Voyage of the wanderlust, p.13
Voyage of the Wanderlust, page 13
Captain Carroway wasn’t sure if she imagined it, but it looked like the underside of Ensign Mike’s pinky-gray mushroom cap blushed a brighter shade of pink. When the fungal officer spoke, their mushy voice was low and serious, “Lt. Cmdr. Vossie can count on my complete and absolute discretion. I would never betray his confidences. He can think of anything we shared together as shared with either a therapist, absolutely bound by confidentiality, or...” Somehow the mushroom’s voice got even quieter, like the sound of wind whispering through wet leaves. “...the closest of childhood friends. If there is anything I can do for him, to ease this transition, simply say the word, and I will do it.”
Perhaps, here was another thing that the mushroom and the Norwegian Forest cat could agree upon: they both cherished their connection to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie.
“I will pass your words along,” Captain Carroway meowed, satisfied by the mushroom’s obvious sincerity.
“I would appreciate that.” Ensign Mike nodded their mushroom cap head again, looking oddly shy, like they were afraid of the idea of speaking to Lt. Cmdr. Vossie directly. It must be strange for them to go from sharing the rabbit-like alien’s private thoughts to only seeing him from the outside now, as separated from him as from every other person.
Captain Carroway couldn’t imagine what the mushroom person was feeling, and she didn’t want to. She wanted this day to be over. She wanted to be finished with this weird transition. The ship she was captaining—and the ship’s crew—were strange enough in their own right that she couldn’t deal anymore with the combination of strangeness and liminality inherent to today. The Norwegian Forest cat hoped that when she went to sleep tonight, somehow, the whole ship would settle into the beginnings of a standard routine that would carry them forward, and ideally, carry them all the way home.
Captain Carroway dismissed Ensign Mike from her quarters and then checked in briefly with Commander Chestnut on the bridge who assured her all was going as smoothly as could be hoped for—the memorial services still lingered on between the Anti-Ra officers’ duties, but other than that, everyone was settling into their new shifts and accommodations well. The turtle-like silhouette on the main viewscreen continued to grow and brighten as they approached it, but it was still many hours away.
So, Captain Carroway left Commander Chestnut in charge, and she retired to her room for a quick, much-needed cat nap.
CHAPTER 16
THE SILHOUETTE ON THE VIEWSCREEN
The empty windows, framing nothing but endless dark, haunted Captain Carroway in her fitful dreams. The Norwegian Forest cat had never suffered the vertigo that plagued some officers when they first went on deep space missions, profoundly aware that the metal hull of the spaceship around them was a thin, breakable bubble compared to the unfathomable fathoms of vacuum all around. The stars comforted her. They felt like the bright points at the vertices of a spiderweb where dew collected in the early morning, implying a whole net of cosmic threads stretched around her like a hammock she could sleep inside, gently swaying in an intergalactic breeze.
But there were no stars here. Nothing to catch her as she fell and fell and fell, twisting and twisting, trying to orient herself so she’d land on her feet... if she ever landed.
In her dreams, mycelial threads caught at her like cobwebs, and perverted cartoony versions of her new Anti-Ra officers laughed at her. Vossie’s forehead bled and bled until the growing puddle of blood rose up from the floor and became a whole golem of blood, sloshing and sploshing through the corridors of The Wanderlust.
“What were you thinking?” Lt. Lee barked at her with his pointed muzzle, as his butterfly-like ears flapped away from his head and took flight becoming actual butterflies, still thick and fuzzy. “What were you thinking?” the earless abomination barked at her, over and over again, the rank on his collar upgrading with every bark until the young Papillon was an admiral who outranked her.
Captain Carroway awoke, but Lt. Lee’s voice followed her into consciousness.
“Captain?” the Papillon’s voice barked from the comm-pin on the breast of her uniform, which she’d left discarded on the floor beside her bed while she slept. “Captain? We’re close enough to the... uh... intergalactic spaceship to properly scan it. And I don’t think it’s a spaceship. You should come see it.”
