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 Carroway could not have been more surprised when the face that appeared on The Wanderlust’s viewscreen was the very familiar golden-furred face of Captain Chestnut. “What the hell?” she spat. “We watched your ship explode!”
“And I felt it explode,” Captain Chestnut said, shuddering. The reptile-bird behind him had a haunted look in her eyes, and Captain Carroway noticed that the other Anti-Ra officers — the Morphican and other squirrel — were no longer on the ship’s bridge. “But more importantly, my engineer tells me that our ship has sustained enough damages from that first explosion that unless we power down immediately, it might very well explode again. And believe me, I do not want to experience that twice. None of my crew do…” His voice went hollow in a way that suggested to Carroway that maybe not all of his crew had survived the return from that first explosion. “Especially when I expect the second time might be… well… more final. It’s not often that you get a reprieve from your ship exploding around you.” He smiled weakly.
“What can we do to help?” Captain Carroway asked. Minutes ago, she’d been responsible for the Anti-Ra ship’s total and complete destruction. Now she was asking how she could help the survivors…
Of course, minutes ago, she was facing the prospect of her own death. And now… Now she didn’t know what she was facing at all.
This day was dizzying.
“If your ship has room and is in a more stable condition,” Captain Chestnut said, “could my crew evacuate to it?”
“Yes,” Captain Carroway agreed without hesitation. “We can bring you all onboard. Power your ship down, and we can tow it… well… wherever we end up going.”
“We’ll figure it out when we get there,” Captain Chestnut said. The lights on his bridge flickered. He looked over his shoulder and shouted, “All paws prepare for immediate evacuation. And Diaz? Power it all down. Everything.” Looking back at the screen, he said, “Thank you, Captain–?”
“Carroway,” the Norwegian Forest cat provided. Then she said to Ensign Lee, “Please teleport all life signs on The Last Chance into The Wanderlust’s second barracks room.” Then turning so her face couldn’t be seen by Captain Chestnut through the viewscreen, she quietly hissed, “Make sure our teleporter disables any weaponry they might have on them, and set up a force shield across the barracks’ door.” She wanted to help the Anti-Ra crew, but she didn’t want to give them the opportunity to take over her ship.
Ensign Lee nodded in acknowledgement and then woofed, “I’m reading four life signs.” Then lowering his voice, the Papillon added, “That’s two fewer than showed on the ship before…” He waved a paw loosely, indicating the bewildering space-time blip they’d all just experienced. “…before all this happened.”
Captain Carroway drew a deep breath between her fangs to steady herself.
The Anti-Ra officers would be mourning their lost crewmates. Individuals who had died because of an order she’d given and a vacuum bomb her ship had fired. She hadn’t expected to have to look survivors in the face after committing the atrocity she’d been ordered to commit.
She hadn’t expected to look at anything at all.
No matter how hard and confusing all of this was… it was better than being squeezed to death inside a baby black hole, which was what she and Vossie had expected would happen.
There was a certain freeing quality to having expected her own death so completely and to have come out the other side alive. Freeing and a little unreal. Surreal, even. Like she was floating through an impossible dream.
Captain Carroway had faced the certainty of her own death and survived; anything else could be figured out.
First off, Captain Carroway needed to deal with her new guests. If she had a proper crew for her ship, she’d be able to send an underling to deal with the Anti-Ra refugees while she stayed on the bridge, figuring out what was going on. As it stood, there were now as many Anti-Ra on her vessel as Tri-Galactic Union officers. That was not a good balance.
Captain Carroway made her way to the back of the bridge and opened a supply cupboard filled with hand weapons — half a dozen blazors and two blazor rifles. She hoped she wouldn’t need one. But in case she did… It was better to be armed and not need it than the alternative. Captain Carroway hooked a blazor onto her uniform’s belt, took down another two blazors which she handed to Ensign Lee and Mr. Melbourne, and then locked the cupboard. She didn’t offer a blazor to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie.
The injured Morphican was in no shape to wield a weapon. He was still shaking uncontrollably. Though, Mr. Melbourne had bandaged the wound on his brow.
“How did your implant get pulled out?” Captain Carroway meowed gently. “Why didn’t it… I dunno… get repaired like the viewscreen and the ceiling when the, uh, blip reversed time?”
