Voyage of the Dogs

by Greg Van Eekhout

  He gave the Rover a burst to spin it around so the exposed battery compartment faced Roro.

  “Plug,” he code-barked.

  He had to bark it three more times before Roro understood what he was telling her to do.

  Slowly, sluggishly, she disconnected the power line from her own battery and plugged it into the Rover’s battery.

  “Heater working?” he code-barked.

  “Yes,” Roro said. “I can feel it.” He could hear the relief in her voice.

  Lopside hooked the claw through the loop on the back of Roro’s suit. He told her to hold still and get ready, and with a good, strong burst of propellant, they lifted off from the crater, into a black sky filled with a tumult of asteroids.

  All he had to do was drag Roro back to the dome.

  Assuming he could even find the dome again.

  And avoid collisions with asteroids.

  And do it while sharing precious battery power.

  “Lopside, if your battery drops below fifty percent, unhook me.” Her voice was still weak and whispery. She was spending a lot of effort to get all the words out.

  Lopside didn’t tell her his battery was already down to thirty percent. Maybe disobeying her made him a bad dog. But he hadn’t come all this way just to abandon her.

  “Pack members stay together,” he barked back at Roro.

  She said nothing. Maybe she’d fallen asleep or unconscious.

  He gave the Rover another burst and set out into the wide open.

  Twenty-Two

  LOPSIDE AIMED TOWARD THE GREAT, whale-shaped asteroid drifting between him and the dome.

  He hadn’t had contact with his pack in hours. It was just him in the Rover, dragging Roro with one claw arm and the lifepod’s singularity core containment unit with another. The slender battery cable drained power from the Rover and fed it to Roro’s suit.

  Roro wasn’t saying much.

  Lopside would ask her condition in barked Morse code, and she would mumble something he couldn’t make out.

  He didn’t think it was a technical issue. Judging by the Rover’s battery meter, her suit was getting enough power to keep her environmental controls operating. She should be warm enough in there.

  By contrast, giving the Rover’s power to her suit meant that Lopside was getting colder. His paw pads ached, and his breath fogged the tool compartment’s windows.

  “Keep a steady course,” he told himself. Eventually the whale asteroid would pass and then he’d be able to contact the dome again.

  All he had to do was keep going for the whale.

  And stay awake.

  The colder he got, the harder that was.

  “Roro,” he code-barked. “Story. Tell.”

  “Story?” she croaked.

  “Affirmative. Tell me story. About dog.”

  He wanted to keep Roro conscious and talking so she didn’t slip away and never come back. He wanted to keep his mind occupied on something other than the cold and the distance. And he needed courage.

  “Please,” he code-barked.

  After nothing but silence, Lopside thought Roro had lost consciousness. But then, “There was a small dog,” she began. Her voice sounded so far away that Lopside looked behind him to make sure she was still attached to the Rover. “A small dog who only knew his past and his present. And neither of those were very good. A family who didn’t take care of him. A tree to stand next to in a rainstorm.”

  Lopside had an idea where this story was going, but he didn’t interrupt. He wanted to hear it.

  “You should have seen him,” Roro went on. “All drooped over, his ears limp, a mess of wet fuzz. So sad and so adorable. He was scared and cold and miserable. But not broken. He had spirit. He had hope. All he needed was warmth and food and love. All he needed was a chance for a future that he could have never imagined. Most of the people at Space Operations didn’t see why anyone would recruit him for the Barkonauts program. He was too small. Too rough. Not a purebred. But one person knew better. She knew all he needed was a chance to learn and train with some of the best dogs in the world. A chance to travel into space. To travel faster and farther than any dog in the whole history of dogs. A chance to prove how strong he was, by surviving catastrophe after catastrophe. A chance to show how brave he was, by venturing into an asteroid field and rescuing one silly human being.”

  Despite the bone-crushing chill in the Rover, Lopside felt warm. Or maybe not warm. It was too cold to even imagine warmth. But there was light. It was just a tiny pinpoint, like a distant star that held out promise. He needed to hold on to that spark.