The bleary, half-awake Norwegian Forest cat rubbed at her stinging eyes with a fuzzy paw. Her eyes still wanted to be shut. But she was needed again. She’d never stopped being needed, not really, she’d just slipped away briefly, pretending she could lay down the weight of captaincy. She could never lay down this weight, not so long as her crew was this far from home.
“I’ll be right there,” Captain Carroway meowed, lifting her discarded uniform from its pile on the floor and speaking into the comm-pin. Then she pulled the uniform back on, straightened the tunic, and prepared for returning to the world outside her quarters. Her small bubble of sanctuary and privacy had been pierced and popped, but at least, she was no longer endlessly falling through the void. Well, not literally. Arguably, The Wanderlust was falling through the void, and it was her job to steer it back on course to home.
Drawing a deep breath between her fangs as she stood at the door, Captain Carroway prepared herself. She didn’t feel ready. But that didn’t matter—people were waiting for her. Revelations and new knowledge were waiting for her. Decisions that would need making were waiting for her.
Feeling completely unprepared and incapable of true preparation, Captain Carroway opened the door and stepped through it.
The central corridor of The Wanderlust was quiet, and though Captain Carroway craved a cup of coffee, she made herself head to the bridge first. She would get coffee soon, but first, she needed to check in.
The only officers on the bridge were Lt. Lee, who had been sitting in her captain’s chair and scurried to his feet as soon as she saw her approaching him, and Ensign Risqua at the helm, piloting The Wanderlust in place of Ensign Melbourne. Just a reptile-bird and a dog, alone in this endless night.
Everyone else was probably sleeping, as per the work shifts Captain Carroway and Commander Chestnut had worked out yesterday. Or earlier today, really. Although Captain Carroway had managed a little sleep, it hadn’t been anything like a full night. This was the day that would never end. It just kept expanding and growing and getting bigger and crazier and more complicated, like the black hole Captain Carroway had tried to create.
The Norwegian Forest cat wondered if the baby black hole had continued to exist after the time blip. Part of her hoped it had—then she would have succeeded at her mission. But it was a small part, and shrinking. Because thinking about Ensign Diaz’s bloodcurdling howl of mourning for Wilder? And Ensign Risqua’s careful, fastidious attention to detail about how each and every ornament was arranged on Maple’s spirit tree?
Captain Carroway couldn’t actually hope that she’d succeeded. She didn’t want more people to have died because of her orders. Two was more than enough. Far more than enough. Maple and Wilder—even though Carroway had never met them—would weigh on her conscience forever.
“So, what have we learned about our mysterious intergalactic spaceship?” Captain Carroway meowed, settling into her captain’s seat now that Lt. Lee had vacated it.
The Papillon returned to his normal station off to the side of the bridge. While waiting for an answer from him, Captain Carroway stared at the silhouette. It still looked like a turtle to her. In fact, it looked more like a turtle than ever before. The lumpy protuberance to the end farther away from them was definitely rounded like a head, and the other end tapered off like a tiny pointed tail sticking out from under a great oval shell. The top of the silhouette was rumply and uneven, but the bottom was smooth, and the whole thing glowed ever so gently, mostly from the top side, with a pale green light.
“Like I said before,” Lt. Lee woofed somewhat impatiently, “the readings we’re getting don’t support the notion that it’s a spaceship. There aren’t enough hollow spaces on the inside for any gas breathing species to be living in there. It’s all fluid and organic compounds.”
Captain Carroway tilted her head, angling her view of the silhouette. Whatever she was looking at, it was beautiful. It was big and solid. It was the exact opposite of the empty vacuum everywhere else here. “Perhaps we’re dealing with an aquatic species,” the Norwegian Forest cat suggested. She had mixed feelings about that idea. It would be much harder to communicate and trade with a species that was so different from them. But it would also be fascinating. “Have you read the reports from Captain Pierre Jacques about the time when the starship Initiative made contact with an electric eel-like race? The individual they encountered had traveled a long way. Perhaps they had traveled from the Tetra Galaxy, and this spaceship is from their civilization.”