Buck teeth chattering, Lt. Cmdr. Vossie stuttered, “Don’t… know… time effects… patchy…”
“A similar question,” Ensign Lee woofed, “is why didn’t the Anti-Ra ship repair itself? Why did two of their officers die?”
“Their ship was damaged earlier than ours,” Captain Carroway meowed. “Presumably the blip simply didn’t reverse time far enough to repair their ship.”
“Except if the time blip didn’t go all the way back to before their ship collided with our… scientific probe–” Ensign Lee positively glared at Captain Carroway as he repeated the words of her lie. “–shouldn’t the cascading explosion of their ship that led to the birth of a baby black hole simply have started over again?”
“And then led to another reversal,” Mr. Melbourne offered. “Rocking back and forth forever and ever, trapping us in a tiny, horrible time loop?” The white cat shuddered. Even a lifetime of servitude on a penal asteroid sounded better than living through the last few minutes, backward and forward, over and over again for eternity.
Maybe he shouldn’t have been so excited to receive parole. Maybe this mission wasn’t worth it…
Too late now.
“Time loops…” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie spoke bitterly and haltingly. “…are… nonsense.”
“But time blips aren’t?” Mr. Melbourne meowed.
Captain Carroway looked at her Morphican friend. He was doing poorly. He needed a doctor. Someone who could perform brain surgery and put his implant back in place. “Is there anything we should do with your implant?” the Norwegian Forest cat asked. “To protect it? Should we unplug it from The Wanderlust’s computer system?”
Lt. Cmdr. Vossie shook his head emphatically, and Mr. Melbourne said, “The implant and the mycelial… uh… tendrils from The Wanderlust’s computer system seem to have fused together. I don’t think we can remove it without doing damage to it.”
Captain Carroway scowled. That was a problem she would have to deal with later.
“In fact,” the white tomcat added, “the fungal tissue attached to the implant… seems to be growing. Ugh.” He poked at the lumpy pinkish-gray fungal flesh attached to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s implant with a carefully extended claw. The flesh shuddered, reacting to his poke.
“Don’t do that,” Captain Carroway snapped. “Lt. Cmdr. Vossie needs that implant. So, I’m going to go deal with our… visitors. While I do that, I want Ensign Lee to continue scanning the nearby area. We could use a planet to land on–”
“Not likely out here,” Ensign Lee woofed pessimistically. “We’re at least a week’s travel from the nearest star…”
“–or any other potential source of resources, as it doesn’t sound like we’ll be able to get home… well…” Captain Carroway still didn’t have a good estimate of how long to expect their voyage home to be. Maybe they could find a way to reverse whatever phenomenon had sent them here? And possibly end up back inside the gravity well of a growing black hole… No, she’d rather be on the far side of the Tetra Galaxy than crushed to death. The Norwegian Forest cat decided to pivot to a different topic. “Mr. Melbourne, please start researching what we can do to help Lt. Cmdr. Vossie handle the removal of his implant and what might be necessary for us to get it placed back where it belongs in his head, given the resources we have aboard The Wanderlust.”
“Aye, Captain!” Mr. Melbourne meowed.
Vossie managed a weak buck-toothed smile at his captain and friend. Ensign Lee just kept frowning at the console in front of him.
Captain Carroway stalked off the bridge and down the central corridor of The Wanderlust with her fluffy tail lashing behind her. When she got to the second barracks room, she found the Anti-Ra officers had already opened its door and discovered the glittering sheen of the force shield holding them in.
“You didn’t have to disable our weapons and lock us in,” a canine woman growled from within the room as Captain Carroway stepped into sight on the opposite side of the force shield from them. The canine woman was the largest person onboard The Wanderlust right now. She probably stood head and shoulders taller than Captain Carroway. She had short, dark, brown fur, bat-like ears, and wide set eyes. She wore a necklace of braided reeds over her clothes, and the fur on one side of her face had been dyed reddish in an ornate pattern. She was also glaring absolute daggers at the Norwegian Forest cat who had incarcerated her. If she’d been loose aboard the ship, she could have caused a lot of damage.
