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 entered her quarters to find the golden-mantled squirrel captain carefully examining a framed piece of art on the interior wall. It was a painting of the ship itself, The Wanderlust, flying through a swirling nebula — one that was much more colorful, bright, and appealing than the Dirt Cloud. It was an utterly generic work of art. The kind that starship designers put in a captain’s quarters before the actual captain comes aboard and personalizes their space.
“You haven’t been on this ship long, have you?” Captain Chestnut observed.
“No,” Captain Carroway agreed, trying to keep her tail from lashing too obviously. She didn’t want to broadcast her emotions to this little squirrel.
So many squirrels have a frenetic energy. Almost frantic. As if they’re perpetually in the state of having had one too many cups of coffee and could stay up all night talking to you, weaving their way from one anecdote to the next, never stopping. Captain Chestnut wasn’t like that. He had a steadiness that made Captain Carroway think more of some of the largest dogs she’d met — Newfoundlands, Mastiffs, or St. Bernards — than other squirrels. She found his presence oddly calming, especially considering what she’d done to him and what he must think of her.
That trait must come in useful for him as a captain. It would make it easy to lead. A crew would want to follow him. Captain Carroway supposed that was part of why there were so many more canine captains than feline ones in the Tri-Galactic Union — not because they were necessarily better at leading or making important decisions, but simply because they had a calm, steady way about them. The Norwegian Forest cat found that infuriating, even if it had arguably helped her rise to the rank of commander faster than many other cats, as she was one of the biggest cats around. But physical size — and the way it was perceived by others — had nothing to do with her decision making processes or why she actually did belong in command.
Captain Carroway sat down on a comfortable chair next to a small couch that was situated in front of a wide window looking out on the distressingly starless black expanse of sky surrounding The Wanderlust. She gestured at the couch and said, “Why don’t you sit down, and we can talk about our situation.”
The golden-mantled squirrel sat down on one end of the couch and let his brush of a tail fluff out and take up an entire seat beside him. “Did you have a clever trick up your sleeves for escaping the black hole that you were sent into the Dirt Cloud to create?”
“That is confidential information,” Captain Carroway rumbled unhappily. This wasn’t what she wanted to talk about.
Captain Chestnut smiled at her sadly. “No it isn’t, because you didn’t, did you? It was a suicide mission.”
Captain Carroway’s ears flicked, wanting to flatten, and she shifted uncomfortably. She didn’t know what to say to this Anti-Ra squirrel. She shouldn’t share Tri-Galactic Union secrets with him, but also…
The Tri-Galactic Union sent her to die, and she had no one to talk to about that, except her subordinate officers. And you can’t have the same kind of conversation with someone who depends on you and looks up to you as you can with someone whose life isn’t all tied and tangled up with yours.
Perhaps soon, this squirrel’s life would be tangled up with Captain Carroway’s and the fate of The Wanderlust. But for this brief moment — this liminal moment before anything was figured out and settled — Carroway and Chestnut were both captains, both carrying the responsibility of caring for a ship and crew. They were equals.
“Yes,” Captain Carroway admitted, allowing her ears to flatten after all. “It was a suicide mission. We had no tricks up our sleeves.”
“You were willing to die to destroy the Anti-Ra fleet?” Captain Chestnut pressed, seeming genuinely interested. But when Captain Carroway didn’t answer right away, the squirrel amended his question: “Or maybe, you were willing to die simply to follow your orders? T’lia told me that the Tri-Galactic Union plays head games with its officers, but I had no idea it was that bad.”
Captain Carroway bristled, feeling her fur fluff out just the slightest bit around her neck and shoulders. Her fur was bushy enough that the squirrel probably couldn’t tell. She wanted to defend the Tri-Galactic Union, but the best she could muster was, “I read about the atrocities being committed by the Anti-Ra before taking on this mission.”
The set of the squirrel’s small jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “So you volunteered for a suicide mission? To follow your principles? I guess we have something in common then. I was fighting for my principles too.” His chittering voice hardened as he spoke, ending on a defiant tone. “Except, actually, I was fighting for more than principles. I was fighting for my home.”
The Norwegian Forest cat sighed and settled further back into her chair, feeling very tired. Ever so tired. “Right, so as we already knew, we’re enemies, standing on opposite sides of an unofficial, undeclared, but nonetheless real war.”
Chestnut looked surprised to hear a Tri-Galactic Union officer admit that he was engaged in a war, rather than using a different, more minimizing word for it.
“But right now, that war and your home are more than a galaxy away,” Captain Carroway continued. She didn’t like what she was about to suggest, but she didn’t see any alternative. Four officers was not enough to crew The Wanderlust for weeks or months on end. “Out here, it’s our two crews against the unknown. My navigations officer–” She made a point of referring to Ensign Lee in a way that made it sound like The Wanderlust might have more officers aboard her right now than she actually did. Never mind the fact that Ensign Lee was currently called upon to fill a lot more roles than merely navigations, especially with Lt. Cmdr. Vossie out of commission. “–hasn’t given me an estimate for how long it will take us to get back to the Milky Way Galaxy yet, but it could easily take months.”