The Papillon seemed like the kind of eager young officer who would keep up on arcane intelligence like Captain Jacques’ report about the eel-like alien. Regardless, Lt. Lee simply shook his head and woofed again, “I don’t think it’s a spaceship.”
Captain Carroway’s ears skewed, threatening to flatten entirely against her head. She should have taken a minute to get herself a cup of coffee before facing this. But it was too late now. It’d be a whole awkward thing if she stormed off to get coffee in the middle of a conversation. She needed to present a more collected, coherent front than that. “So, what do you think it is?” the irritable Norwegian Forest cat hissed.
To Lt. Lee’s credit, he was unfazed by his captain’s ill temper. “I think it’s actually a turtle.”
At the pilot’s console, Risqua made a tittering sound before recovering her composure. Captain Carroway glanced at the reptile-bird, oddly grateful for the distraction from her own reaction to the Papillon’s statement.
“Excuse me, Lieutenant?” Captain Carroway meowed, feigning to have either not heard or not understood what her subordinate officer had just said.
“Obviously, I don’t mean it’s a literal turtle from earth, uplifted and gigantified or anything,” Lt. Lee said. His own butterfly-like ears skewed as he heard himself say ‘gigantified’ which was definitely not a real word, but in fairness to the Papillon, he hadn’t had a turn sleeping yet and was still living through the longest day of his life so far. “But I do think that the object on our viewscreen is an organic lifeform native to the vacuum of space.”
“One big lifeform?” Captain Carroway asked, still processing how to feel about that information. On one paw, a gigantic space-faring lifeform native to the space between galaxies was an incredible discovery, and the kitten inside her couldn’t believe how amazingly cool such a discovery would be... if that was what they were really seeing here. On the other paw, Captain Carroway didn’t see how a gigantic space turtle was going to help her stranded crew. Would they even be able to communicate with it? At all? It’s not like they could afford to just chase it for months while trying to crack the code of whatever language it might speak, which would probably be far too different from any of the languages Earth animals had encountered before for The Wanderlust’s computer to immediately translate it. They were already taking a risk by going this far out of their way.
Would they have to turn around without even learning anything about this amazing discovery?
Also, what did this mean for what they might find in the midst of the Tetra Galaxy? Captain Carroway had been hoping for—and assuming there would be—civilizations to meet, learn about, and trade with as they traveled. But... what if the Tetra Galaxy was filled with nothing but giant, silent space turtles?
Captain Carroway remembered being a kitten and finding an illustration in a book about old mythologies that showed the Earth, looking like a tiny marble, balanced precariously on the back of a whole stack of turtles. The caption under the illustration had read, “It’s turtles all the way down.” Kitten Carroway had laughed so hard over that picture that she’d fallen over and literally rolled on the floor with laughter. Her mother had come rushing to see what was wrong.
It didn’t seem so funny right now.
Maybe the Tetra Galaxy was just turtles, turtles all the way down.
“Captain?” Lt. Lee woofed. Something in the Papillon’s voice made it sound like it wasn’t the first time he’d woofed it. “Did you hear anything I was saying?”
Captain Carroway’s ears definitely flattened this time. And she realized, she couldn’t afford to do anything other than opt for complete honesty. There wasn’t room aboard such a tiny spaceship for hiding her weaknesses the way she wanted to. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t grab myself a cup of coffee before coming here, and I’m afraid I can’t really wake up properly without it. I know it’s an unusual foible, but the caffeine really does the trick. Let me grab myself a cup, and when I get back, you’ll have my full attention.”
Hopefully, the caffeine would help her focus and keep her mind from wandering to frivolous picture books she’d read as a kitten.
CHAPTER 17
TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN
Captain Carroway took her time in the multi-purpose room, synthesizing herself a cup of coffee. Well, as much as one can take one’s time with doing that. She punched in the order for coffee, then altered the order to make the coffee be hazelnut flavored, then changed it back to normal. As she kept changing the order, before actually synthesizing the drink, Captain Carroway found herself wondering about whether The Wanderlust would need to start conserving energy or supplies during the coming voyage. Could synthesizers run out of the types of raw matter they needed for synthesizing useful things like coffee? If they could, would it be possible to find replacements on planets or asteroids they passed?