  He had to be the best dog he could be.

  Like Bobbie, who walked longer and farther than should have been possible.

  Like Barry, the Saint Bernard who brought hikers back from avalanches.

  Like Bug, the stubbornest dog he’d ever met.

  Like Champion, who’d risked her life to drag food into the dome so the pack wouldn’t starve.

  Like Daisy, who basically just rolled around on the floor a lot but could make a splint with her strong teeth and jaws.

  Like Lopside, who would not let Roro die.

  He had to be a good dog.

  Twenty-Three

  LOPSIDE WAS ONLY HALF-AWAKE WHEN he heard someone barking in his ear.

  He shook his sluggish head.

  “Rover, this is Laika dome. Do you read?”

  A pause.

  “Lopside, this is Champion. Do you read?”

  Her barking sounded both urgent and exhausted at the same time. How long had Lopside been asleep? How long had Champion been calling for him?

  “Dome. I read you.”

  Celebratory barks and yips over the radio filled the Rover’s compartment. He also heard Champion’s sharp bark telling Bug and Daisy to shut up.

  “What’s your condition, Lopside?”

  Good question. He could see nothing out of the Rover’s window, just the damp film of his own breath. His battery was down to less than three percent. And he only had enough propellant for one or two more bursts. But that wasn’t his biggest concern.

  “Roro?” he barked.

  “Mmm?”

  Good. At least she was still alive.

  Lopside reported everything to Champion. Then he asked, “How far off course am I?”

  It was Bug who answered: “You’re pointed the wrong way, but you’re only about one-third of a mile outside the secondary airlock. Bobbie the Wonder Dog couldn’t have done better. Stand by for directions.”

  Bug instructed Lopside to give the Rover a tiny burst to rotate it so that when he gave the final burst, one that would use up the very last of the Rover’s propellant, he would glide into the airlock.

  If Lopside made a mistake, or Bug made a mistake, he would sail right past the dome, and he would keep going, and there would be nothing left to do but bark some long good-byes as his battery drained to nothing and he and Roro froze to death.

  But he discovered he wasn’t afraid.

  He wouldn’t make a mistake.

  Neither would Bug.

  He trusted himself, and he trusted his pack.

  Stretching his neck, he brought his nose right up to the nozzle control.

  “Okay,” Bug said. “You’re good. Pull the trigger.”

  “Affirmative,” Lopside said. “We’re coming home.”

  Twenty-Four

  LOPSIDE AND RORO WERE GREETED by invasive sniffs and lapping tongues and wagging tails and out-of-control yips and barks and panting. Roro removed her helmet, moving her arms slowly, as if they weighed a hundred pounds each, and though tears fell from her half-closed eyes, she smiled.

  “My dogs,” she said over and over. “My good, good dogs.”

  They had a million questions for her.

  What had happened to the lifepod?

  Where was the rest of the crew?

  How had she survived, and how long had she spent on the surface of the asteroid?

  But it was Da
isy who put a stop to it.

  “She needs rest,” she barked, and the way she said it left no room for argument. Letting Roro lean on her, Daisy led her away from the airlock and told her to lie down on the Barkonauts’ tarp.

  While Daisy brought Roro a mix of water, ERPs, and electrolytes from the medical supplies, Champion nudged Lopside away. When they were far enough from the pack that they could talk in private, Champion said, “We need to know.”

  Lopside glanced over to Roro, slumped up against a watchful Daisy.

  “She’s still very weak,” Lopside said. “Can’t it wait?”

  “We’ve already waited. We should ask her now.”

  Champion wasn’t using any of her dominating postures or gestures. She didn’t have to. She was right, and Lopside knew it.

  “Ask me what?” Roro said. Grimacing, she raised herself on her elbows.

  The dogs slunk over to her. They felt guilty for talking about her behind her back. But Lopside gave her a direct, challenging gaze.

  “Ask me what?” she said again.

  “We need to know why you left us,” Lopside said. “Why you and the crew evacuated the Laika. Why you abandoned us.”

