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.
After the initial blush of excitement, several hours of studious, focused concentration and contemplation followed. Numbers streamed over screens — fascinating, mesmerizing numbers — each one representing a star or planet; asteroid field or nebula; likelihood of habitability and — even more exciting — likelihood of already being inhabited.
Mazel was in seventh heaven; her crew was less thrilled. Quincy, Neera, and Omoleura disappeared back into the barracks to play a game of Chanster’s Claws. Even Lt. Unari seemed to grow weary of cataloguing star systems by their likelihood of containing biological elements — native plants and animals — that she could study if they went to them… but that were too far away as they floated in space beside the currently invisible nexus just scanning, scanning, scanning.
Grawf was the only officer who seemed to fully understand what she’d signed on for, and she stayed stalwartly at her post, helping Mazel run scans and categorize data without the slightest complaint. The bear seemed to genuinely enjoy the clerical side of doing science.
As they worked, Mazel and Grawf chatted off and on about the latest politics and news from Ursa Minuet. The bears had extended their civilization outward from their home world to include two settlements on other planets in their system, currently undergoing rapid terraformation, and also a colony world in a neighboring star system.
Of course, there was a great deal of internal political competition for which dynasties could claim the strongest positions in the new settlements. Mazel was happy to hear that her former dynasty — Augrula’s dynasty — had claimed a substantial portion of one of the continents on the colony world in the neighboring star system. Mazel couldn’t get that kind of news from most Tri-Galactic Union sources, since part of the requirements for joining the TGU involved worldwide peace and cooperation. So, internal strife was kept on the down low, but that didn’t mean competition didn’t still happen.
Grawf seemed to enjoy telling the small calico cat about her home world. “Most Tri-Galactic Navy officers aren’t interested in Ursa Minuet politics,” the bear rumbled appreciatively. She eyed Mazel, probably gauging whether the calico cat was ready to explain the source of her interest.
But the calico cat was not. Mazel was enjoying talking to someone who didn’t know her complex history too much to spoil it just yet. Besides, being mysterious comes naturally to cats. Especially calico ones with lopsided markings.
“Let’s break for lunch,” Mazel said. “While we eat, we can go over our findings and decide on the best course of action from here.”
There were so many worlds they could visit. But for this mission, they’d probably have to choose just one. This was, fundamentally, an initial scouting mission after all. More trips would be made later. And yet, Mazel desperately hoped that from the list of planets they’d catalogued — a dry collection of numbers and statistics — she could manage to select the diamond in the rough. A world inhabited by octopi who’d enhanced themselves with neural chips, ready to embrace her with open tentacles.
For lunch, Mazel synthesized herself a sushi roll thick with salty, tangy salmon eggs. She was feeling especially connected to her ancient octopus origins and wanted to eat something appropriate. Fortunately, while Darius had hated fish and fish eggs, Mazel loved them. Just one way that cats and octopuses are more alike than dogs and octopuses.
All six of them ate in the barracks. Quincy kept playing Chanster’s Claws with the only one who would join him — Lt. Unari. The black cat hadn’t lost any money to him yet and thus hadn’t become soured on the game. While each of them munched on their synthesized choices of food — wriggly plates of worms for the bird, mimic-bird, bear, and frog; and a different style of sushi roll for the other cat — they passed around a port-screen showing the statistics regarding the closest hundred or so habitable planets.
“I’m happy with any world likely to have plant life,” Unari said, passing the port-screen on to Quincy.
The frog didn’t glance at the screen at all before handing it on to Neera. He gallumphed, “We should go to whichever star system has the most radio traffic coming from it. Busy civilizations have more goods to trade.” He went back to rolling the collection of dice and tokens for his game.
Neera studied the port-screen carefully before telling Mazel, “For whatever reason, the Unhatched chose the Apex, and the Apex sent you on this mission. I trust you’ll make the best choice.” She tried to hand the port-screen to Omoleura, but the insect quivered all over and shook zir head, unwilling to take it. Instead Neera passed the port-screen to Grawf.
