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 electron torpedo flew away from The Wanderlust, shining like a tiny, shooting star on the main viewscreen. From the outside, it looked like it emerged from the armaments of a much larger, much more dangerous ship. In the blink of an eye, the torpedo collided with the closest Zakonraptor vessel, and the small ship erupted with fire that mirrored the fires it had been lighting below. Though, of course, unlike the fires on the turtle’s back, this fire didn’t last long, fueled only by whatever air had been aboard the section of the ship that was breached by the electron torpedo’s explosion.
When the blast of fire died down, a cratered hole was left in the side of the vessel where its blazor canons had been. The Zakonraptors aboard the ship would be lucky if they could still fly away. They’d be lucky if they were all still alive.
“I guess their shields weren’t designed with Tri-Galactic Union electron torpedoes in mind,” Ensign Melbourne meowed soberly.
“A lucky hit,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie corrected. “And I don’t think we’ll be as lucky if we have to fire a second time. They’ll reconfigure their shields quickly now that they know what to expect.”
“The Zakonraptors are hailing us now,” Ensign Diaz barked, sounding pleased to have the power tilted in her ship’s direction, at least for the moment.
“Answer the hail,” Captain Carroway meowed. She’d been running quick calculations in her head, trying to figure out if they could take the whole Zakonraptor fleet down, if they moved quickly enough. But the numbers just didn’t add up. At best, they could take down half of them. No matter how she moved the ships around in her mind, no matter how she imagined it playing out, if they went for an all out fight, The Wanderlust would go down. Her crew would die.
But… at least they would die defending something peaceful and beautiful. It would be a noble sacrifice.
It would also be the easy way out.
Captain Carroway wouldn’t have to face the weeks and months of holding this crew together, making sure it stayed blended into one cohesive whole instead of falling to mutiny and division. She wouldn’t have to keep trying to remember what Maple’s face had looked like, when she’d seen the squirrel briefly in the background of The Last Chance’s bridge when she’d first talked to Chestnut over her viewscreen. She wouldn’t have to keep stopping herself from asking the Anti-Ra officers if they had any pictures of Wilder for her to look at, so she could see who she had killed.
Of course, they wouldn’t have any pictures with them. But sometime soon, they would need to download all the data from The Last Chance’s computers to The Wanderlust. And then, would Captain Carroway be able to stop herself from staring for hours at photographs of Wilder and Maple before they died, wondering about what their lives would be like, going forward, if a ruthless Norwegian Forest cat hadn’t ordered a vacuum bomb to be fired.
The Zakonraptor’s face reappeared on the viewscreen. Though, actually, from the color of this one’s feathers — orange and purple — Captain Carroway could tell she was dealing with a different Zakonraptor. In fact, based on the shape of the bridge, it looked like she was speaking to a Zakonraptor on an entirely different vessel.
“No more firing,” the Zakonraptor roared. “We leave. You win. But not forever.”
Captain Carroway skewed her ears and couldn’t help asking, “Did you mean to say that last part out loud?”
“Is threat,” the Zakonraptor snarled, its feathers flaring aggressively.
But then the Zakonraptor’s image disappeared from the viewscreen, replaced once again by a view of the turtle. This time, the Zakonraptor ships were clearly flying away as quickly as they could, configuring themselves into a loose formation as they fled.
“Well, that was ominous,” Commander Chestnut observed.
“They’ll be back with friends,” Captain Carroway said, interpreting the Zakonraptors threat. She felt very tired. “So, we’ve probably only given this helpless world turtle and its inhabitants a brief reprieve. And next time, illusions probably won’t be enough to chase them away.”
“By next time,” Ensign Risqua asked, “won’t we be long gone? Well on our way home?” The reptile-bird really did look so small and delicate, completely unthreatening compared to the Zakonraptors.
Captain Carroway felt every eye on the bridge turn toward her. Every eye on the ship. This wasn’t the kind of question that had multiple correct answers. But there were multiple possible ways to phrase the correct answer, ways to skew it a little, give herself a bit of wiggle-room in how she interpreted it. “That is the hope,” Captain Carroway meowed. “But first, let’s see what we can learn from the Ollallans and this Korvax individual. And maybe, while we’re learning from them about the Tetra Galaxy, we’ll be able to also teach them something that will help protect them better from the next attack they might face.”