“Ah, but see, the fact that you have weapons and have already noticed that they’re disabled–” Captain Carroway countered, tail still lashing, refusing to show that she was intimidated by the canine’s size, “–says to me that I most definitely did.”
The towering canine woman growled. Captain Chestnut stepped in front of her. He was barely a third of her height, but the canine responded to his posturing by backing down and shrinking away from the shielded door like a shadow melting from the light. She moved farther back into the barracks and sat down on one of the bunks beside the Morphican man without any implants who seemed to be holding a small bonsai tree in his arms, cradling it like an infant. The tree had pink and white blooms among its lime green leaves and was planted in a small, beautiful glazed pot. The final Anti-Ra officer — the reptile-bird woman — was approximately the size of the Morphican — both of them being about the size of a small cat — and, she was pacing the room restlessly, claws on her talons clicking against the metal floor. Her plumes of red and blue feathers were all puffed out.
“Touché again,” Captain Chestnut chittered, clearly trying to block the view of his distraught crew members with his small body which was entirely incapable of such a task, except for the way that his intense aura of energy made eyes draw to him like moths to a light. Captain Carroway wasn’t sure if the squirrel captain was trying to stop her from looking at his crew or stop his crew from looking at her. Either way, he tried and failed to smile, before saying, “I think we have a lot to talk about, and it might be best if we were to talk in private, away from either of our crews. Is there somewhere we can do that?” His rounded ears flicked, causing the rows of tiny gold and silver hoops lining their outer edges to jingle.
The other three Anti-Ra officers were clearly listening to Captain Chestnut as he spoke. The tiny squirrel captain looked about as haggard as Captain Carroway felt, and she knew he had even better reason than her. He had lost friends today. He had possibly lost his ship. And he hadn’t seen any of it coming. She’d had two days warning that a catastrophe was coming, and it hadn’t been nearly enough.
“Yes,” Captain Carroway agreed looking down at the much smaller squirrel. “I suppose we do have a lot to talk about. Perhaps, we could discuss things in my quarters.”
Captain Chestnut gave her a forced attempt at a grin. “I’d be happy to–” He gestured at the force shield with one of his tiny, delicate paws. “–if you’d just be so good as to let me out.”
Feeling a little uncertain, Captain Carroway reached a paw out to the control panel beside the door and dropped the force shield. The squirrel captain had taken one step through the door’s threshold when his reptile-bird officer came rushing toward him.
Automatically, Captain Carroway took a step back and brought her paw to the blazor clipped at her waist, but the reptile-bird stopped as soon as she reached her captain. She placed both scaly, talon-like hands on his narrow shoulder and squawked intensely, “Don’t forget. We can’t leave Maple’s spirit tree behind!” The red and blue feathers framing her face flattened down in a way that made her look even more distraught than when they’d been puffed out.
Captain Chestnut took the reptile-bird’s talons gently in his own small paws and said, “I won’t forget. We won’t leave her tree behind, and it’ll be fine for a while longer, even without life support. It’s a tree. It’s sturdier than we are, right?” He nodded encouragingly up at the reptile-bird until she nodded back at him.
“You’re right. Thank you.” The reptile-bird drew her talons away and wrapped her wing-like arms around herself. She went back to pacing the room.
Captain Chestnut stepped all the way through the door, and Captain Carroway was relieved to be able to reengage the force shield and close the door, locking the squirrel’s crew away. The squirrel himself was small enough — and unarmed — that Captain Carroway had no worries about releasing him, alone, onto her ship. She was more than twice his size and still had one paw on the butt of a blazor. Not to mention that she had two more armed officers on the bridge.
The Anti-Ra squirrel would behave himself during their conversation. He had no alternative.
“Captain Carroway,” Captain Chestnut said. “Before we begin discussing anything in depth, perhaps I could get you to do a favor for me?”
“About the spirit tree?” Captain Carroway asked.
“Yes, I grabbed my own tree before we were teleported off of our ship, but…” The golden-mantled squirrel faltered. He didn’t look like the captain of a squad of resistance fighters; he just looked like a man who had lost a friend today. “My crewmate, Maple, was another Arborealist, like me, and none of us had a chance to get to her spirit tree before being teleported away.”
Maple must have been the other squirrel who Captain Carroway had seen on the Anti-Ra bridge, before all the chaos had occurred. The chaos she’d caused by following her orders, by carrying out her mission.