“Do you call the captain that,” Mazel said, “to his face?”
“What?” Neera asked. “The Apex? That’s what he is.”
No wonder Bataille had been stressed out, Mazel thought. “He must love that,” she said.
Neera nodded curtly. “He doesn’t seem to,” she admitted. “But it’s accurate, and I’m far more concerned with what the Unhatched think than with what he thinks.”
“Even though the Apex is an instrument of the Unhatched?” Mazel asked, challenging the bird. She knew Avioran scripture pretty well by this point. At least, the parts of it about the Sky Nest, Broken Twigs, and the Apex.
“Why are the Avioran gods called the Unhatched?” Unari asked, laying down her hand of cards. She seemed to have tired of Chanster’s Claws even faster than Neera and Omoleura who’d played all morning.
Mazel and Neera exchanged a glance, silently negotiating who would answer Unari’s questions. Mazel didn’t want to presume, but Neera spread her pinion feathers, gesturing for the calico cat to go ahead. So, Mazel answered, “The Unhatched supposedly–”
Neera coughed, spluttering over Mazel’s use of the word “supposedly,” but she didn’t actually interrupt, so Mazel proceeded.
“–predate the universe itself. Everything in the universe — all of the stars and planets and everything on them hatched from eggs laid by the Unhatched, but the Unhatched themselves have existed since before time or space.”
Unari nodded, but the laughter in her green eyes clearly stated that she found the whole thing to be nonsense.
Mazel didn’t entirely disagree. She was half glad and half disappointed that Shep wasn’t here to make an inappropriate joke about the chicken coming before the egg. Or rather, to smile at her and break into laughter because they both knew what he was carefully NOT saying.
Grawf’s deep voice interrupted their theological tangent to say: “I’ve picked the best star-system — a high concentration of radio signals, several habitable planets, near several other star systems with habitable planets, and not the closest option to our current location.”
“Why does that matter?” Unari asked.
“We don’t want to reveal the location of the only known passage to our own galaxy,” Grawf rumbled. “If at all possible, we want to disguise our origins, in order to protect ourselves from potential hazards.”
“Potential hazards,” Omoleura crooned in a mocking tone. “You mean hostile civilizations.”
“Yes, I do,” Grawf agreed. “And it’s a danger we should take very seriously.” She handed the port-screen back to Mazel. The electronic device looked small cradled in her large brown paws.
Mazel took the port-screen and looked at the star system Grawf had selected. “This looks like a good choice,” she agreed. “Whenever you’re ready, Lieutenant Grawf, please return to the helm and set a course. It looks like it’ll be a three hour flight at a casual speed.”
“I could get us there faster,” Grawf said, “but it’s probably better not to strain the engines if we don’t have to.”
“Very good,” Mazel said.
And the next thing she knew, there was a hard, cold, concrete slab beneath her, slick and wet. Her fur felt moist, sticking against her body, and her shoulder was sore, like she’d been lying on the cold floor for hours.
“Are you okay?” Grawf’s voice rumbled, but it was coming from the wrong direction, like the bear had somehow teleported across the room.
Except they weren’t in the shuttle craft barracks anymore. They seemed to be in a concrete room — four concrete walls, concrete ceiling, and concrete floor. There were seams in one of the walls, like maybe it was a big, heavy door. The only light came from recessed bulbs hidden behind panels in the ceiling. Mazel pushed herself up from the floor, feeling confused and lost. She felt sure that she’d forgotten something. Had time skipped around her?
“Are you okay, Lieutenant Rheun?” Grawf repeated.
Mazel put a paw to her head. She touched the base of her own skull, like she was looking for something there. Something missing. Her life felt short. She felt blind. She couldn’t see. Well, not literally blind. She could see the dingy, dirty concrete cell around her, and when she turned her head, she saw the big brown bear, Grawf, leaning over her, and she saw a black cat, Lt. Unari, in the corner, paws wrapped around her knees, clutching the tip of her tail and rocking herself.
