Voyage of the Dogs

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “The ship’s systems are running on battery,” Bug said. “But without the engines running, we can’t recharge them. All our systems are strained: heat, air, food recycling, gravity . . . It’s like the ship is starving but we’re still asking it to run.”

  “How long can the batteries last?” Champion asked.

  “I don’t know. A couple of weeks? Maybe days? It depends on how much we use them to stay alive.”

  There was a dark silence as the dogs took this in. Without power, they’d run out of air. They’d run out of food and water. And with the ship stuck in the cold depths of space, they’d freeze to death.

  “I’ve checked the scanners, so at least we know where we are,” Champion said.

  She moved to the wall and lifted her paw to activate a viewer. A familiar sight appeared: a glowing dot with smaller dots rotating around it. The dot in the center was the Sun. The third dot in was Earth. Home.

  “We started here,” Champion said, touching her nose to Earth and leaving a wet nose print. “Now, we’re here.” She touched the viewer again, and another system of dots appeared. This was the star HD 24040 and the planets orbiting it. A small rectangle blinked on the edge of the system: the Laika. “We still need to get from where we are now, to here.” The final touch of her paw lit up the fourth dot from the star. This was Stepping Stone, their destination.

  Champion looked at each dog in turn. They all thumped their tails to show they’d paid attention and understood what Champion had said so far.

  They were still 4.7 billion miles from Stepping Stone. It was an enormous distance, but the Laika had already traveled more than 150 light-years from Earth. Considering a light-year was the distance a beam of light traveled in one year, and that light moved at a speed of 186,000 miles every second . . . it boggled Lopside’s mind to think about. But the important part was this: The Tesseract motor had warped space and brought the ship from the edge of Earth’s solar system to the edge of Stepping Stone’s. To explain it, Roro had shown the dogs a picture from one of her favorite books. In the picture, an ant crawled across a straight length of string. It was a long way for the ant. But if you brought the two ends of the string together, the distance was much shorter. The Tesseract motor shortened distances in much the same way. But it wasn’t safe to use it inside a planetary system, because the gravitational effects could be deadly. For travel within planetary systems, the Laika relied on her pulse engines.

  “With pulse engines, we could make it the rest of the way there in forty-six days,” Champion was saying. “Bug, I want you to turn off unnecessary systems to save power. As long as we’re adrift, we’re using up energy we can’t spare. And then start doing whatever you have to do to bring the pulse engines online.”

  Bug barked, “Affirmative.”

  “Next,” Champion continued, “we’ll focus on sending a distress signal back to Earth.” Everyone sat up a little straighter. The dogs were trained to solve problems. “One challenge with that: The transmission dish is pointing the wrong way. So we need to get it pointed toward Earth. Unfortunately, the dish’s rotation controls aren’t working.”

  “We’ve got more broken things than working things,” Bug grumped.

  Champion stared at him. She wasn’t a fan of anything that sounded like complaining.

  Bug flipped on his back to display his belly. Champion gave it a very soft bite and let Bug get back to his feet. In a more positive tone, he said, “We might be able to turn the antenna dish without the controls if we do it from outside the ship.”

  Lopside’s tail twitched with nerves. He didn’t like how this meeting was going. Outside the ship was not a safe place to be. The whole point of the ship was to hold the insides in and the outsides out. Inside the ship there was warmth and breathable air. Outside the ship was only frigid cold and airless vacuum.

  “I can go outside,” Daisy volunteered, drumming the deck with her paws. “I’d be real good at going outside.”

  “We don’t have a Great Dane space suit,” Bug reminded her, struggling to scratch his ear with a rear leg that didn’t quite reach. “We don’t have any dog space suits at all. But we don’t need space suits to go outside the ship. We can use a Rover.”

  The Rovers got their names from the initials for Remote Operated Vehicle. The -er part came because Rover was a much better name than Rov.

  “Problem,” Champion said. “I checked the Rovers during my inspection. The remote operating transmitters are dead.”

  Bug sighed.

  Daisy tried to lick her eye.