“Speak of the devil…” Ensign Diaz woofed softly to herself, followed by announcing more loudly, “We’re being hailed by Korvax again.”
“Put him onscreen,” Captain Carroway meowed, and when the alien hedgehog’s funny, pointy, little face appeared, she actually smiled at seeing him.
“You did it! You did it!” Korvax squeaked, literally hopping up and down, cheering. He was such a round, prickly little fellow that he looked something like a pinecone bouncing down a hillside. “You drove them away! Oh, thank you so much! The Ollallans and I are ever so grateful!”
Captain Carroway bowed her head in acknowledgement of the praise, then meowed, “About that, Korvax, we could use some guidance, as we’re new to this corner of the universe.”
“Guidance?” the hedgehog squeaked, his eyes brightening as if he couldn’t believe his luck. “You need a guide? I can be your guide!”
Captain Carroway’s ears skewed and twisted about, completely unable to disguise her surprise at the hedgehog’s enthusiastic response to a job offer that she hadn’t meant to make. “No, I mean, we could use maps, information… an idea of what to expect during our travels.”
“I can give you all those things!”
Somehow, Captain Carroway’s attempts to correct course weren’t working. Regardless, for now, what she, her crew, and The Wanderlust really needed was a place to land, take stock, see if they could salvage anything useful from The Last Chance, and generally get their bearings before forging ahead into an unknown galaxy. “Why don’t we start by having your ship guide ours down to a good, safe location on the Waykeeper’s back where we can land and meet some of these Ollallans you’ve been telling us about.” Perhaps, Captain Carroway thought, she’d have better luck working with the Ollallans than with this hedgehog alien who seemed to have nominated himself as spokesperson for them.
“Yes! Yes! Wonderful idea!” Korvax agreed, grabbing a bright green sphere that had been lodged on the end of one of his quills and moving it to a peg sticking out of the console in front of him. Apparently, it was a knob for one of the controls. What it had been doing on the end of one of his quills was anyone’s guess.
Without further ado, Korvax kicked his little ship into gear, which kind of surprised Captain Carroway. She’d halfway expected him to start singing some sort of “Follow Me Down to the Turtle’s Back” song. Instead, his face disappeared from the viewscreen, and when the turtle’s back reappeared, this time, a tiny orb of a ship — barely a shuttlecraft, really, almost more of an escape pod — came zipping up from where it had been hiding just beneath the lip of the turtle’s shell.
The orb ship was bronze in color, and it zipped around erratically, causing Captain Carroway to question Korvax’s skills as a pilot. She skewed an ear to the side but didn’t plan to say anything.
Ensign Diaz wasn’t so restrained: “Is he drunk?” the Xolo-Lupinian barked. “Who flies like that?”
“I guess, our new spiky friend does,” Ensign Melbourne meowed drily, doing his best to pilot their much larger vessel in a path that would follow Korvax’s drunken orb ship without quite so many sharp turns and sudden veers. Given that The Wanderlust was towing an entire second vessel behind her, they couldn’t really afford to fly as erratically as Korvax. The Last Chance would have been yanked around by the energy beam holding it in place behind The Wanderlust, straining both vessels. Fortunately, the white tomcat was a better pilot than a charmer, and he was pretty charming, no matter how much no one else would want to admit it.
The turtle’s back grew on the viewscreen until it was the entire view. From one end of the screen to the other, all that could be seen was the rumpled, crenelated tops of trees, glowing with their gentle green phosphorescence. There were no rivers, no lakes, no mountains. Just a dappled forest that spread from one edge of the Waykeeper’s shell to the other, dense with trees.
Watching the forest grow closer, Captain Carroway began to worry that there wouldn’t be a clearing large enough for The Wanderlust to set down, especially while towing The Last Chance. Korvax’s ship was so small, perhaps it could sneak between the trees. But The Wanderlust would need a clearing.
“Hold up,” Captain Carroway started to say, raising a paw into the air in front of her, as if she could slow The Wanderlust down just by pressing against the air in front of her. But then she saw the clearing they were aiming for — a darker patch on the turtle’s back. All of the light came from the phosphorescent leaves of the trees, so it made sense, upon reflection, that a clearing would look like little more than a shadow. “Never mind,” Captain Carroway corrected herself as Ensign Melbourne looked over his shoulder, checking if there was going to be a follow-up order.