Captain Carroway had never studied those aspects of shipboard life. Back in the Milky Way Galaxy, none of it had seemed important. A ship was never too far from a space station that could refurbish it, tune it up, and make sure all its needs were met and then topped off.
Finally, Captain Carroway finished punching in the order—for normal coffee. Perfectly normal coffee. She didn’t need a single other weird thing today, even a special flavor in her drink would be one thing too many. For a moment, she’d thought it would make a nice treat, but she didn’t really want treats right now. She wanted something much harder to come by: normalcy.
With her paws firmly wrapped around the warm, aromatic mug, Captain Carroway worked at pushing questions of conservation out of her mind. That wasn’t the problem at paw right now. And she couldn’t believe that a single cup of coffee more or less right now would make a big difference in the long run.
After a few sips, Captain Carroway’s head felt much clearer and sharper. The first matter of business had to be figuring out what The Wanderlust was dealing with when it came to this turtle-thing. She couldn’t let herself get overwhelmed by questions of what it implied about the Tetra Galaxy. One matter at a time. That was the way to move forward.
“Alright,” Captain Carroway meowed to Lt. Lee, who was looking like a very tired dog, as soon as she stepped back onto the bridge. “Walk me through your findings. Tell me everything you’ve figured out about this big space turtle we’re chasing.” Instead of returning to her captain’s chair, the Norwegian Forest cat stood beside her lieutenant, looking at the station in front of him and all the charts, graphs, lists and other readings flickering over it.
Staring at all that data, suddenly, Captain Carroway realized: she’d never been far enough away from Earth—from home—that Sol wasn’t even a star in the sky, somewhere in the sky.
It wasn’t just that there were no stars in the sky.
That one specific star was gone.
The Norwegian Forest cat shivered, in spite of her thick, fluffy fur.
Captain Carroway struggled to follow all the information as Lt. Lee explained it to her, but it mostly seemed to amount to the fact that the turtle shape was a single giant organism, approximately the size of a small moon. The way it was flying through space apparently created something like a hyperspace slipstream around it, meaning the turtle actually had a small bubble of atmosphere collected over the back of its shell, and readings suggested there might be more lifeforms—though mostly vegetative plant lifeforms—collected on its back. So, it was indeed a world turtle, like Captain Carroway had seen in old mythology books. She wondered if a turtle like this had passed close enough to Earth in the distant past that an astronomer had spotted it, and that’s where the myths had come from.
Also, the whole thing was accelerating away from the Tetra Galaxy, picking up speed as it flew. If they’d arrived a few days later, The Wanderlust would have had no chance of catching up to the mysterious turtle.
“It’s really too bad that it’s heading away from the Milky Way instead of towards it,” Captain Carroway mused. “With the way it’s picking up speed, it could have taken us home much more quickly than we can fly there ourselves.”
“That’s an interesting idea,” Ensign Risqua squawked suddenly, inviting herself into the conversation. “Could we convince the turtle to turn around somehow? Travel in the right direction for us?”
“Is it safe?” Lt. Lee woofed. “I mean, we don’t know hardly anything about it. What if it... I don’t know... eats spaceships? And leading it to the Milky Way would mean mass death and destruction?”
“We need to get closer to it,” Captain Carroway concluded. “So we can gather more information. We simply don’t know enough yet, from this far away.”
“If we could convince the turtle to carry us home,” Ensign Risqua continued, pressing harder on her idea, “then maybe we could spend the trip on its back. The smaller life signs on the back could be trees, right? Trees and other plants? It might be a paradise. I’d rather travel in a paradise garden on the back of a turtle than this cramped little Tri-Galactic Navy ship.”
Captain Carroway caught a flash in Lt. Lee’s eyes that said the Papillon wanted to defend the comfort and quality of The Wanderlust. He’d been working on The Wanderlust—tuning her up, upgrading, and retro-fitting her—for longer than anyone else aboard. But Ensign Risqua had a point. No one actually wanted to live on a small ship like The Wanderlust long term. This ship was built for short missions, not the kind of voyage they were facing now.