The chameleoid frog, Quincy, was sprawled on the floor looking dead. Mazel hoped he wasn’t dead. His skin was an ashen shade of gray… of course, his coloring matched the concrete floor under him. Then the frog snerrked, snoring like a buzz saw, and a ripple of pinkish-red shivered over his body, perfectly matched by a ripple of pinkish-red in his expensive, perfectly tailored suit. The suit’s camouflage abilities were still working, but it looked otherwise tattered and dingy. At least, Mazel knew Quincy was alive.
But… the blindness. She couldn’t see her past anymore.
“Who is… Lieutenant Rheun?” Mazel asked.
The large bear helped Mazel up from the floor. Once she had her paws under her, the bear said, “You — you’re Lieutenant Rheun.”
“Tabbith,” she said. “Don’t you mean… Oh no.” And she knew what she couldn’t see. All of her past lives were gone. “What happened?” She could hear the frantic tone in her voice, but she couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t feel anything now. Just numbness and smallness. Because all of her voices that told her how she felt were gone. Darius… Aug… something… Aurgrooo… Who had come before Darius?
Mazel could remember Darius, because she’d known him in this life. Mazel had known Darius. But she didn’t remember who’d come before him. Someone who wasn’t a cat… or a dog…
There was no one in her head telling her what to think. She was all alone inside herself. Mazel started to cry, but she was still a Tri-Galactic Navy officer. She swallowed her tears, hiding them as much as she could.
To Mazel’s great surprise, Grawf wrapped big bear arms around her and squeezed tight. The calico cat melted into the hug and let the steady pressure calm her. When the bear finally stepped away, releasing her, Mazel said, “Thank you. I needed that.”
Grawf nodded solemnly, too proud to talk about the moment of intimacy, but too good of a bear to not offer comfort where comfort was needed. “Now, what do you mean, ‘what happened’?”
“The last thing I remember,” Mazel said, “was choosing which star system to pursue… We were finishing lunch. You were going to set a course and pilot the ship there when you were ready. Did we get attacked? What happened to the shuttle?”
In the corner of the concrete cell, Unari stopped rocking herself and looked over at Mazel. “That’s really the last thing you remember?”
“Yes…” Mazel was suddenly very worried. How much of her life had been taken away from her? Had they been in this cell for months? How had they gotten here? She asked, “Where are Neera and Omoleura?” But she was almost afraid of the answer. Were they dead? Did she want to know? She felt so young and lost.
Mazel remembered being old and wise, but all of her years of wisdom were gone. She cradled one of her paws against the base of the skull, as if her memories were leaking out, and she could stop the mnemonic bleeding by staunching the flow of memories with her paw.
But the memories were already gone. All of her past selves, all of those voices had been like friends inside of her, but they wouldn’t talk to her anymore. The chip in her brain wasn’t working. Was it broken? Or were the signals connecting her brain to the chip being blocked?
“We don’t know what happened to Commander Neera and Chief Omoleura,” Unari answered.
“The Carapids separated us from them as soon as they boarded the Star-Skipper 1,” Grawf rumbled.
“Carapids…” Mazel repeated. The word meant nothing to her, but Grawf had said it like it should. “Some kind of insect?” she asked, but she was having trouble focusing on the here and now. Ironic, since for the first time in a year, she didn’t have centuries of memories to distract her from living in the present. And her memories of the last year were… at best… hazy. Like she could only remember half of them.
Grawf and Unari began describing an insectoid race that had attacked and commandeered their shuttle craft, but Mazel could barely hear them over the deafening silence inside her own head.
Why wasn’t her neural chip working? She tapped the back of her skull, softly at first but then harder and harder, as if she could joggle a complicated, ancient piece of machinery into working by hitting it hard enough. Her ears flattened, and her whiskers slicked back against her face.