  But Lopside had an idea. It was not necessarily a good idea. In fact, it was a risky, dreadful idea. But the pack couldn’t keep drifting along in a broken ship. They needed help, and contacting Earth was their only chance of finding it.

  “I might know of a way we can use the Rover without remote control,” he said. He tried to say it brightly, with a happy tail, but Champion smelled right through him.

  “You’re scared,” she said.

  Bug and Daisy knew it, too.

  “Come on,” Lopside said. “I’ll tell you my idea in the airlock.”

  At the mention of “airlock,” the other dogs started to smell as afraid as Lopside.

  Back when he was still on Earth, Lopside had trained every day for the Barkonauts program. There would be only four dogs on the mission to Stepping Stone, and he wanted to be one of them so bad his brain sometimes broke and he’d go zooming around the training yard, as if his desire to go to space was a rat, and if he ran fast enough he could catch it. But so much of training was about learning to remain calm. It was about learning to focus on new tasks. He mastered new tricks, new commands, new words. He and other dogs sat before control panels with dozens of different buttons, and the trainer would say, “Press the button with three circles.” The dogs who pressed the correct button would get a treat. The dogs who couldn’t do it were sent to good homes. They lived very nice lives, with comfortable beds and trips to the park and lots of attention. But they wouldn’t be going into space.

  Only the best-trained dogs would become Barkonauts.

  By the time they got to learning about airlocks and the vacuum of space there were only twelve dogs left in the training pack: Lopside, Champion, Bug, Daisy, and eight others.

  “Pretend this is you,” the trainer said, holding up a plump link of pork sausage. Lopside started to salivate at the sight and smell of it, and he wasn’t the only one. Daisy wriggled, gobs of slobber dripping from her mouth. Champion alone held herself perfectly still, paying more attention to the trainer than the sausage.

  Lopside tried to do as Champion did, because she was the best dog in class. But the sausage smelled so good.

  “Just like you, the sausage has skin, and the insides are stuffed with meat,” the trainer said. “The reason the stuffing stays inside the skin is because there’s just as much pressure inside the sausage as there is outside of it. We call this equal pressure. Right now, on Earth, in this room, we are all under equal pressure.”

  The trainer paused and looked over the pack to see if the dogs were understanding the lesson. Lopside glanced at Champion and tried to copy her posture and expression, since he figured Champion understood everything.

  The trainer walked the sausage over to a table, upon which sat a metal box with a glass door, like a small oven. “This device is called a decompression chamber. But let’s pretend it’s the Laika.” He put the sausage inside the box. “There will be air on board the Laika, and the environmental systems will keep the air pressure at Earth-like levels. The pressure inside you will be the same as the pressure outside you. Equal pressure.”

  Champion sat with her eyes focused on the trainer and her head cocked slightly to the side. Lopside cocked his head slightly to the side.

  “Now, let’s pretend our decompression chamber here is the airlock. The airlock is the one part of the Laika that opens to the outside. I am now going to simulate opening the airlock and letting all the air escape into space
. Outside the Laika, in open space, there is no air. Without air, there will still be pressure inside the sausage, but zero air pressure outside the sausage. Observe.”

  He flipped a switch, and the dogs watched with rapt attention as a hissing noise filled the room. Very quickly, the sausage began to change. Its skin bubbled, as if it was boiling on the inside, and it started to swell. In seconds, the skin broke, and grease leaked out.

  The trainer opened the decompression chamber, plucked out the sausage, and held it up for the dogs to see.

  “This is you, exposed to the vacuum of space. This is you if the Laika is damaged and loses atmosphere. This is you if you go outside the Laika without a space suit. And this is you if you’re standing in the airlock when the airlock door is opened.”

  Meat stuffing oozed.

  “So, who’s going to stay away from the airlock?”

  All twelve dogs raised their right front paws. None of them wanted to become exploded sausages.

  “Good dogs,” the trainer said.

  As a reward for learning the lesson, all the dogs got to eat a piece of the sausage.

