Voyage of the Dogs

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “There’s lots of damage. I think I know what happened to the ship. Something breached the hull. We must have hit something.”

  It was the worst kind of emergency. A hull breach was a full-on disaster. It was like being struck full-speed by a tram and breaking all your legs. It was like the ancient Titanic hitting an iceberg and sinking. Only worse. More violent. In a hull breach, everything and everyone could be blown out of the ship. A hull breach could kill an entire crew. It could destroy an entire starship.

  The breach must have been why the crew abandoned ship.

  “Affirmative,” Champion said. “Proceed with your mission.”

  Lopside nudged the Rover along until he made it to the communications dish at the back of the ship. The shallow bowl of the antenna towered over him, taller than a three-story building. Lopside moved in closer to its base, where a giant gear was supposed to turn the dish to keep it pointing toward Earth. With a couple of nozzle bursts, he brought the Rover to a rest over an access port.

  So far, so good.

  Except it was getting hot inside the Rover. His own body produced heat, and since the Rover was airtight, the heat had nowhere to escape. He began to pant, and the Rover’s transparent plastic shield fogged over, making it hard to see outside.

  “Calm yourself, pup,” he said to himself, trying to imagine how Roro would have sounded.

  It helped, just a little.

  He craned his neck forward and rubbed his nose against the shield, managing to wipe away some of the fog but replacing it with wet-nose smear, which was almost as bad.

  At the bottom of the dish he spotted the communications port, a socket the size of his paw. This next part of the repair mission was more delicate than just steering the Rover around.

  He extended the Rover’s arm until it made contact with the socket. The great dish began to turn.

  The whirr of mechanical motors and giant moving gears would be loud inside the ship, but noise didn’t travel in airless space. Other than his own steaming breath, Lopside heard only silence.

  Right now, Daisy was probably barking and Champion was probably telling her to hush. Lopside knew Champion wished she could have fit inside the Rover and tackled the mission herself, because with something so important, she was the only dog she trusted. Lopside wished she were here instead of him, too. He ached to be back inside the Laika with his pack. But his mission was only half-completed.

  “Champion, I’m plugged into the antenna.”

  “Do you remember the message?”

  Of course Lopside remembered the message. Champion had made Lopside practice it over and over until his throat was sore and his barks came out in weak coughs. “Affirmative,” he barked.

  “Are you sure? You sound out of breath.”

  That’s because he was out of breath. Moisture coated his window, the air felt like a sauna, and he was breathing like he’d just run a race.

  “Affirmative on remembering the message,” he barked forcefully.

  There was a long pause. Champion didn’t like to be yelled at. If Lopside had been on the ship, she would probably give him a hard, dominating stare that would make him cower with his tail between his legs.

  “You are go on transmission,” Champion finally barked.

  Lopside took a breath.

  He licked his lips.

  He barked. “Bark-bark-bark. Woof-woof-woof. Bark-bark-bark.”

  Morse code was a very old form of communication. People used it even before they figured out how to send their voices over far distances. Before radios. Before telephones. The code used a series of beeps that formed letters of the alphabet. Short beeps were called dots, and long beeps were called dashes. With dots and dashes, you could spell out a message.

  The most common message was SOS. Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dot-dot. A cry for help.

  Lopside’s dots were short, sharp barks. His dashes were longer woofs.

  He continued: “Bark-woof-bark-bark bark-woof bark-bark woof-bark-woof bark-woof. Woof-bark-bark bark-woof woof-woof bark-woof woof-woof-bark bark woof-bark-bark.”

  It took all that just to say, “Laika damaged.”

  His throat felt like sandpaper, but he kept going.

  “Bark-woof-bark-bark bark-bark bark-bark-woof-bark bark bark-woof-woof-bark woof-woof-woof woof-bark-bark. Woof-woof bark-bark bark-bark-bark bark-bark-bark bark-bark woof-bark woof-woof-bark.

  “Bark-bark-bark-bark bark-bark-woof woof-woof bark-woof woof-bark. Woof-bark-woof-bark bark-woof-bark bark bark-woof-woof. Woof-woof bark-bark bark-bark-bark bark-bark-bark bark-bark woof-bark woof-woof-bark.

  “Bark-woof-woof bark. Bark-woof bark-woof-bark bark. Woof bark-bark-bark-bark bark. Woof-bark-bark woof-woof-woof woof-woof-bark bark-bark-bark.

  “Bark-woof-woof bark. Bark-woof bark-woof-bark bark. Bark-woof bark-woof-bark-bark woof-woof-woof woof-bark bark.”

  And that was it. Lopside had sent all their hopes in that string of barks.

  SOS.

  Laika damaged.

  Lifepod missing.

  Human crew missing.

  We are the dogs.

  We are alone.

  With the message sent, he detached from the communications port and began the trip back to the airlock.

  Roro would have been proud of him. If she’d still been on the ship, she would have greeted him at the airlock with hugs and scritches. She would have given him biscuits and told him what a good dog he was.

  On Earth, the trainers and technicians had nicknamed the pack the Barkonauts, and being called a Barkonaut was the highest praise the dogs ever got. Barkonauts were more than simply smart, more than merely obedient, more than just brave. Barkonauts were dogs who completed their missions.

