by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Voyage of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
The empty windows, framing nothing but endless dark, haunted Captain Carroway in her fitful dreams. The Norwegian Forest cat had never suffered the vertigo that plagued some officers when they first went on deep space missions, profoundly aware that the metal hull of the spaceship around them was a thin, breakable bubble compared to the unfathomable fathoms of vacuum all around. The stars comforted her. They felt like the bright points at the vertices of a spiderweb where dew collected in the early morning, implying a whole net of cosmic threads stretched around her like a hammock she could sleep inside, gently swaying in an intergalactic breeze.
But there were no stars here. Nothing to catch her as she fell and fell and fell, twisting and twisting, trying to orient herself so she’d land on her feet… if she ever landed.
In her dreams, mycelial threads caught at her like cobwebs, and perverted cartoony versions of her new Anti-Ra officers laughed at her. Vossie’s forehead bled and bled until the growing puddle of blood rose up from the floor and became a whole golem of blood, sloshing and sploshing through the corridors of The Wanderlust.
“What were you thinking?” Lt. Lee barked at her with his pointed muzzle, as his butterfly-like ears flapped away from his head and took flight becoming actual butterflies, still thick and fuzzy. “What were you thinking?” the earless abomination barked at her, over and over again, the rank on his collar upgrading with every bark until the young Papillon was an admiral who outranked her.
Captain Carroway awoke, but Lt. Lee’s voice followed her into consciousness.
“Captain?” the Papillon’s voice barked from the comm-pin on the breast of her uniform, which she’d left discarded on the floor beside her bed while she slept. “Captain? We’re close enough to the… uh… intergalactic spaceship to properly scan it. And I don’t think it’s a spaceship. You should come see it.”
The bleary, half-awake Norwegian Forest cat rubbed at her stinging eyes with a fuzzy paw. Her eyes still wanted to be shut. But she was needed again. She’d never stopped being needed, not really, she’d just slipped away briefly, pretending she could lay down the weight of captaincy. She could never lay down this weight, not so long as her crew was this far from home.
“I’ll be right there,” Captain Carroway meowed, lifting her discarded uniform from its pile on the floor and speaking into the comm-pin. Then she pulled the uniform back on, straightened the tunic, and prepared for returning to the world outside her quarters. Her small bubble of sanctuary and privacy had been pierced and popped, but at least, she was no longer endlessly falling through the void. Well, not literally. Arguably, The Wanderlust was falling through the void, and it was her job to steer it back on course to home.
Drawing a deep breath between her fangs as she stood at the door, Captain Carroway prepared herself. She didn’t feel ready. But that didn’t matter — people were waiting for her. Revelations and new knowledge were waiting for her. Decisions that would need making were waiting for her.
Feeling completely unprepared and incapable of true preparation, Captain Carroway opened the door and stepped through it.
The central corridor of The Wanderlust was quiet, and though Captain Carroway craved a cup of coffee, she made herself head to the bridge first. She would get coffee soon, but first, she needed to check in.
The only officers on the bridge were Lt. Lee, who had been sitting in her captain’s chair and scurried to his feet as soon as he saw her approaching him, and Ensign Risqua at the helm, piloting The Wanderlust in place of Ensign Melbourne. Just a reptile-bird and a dog, alone in this endless night.
Everyone else was probably sleeping, as per the work shifts Captain Carroway and Commander Chestnut had worked out yesterday. Or earlier today, really. Although Captain Carroway had managed a little sleep, it hadn’t been anything like a full night. This was the day that would never end. It just kept expanding and growing and getting bigger and crazier and more complicated, like the black hole Captain Carroway had tried to create.
The Norwegian Forest cat wondered if the baby black hole had continued to exist after the time blip. Part of her hoped it had — then she would have succeeded at her mission. But it was a small part, and shrinking. Because thinking about Ensign Diaz’s bloodcurdling howl of mourning for Wilder? And Ensign Risqua’s careful, fastidious attention to detail about how each and every ornament was arranged on Maple’s spirit tree?
Captain Carroway couldn’t actually hope that she’d succeeded. She didn’t want more people to have died because of her orders. Two was more than enough. Far more than enough. Maple and Wilder — even though Carroway had never met them — would weigh on her conscience forever.
“So, what have we learned about our mysterious intergalactic spaceship?” Captain Carroway meowed, settling into her captain’s seat now that Lt. Lee had vacated it.
The Papillon returned to his normal station off to the side of the bridge. While waiting for an answer from him, Captain Carroway stared at the silhouette. It still looked like a turtle to her. In fact, it looked more like a turtle than ever before. The lumpy protuberance to the end farther away from them was definitely rounded like a head, and the other end tapered off like a tiny pointed tail sticking out from under a great oval shell. The top of the silhouette was rumply and uneven, but the bottom was smooth, and the whole thing glowed ever so gently, mostly from the top side, with a pale green light.