  Four

  THE DOGS GATHERED IN THE Laika’s primary airlock.

  The Rover was there, held down by clamps. It looked like a cross between a small refrigerator and a robotic octopus bristling with screwdrivers, wrenches, plasma torches, flashlights, and grippers and clamps on mechanical arms. Everything you could need to fix things outside the ship.

  Champion paced circles around the Rover, inspecting it with her keen eyes and nose.

  “The Rover’s not a space suit,” she said, as if she disapproved of whoever had designed it so poorly. “It was never meant to hold a living passenger.”

  Bug came to the anonymous designers’ defense. “But it can do the job. The tool compartment is pressurized to protect delicate components. And we can squeeze an air recycler from one of the space suits in there to provide oxygen. We can make this work.”

  Bug tended to see the downside of things, but Lopside could tell he was trying hard to keep a positive attitude. Champion expected nothing less of the dogs, and with the humans gone, she was in charge not only of the dogs, but of the entire ship. Lopside looked at the small compartment on the Rover’s back. It was a place to store spare parts and nuts and screws and bolts—things the Rover needed to make repairs. Of all the dogs, he was the only one small enough to fit inside it.

  That meant he was the only one who could get a distress signal back to Earth.

  He hoped he wouldn’t end up as sausage.

  Preparations were under way to adapt the Rover for canine extravehicular activity.

  Daisy was helping Bug, and Champion was keeping a watchful eye on them both, so there wasn’t much for Lopside to do but worry. He went about his normal duties, checking the budding crops in the agricultural dome and patrolling the ship for rats. Eventually, he came to Roro’s quarters.

  None of the crew had much room to themselves, and Roro was no exception. She had a narrow bunk, with a blanket that she’d brought from home, because things that reminded the crew of home helped comfort them on the long journey. There wasn’t anything remarkable about Roro’s blanket, except that it smelled like her. Her pillow had a permanent Lopside-shaped indentation, because when he couldn’t sleep, he would curl up and inhale Roro’s scents and listen to her snore.

  He climbed up on her bunk now and buried his head in her blanket. It smelled of farm soil and shampoo, but the scents were faint. He couldn’t stand the thought of her smell being gone. It was worse than not being able to hear her voice or see her face. Worse, even, than not feeling her warm hand petting his back.

  He jumped down from her bunk and pressed his nose against a touchpad on the wall. With a soft buzz, a drawer slid out. He poked his nose in, and it came into contact with a soft piece of cloth. It smelled like Roro’s feet. A sock.

  He bit down on it to pull it from the drawer.

  With the sock in his mouth, he put his paws up on the window ledge over her bunk and looked out into space. Distant stars glittered like pinpoints against the velvet black expanse. There were unfathomable distances between each star, and trillions of miles between the Laika and Earth, and billions of miles between the Laika and Stepping Stone. And somewhere out there was Roro. Roro and the rest of the crew in the lifepod.

  Lopside didn’t know how or when, but the crew and the dogs would all be together again someday, somehow. And the first step in making it happen was contacting Earth for help.

  This was his mission, and he would not fail.

  Lopside was stuffed in the Rover like a loaf of bread crammed inside a banana peel, sharing the space with a radio and an oxygen recycler. He also had Roro’s sock. When Champion first saw Lopside with the sock in his mouth, she cocked her head, about to question and judge him, but after she smelled it and understood that it belonged to Roro, she didn’t say anything.

  “Let’s do a systems check,” came Champion’s barks through the radio.

  Champion and the other dogs remained in the passageway outside, looking through a window into the airlock. Lopside didn’t like being so separated from his pack. He already missed their scents.

  “Are you breathing okay?” Champion barked.

  Lopside took a breath. “Affirmative.”

  Affirmative meant yes. He could have just said “yes,” but Roro used to say “affirmative” instead of “yes” while doing something important.

  “Can you see okay?”

  Lopside looked out through the tool compartment’s transparent, break-resistant shield. He could see the other dogs through the window to the passageway.

  He started to pant a little. “Affirmative.”

