Deep Sky Anchor

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut.  If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.

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Epsilon jumping through space made Yvette feel like the universe was doing gymnastic flips around her, while she held her own mouse body perfectly still.  It was like the inverse of doing gymnastics herself, and it gave her such a sense of stillness and peace.  She couldn’t tell if she loved the sensation… or if it just felt normal, like the way the universe was always supposed to be, but refused to be until she’d found her way onto this madhouse of a spaceship. Continue reading “Otters In Space 4 – Chapter 20: Yvette”

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut.  If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.

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The EDV-pocket orbiting the simple, lonely yellow sun turned out to be contained inside a partly melted lump of metal — a derelict spaceship, abandoned many, many years before, spiraling slowly inward toward the sun.  Whoever had been inside the spaceship had escaped, been rescued, or died in there long ago, and the heat radiation from the sun meant there’d be nothing useful the crew of The Lucky Boomerang could find inside, even if they were able to tow the vehicle far enough away from the sun to safely examine it. Continue reading “Otters In Space 4 – Chapter 19: Kipper”

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut.  If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.

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Kipper stared at the viewscreen in complete wonder and awe.  She had assembled this team, dragged them into the middle of nowhere on a wild goose chase, and yet, there they were:  wild geese.  The viewscreen was filled with pockets and clusters of pockets of extra-dimensional vacuums (EDV).  The scan was overlaid on top of a star map, showing that the vacuum pockets grouped around yellow stars, the exact kind of stars Sequoia had kept The Lucky Boomerang chasing after all week.

Not all of the yellow stars were surrounded by the pockets.  Most of the yellow stars were single, lonely points of light.  Like the stars they’d been jumping between all week. Continue reading “Otters In Space 4 – Chapter 18: Kipper”

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut.  If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.

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Amelia tried to ignore the racket coming from the rest of the ship, but she feared all the hooting and hollering would wake Sequoia.  The squirrel had only just fallen asleep, and she needed her sleep.  So, the small dog unstrapped from her bunk, floated over to the door to the barracks, and gently but firmly closed it, blocking out the noise.  When she looked back, the squirrel was still sleeping, breathing slowly.

Amelia wondered what all the fuss was about — and also the strange blip of gravity she’d felt a few minutes earlier — but the crew here had proven to be very excitable and unpredictable.  If it were really important, Amelia was sure she’d find out eventually. Continue reading “Otters In Space 4 – Chapter 17: Amelia”

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut.  If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.

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Kipper knew that it was canonically hard to herd cats, and there were in fact two cats among her engineers…  However, she thought that overall it was harder to herd engineers.  And as a cat herself, instead of some kind of herd dog, she wasn’t at all sure that she was well suited to the task.

The gray tabby grumbled to herself about the difficulty of leadership as she floated through the halls of her ship, mostly as a way to console herself over the fact that she’d missed something as important as three-quarters of her engineering team going rogue and building an untested artificial gravity generator in deep space. Continue reading “Otters In Space 4 – Chapter 16: Kipper”

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut.  If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.

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“You need to sleep,” Captain Kipper insisted to the bleary-eyed, scraggle-tailed squirrel, mere minutes after the latest epsilon jump.  “I can make that an order if you’d like.  And it doesn’t have to be more than a nap, but if you don’t lie down in the barracks and close those eyes for a while, you’re not allowed on the bridge anymore.”

Sequoia glared at the screen of data in front of her, flooding with new numbers in this new location that represented stars she hadn’t had time to get to know well yet.  She didn’t dare look up at the captain.  She knew she’d keep glaring, and she figured that glaring at her captain was a bad idea.  She’d probably end up ordered to sleep for a solid eight hours instead of just catching a nap. Continue reading “Otters In Space 4 – Chapter 15: Sequoia”

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut.  If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.

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After a week of hopping across the galaxy, cataloguing stars and background radiation signatures everywhere they went, The Lucky Boomerang wasn’t feeling like such a lucky vessel to the hopeful crew aboard.  They’d found no sign of humans.  No sign of alien life.  Nothing.

Just stars.

They were beautiful stars, and the squirrel navigator still seemed to be happy once she’d accepted the captain’s insistence that the crew was better off collecting data across a multitude of different sites rather than digging really deeply into one site. Continue reading “Otters In Space 4 – Chapter 14: Yvette”

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut.  If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.

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Sequoia felt like she’d spent the whole meal on Europa playing some sort of game with Amelia, catching each others’ eyes and then glancing away, trying not to get caught looking at each other.  Except, she wasn’t sure if it was something they were both doing, or if it was all in her own head.  She didn’t know why the mop dog had stayed with the crew when she was so clearly opposed to everything Captain Kipper was doing.  And it made her feel all fluttery inside.

Or maybe that was the low gravity. Continue reading “Otters In Space 4 – Chapter 13: Sequoia”

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut.  If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.

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Kipper watched the faces of her crew closely as they took in the sight of their newest comrades in arms… and tentacles… and flightless wings.  They might be more arms than wings, but those feathery raptor limbs had clearly evolved into bird’s wings in some branches of the family tree all of Earth’s creatures shared.  Well, all of them shared a family tree, except the octopuses.  From what Kipper had learned, octopuses were the one sentient race of creatures rattling around this solar system who hadn’t actually evolved on Earth.  Thank goodness for that, given that octopus technology was behind every piece of her plan to take The Lucky Boomerang out into the universe, searching for the wayward humans who’d forgotten to come home and check on the dogs they’d left behind waiting for them.  And, you know, the cats too.  Though, cats weren’t quite as much waiting.  Certainly not the ones on The Lucky Boomerang. Continue reading “Otters In Space 4 – Chapter 12: Kipper”

by Mary E. Lowd

An excerpt from Otters In Space 4: First Moustronaut.  If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.

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The atmosphere in The Lucky Boomerang’s engine room was riotously celebratory.  The engineers didn’t have the gorgeous, panoramic view of Europa that the bridge crew had been enjoying on the main viewscreen; though, smaller versions of the view were relayed to several monitor screens built into the walls.  But the engineers were the members of the crew who had done the hard work of properly calibrating the epsilon drive engines for the flight, and they were literally above and beyond the moon with the success of their efforts. Continue reading “Otters In Space 4 – Chapter 11: Yvette”