“Where are you?” Mazel muttered to the voices and memories missing from her own mind. But what she really meant was, “Where am I?” because she didn’t feel like herself anymore with half of her mind gone silent. She hadn’t realized how fully she’d managed to integrate the organic and electronic components of herself until the electronic half had gone quiet. She hoped there was nothing wrong with it. She wished she could remember if this had ever happened before…
Unari came across the cell, stepping over the frog sprawled on the floor and still snoring, to get to Mazel. The black cat grabbed the calico cat’s orange and white paws with her black ones, prying them away from the back of the calico’s neck.
There was blood, wet and red, in her crescent claws and smeared in the fur at the tips of her paws, Mazel noticed once her paws were in front of her, still gripped tightly by Unari’s.
“What are you doing?” Unari asked. “Why are you trying to scratch off the back of your head?”
“My…” Mazel couldn’t remember the name of the chip. Wait, it had been Darius’ last name. “Rheun chip. It’s not working. I can’t… remember… anything.”
“Anything?” Grawf rumbled, sounding somewhere between surprised and skeptical.
“Everything,” Mazel escalated, ears still clamped tightly against her head. “Everything that I didn’t live through inside this body — it’s all gone… all the memories…” She tried to pull her paws away from Unari; she wanted to claw at her skull where the Rheun chip lived. She wanted to turn the chip back on or, at least, poke at it like one might pick at a scab until it tears away, leaving the wound worse than before. More likely to fester and get infected.
But Unari did not let go. “Didn’t it take brain surgery to implant your Rheun chip?”
Mazel nodded, still pulling with slight, jerking sensations at her paws.
Unari continued: “And isn’t it an ancient piece of arcane computer technology?”
Mazel nodded again, letting her arms go limp. Her ears tilted a little up from her head.
“Then I don’t think you can turn it on by clawing up your skin,” Unari said. “It’s safe inside your skull, right? So, we’ll have Doctor Jardine… or my husband — I don’t know whether you’d have an engineer or a doctor fix it — but either way, we’ll have them look at it when we get home. To our own galaxy. But first–” Unari stared into Mazel’s eyes; her green eyes burned with intensity. “–we have to get back there.”
“And out of here,” Grawf added. “And you’re our commanding officer. So get to commanding.”
Mazel was startled by Grawf’s blunt tone, and she could hear the undertone: “Or else, I’ll relieve you of command.” But she wasn’t used to being a commanding officer. She’d been an ensign when the Rheun chip had been implanted in her brain, and all of the experience she’d had as a lieutenant felt half-lived. She hadn’t done any of it — not Mazel Tabbith.
“I…” Mazel wanted to hand the mission over to Grawf, but the bear was staring at her in a way that challenged her pride. And cats tend to be proud. Even the ones who feel small and lost.
Mazel stood tall, swished her tail, and forced her ears to turn forward. “Right, then, what are our options?” she said, stepping away from Unari and reclaiming her paws for herself. She clasped her paws together behind her back, digging her claws into her own paw pads to keep herself from reaching up to the base of her skull again. She wanted to, oh, she wanted to. But she needed to leave the silent chip alone, safely cradled inside her cranium. She needed to get out of here and put herself in the paws of that pretty squirrel doctor and the white dog wizard. She needed to know what she was up against: “Also, tell me about these — what were they called? Carapids? — again.”
“Insectoid warriors,” Grawf rumbled, crossing her arms. “Their bodies are basically exoskeletal shells of armor. Their pincer-like appendages and mandibles are built-in weapons.” The bear’s round ears couldn’t flatten like a cat’s or some dogs’, but Mazel was sure they would have flattened if they could have.
