“It’s an interesting idea, Ensign Risqua,” Captain Carroway conceded, hoping to cut off Lt. Lee’s desire for an argument. “But we still need to learn more.”

  Then sizing up the Papillon, noting the redness in his eyes and the greasiness of the long fur around his pretty ears, Captain Carroway asked, “When does your shift end, Lt. Lee? I’m guessing soon?”

  The Papillon nodded, suddenly looking even more tired, as if Captain Carroway’s question had finally given him permission to admit his own tiredness to himself. “Ensign Melbourne will be replacing Ensign Risqua at the helm soon, and then Risqua is supposed to take over my post until Ensign Diaz’s shift begins.”

  Captain Carroway nodded. She’d made sure to arrange the shifts so that The Wanderlust wouldn’t be entirely run by former Anti-Ra officers for as long as possible. Eventually, with such a small crew, it would be inevitable that they’d end up with only Anti-Ra officers on the bridge at some point, but Captain Carroway wanted to put it off until the crew had melded together more thoroughly. She’d tried not to be too obvious about what she was doing while arranging the schedule with Commander Chestnut and Ensign Diaz, but they were both sharp officers. Captain Carroway had no doubt they’d seen right through her ruse about wanting officers from the different crews to get to know each other better and understood exactly why she didn’t want the bridge run by only Anti-Ra yet. She didn’t fully trust them. How could she? They’d just met, and their organizations didn’t share any of the same foundational principles.

  Fortunately, Commander Chestnut had been cooperative. That squirrel was a good egg.

  Over the following hours, officers came and went, their short shifts meaning they could rotate on and off of the bridge, taking time in the multi-purpose room to eat and chat, getting to know one and another. Captain Carroway listened, but she tried to look like she wasn’t listening. She tried to look like she was deep in thought, musing over their options and her plans for the days to come. In actuality though, she was listening for signs of trouble, seeds that might grow into full grown problems between officers, or anything among her crew that needed looking into.

  Captain Carroway wasn’t an expert on interpersonal relationships, but she’d had to learn how to pay attention to the officers around her in order to work her way as high through the ranks as she had. And so far as she could tell, the assortment of crew members who’d been thrown together on The Wanderlust for this fateful voyage was a remarkably lucky mix. She could picture true friendships developing out here in the wilds of the Tetra Galaxy before they all managed to make it home. That said, she could also tell that her subordinate officers were all going to start getting pretty twitchy if The Wanderlust didn’t start flying in the right direction to take them home pretty soon. There was only so far she could stretch their patience before people started to snap.

  It was bad enough being a long way from home. It was even worse that they were heading in the wrong direction.

  And yet...

  The turtle on the viewscreen was growing brighter by the minute now. The rumpled, crenellated quality to its back had started to look like treetops—a whole forest spread from one edge to the other of turtle’s back, and the trees glowed. Phosphorescent green. It must be beautiful underneath them, looking up at a sky filled with shining leaves, fluttering in the breeze, capping off the ceiling of a traveling world.

  How far had this turtle traveled? How far did it still have to go?

  Was it going somewhere specific? Or just migrating across the universe, seeing where the tides of the stars took it?

  Captain Carroway couldn’t imagine a more beautiful existence than that. The uplifted cats, dogs, squirrels and such of Earth had needed to build rockets and a space elevator to escape the gravity of their world, and then they’d needed to design crafts capable of supporting them while traveling between stars before they’d been able to truly explore. Anyone who lived on this turtle would be born an explorer, always exploring, because their very world was designed to carry them across galaxies and from one galaxy to the next.

  Captain Carroway hoped fervently that someone lived on the back of this turtle. It would be such a shame, such a waste if no one did.

  On the bridge, where the officers would come and go, the viewscreen was now almost entirely filled by a turtle shell. Captain Carroway stared at it with her green eyes as if by focusing hard enough, she could make sense of the entire universe—from the suicide mission she’d been sent on to the chaos she was now trying to crystallize into a single crew, bound together by a single mission. A better mission. Because taking her crew members home was a much more wholesome purpose than the one some random admiral had saddled her with when she’d been given this post on The Wanderlust.

