Deep Sky Anchor

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.

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Sojourner burst out of the ocean first, splashing the blue-and-green algae-laced water aside.  The Wanderlust followed, emerging from the alien ocean into the clear atmosphere of a world with a pale yellow sky.  The turtle and ship continued flying and growing, upward toward the yellow sky, carried by the last dregs of their momentum from the exploded asteroid base just far enough to coast into orbit above this random world in the Tetra Galaxy.

“Of all the places to end up,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie observed pedantically, “a habitable planet was quite unlikely.” Continue reading “Discovery of the Wanderlust – Chapter 23: Regrouping”

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.

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All eyes on the bridge turned from the viewscreen — as fascinating as Sojourner’s fight with the outsized tardigrade was — toward Lys, since everyone knew the caterpillar had the best chance of understanding what was going on.  Lt. Diaz expected the caterpillar to be doubled over, her squiggle of a body bent into the shape of a hook, as she wrestled with overwhelming feelings of fear or anger.  Any kind of emotion that would make sense during a fight.  But that wasn’t what the Xolo-Lupinian saw.

Lys looked blissfully, peacefully happy.

“What the hell is going on?” Captain Carroway yeowled at the caterpillar. Continue reading “Discovery of the Wanderlust – Chapter 22: Large Friends in Small Places and Small Friends in Large Places”

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.

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During their time traveling at the nearly quantum level, the Wayfarer’s child had learned how to fly close enough to the Wanderlust to share her hyperspatial slipstream without having to cling to the ship with her flippers.  She had also chosen herself a gender and with a little help from Lys, a name:  Sojourner.

When Lys passed along the message to Sojourner that it was time to get large again, the baby world turtle was excited.  She’d found the fizzy frothing of Hawking radiation tickly against the underside of her shell where it was softer, and she looked forward to the universe returning to a scale she could more easily understand. Continue reading “Discovery of the Wanderlust – Chapter 21: Several Sizes Up”

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.

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Regardless of the captain’s orders or their stations, all of the crew onboard the Wanderlust had gravitated to the bridge by now to watch the main viewscreen with openmouthed awe.  Many a muzzle gaped at the fizzing, crackling static on the viewscreen.  It didn’t look like the emptiness of space.  It looked like they’d broken open the universe and found pop rocks fizzling in soda pop under the veneer.

“What are we looking at here, Captain?” Korvax asked, his squeaky voice unusually low and sedate.  The gravity of their situation, the sheer bizarreness of it all seemed to have subdued him.  Though, his pointy snout kept twitching, and his prickles stood out more than usual. Continue reading “Discovery of the Wanderlust – Chapter 20: The Sudsy Fabric of Space”

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.

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The Wanderlust sped away at an unthinkable speed, so far beyond the speed of light that ancient human physicists who’d had epiphanies caused by falling apples would have never believed it possible.  They flew away with a large turtle riding piggyback on them.  They left the binary star system and the planet where Risqua was now stranded far behind in the blink of an eye.  Down on the planet’s surface, the traitorous reptile-bird was watching the sky, and she saw the asteroid base explode, or rather it began as an explosion, but after the fiery beginnings breached the base’s containment systems, the entire craggy, asteroid-like moon quickly crunched in on itself, filling the hollow space inside. Continue reading “Discovery of the Wanderlust – Chapter 19: Without a Goodbye”

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.

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The baby world-turtle and the Tri-Galactic Union spaceship flew towards each other, each shrinking, becoming smaller targets for the Zakonraptor vessels pursuing them.  The Waykeeper’s child’s hyperspatial slipstream shrank in proportion with their body, but also, the ship and tortoise flew closer and closer, making up the difference.  Like in Zeno’s famous paradox, they halved the distance between them, over and over, never quite reaching the other.

All around them, the asteroid base seemed to grow and grow like Wonderland after Alice tasted the mushroom.  Except, of all the beings aboard the Wanderlust, their fungal officer — currently busy playing custodian to a lot of potted plants — probably had the least to do with this particular wild adventure. Continue reading “Discovery of the Wanderlust – Chapter 18: The Strangest Dance”

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.

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The Waykeeper’s child agreed to the plan as soon as Lys passed it along; in fact, they agreed so fast that the newly-hatched creature couldn’t possibly really understand what they were agreeing to, which caused Captain Carroway to make a much bigger deal about Lys explaining and re-explaining the whole situation and all the possible dangers involved far more thoroughly than would’ve been necessary if the baby world-turtle had just taken a little longer with their response.  Or if Lys had passed their consent along with a slightly longer hesitation preceding it, Lt. Diaz thought rather cynically. Continue reading “Discovery of the Wanderlust – Chapter 17: Shrinking”

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.

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Lt. Diaz chased after Captain Carroway as the Norwegian Forest cat strutted down the central corridor of the Wanderlust toward the bridge.  A dog chasing a cat.  Tale as old as time.  Except this time, the dog really wanted to know what in the world the cat could possibly be thinking.  The dog didn’t just want to catch the cat; she wanted to change her mind.

Captain Carroway’s tufted ears flicked just enough as she walked to show that she could hear Lt. Diaz following her, but she didn’t stop.  She strutted all the way to the bridge and took her seat in the captain’s chair, paws immediately working the control panel in the arm to pull up status readings about the state of various systems on the ship.  So even though she only beat Lt. Diaz to the bridge by about three strides, the Norwegian Forest cat already managed to look busy and like the Xolo-Lupinian was interrupting her. Continue reading “Discovery of the Wanderlust – Chapter 16: Convincing a Cat”

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.

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The idea of anti-noise defrag couplers may have been completely fake, something that the two dogs had invented as a way to trick the Zakonraptors into letting them steal the device used for shrinking all those poor, hapless creatures to a microscopic scale, but Lt. Lee really did have an idea for how to make it work better.  If the creatures — or anything else one might want to shrink — were encased in a hyperspatial slipstream, then the folds of that field would protect anything within them from the natural decay that happened when they came into contact with matter still obeying the normal laws of physics.  It wasn’t a permanent solution, as hyperspatial slipstreams require a great deal of energy to sustain.  However, if one could shrink an object like, say, a spaceship, even for only a short time, then it would be possible to apply an external force to that object and — because of its effectively lowered mass — propel it as a much higher velocity than would otherwise be possible. Continue reading “Discovery of the Wanderlust – Chapter 15: A Question of Scale”

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.

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While Lt. Diaz had been arguing with Risqua, making sure the reptile-bird understood her place in their little hierarchy, Lt. Lee had been turning his understanding of the Zakonraptor research — illuminated in new ways by Lt. Diaz’s perspective — over and over in their shared mind space, and he was pretty sure he knew what they needed to do.

It was a ridiculous plan.

But if it worked — and it might work — then it might actually get them a lot closer to home. Continue reading “Discovery of the Wanderlust – Chapter 14: Ridiculous Plans are Better than No Plans”