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.
“Captain?” Ensign Melbourne meowed from the pilot’s seat. “We have company.”
“The Zakonraptors are back?” Captain Carroway had barely been back in her captain’s seat long enough to get comfortably settled. “Already? We scared them away for less than a day?”
“I guess so,” the white tomcat meowed acerbically, the tip of his tail twitching in a way that betrayed the concern his dry tone tried to belie. “We don’t have any better weapons than when they were here last time, but this time it looks like there’s a lot more of them. Do you think Ensign Diaz has any more ideas or clever tricks hidden up her sleeves?”
There was genuine admiration in the snarky tomcat’s voice as he spoke of the Lupinian-Xolo officer. Captain Carroway almost wondered if she was hearing the start of a crush. She didn’t really want to deal with the messiness of romantic relationships happening in such a small crew, in such close quarters, on such a long mission. But she supposed the possibility was inevitable. It was a problem she’d deal with when it became a problem. For now, her problem was the fleet of sharp, fierce, dangerous looking vessels that were now showing on The Wanderlust’s viewscreen.
“Well, I guess we’d better get back in the sky then,” Captain Carroway growled. “The last thing we want is to find ourselves trapped on the ground during a firefight.” Grounded spaceships don’t fight well. They also aren’t good at escaping.
And if Captain Carroway was truly honest with herself, she wished she’d gotten her crew moving a little faster, so they could already be gone by now. This wasn’t their fight. If they’d left one hour earlier, they wouldn’t even know it was happening. They could have moved on with clear consciences, having done their best to help the Waykeeper and the Ollallans before leaving them behind forever. But now…
Now Captain Carroway felt obligated to help. But she also had an obligation to her crew, to get them home.
Being a captain was a lot. It felt like being pulled in every direction at once, all the time. She’d only been doing it for about two days, and the Norwegian Forest cat was already thinking about how she might retire early when she got her crew back home to the Milky Way. Find somewhere with lots of sunlight and spend her days communing with nature, walking through forests and watching the shadows of fish swim just under the surface of a clear lake. Something peaceful, something quiet.
Oh, who was Captain Carroway kidding? She knew herself better than that. Just because she was tired and grumpy right now didn’t mean she’d ever be ready to hang her captain’s pin up and give up adventure. Still, she could use a little less adventure just this minute.
The glowing forests fell away on the viewscreen as The Wanderlust began to rise up from the ground. Liftoff started slow, but as soon as the ship had cleared the glowing trees, Ensign Melbourne pushed the throttle, so to speak, as far as it would go, and The Wanderlust tore across the treetops, rising up higher and higher until it cleared the bubble of atmosphere held in by the hyperspatial slipstream.
The turtle’s back shrank from an entire world, ensconcing them, holding them in its protective bubble, to a distant landscape, beautiful but removed. Then finally, the whole forest that stretched from one edge of the Waykeeper’s domed shell to the other contracted into a single oval of luminescent green, still raging orange in parts where the Ollallans hadn’t finished fighting the fires from the Zakonraptors’ earlier attacks.
There would be new fires soon.
And Captain Carroway wasn’t at all sure there was anything her plucky little crew of less than a dozen could do about it.
“Ensign Melbourne, take us down level with the lower edge of the Waykeeper’s shell. Maybe just a little below the edge. I want us to stay out of sight until we’ve had time to come up with a plan.”
“Yes, Captain,” the white tomcat meowed, commensurately professional, albeit maybe a little too eager given the direness of the situation. Still, Captain Carroway couldn’t blame him for enjoying being back at the helm. The Wanderlust was a fit little ship, and Ensign Melbourne clearly enjoyed flying her.
Captain Carroway couldn’t help marveling a little at her own order — she had essentially told Ensign Melbourne to hide The Wanderlust on the underside of a planet, but most planets don’t have an underside. They don’t have an up or a down; they’re just round, round, round. It was a very strange thing, really, that this particular planet had an orientation. But then, the Norwegian Forest cat supposed that was nothing compared to the fact that it also had flippers, a spike of a tail, and an actual head. She wished they’d had a chance to find out if it was possible to talk to this gigantic, long-lived being. A creature who lived on an entirely different scale from one small cat.