Grawf continued: “They boarded Star-Skipper 1 as soon as we reached the chosen star system. We hadn’t even had time to send out a welcoming message to introduce ourselves.” The bear’s countenance was remarkably calm given their circumstances, and Mazel thought that ursines, in general, might have particularly good poker faces. The thought felt like it should connect to a memory… but disconcertingly… it didn’t.
“Did they say anything?” Mazel asked.
“No,” Grawf said. “They fought. They attacked. They bludgeoned. I was the last of us to lose consciousness. Also the first to regain it.” Grawf looked away from the others; the big brown bear stared into the mid distance, somewhere between the floor and the farthest wall, which wasn’t very far. For all of her bulk and strength, she looked as helpless and lost as Mazel felt. “When I awoke, we were here. The other two — the uncooperative insect and the domineering bird — were gone. I don’t know what happened to them.”
Mazel noticed that the bear’s chain mail sash was missing, and that caused her to reach into her own pocket. Doggarnit, her antique scanner was gone, too. Why had she owned such an antique scanner anyway? She couldn’t remember that either… She touched a paw to her chest, and yes, the comm-pin had been removed from her uniform. Except it hadn’t been removed nicely; it had been torn off, leaving a ragged hole where an orange patch of her fur poked through.
She saw that the comm-pins had been removed from Grawf and Unari’s uniforms as well, also leaving behind tears. Mazel couldn’t see Quincy’s breast with the way he was sprawled on the floor, but then he’d never had a comm-pin in the first place, since he wasn’t a Tri-Galactic Navy officer.
“Anything that might have been a useful tool for escaping or fighting warrior insects has been taken from us,” Mazel hissed in frustration. Except… Mazel looked at Quincy again. The frog was still ash gray like the concrete floor. “Wait, how does Quincy’s suit work? Is the fabric of his suit something we could use?”
“You mean, like as a… disguise?” the bear rumbled with obvious distaste.
Did the ursine people of Ursa Minuet dislike subterfuge? Mazel wondered. The calico cat felt sure that she should have known… But she didn’t. She missed her long, complicated wealth of memories. Being joined with the Rheun chip had been like inheriting super powers. She hadn’t appreciated it enough at the time.
The black cat approached the snoring frog and snagged one of the tattered edges of his suit with her claws. Where she touched the ash gray suit, the fabric bruised black to match the color of her paw. “No, I see what you’re saying — this is smart fabric, probably using nanobots to change color. If my husband were here, he could reprogram them to… I don’t know.” She dropped the tattered edge of fabric and sat down on the concrete ground with her long tail wrapped around her. “He’d make something amazing out of nanobots, a crust of bread whenever they get around to feeding us, and sheer genius.”
“I’m sure he would,” Mazel said, trying to sound comforting. But she had no idea what it felt like for Unari to be separated from her canine husband by multiple galaxies. Mazel had never been married. Hell, she’d never even been all that deeply in love. In fact, none of her relationships — each with gray-striped tomcats — had lasted very long. Usually no more than a few months. “But look, even without O’Neill’s wizardry, we’re going to find a way out of here and get back home.”
Unari smiled weakly; a smile that lifted her whiskers, but didn’t reach all the way to her sad green eyes.
Mazel shoved the snoring amphibian gently with a hind paw, until he rolled onto his side. His eyes snapped open, and his throat bulged with a fit of hiccoughs. Before he’d fully recovered, Mazel asked the frog: “Quincy, do you know how to program your suit?”
“My– my suit?” The frog pulled his large hind legs under himself, moving into a crouching position, and then felt all over his body with his webbed hands. “Oh, no, my beautiful suit! My poor, poor, beautiful suit’s in terrible condition!” He fiddled forlornly with the ragged edges, caressing them ever so gently with the bulbous tips of his webbed fingers.
“Yes,” Mazel agreed, “but it still works. And it’s the closest thing to a tool or weapon that we have.”
Quincy swelled out his neck like a balloon, and let the air out slowly. When he’d returned to his normal size, he said, “I had the tailor, a Reptassan fellow, program my suit for me. I only needed it to match my skin — nothing fancy, no fractal patterns or videos.”