  Somehow, it felt like Captain Carroway had been called here, like the turtle had pulled her across the universe. It didn’t make sense. But she couldn’t let the idea go.

  “It’s nice to have something on our viewscreen other than the endless darkness between galaxies,” Captain Carroway observed, trying to lighten the mood on the bridge.

  Ensign Diaz at the helm post resolutely refused to turn her head and acknowledge the captain’s unearned optimism in any way. The set of the canine’s broad shoulders, though, seemed to slump a little more, like she found the captain’s positivity in such a dire situation exhausting.

  Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, who was back at his original post, looking a bit shaky and worse for wear observed, “If we were flying toward the Tetra Galaxy instead of away from it, then we’d have a glittering expanse of stars for you to look at. There are stars out here, captain, they’re just not in the direction you’ve been looking.”

  It hurt for Captain Carroway’s best friend to make a point of using his considerable skills at snarkiness against her. She would have liked to have his support in the choices she was making for The Wanderlust, but she had to remember that he was still suffering from the loss of his computer implant. Though, if Mike’s personality was anything to judge the implant by, Captain Carroway couldn’t imagine how it had been helpful for Lt. Cmdr. Vossie to always have the thing whispering straight into his brain. She’d barely been able to stand being in the same room with Ensign Mike, let alone imagining what it would be like to share the same head.

  At some level, Captain Carroway knew she was being unfair to the fungal officer, holding things against them that weren’t exactly their fault. They wouldn’t have chosen to hurt Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, leaving him shaken and struggling, if they’d had a choice. At least, Captain Carroway didn’t think so.

  But part of her wondered. The same part that feared Commander Chestnut had been being so nice because he was trying to lull her into complacency. The same part that assumed Lt. Lee would turn on her as soon as he had a chance, because she wasn’t living up to being the kind of Tri-Galactic Union captain such a skilled and ambitious young officer deserved. The part of her that figured this would all end with everyone except her and—somehow—Ensign Melbourne dead, and the two of them would wind up back on that mining asteroid where he’d been incarcerated. Just two jail birds. Who happened to be cats. Jail cats. Reminiscing about how they’d gotten everyone else dead.

  At least, Captain Carroway was sure that the white tomcat would be able to turn all of this into a funny story for his former jail mates somehow. She wasn’t sure how, but she was sure he could do it. She had faith in his storytelling skills.

  Maybe it was because the Norwegian Forest cat’s outlook had gotten so dim and gloomy or maybe it would have happened at that moment either way, but Captain Carroway suddenly spotted movement over the far horizon of the turtle’s shell. Dark, dart-like objects whisked past the crenellated forest top, blocking the green light from below, zipping and zooming in a very familiar, very spaceship-like way.

  “What is that movement?” Captain Carroway meowed, pointing at the viewscreen. “Can you get any readings on those things? Scan them, please, Ensign Diaz,” the Norwegian Forest cat ordered.

  For a moment, the captain’s heart filled with hope: there really were spacefaring people living on the back of this turtle! Then she saw the black ships fire on the forest, red energy beams blasting at the treetops, causing the trees to burst into flame. The glowing green trees began glowing even more brightly, more redly, more horribly. Instead of the gentle glow of phosphorescence, this was the horrible glow of destruction.

  Captain Carroway didn’t know what to think. But Ensign Diaz did. The canine snapped, “We need to get out of here!” The Xolo-Lupinian whirled around in her pilot’s seat until she could face her captain. “Those ships could attack us,” Ensign Diaz snarled.

  But the canine didn’t lay in a course away from the turtle. Her brown eyes flashed with anger, but she didn’t take the situation into her own paws. She looked to her superior officer for orders—even though the ranking officer on the bridge at that moment was Captain Carroway and not Commander Chestnut—and that fact warmed the Norwegian Forest cat’s heart. It was only their first day as a blended crew, and the plan was already working.