As the view on the main viewscreen veered past the Waykeeper and then turned back to show the armored underside of the giant space turtle’s shell, dotted here and there with glowing patches that looked more like moors of moss than full forests, Captain Carroway tore her eyes away from the fascinating sight and rose from her captain’s seat. She meant to ask her crew once more for suggestions and get them brainstorming again. Instead, she was interrupted by a squeaking scream from the rear of the ship, either the engine room or the multi-purpose room based on how it sounded. Also, based on the sound, Korvax.
Captain Carroway’s ears skewed as she tried to decide quickly if this was a situation that called for delegation — she could order Commander Chestnut to check on the scream and stay focused on the situation here, on the bridge. But the ship was just so small, and she was, in fact, a cat: curiosity got the better of her.
The Norwegian Forest cat stalked off down The Wanderlust’s central corridor, several other officers following behind her. When she got to the multi-purpose room, it became clear that she wouldn’t have to continue on to the engine room. Korvax was knelt over Lys, his normally round body even more rounded by the way he was huddled over her. The green-skinned caterpillar alien was laid on the floor in a sinuous squiggle. It looked like she had fallen.
“No, no, no! Not again!” Korvax squeaked. “You can’t do this to me again! Not like your mother!” The hedgehog moved his paws up and down Lys’s body, touching gently, smoothing away wrinkles that were forming as he watched.
“What’s wrong?” Captain Carroway meowed, kneeling down beside the bundle of nerves and quills. “What happened to her?”
“She’s going into her chrysalis state…” Korvax said, despair in his squeaky voice. “But she’s too young, much, much too young.”
“What did you say about her mother before?” Captain Carroway asked.
Commander Chestnut came and knelt down on Lys’s other side, causing Captain Carroway to wonder who was manning her bridge; Ensign Mike joined them and placed their funny stringy hands that seemed to be formed from bunched up bundles of mycelial threads against the caterpillar’s body. The thready hands expanded, some of the mycelial strands seeming to worm their way right into Lys’s wrinkling, withering green skin. Captain Carroway wanted to snap at the mushroom to stop doing whatever they were doing, but she didn’t want to interrupt Korvax’s burbling, meandering explanation of how the exact same thing had happened to Lys’s mother — many, many years ago when she’d begged him to take her up into space on his ship.
“Kynnis went into her chrysalis state early,” Korvax babbled, “and I never believed her, no matter how much she assured me otherwise, that it wasn’t connected to how she got sick and died so young as an adult. And now it’s happening to Lys! And–” His words devolved into inarticulate moaning, but then he managed to pull himself back together. “–I just– just– just– I should never have believed her that it wasn’t because I took her up into space! And now I’ve done the same thing to Lys! And she’s my baby! I’ve taken care of her since she was just a little yellow squiggle inside of her unhatched egg! You have to save her, Captain Carroway! She’s not supposed to turn into an adult yet!”
The hedgehog alien grasped Captain Carroway’s much larger paws with his tiny delicate ones and looked deep into her eyes, imploring her. His eyes shiny with unshed tears, and the fur around them wet with the already shed ones.
“Me?!” Captain Carroway yowled in surprise. “What am I supposed to do? We don’t even have a doctor here, let alone any knowledge of Ollallan physiology and life cycle phases.” The Norwegian Forest cat tried to pull her paws away from the hedgehog, but his little paws only clung on harder. “We’d better just take her back down. Surely, the Ollallans have their own doctors–”
“No, no, no!” Korvax exclaimed, the squeak in his voice rising to an ear-shattering pitch. “They know nothing about this! Nothing!”
Captain Carroway suspected that the distraught hedgehog would have continued his tirade, but a soft sound stopped him. Lys’s cilia-like mouth parts were shriveled, wrinkled little things now, but they wriggled as she tried to speak. All of her green skin had taken on a deathly pallor — more the shade of mold growing on fruit than the bright, glowing shade of lime she’d been before. And there was a crack beginning to form at the top of her forehead; under the crack, something gleamed. The only person present who recognized what he was seeing under the crack at the top of her face was Korvax — he’d seen it once before, years ago, with Kynnis.
Under the crack, the crystalline face of her chrysalis was forming, smooth and expressionless.
Continue on to Chapter 26…