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.
“You can move Lupinia?” Commander Chestnut asked, scurrying his way into the engine room and pressing his way between the much larger cat and canine blocking his view of the indecipherable equations Ensign Diaz had been writing. His brushy reed of a tail flipped about wildly, expressing more excitement than seemed like should be able to fit into such a small mammal.
For the moment, Ensign Risqua and Lt. Lee, along with Lys and now Korvax stayed in the doorway, looking uncertain, raising the stakes of everything that happened, because it was all being watched.
“It’s chaos theory,” Ensign Diaz explained, not very helpfully. “Basic chaos theory.”
“What do you mean?” Captain Carroway’s ears flattened, irritated that she had no idea what the canine was talking about. She vaguely remembered an academy physics class, many years ago, that had brushed past chaos theory far too quickly for her to have really learned anything about it, and she didn’t see how it was at all relevant here.
Ensign Diaz held out a paw, as if she were about to hold up an actual useful explanation. Instead, she barked, “A butterfly flaps its wings on Earth and two hundred years later there’s a rebellion against the Reptassans on Avia.” As if that made any sense.
“Or in this case, a butterfly flaps its wings on the outer edge of the Tetra Galaxy,” Commander Chestnut chittered, getting excited, “and we fall through a black hole to the other side of the universe.”
Captain Carroway wasn’t sure if Commander Chestnut actually understood what Ensign Diaz was talking about, or if he was just really excited about the idea of moving Lupinia. To be fair, it was an interesting idea. If Lupinia weren’t in contested, neutral territory between Tri-Galactic Union and Reptassan territories, then it could be properly defended, properly made a part of the Tri-Galactic Union.
But Captain Carroway didn’t see how they could possibly move an entire planet. Especially from several galaxies away. She was about to say as much when Lys came inching her way into the engine room with her strange worm-like way of moving.
“Or a butterfly doesn’t flap her wings,” the caterpillar said in a singsong voice. “Because she hasn’t grown them yet, thanks to your ship’s lovely and brilliant doctor. Butterfly is the word your people use for my species’ adult form, right?”
Instead of answering Lys, Captain Carroway asked a question of her own: “We have a doctor?” This day seemed to be just one surprise upon another. This whole week, actually. At least this might prove to be a good surprise. She wondered who among her crew had proven to have enough medical training to qualify for such a position…
She didn’t have to wonder for long.
“That would be Ensign Mike,” Commander Chestnut chittered proudly, as if the golden-mantled squirrel had helped the fungal officer realize their purpose himself rather than just watch it happen.
Captain Carroway’s ears — which had perked up at the idea of a doctor — flagged again. She still didn’t like Ensign Mike. But she supposed they did need a doctor pretty badly. Badly enough to count a computer program animated by mushy fungal tissue as a substitute for one, she supposed. Begrudgingly. Regardless, that was a problem for later. There were bigger problems to deal with now. Planet sized problems. “I still don’t understand how any of this means you can move Lupinia,” Captain Carroway meowed forcefully, trying to cut through all the nonsense to the heart of the issue.
Ensign Diaz drew in a deep breath through her muzzle and started to explain, “Think of it like this: when our ships were pulled across the universe, they… well… sort of carved a groove into subspace.”
Intrigued in spite of herself, Captain Carroway asked, “Like wearing a path into a forest by walking through it the same way over and over again?”
“Yes, kind of like that,” Ensign Diaz agreed. “Except since we were pulled through so forcefully, it was almost more like…”
“Carving a groove out with a plow?” Commander Chestnut suggested.
“Yeah, sure, why not?” Ensign Diaz rolled her eyes at how this metaphor was getting away from her. She was dealing with physics and hyperspace, not footpaths and farm equipment, but the Xolo-Lupinian didn’t have a better way to explain her equations to officers who simply didn’t know as much math and quantum physics as her. “The important thing is — we can essentially… uh… roll Lupinia along our path, jumping it from orbiting its own star to the star in the Dirt Cloud.”
“That’s huge,” Captain Carroway breathed in awe. Her tail had begun swishing behind her, expressing her excitement and agitation. This was all a lot to deal with, and she was going to have some very big, very weighty decisions to make. Very soon.
“To the Dirt Cloud?” Commander Chestnut asked. His tail was whipping about even more frenetically than Captain Carroway’s.
“Yes, that’s the only place we can move it to,” Ensign Diaz confirmed.
“That’s neutral territory,” Commander Chestnut chittered.
“Which is a whole hell of a lot better than Reptassan territory!” Ensign Diaz barked angrily.
Commander Chestnut’s tail stopped moving. The golden-mantled squirrel froze, absolutely as still as a statue, as if the much larger canine’s bark had triggered a deep self-defense reflex from the time before golden-mantled squirrels had been uplifted and could be a large canine’s commanding officer.
Eventually, Commander Chestnut thawed out and said, “I didn’t say it wasn’t better.”
“You implied it with your statement,” Ensign Diaz growled.