Grawf groaned, and it sounded like a very judgmental building settling into its foundation. Unari simply rolled her sparkling green eyes and muttered something about missing O’Neill.
“Are you saying you don’t know how to reprogram it?” Mazel asked, trying to stay focused on the task at hand and not get distracted too much by the Phiboon’s stunning uselessness. Perhaps if the Carapids returned, he could distract them by playing Chanster’s Claws with them… except that all of the game pieces were presumably still aboard their shuttle.
“Well…” Quincy equivocated. “The tailor insisted that I watch while he programmed it. He said only a fool would wear smart clothes without knowing how to properly program them. I didn’t appreciate that much… But I could see I wasn’t getting out of his tailoring shop until I let him give me the introductory lecture.”
“So you do know how to reprogram your suit?” Mazel pressed.
“I guess…” Quincy muttered, pulling at his collar, twisting it around so he could look at the tag in the back. “I can see how much I remember. Why? What do you want me to program it to do?”
Mazel hadn’t thought of that yet — the obvious choices were all distractions. Fire, so the Carapids would have to scramble to put the fire out; a hole in the ground, so the Carapids would think they’d already escaped; a mirror, so the Carapids would fight themselves. No, those ideas were all dumb. “Just show me what you remember,” Mazel said, “and we’ll figure something out.”
So Quincy pulled his shirt over his head, and he showed Mazel how the tag in the back of the collar controlled the suit’s color patterns. While they were working on programming the shirt to display episodes of the Earth sitcom Small Dog, Big Heart, the heavy concrete door swung open with a grinding sound. Concrete scraping against concrete. The sound hurt Mazel’s head, deep in her jaw. But she kept her senses together well enough to stuff Quincy’s shirt — colorfully displaying a heart-wrenching scene where the eponymous small dog was reunited with a long lost brother — inside her own jumpsuit to hide it. She didn’t want any Carapid guards seeing there was more to the fabric of Quincy’s suit than they’d realized.
Once the heavy concrete door was fully open, Neera hopped through, feathers looking dull, and her bright purple uniform torn in several places. Behind her stood two Carapid guards — their hulking forms dwarfed Neera, and their bodies seemed to be made entirely from plate mail armor, pieced together perfectly to bend with an elastic fluidity, and a frightening array of axes, scissors, and shears that were apparently limbs. Their eyes were faceted gemstones that reminded Mazel of the multi-faceted eyes seemingly always hidden under Omoleura’s false chin.
Omoleura had hoped to find zir own origins in this galaxy. Could these brutish, bulky warriors be related to Omoleura? The security chief was so much slighter than them, and yet, zir body changed drastically at times. These insects could be related to zim.
One of the Carapids shoved Neera forward with a brutal blow to her back with a closed pincer. The bird lost her footing and fell to the floor, but she’d been shoved far enough forward that the Carapids were able to close the giant concrete door behind her.
Neera barely waited for the door to finish shutting before she said, “What’s the plan? I mean, I assume you’re already working on getting out of here…”
Mazel pulled Quincy’s shirt back out from inside the belly of her jumpsuit. The crumpled fabric showed a distorted scene of two small dogs and a tabby cat in a coffee shop. Mazel recognized the scene; it had been groundbreaking at the time.
Lieutenant Unari approached her and put a paw on the suit’s fabric, smoothing it out. “I remember this…” Unari said. “This is the scene where Vanessa finds out her long lost brother is married to a cat… I loved that episode. It meant so much to me.”
Mazel supposed a lot of kittens had grown up watching Small Dog, Big Heart. She certainly had. “Yeah, me too,” she agreed. Although, she imagined the scene had meant even more to Unari. Even so, the show had legitimatized inter-species marriages at a time when they were still very much taboo, and even more so, it had introduced a cat who became a lead character on a prime time television show. It had been a big deal to a lot of cats.