“Like I said before,” Lt. Lee woofed somewhat impatiently, “the readings we’re getting don’t support the notion that it’s a spaceship. There aren’t enough hollow spaces on the inside for any gas breathing species to be living in there. It’s all fluid and organic compounds.”
Captain Carroway tilted her head, angling her view of the silhouette. Whatever she was looking at, it was beautiful. It was big and solid. It was the exact opposite of the empty vacuum everywhere else here. “Perhaps we’re dealing with an aquatic species,” the Norwegian Forest cat suggested. She had mixed feelings about that idea. It would be much harder to communicate and trade with a species that was so different from them. But it would also be fascinating. “Have you read the reports from Captain Pierre Jacques about the time when the starship Initiative made contact with an electric eel-like race? The individual they encountered had traveled a long way. Perhaps they had traveled from the Tetra Galaxy, and this spaceship is from their civilization.”
The Papillon seemed like the kind of eager young officer who would keep up on arcane intelligence like Captain Jacques’ report about the eel-like alien. Regardless, Lt. Lee simply shook his head and woofed again, “I don’t think it’s a spaceship.”
Captain Carroway’s ears skewed, threatening to flatten entirely against her head. She should have taken a minute to get herself a cup of coffee before facing this. But it was too late now. It’d be a whole awkward thing if she stormed off to get coffee in the middle of a conversation. She needed to present a more collected, coherent front than that. “So, what do you think it is?” the irritable Norwegian Forest cat hissed.
To Lt. Lee’s credit, he was unfazed by his captain’s ill temper. “I think it’s actually a turtle.”
At the pilot’s console, Risqua made a tittering sound before recovering her composure. Captain Carroway glanced at the reptile-bird, oddly grateful for the distraction from her own reaction to the Papillon’s statement.
“Excuse me, Lieutenant?” Captain Carroway meowed, feigning to have either not heard or not understood what her subordinate officer had just said.
“Obviously, I don’t mean it’s a literal turtle from earth, uplifted and gigantified or anything,” Lt. Lee said. His own butterfly-like ears skewed as he heard himself say ‘gigantified’ which was definitely not a real word, but in fairness to the Papillon, he hadn’t had a turn sleeping yet and was still living through the longest day of his life so far. “But I do think that the object on our viewscreen is an organic lifeform native to the vacuum of space.”
“One big lifeform?” Captain Carroway asked, still processing how to feel about that information. On one paw, a gigantic space-faring lifeform native to the space between galaxies was an incredible discovery, and the kitten inside her couldn’t believe how amazingly cool such a discovery would be… if that was what they were really seeing here. On the other paw, Captain Carroway didn’t see how a gigantic space turtle was going to help her stranded crew. Would they even be able to communicate with it? At all? It’s not like they could afford to just chase it for months while trying to crack the code of whatever language it might speak, which would probably be far too different from any of the languages Earth animals had encountered before for The Wanderlust’s computer to immediately translate it. They were already taking a risk by going this far out of their way.
Would they have to turn around without even learning anything about this amazing discovery?
Also, what did this mean for what they might find in the midst of the Tetra Galaxy? Captain Carroway had been hoping for — and assuming there would be — civilizations to meet, learn about, and trade with as they traveled. But… what if the Tetra Galaxy was filled with nothing but giant, silent space turtles?
Captain Carroway remembered being a kitten and finding an illustration in a book about old mythologies that showed the Earth, looking like a tiny marble, balanced precariously on the back of a whole stack of turtles. The caption under the illustration had read, “It’s turtles all the way down.” Kitten Carroway had laughed so hard over that picture that she’d fallen over and literally rolled on the floor with laughter. Her mother had come rushing to see what was wrong.
It didn’t seem so funny right now.
Maybe the Tetra Galaxy was just turtles, turtles all the way down.
“Captain?” Lt. Lee woofed. Something in the Papillon’s voice made it sound like it wasn’t the first time he’d woofed it. “Did you hear anything I was saying?”
Captain Carroway’s ears definitely flattened this time. And she realized, she couldn’t afford to do anything other than opt for complete honesty. There wasn’t room aboard such a tiny spaceship for hiding her weaknesses the way she wanted to. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t grab myself a cup of coffee before coming here, and I’m afraid I can’t really wake up properly without it. I know it’s an unusual foible, but the caffeine really does the trick. Let me grab myself a cup, and when I get back, you’ll have my full attention.”
Hopefully, the caffeine would help her focus and keep her mind from wandering to frivolous picture books she’d read as a kitten.
Continue on to Chapter 17…