  “Are the repair arms working? Maneuvering jets charged? Navigational gyroscope spinning?”

  Champion and Lopside ran through checks of all the Rover’s systems. Everything was affirmative. Everything, except maybe Lopside. He wasn’t sure how affirmative he was.

  “Rover systems check complete,” Champion announced. She paused. “You know how important your mission is, Lopside. If you can’t get the communications dish pointed toward Earth to transmit our message, Space Operations won’t know they have to send a rescue mission. They won’t know we’re alone on the Laika.”

  Lopside swallowed. “Affirmative.”

  The bark almost got stuck in his throat.

  “Airlock doors opening in T-minus ten,” Champion said.

  T-minus ten was the spacey way of saying something was going to happen in ten seconds. And what happened was this:

  The doors slid open.

  The clamps holding the Rover in place released with an alarming clanking noise. All the air inside the airlock rushed out in a flood of wind, and the Rover was blown into space with such sudden violence that Lopside couldn’t even utter a surprised yip. The Rover somersaulted like a tumbleweed in a hurricane, around and around, end over end. Blood rushed to Lopside’s head, and his vision closed to a flickering tunnel of black.

  “Do not pass out,” he told himself. “You can’t complete your mission if you pass out. A good dog would not pass out.”

  “Steady yourself,” Champion ordered over the radio. “You’re tumbling forward and clockwise.”

  The Rover was steered by a series of jet nozzles that sprayed liquid propellant. Ordinarily, they were controlled remotely, but Bug had removed a panel so that Lopside could reach the jet and repair-arm controls from inside the Rover. Lopside stretched his muzzle forward and nudged two jet toggles. Puffs of silver-white exhaust sprayed out, and the Rover stopped rolling and spinning.

  The Rover had come to a halt facing away from the Laika, and all Lopside could see was space: a vastness blacker than the blackest night. The raging stars were so far away they were just bright points of light, smaller than a period at the end of a sentence.

  Lopside had only ever seen space through the windows of the Laika. And even with failing systems, the Laika was home. Maybe no longer
a safe home, but safer than this. He’d always thought of space as full of planets and stars and galaxies, but now, stuffed into a little can, space seemed like the absence of stuff. Space was so, so empty, like the deepest hole imaginable. And he was falling into it.

  He nudged the jet toggles, and the Rover made a half turn.

  “I am facing toward the Laika,” he reported.

  The ship was longer than two soccer fields, with a spoon-shaped section at the front where the command-and-control module was housed. With another nudge of jet nozzle controls, Lopside began his journey down the Laika’s length, drifting past the transparent dome of the agricultural module. He could make out the green fuzz of sprouting celery and broccoli. Next to the dome was the secondary airlock and the spare Rover unit.

  Then came the part of the ship that housed the crew quarters, the kennel, and the infirmary. And then, the lifepod docking station. Lopside knew the lifepod wouldn’t be there, but he wasn’t prepared for how much it looked like a socket with a missing tooth. This was the last place the human crew had been before they abandoned ship.

  Lopside tamped down a whimper and kept going.

  “Lopside, report,” Champion said. Her barks sounded flat, emotionless, businesslike without her smells and tail and ears and eyes to tell Lopside what she was thinking and feeling beyond her vocalizations. It was like talking to half a dog.

  “I’m moving toward the engineering module,” Lopside barked back. “All systems are normal. I . . . wait a minute.”

  Lopside gave one of the jet nozzles a squirt to bring the Rover to rest.

  The section of the ship before him should have been a smooth, curving piece of gray metal. But here, the Laika’s skin was blackened and crumpled. A section of it was covered with rough, bumpy material, like a crust of dried macaroni and cheese.

  He moved the Rover in closer.

  “Report,” Champion demanded.

  “I’m seeing repair foam outside Passageway Six,” Lopside said. Passageway Six, where, inside the ship, a bare thread of Roro’s smell clung.

  Repair foam was used to fix leaky hoses, cracked pipes, any of the hundreds of little things that could malfunction on a journey between stars. Lopside had never seen so much of it.