazel put her paws back to the keyboard. She tried a few keystrokes, and then the vision came into sharper focus, and a murmuring sound began.
Now she could see that the figure who’d moved across the room was Darius; the figure rocking herself was Augrula. Other hosts of the Rheun chip — Mazel’s previous lives — stood around the room, leaning over consoles, working on computers, farther in the background. Some of them spoke, but none of their words were clear. All of them seemed to be aboard the shuttle Mazel remembered from her earliest memory; the distorted sky of the inside of Nexus Nine flickered by outside the shuttle.
“There are humans in your vision,” Bataille said, wonder filling his voice. The sound of his reverence made Mazel shiver, fur fluffing out everywhere that her uniform didn’t tamp it down. “Also… octopuses? And what’s that outside the shuttle?”
Mazel wasn’t sure, but as they continued to watch the shuttle craft distorted as though she was looking at it through a fisheye lens. The insides flipped out, and the outside flipped in. All of her previous selves seemed fine, completely unconcerned even, that their shuttlecraft was now shaped like an M.C. Escher painting. Their background murmurings grew more insistent, and Mazel realized she recognized what they were saying — “Home, come home, almost home.” Repeated over and over in a language too ancient for Shep to understand them.
The rippling colors of Nexus Nine flowing through and around the shuttle looked like a river — no, more like a painting of a river. The blue waters were far more colorful, in far brighter and more varying shades, than the actual blue of a river. Among the caricatures of waves and eddies, tentacles appeared. Pearlescent arms with perfectly round sucker discs, twisting around whirlpools in the river and swirling around the inside-out shuttlecraft. Then the vision ended.
“I saw something like that — those strings of pearls,” Bataille said.
Mazel blinked, trying to understand what he meant. Did he think the tentacles were strings of pearls?
“Those glowing white strands of circles — I saw those,” he insisted.
“In your vision?” Mazel asked.
“Yes, they were everywhere, all around. I thought… I thought they were clouds in the sky.” He put his big head in his big paws, ears tilting backward. “It all happened so fast, and I never got to talk about the details… because all the Vee or Neera cared about was the word Apex.”
Mazel wondered how many others had seen those same tentacles in their visions and misinterpreted them as strange clouds or strings of pearls. She might need to read more Avioran scripture after all. “Maybe you should talk to the council of Vees,” she said. “They might help you interpret your vision. Instead of worrying that they’ll judge you or make a decision that you don’t like… maybe just tell them your vision to find out what they think about it. They do have more experience with Broken Twig visions than either of us.”
Bataille nodded and chewed on his lower lip, showing his sharp canines. “Big Dog,” he said, “who were those humans in your vision? Did you… know them?”
Inside of herself, Mazel jumped at the chance to say, “I was them!” But she held her tongue still, trapped behind her own sharp teeth. She kept her mouth shut and only shook her head, ears flattened as far back as they would go.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk about it…”
“I don’t.” But she could tell that wouldn’t stop him from speculating. Perhaps speculating was better than knowing.
Captain Bataille stared levelly at Mazel for some time. Finally he nodded and said, “All right. I’ll meet with the Council of Vees. And you can launch your probe.”
“Thank you!” Mazel squeezed the captain’s paw hard, realizing she was still holding it. “But… just one thing… can we launch the probe before you speak with the Council of Vees?”
The captain shrugged. “I don’t see why not. As you say, the Aviorans won’t make much headway with joining the Tri-Galactic Union if they try to block important scientific research in their sector, and as far as I’ve been told, they are still serious about joining the Tri-Galactic Union, regardless of–” He shook a paw dismissively, perhaps a little disgustedly, at the computer screen where Mazel’s vision had played out. The vision was over now, and the screen had frozen on an image of Darius. “–all of this vision nonsense.”
“I’m sure the Vees will love that attitude.” Mazel’s muzzle quirked into a taunting, teasing, lopsided grin.
“You know what I mean,” Bataille said.
“I do,” Mazel agreed, wishing that Bataille understood that his attitude toward the Avioran religion and her attitude towards the religion of the First Racers wasn’t all that different. But she was still too scared to tell him.
Continue on to Chapter 6…