“Or longer,” Captain Chestnut agreed grimly. “My navigations officer — Risqua, the one who was reminding me about Maple’s spirit tree — tells me that given some of the obstacles we might run into in the Tetra Galaxy, we should expect traveling back home to take years.”
Captain Carroway didn’t like hearing that at all. “What kind of obstacles does she expect?”
“Apparently one of the spiral arms of the Tetra Galaxy has unusually thick concentrations of space dust and nebula clusters, based on long range observations of it,” the squirrel captain explained. “We may have to fly around those. And of course, that’s not accounting for the possibility that we might run into new and potentially hostile alien empires. We don’t know who is out here.”
“The enemy you know,” Captain Carroway muttered bitterly.
“Indeed,” Captain Chestnut agreed even more bitterly. “So what do we do? I appreciate your ship’s help, but I don’t exactly want to hand my entire crew over into incarceration while you spend years dragging us back to the Tri-Galactic Union for some kind of joke of a trial for daring to defend the Dirt Cloud from ultimate destruction.”
Captain Carroway was about to start breaking Tri-Galactic Union regulations and share more information with her Anti-Ra enemy than would usually be acceptable. But this was an unusual situation, and her choices were to hide information from Chestnut and try to crew The Wanderlust with far too few officers… or to come to some sort of uneasy truce.
“My crew isn’t large enough to fly this ship for years on our own,” Captain Carroway admitted. She didn’t exactly expect Captain Chestnut to look surprised — he’d been far too perceptive so far to have not figured out something was off about her ship — but the look of confirmation in his eyes still took her off guard.
“You need us,” Captain Chestnut chittered.
Captain Carroway was a cat, and her pride wouldn’t allow her to straightforwardly agree with the squirrel’s assessment. She did not want to need a squirrel and his ragtag group of terrorists. But she did. “We’re all heading in the same direction. We may as well travel together, especially given the state of your ship.” She couldn’t resist baiting the squirrel. Her pride was damaged, so she wanted to damage his.
Captain Chestnut didn’t fall for Carroway’s barbed comment though. He simply said, “It will be challenging blending our crews.”
The idea of blending her crew with a group of terrorists was a hard concept to swallow for Captain Carroway. But her crew was already one quarter paroled criminals and one quarter completely incapacitated by injury. So, she didn’t have a lot of choice. “This is still my ship,” she insisted.
“Alright,” the squirrel agreed, “But my crew isn’t going to blindly follow your commands like some brainwashed Tri-Galactic Union crew.”
“They follow your orders well enough,” Captain Carroway observed.
“True.” The golden-mantled squirrel had the audacity to look smug. “So, what should we do about that?”
Captain Carroway could feel the shape of her life turning around these moments, hashing out an agreement with this rebel squirrel. But then, after that space-time blip, her life already kind of felt like a waking dream. Why not make it even more surreal?
“Here’s my offer,” the Norwegian Forest cat said, perking her ears tall and leaning forward. “We integrate our two crews. I’ll stay captain, but you can be my first officer.” Would she be making this offer if he weren’t such a handsome, steady, likable, and unthreateningly-small squirrel man? Captain Carroway couldn’t be sure. But she simply didn’t see another way forward. “I’ll grant temporary Tri-Galactic Union ranks to you and the rest of your officers, and when we get back home, I’ll give each of you a choice: apply to the Tri-Galactic Union based on your record of service during our journey or be dropped off at a neutral site before The Wanderlust reports in.”
“If my crew had wanted to be part of the Tri-Galactic Union, they wouldn’t have been on my ship in the first place,” Captain Chestnut chittered. But he kept glancing over his shoulder at the great empty expanse behind him. Surrounding them. No stars. Only darkness.
Captain Carroway shrugged. “Then you all get dropped off on a neutral planet or space station of your choice along the way home, and you disappear back to your old lives, as well as you can after our prolonged absence.”
“Promise?” Captain Chestnut asked, his tiny ears flicking nervously, causing all his earrings to jangle.
Captain Carroway stuck out a paw. “I promise.”
The squirrel took her much larger paw in his, and they shook on their unusual deal.
“I hope you realize, I’m making the much bigger concession here,” Captain Chestnut said. Except, he wasn’t really a captain anymore. He was Captain Carroway’s first officer.
“I do,” Captain Carroway meowed. “And I understand that this will be a significant adjustment for your crew. Mine as well. We’re all going to have a lot of work to do, if we want to make it home without tearing ourselves apart.”
“I suppose we will,” Commander Chestnut agreed.
Captain Carroway stared intently at the small squirrel and realized how profoundly lucky she was that he was this easy to work with. Maybe he was secretly planning rebellion and mutiny… but she didn’t think so. She thought he understood how precarious his situation was. And she thought, he needed her and her crew too. They needed each other.
Continue on to Chapter 10…