  Roro lay back down. She covered her eyes with her forearm, as if the minimal light from the overhead lamp was too bright.

  “Of course you’re wondering about that,” Roro said. “Who could blame you for thinking you were left to die? Oh, my lovely dogs. Oh, you poor things.”

  She took a sip of water and closed her eyes a moment. Gathering her strength, or gathering her courage?

  “We were in the arrival preparation stage for reaching HD 24040” she began. “The automatic systems brought us—by ‘us,’ I mean the human crew—out of hibernation. The Laika was exactly where she was supposed to be, right on the edge of the planetary system, and running perfectly. We had started to bring you dogs out of hibernation.

  “And then . . .” She closed her eyes for so long Lopside thought she’d fallen asleep, but she opened them and continued. “I felt a great shudder and a whoosh of air. You know what that means. Something had breached the hull. A meteoroid. It became clear pretty quickly that the Laika was fatally damaged, and Commander Lin gave the order: Abandon ship.”

  Her voice shuddered, and Lopside almost called a stop to this. It wasn’t just the telling of the story that was costing her, but the story itself. She took another sip of water and continued.

  “I can’t blame the commander. His job was to fulfill the mission and protect the crew. He knew better than anyone that the ship and the mission were lost, so he kept to his orders: Save the crew. We were all supposed to board the lifepod and try to limp the rest of the way to Stepping Stone.”

  “But without us,” Champion said.

  “You know coming out of hibernation takes hours,” Roro said. “Do it too quickly, and the subject goes into shock and dies. And the hibernation beds are completely integrated into the ship systems. We couldn’t take them with us. The commander felt he had to leave you behind. He didn’t have much choice.”

  She closed her eyes again. When she opened them, Lopside saw a steely resolve.

  “I disobeyed orders. Because . . . I just couldn’t.” Her voice thickened, and her eyes glistened. “I couldn’t leave you by yourselves. I had to try. Instead of boarding the lifepod, I grabbed a survival suit and a tank of emergency repair foam and headed for the airlock. As I exited the ship, I watched the lifepod accelerate away from the Laika.”

  “You stayed behind and sealed the breach,” Lopside said. “I saw it the first time I went out in the Rover to fix the communications antenna.”

  Roro swallowed and wiped her eyes. “Yes.”

  “But why didn’t you come back inside the ship?”

  “Commander Lin sent out a grappling drone. It grabbed me and reeled me in. I begged him to leave me behind, to let me get back inside the Laika. I knew he wouldn’t. But the thought of leaving you . . . of abandoning you . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. Daisy gave Champion a hard look. “She’s tired.”

  Champion returned Daisy’s look with a soft one.

  “Roro, what happened to the lifepod?”

  Roro licked her cracked lips and swallowed some more water. “We lasted a couple of weeks. Made it as far as the asteroid field before one of the smaller asteroids hit us. The crew were sucked out into space. Engineer Lopez. Medical Officer Ortega. Commander Lin. All of them.” Her voice was barely a whisper now. “All but me. I was near the suit lockers, and I was the only one who managed to get my survival suit on before the lifepod broke up around me. I tried to reach the others, to help them into suits . . . but they scattered. Like confetti in the wind. They were gone.”

  “She has to rest,” Daisy insisted. Lopside was ready to agree with her, but Roro waved a hand.

  “No. This is my mission report, and you’re my crewmates. I’ll finish telling you. I used every ounce of my suit’s propellant to steer me to the asteroid where Lopside found me. Made contact with the surface and woke up at the bottom of the crater. My water and oxygen recycler worked, and I had my emergency beacon. But, honestly, I didn’t have much hope. I thought it was just a matter of time until my battery gave out and I froze to death.”

  “You almost did,” Champion said.

  “Almost,” she agreed. “But I held on to a tiny shred of hope. Just a morsel. I kept thinking, If there’s a way the dogs can find me, they will. I guess hoping was the right strategy.”