“It’s small, like the tree my Morphican officer is holding, if you noticed it…”
“I did,” Captain Carroway meowed. “It was lovely. And of course, I’ll have one of my officers locate the life signs of your friend’s tree and beam it aboard immediately. Why don’t you wait for me in my quarters while I take care of that?”
The Norwegian Forest cat gestured with a paw at the doors to her quarters. She wasn’t too worried about leaving the golden-mantled squirrel alone in them for a few minutes. He couldn’t get up to too much trouble in that time. And right now, it looked like he simply didn’t have the energy or heart for causing trouble in him. There’d been a gleam in his eye when he’d matched wits with her over the viewscreen, before The Wanderlust has triggered the creation of a black hole. That gleam was gone now. Gone since he’d died, come back to life, and been forced to face the loss of two of his friends.
Captain Chestnut opened the door to Carroway’s quarters and stepped inside, his fluffy reed-like tail dragging behind him.
Captain Carroway took a deep breath to steady herself. Then she walked back to the bridge and explained the situation about the spirit tree to Ensign Lee. The Papillon promised to locate it — which he’d failed to do originally because its life signs were so much smaller than for the crew members of The Last Chance — and teleport it directly to the barracks where Captain Chestnut’s crew was still incarcerated.
With that taken care of, Captain Carroway checked in on Lt. Cmdr. Vossie who was now draped over his computer console, shaking and crying, trying to hide his face behind his long ears out of shame over his lack of emotional control. He turned away from Carroway — even though she was his oldest and closest friend, he didn’t want her to see him like this. He didn’t want anyone to see him like this. He didn’t want to be this way. He wanted his implant back; he wanted it to whisper directly into his brain that everything would be okay, listing precise probabilities for every likely occurrence that might happen in the coming minutes, while releasing soothing hormones into his bloodstream, bathing his brain in the bright, cool, clarity of a properly balanced body.
Captain Carroway reluctantly left Lt. Cmdr. Vossie to his misery, since there didn’t seem to be anything she could do for him right away. And she had other problems to deal with.
“Keep researching the implant,” Carroway said to the white cat who was sitting beside Vossie, clearly already deep in research. Articles streamed across the screen in front of him, reflecting in his clear blue eyes. Then a thought struck Carroway and she added, “There’s a Morphican Anti-Ra officer locked in the second barracks room right now. Maybe he knows something that can help Vossie. He doesn’t have implants, but maybe he knows something useful about them. Or…” She hesitated to say this, because she knew it would only upset Vossie further right now… but it needed to be said. “Maybe he knows something that can help Vossie adjust to… living without his implants. We may be out here for a while… He may need…”
Captain Carroway didn’t finish her sentence. Lt. Cmdr. Vossie had tilted his head to where he could see her between his long ears and was glaring at her even more sharply than the canine Anti-Ra woman had been doing only a few minutes ago.
Captain Carroway was getting the distinct impression that she was stuck on a ship, several galaxies away from home, with a whole crew of people who hated her. Two crews of people who hated her.
Well, maybe not Mr. Melbourne. The white tomcat seemed deeply absorbed in researching Morphican implants. He didn’t seem unhappy. Why would he be? The asteroid where he’d been imprisoned was galaxies away, and right now, he was an integral member of this small crew. He was the only person aboard the ship who was having, arguably, a good day.
Before leaving the bridge, Captain Carroway glanced one more time at Lt. Cmdr. Vossie’s implant, lying on the computer console. The implant was barely even visible now; only a corner of it peeked out of the growing glob of pinky-gray mushroom flesh that kept growing around it. The blog of flesh was the size of a baseball now.
Looking back to Ensign Lee, Captain Carroway said, “You’re the closest thing we have to an expert on The Wanderlust’s mycelial systems. When you’ve finished scanning for nearby resources, I want you to figure out if we can get Vossie’s implant unplugged from this fungal matter without hurting it… or… hurting the ship’s computer.”
With that, Captain Carroway stalked back off of the bridge, tail swishing irritably behind her. She didn’t wait to hear from her officers that they’d follow her orders. She knew they would. She was their captain.
Continue on to Chapter 9…