  “No,” Captain Carroway meowed evenly, firmly. “We can’t leave. There’s too much to be gained here. Besides, the turtle might need our help.”

  “Or the turtle might be dangerous! We don’t know what’s going on here, and we don’t want to get caught in the middle of a conflict we don’t understand!” Ensign Diaz looked furious, but she was arguing instead of disobeying.

  “Then we need to try to understand it.” Captain Carroway’s ears flattened, and she didn’t try to stop them. She wanted Ensign Diaz to see her anger—and that she was controlling it. Turning toward Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, the Norwegian Forest cat asked, “Are those ships a threat to us?” They looked small from this distance, but even a small ship can be well-armed. The Wanderlust was proof enough of that.

  “Most definitely,” the rabbit-like alien announced after looking over the readings on his control panel. He looked surprisingly calm about the situation. It almost seemed like the presence of a clear and present danger was soothing his nerves—now that he knew where the danger was, and it was outside of his body, outside of his ship, he could handle it. Sometimes, the dangers that we only imagine are the scariest ones of all.

  “Can you get a reading on how many of those ships there are?” Captain Carroway kept trying to count, but it was difficult to keep track of the fast-moving vessels, small and silhouetted as they were.

  “The Wanderlust’s scanners are tracking six vessels attacking the turtle right now,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie stated. “Though, I can’t guarantee there aren’t others still hidden or out of range of our sensors.”

  “But they haven’t seen us yet?” Captain Carroway pressed.

  “Extremely unlikely,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie agreed. “They’re closer to the turtle than us—close enough that the hyperspatial slipstream should be interfering with their sensors and obscuring us from view. So, it’s not impossible that they’d notice us, but they’d have to look in exactly the right direction. I can’t tell you the exact probability of that...” The rabbit-like alien’s ears flagged, and his voice faltered. “Perhaps, if you wanted an exact probability, we could get Ensign Mike on the bridge to tell you one.”

  “That’s alright,” Captain Carroway meowed. “Unlikely is good enough for me.”

  Ensign Diaz snorted derisively and woofed, “Then maybe you should have higher standards. We’re being hailed.”

  CHAPTER 18

  FIRST CONTACT

  Captain Carroway’s heart skipped a beat. At least, it felt that way to her.

  They were being hailed. By aliens from another galaxy.

  The Tri-Galactic Union may have tried to throw her away on a suicide mission, but they had failed. She was on the far side of the cosmos, about to make first contact with aliens from the Tetra Galaxy. Answering this hail was possibly the most important thing that any captain in the Tri-Galactic Union had ever done. Or any officer. Or any uplifted animal from Earth. And she was ready for it. She would prove all the dogs who’d tried to hold her down, all the superior officers who’d tried to hold her back wrong. She would be immortalized in history books, remembered forever as the first cat to talk to someone from the Tetra Galaxy.

  Never mind that The Wanderlust would need to find a way home for any of this to be remembered... They would find a way. And when they got home, holy fishcakes, would she be vindicated.

  Captain Carroway straightened her tunic, smoothed down the long fur that always escaped around her collar in fluffy wisps, and stood taller than she had in days. Then she meowed, “Answer the hail, put it on the main viewscreen.”

  Ensign Diaz glared with wide-set eyes at her captain for a long moment. The canine didn’t look like a normal Tri-Galactic Union officer with her necklace of reeds worn over her uniform and the ornate facial tattoo of red-dyed fur on one side of her face. None of that was regulation. Of course, neither were all the gold earrings that lined the sides of Commander Chestnut’s round ears. But Captain Carroway hadn’t thought it would win many points with the Anti-Ra side of her crew to insist on following strict regulations out here in the middle of nowhere. The Norwegian Forest cat was starting to question the wisdom of that choice though. Maybe if she’d tried to hold a tighter reign while beginning the integration of the crew yesterday, she wouldn’t be facing so much defiance from Ensign Diaz today.