“Hey now,” Captain Carroway meowed, holding out her paws between the two Anti-Ra officers in a placating way. It was strange for her to be playing peacemaker between two colleagues who had both been her enemies a few days ago. “Commander Chestnut was just stating a fact. We don’t shut people down for stating facts. Facts are good. Collecting them is the foundation of science.”
“We’re not talking about science,” Ensign Diaz growled through gritted teeth. Very long, pointy gritted teeth. “We’re talking about my homeworld.”
At this point, Ensign Risqua stepped forward from where she’d been watching in the doorway to the engine room. Her red and blue feathers were puffed out, making her look larger, but also more nervous than usual. “We can’t just go around moving planets,” the reptile-bird squawked. It wasn’t clear if she was trying to calm the Xolo-Lupinian down — if she was, Ensign Risqua had picked entirely the wrong strategy.
Ensign Diaz had very short dark brown fur, but it was clearly all standing on end, prickled out by her feelings and passion. She was literally gnashing her sharp teeth. This was not a subject that Ensign Diaz could be rational about…
And that was fair.
Captain Carroway had to acknowledge: the Xolo-Lupinian was right. They weren’t talking about science or political boundaries anymore. They were talking about Ensign Diaz’s home.
Wilder’s home. Maple’s home. Even though they would never get to go back to it. They’d been swallowed up by the complexities of physics and the brute force of a vacuum bomb.
Captain Carroway had begun this whole journey by doing the wrong thing — firing a vacuum bomb at a star, trying to cause destruction.
Was this a chance to do something right?
With the same vacuum bomb?
“Are you saying–” Captain Carroway placed her paws on Ensign Diaz’s shoulders as she spoke, forcing the Xolo-Lupinian to look at her. “–that if we fire this vacuum bomb just right, we can safely move Lupinia from orbiting its current star to orbiting the star in the center of the Dirt Cloud?”
“Yes,” Ensign Diaz woofed, almost choking on the single word, as if it encompassed an idea too large to fit through the narrow passage of her throat.
“Then we have to do it,” Captain Carroway meowed. And it was that simple. She was going to save a world.
If Lupinia were moved to neutral territory, then the Reptassans would no longer have a claim over it. And inside the Dirt Cloud, the Anti-Ra forces would be able to easily protect it. This was what the Tri-Galactic Union should have been trying to do all along. Although, to be fair, it sounded like they wouldn’t have been able to do it without a little help from a giant tortoise flying through the far side of the universe.
The universe is a strange place. Captain Carroway hoped it always stayed that way.
“But…” Lt. Lee was still standing in the entrance to the engine room. His butterfly-like ears were held as low as Captain Carroway had ever seen them. “…I thought… didn’t you say… we could go home? But… only… if we didn’t move Lupinia?” The pretty little dog’s voice quavered. He wanted to go home.
And it broke Captain Carroway’s heart to see him like this — so close to what he wanted so desperately, but also so very, very far away.
Because Captain Carroway wasn’t going to make the choice he wanted her to make. She wasn’t going to take this ship home. Not at the expense of an entire world.
“Lupinia needs our help,” Captain Carroway meowed, as reasonably as she could. “That’s what our whole mission here has always been about, and now, we have a chance to truly fulfill it.”
Feelings flickered across the Papillon’s face like sunlight flickering on a rainy day. But there was no rainbow to be found here. Lt. Lee was such a good officer, such a good dog, that he would do what he was told. But saving Lupinia from political unrest and turmoil would be cold comfort to him as he slept in the crowded barracks of a tiny ship on the wrong side of the Tetra Galaxy for months on end, worrying about his mother back home in the Milky Way, certain her only son had died in the line of duty.
“Wait… really?” Ensign Diaz’s bat-like ears flicked up and down, and the expression on her long muzzle wavered nervously between anger and elation. There were a lot of uncertain feelings in The Wanderlust’s engine room right now.
There were probably going to be a lot of uncertain feelings aboard The Wanderlust for a long time. The remainder of their journey home, however long that took, most likely.
Captain Carroway thought for a moment: perhaps what her crew was really missing, more than a doctor, was a therapist. Maybe the fungal officer would find a way to fulfill that role too. Though, the Norwegian Forest cat doubted it.
“Yes, really,” Captain Carroway meowed. “If you have a way to move Lupinia into a safe orbit around the star at the center of the Dirt Cloud at the same time as protecting the Waykeeper from the oncoming Zakonraptor fleet, then by all means, we should do it. I’m giving the order: save two worlds with one vacuum bomb.”
“Well, that’s kind of overly simplistic–” Ensign Diaz began to bark, but Commander Chestnut could see that his star officer was about to undercut her own position by over-explaining the science involved to a captain who was clearly more swayed by metaphor than raw math.
So, the golden-mantled squirrel stepped up to her again, cutting the much larger canine off, and said, “You have an order, Ensign.”
The Xolo-Lupinian bowed her head, leaving the science half-explained, at best. If she had her commander’s faith and her captain’s order, that was all she needed. It was time for Ensign Diaz to save her home world.
Continue on to Chapter 30…