  Champion came forward. She bent her face down and gave Roro’s hand a gentle lick. Bug did the same. And then Daisy, slopping her wet tongue over Roro’s fingers.

  “You didn’t abandon us,” Lopside said. “You didn’t abandon us, and we didn’t abandon you.” He touched his nose to hers. “Dogs and people. Together.”

  Twenty-Five

  THEY LET RORO SLEEP THROUGH most of the next day. Daisy woke her up just often enough to make her nibble on an ERP and drink water and electrolytes. Meanwhile, Bug and Champion and Lopside went over their situation again. They were happy beyond barks that they’d gotten Roro back, but every other dilemma remained unchanged. They were still adrift with vanishing power and supplies, and they still had no way to make the distance to Stepping Stone within a dog or human lifespan.

  “Are you sure you can’t do anything with the singularity core I recovered from the lifepod?” Lopside asked again for the fifth time.

  Bug yawned with irritation.

  “It’s worthless without the other half of the Tesseract motor: the anti-graviton generator. And for all we know, this core is just as unstable as the one that destroyed the Laika. We should probably jettison it out into space, just to be safe.”

  Daisy ambled over. “The dome’s gravity generator is what keeps us from floating off the deck, right? So why can’t we reverse it or whatever to make anti-gravitons and then hook up the singularity core to make a Tesseract motor and use the Tesseract motor to get us the rest of the way to Stepping Stone, and I know you’re not supposed to use a Tesseract motor inside a planetary system because it’s dangerous and everything could go bad and awful and wrong, but everything’s already bad and awful and wrong and maybe it won’t go bad and awful and wrong and that way we won’t die in space and I’ll get to run in the grass on the planet.”

  Lopside and the other dogs just stared at her. Their jaws hung open. They cocked their heads.

  “Bug?” Champion said. “Is this even possible?”

  “I . . . I . . . ,” Bug said.

  “It could work!” Roro came over on stiff legs. She was still weak, but she wore a huge grin. “Daisy . . . you’re a genius!”

  “I know,” Daisy said with a haughty sniff. “Nobody gets that about me. Anyway, I just came over to tell you all the eggs are hatching.”

  Lopside still hadn’t closed his jaw or uncocked his head. “Are you sure, Daisy?”

  “Well, I could be wrong. I mean, there’s little cracks in them that weren’t there before
. And some of them have little holes. And I think I can see the tips of tiny little chicken beaks sticking out of the holes. But I’m not an expert.”

  Lopside dashed over to the blanket nest. Tiny beaks appeared through holes in some of the eggs. And among the remains of a shell, a wet pink-and-yellow blob struggled to move, peeping for its mother.

  It was almost precisely four weeks since Lopside had taken the chicken eggs from the broken EggHab. Four weeks of disasters, of evacuations, of cracked domes and unstable singularities and extravehicular canine rescues. It seemed like so much longer.

  Lopside lowered his nose, slowly, carefully. He gave the chick a sniff.

  “Don’t you worry, little chicken,” he said. “This mission isn’t over yet.”

  Bug and Lopside and Champion spent sleepless hours getting into the guts of the gravity generators. Roro worked furiously on her tablet, figuring out how to redirect the gravity emitters so they would push instead of pull.

  Even more complicated was the task of hooking up the singularity core. But following Roro’s instructions and working their paw pads raw, the dogs were finally able to tighten the last fastener and close the last hatch.

  Along with directing them through the mechanical work, Roro also figured out the launch window. Stepping Stone was in constant motion around the star, so Roro had to calculate the right time to activate the cobbled-together Tesseract motor so the dome and the planet would meet up in space.

  There was no sense of relief when Roro completed her calculations.

  “I’ve figured out the launch window,” she said. “We have ten minutes.”

  Bug’s eyes bugged out. “But . . . we’re not ready. We need to run more tests. What if I got something wrong?”

  “Ten minutes isn’t enough,” agreed Champion. “When’s the next launch window after that?”

  Roro consulted her tablet and checked her watch. “One hundred and seventy-three years.”