As The Wanderlust settled over the shadow where she was meant to land, all the members of The Wanderlust’s crew watched the viewscreen in awe. They all had different backgrounds and had done different amounts of exploring in their home galaxies, but none of them had ever had the chance to see a world like this one. Even Ensign Mike — whose memory had been seeded with The Wanderlust’s entire computer database, full of more information than most individuals could read in a lifetime — had never seen anything like the Waykeeper’s forests before.
From a distance, the forest glowed as one expanse of gentle green light, like the shallow edge of an ocean reflecting moonlight. But close up, the individual trees became clear, and there were so many different ones, each a slightly different shade or brightness. Altogether, the trees looked like they dripped with emeralds, peridots, opals, and topaz, with bright white light shining up from beneath them, reflecting and refracting through all the gemstones’ complicated facets, shining in every shade of springtime and summer. But even closer still, the illusion of gemstones fell away — it became heartachingly clear that the light emanated from the leaves themselves.
The trees’ leaves glowed with a delicate organic light, sketching out their veins in scribbles of brightness and fluttering in intensity, lightening and darkening just barely perceptibly with the rhythm of life — heartbeat, breath, respiration, or metabolism, whatever it was that ruled the gentle fluctuations in the light was deeply biological, and every creature on The Wanderlust could feel it. A profound peacefulness washed over the crew of The Wanderlust in the form of soft green light.
Above the trees, winged creatures flew. From above, they’d been only shadows, blocking out the phosphorescent light, but now that The Wanderlust was landed, the light shone upward on their wings, revealing bright patterns of color — all the colors of the rainbow, arranged in intricate, complicated, aesthetically pleasing patterns. Reds, golds, blues, violets, all mixed up and fractal. These creatures could have been stained-glass windows come to life for all the vividness of their wings. They were butterflies if butterflies had been recreated, making them more perfect, over and over again for a thousand times. They floated above the treetops, dancing together or soaring alone, moving with the delicate grace of a poem whose lines and rhymes are so close to perfect that the minuscule amount they fall short — breaking the rhythm, slanting the rhymes — guarantees you’ll remember the words forever, longer than you’ll remember the details of your own life.
For several heartbeats, the crew of The Wanderlust all stared at the viewscreen in silence, unable or unwilling to break the beautiful scenery’s spell with the crudeness of language. This was a place that existed before language, more primal than organized thought. It almost felt like the trees were whispering to them, singing about feelings that were too pure to exist in the normal world, shining those lullabies directly into their hearts.
“Wow,” Ensign Melbourne breathed. Of course he was the one to break the spell. The tomcat loved to hear himself speak, even more than he loved to listen to the silent stirrings of paradise itself.
Captain Carroway didn’t believe in an afterlife — heaven or otherwise. She’d read about ancient human mythologies, from way back before cats and dogs had even been uplifted. Eden. The other side of the Rainbow Bridge. They all sounded silly to her. Or at least, they had until now.
Now, the Norwegian Forest cat found herself wondering if heaven had existed in their universe all along, but it had been flying hidden through the darkness between galaxies, populated only by angels.
Well, angels and Korvax.
“I can see why the Zakonraptors wanted to claim this place for themselves,” Ensign Risqua whistled, the words coming out with the musical tones of birdsong.
“They weren’t claiming it,” Commander Chestnut corrected, still gazing lovingly at the scene on the viewscreen. “They were burning it down.”
Captain Carroway glanced at the back of the bridge, checking on the crew members behind her, just quickly enough to see the reptile-bird shrug her winglike arms.
“We should go out there,” Ensign Werik said. “Explore.” Eagerness filled the Morphican’s voice.
Captain Carroway looked toward her other Morphican officer — the one she’d known longer, the one she trusted — and he nodded in agreement. The Norwegian Forest cat knew she should have looked to Commander Chestnut — her actual first officer — for confirmation, but she barely knew him. Somewhere in her heart, she hadn’t really accepted that he’d replaced Lt. Cmdr. Vossie in the first officer position. She would have to get over that. Soon. And permanently. She couldn’t afford to be sending mixed signals.
But she also couldn’t afford to falter right now, and it was Vossie she trusted to warn her if she was about to step on unsteady ground.
The back of a giant turtle’s shell felt like unsteady ground. But it was time to step upon it. Time to set paw to this strange, new land.
Continue on to Chapter 22…