  But then the canine turned back toward the main viewscreen and barked sharply, “Yes, Captain.”

  The beautiful forested back of the giant space turtle disappeared from the main viewscreen and was replaced by a new image that twisted and distorted at first, while The Wanderlust’s computers worked to translate the foreign video encoding, but soon snapped into place. The new image wasn’t anything that Captain Carroway would have expected. She’d expected something truly alien and surprising, something hard to interpret or understand. Instead, she found herself looking at the pointy, pinched face of a fuzzy, brown, mammalian alien with prickly quills poking out all around his face. The quills looked like they covered his whole back, and many of them had small colorful objects stuck onto their ends, giving the creature a cluttered look, a bit like a pin cushion or some kind of half-finished craft.

  Overall, the alien looked a lot like an Earthen hedgehog might look if they’d ever been uplifted. He twitched his nose and spoke in a high-pitched voice, but The Wanderlust’s computers hadn’t figured out how to translate the alien’s words yet.

  The alien spoke quickly, jabbering away with only the occasional break in his stream of words. The words sounded urgent, but also, completely indistinguishable for people from another galaxy who simply didn’t know the language.

  “How long will it take for the computer’s algorithms to work out the language this creature is speaking?” Captain Carroway asked. The sound of her words interrupted the alien’s flow, and she found herself staring at an alien hedgehog in silence. The alien’s stare was quite intense, like he really, really wanted something from Captain Carroway and The Wanderlust.

  “Longer now that the creature has stopped talking,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie observed drily. “It would help if you could get them speaking again.”

  Captain Carroway sighed deeply, and her shoulders slumped forward. She’d felt moments away from the greatest discovery of her time, and now, she was trying to get a jabbering hedgehog covered in baubles to keep talking. She shouldn’t be disappointed. This creature was still a member of a spacefaring alien race from an entirely different galaxy who might have invaluable information to share with them. And this was still a case of first contact. But it no longer felt quite as momentous.

  Speaking slowly and clearly, even though she knew it would make no difference before the computer figured out a translation algorithm, Captain Carroway meowed, “Please, keeping talking so our computer can learn your language.”

  The alien hedgehog on the viewscreen blinked its beady eyes, and for a moment, Captain Carroway thought she’d have to try a different strategy. But then he opened his pointy muzzle and began jabbering again, even more hurriedly.

  Speaking lowly so as to hopefully not interrupt the hedgehog’s flow again, Captain Carroway asked Lt. Cmdr. Vossie, “Does it matter that they’re talking so quickly?”

  “No,” the Morphican answered slowly, analyzing the data streaming across their console. “I think it’s a good thing, actually. It means more data, more quickly for the computer to process.”

  Captain Carroway nodded, keeping her eyes on the hedgehog who was continuing to stare at her just as intensely. However, her ears twisted and turned, hearing sounds at the back of the bridge—shuffling footsteps, whispered words that she couldn’t quite make out. Word of this first contact must have spread to the rest of the crew, and on such a small ship, that meant she suddenly had an audience that might well include absolutely everyone aboard. And of course, even if an officer or two wasn’t crowded at the back of the bridge watching, whatever happened here would be common knowledge and shared with anyone who missed it.

  Knowing she was being watched actually made Captain Carroway feel oddly better. She’d wanted to be in the eyes of history. And maybe, right now, that only meant a meager half-dozen or so people, but it was all of the people from her galaxy who were out here. Suddenly, what she was doing felt important again. Her tail lashed excitedly, and her ears stood tall.

  The Norwegian Forest cat was more than ready for it when The Wanderlust’s translation algorithms suddenly kicked in, and the hedgehog alien on her viewscreen said, “Help us, you have to help us, please, oh please, I’ve already done everything I can, but there’s no one else out here, and we don’t have any weapons to protect us! You have to help me protect these people! The Ollallans are a beautiful, peaceful race, and I can’t stand to see them being hurt like this!”

 

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