“I guess I was wrong,” Neera twittered sourly. “You’re not making escape plans. You’re entertaining yourselves while accepting your unfair incarceration. In other words, aiding and abetting your jailers.” She grabbed the smart fabric shirt with a feathered hand and yanked it toward herself. “Give me that.”
“Hey,” Mazel said. “That’s the closest thing to a tool or weapon that we have.”
“No kidding,” Neera agreed, already busily messing with the tiny fabric control panel on the tag. “I must have reprogrammed hundreds of these during the war.”
“Really?” Mazel asked.
“Oh, sure,” Neera agreed. “They make great bombs. Smart bombs even.” The fabric melted in her feathered hands, losing all structural coherence, and dripping between her pinions like mush. Then it squelched back together, forming the lumpy shape of a ball of unbaked bread dough. It even had a similar pale color. “Now we just need a sample of Carapid DNA,” Neera said. “Once I prime this thing to attack our enemies, we can each take a glob. When the Carapids come near, pull off a tiny amount — no bigger than a waltan berry — and throw it at them. Bam. No more Carapids.”
“That sounds brutal,” Mazel observed.
Neera tilted her feathered head. “Does it? Does it offend the little Tri-Galactic Union kitty’s finer sensibilities?” Her tone dripped with mockery. “Well, then I guess you can just sit on your tail in this cell forever and rot. But me, I’m getting out of here, and I’m getting that shuttle craft back, and I’m flying with the grace of the Unhatched home.”
“Sounds good to me,” Grawf rumbled.
“So when the Carapids come back–” Neera began explaining a plan for getting a sample of their DNA, but the bear cut her off by spitting a black twig out of her mouth and handing it to the bird with a large brown paw.
“What– what’s that?” Neera asked.
“A piece of a Carapid’s antenna,” Grawf answered. “I bit it off. Thought I’d keep it as a trophy.”
“And you were keeping it in your mouth???” Quincy gallumphed in horror. “Ewww!”
Grawf shrugged. “It tasted kind of coppery. Not bad.”
Neera shoved the shiny black piece of Carapid antenna into the putty-like glob of smart fabric. “Perfect,” she said. “Now, as soon as the Carapids come back, we can get out of here.”
“Great,” Mazel said. “Do you know where they’re holding Omoleura? We need to rescue zim.”
“No we don’t.” Neera’s voice took on a chilly quality.
“We’re not leaving a member of our team behind!” Mazel objected.
“Omoleura has betrayed us.” Neera turned away from the others. “I saw it with my own eyes. Zhe met zir people, and zhe had no more use for the rest of us.”
“Wait,” Grawf rumbled, “are you saying that weird chameleon of an insect is related to these impressive warriors?”
“They’re probably members of different castes in the same species,” Unari said. “You know, like worker, soldier, and queen ants.”
“Are you saying Omoleura is a queen?” Grawf asked. The bear sounded incredulous.
“Or some other caste,” Unari said. “With a sentient, space-faring species, there could be far more complicated castes than with sub-sentient Earth ants.”
“Are you sure Omoleura wasn’t playing along with the Carapids?” Mazel asked. “Buying time to help us escape?”
Neera shook her head. “I saw zir order our deaths and begin planning an invasion of our galaxy. We have to warn the Ap– I mean, Captain Bataille. May the Unhatched protect us all.”
“That bilge-toed bastard!” Quincy swore.
Mazel felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. If the Ennea galaxy became a threat, then the nexus to it might be sealed, ending the possibility of any further visits. And for some reason, that made her deeply sad. She had come here for a reason… some bigger, more personal reason than mere science. But… She couldn’t remember what it was.
Regardless, Mazel had to defend all of the societies of the Tri-Galactic Union. If these Carapids posed a profound threat, then Neera was right. Captain Bataille must be warned, at all costs.
Continue on to Chapter 8…