  “I’m a good dog,” Lopside thought to himself. “I’m a Barkonaut.”

  Five

  AS HE GUIDED THE ROVER back to the airlock, Lopside allowed himself a small morsel of hope. The SOS signal would travel on a wave of twist-space, faster than light itself. Space Operations would hear the message, and they would tell the dogs what to do.

  But the message would take days to reach Earth, and then days for Earth to respond. And that was assuming the signal did reach Earth. It could get broken up by a high-energy radiation burst or blocked by a dense, unmapped object in space. There were a million things that could go wrong. It was like posting a “Lost Dog” flier on a light pole and hoping the right person saw it.

  Lopside knew what being lost felt like. He remembered when he was just a puppy living with a family in a house at the top of a hill. There was a boy who smelled like chocolate milk and the boy’s parents. Lopside remembered learning how to play fetch, and how to scratch at the door when he needed to pee. He remembered bursting with energy and wanting to play all the time, just the way Daisy always did.

  It was good.

  One afternoon before the boy came home from school, the boy’s father took Lopside for a walk. Usually the man didn’t do this. Usually it was the boy, or the boy’s mother. But this time it was just the man.

  They went to a park, and Lopside wanted to run in the grass. He liked the grass because the blades tickled his belly and there were so many smells and sometimes bugs to pounce on. But the man wasn’t here to play. He took Lopside to a tree, and he tied Lopside’s leash around the tree, and then he left.

  Lopside waited. He was sure the man would come back. Better yet, the boy or the boy’s mother would come for him.

  Minutes went by. And then minutes turned to hours. Nobody came for him.

  Lopside barked.

  He whined.

  He panted and crooned, and he dug at the earth, and nobody came. The leash was like gravity, holding him fast no matter how hard he strained against it.

  As scared as he was, Lopside knew what to do. He chewed on the leash, tearing at it with his sharp little teeth, and he kept at it until it was nothing more than frayed, slobbery threads. He bit at it some more, and he was free.

  Then he sat by the
tree as the sky darkened. He didn’t know the way home. If he left the tree, he knew he’d disappear into the city streets and starve or get hit by a tram. Water pattered the ground at his paws. Soon, it was a full rain, the drops like cold bullets. Water streamed off the leaves overhead and soaked his fur. He shivered and whimpered in the mud. But he stayed put. The man would come back for him. Or the boy’s mother. Certainly the boy. The boy loved him. The boy often fed him scraps under the table, even though the man yelled at him for it. The boy cleaned the messes Lopside sometimes made on the carpet, when he couldn’t hold it in. The boy wouldn’t abandon him.

  But it stayed wet and dark, and nobody came.

  Lopside grew too exhausted to whimper. When he could do nothing else, he looked at the round light in the sky. The clouds parted, and the light shone silver-white, its edge sharper than Lopside’s sharpest tooth. Later, Lopside would learn that this was the Moon. The Moon circled Earth like a loyal friend, and it was impossible to think of one without the other. The Moon belonged to Earth, and Earth belonged to the Moon, and they’d been together for billions of years.

  Lopside watched the Moon make a slow arc across the sky, and by the time he lost sight of it on the horizon, the sky had lightened from black to gray, and from gray to blue.

  He lapped some water from a puddle, and his empty stomach growled. There were a few people in the park now, walking, jogging, riding bicycles. Some even had dogs with them. Lopside was too shy to approach any of them, but he barked and he wiggled his butt and wagged his tail to get their attention. Sometimes, he whined at them. He was asking for help. Some people ignored him. They didn’t even turn their heads. Others looked at him. Some smiled. Some waved. None gave him food. None helped him find the boy with the chocolate-milk smell. Nobody stopped.

  Not until a woman came jogging up past Lopside’s tree. Lopside wiggled and whined at her. She cocked her head to the side, curious. Lopside cocked his head back at her.

  She looked around, as if to see if Lopside’s people were nearby. They weren’t, of course. He knew by now they weren’t coming for him.

  Slowly, the woman approached.

  She bent down and offered the back of her hand. Lopside sniffed it. Her skin was a little darker than the brown fur on top of his head, and she smelled like coffee and sweat. She let him lick her salty fingers.

  “You lost, little guy?” Gently, she stroked his wet coat. “Oh, you’re cold.”

  She took a little white towel tucked in her waistband and ruffled him with it. The towel smelled like her.

  “No tags, huh?”

  As she dried Lopside off, he sensed her making a decision, and Lopside hoped on the Moon, even though the Moon was gone for the day.

  “Is it okay if I pick you up?” she said.

  It was okay with Lopside.

  She gently gathered him in her arms and held him close.

  “My name’s Roro,” she said. “And I think I just acquired a friend.”

  Six

  DAYS WENT BY WITHOUT WORD from Earth. In another week, Earth and the Laika would no longer be in alignment, and the communications window would close. If the pack didn’t receive a return message by then . . . Well, best not to think about that. Earth would get back to them. Lopside was confident of that. Or was trying to be.

  To save energy, the dogs turned down the heat and dimmed the lights in the parts of the ship where they seldom went. And then, later, they made it darker and colder even where they went often. They dragged their beds close and huddled together in the kennel for warmth.

  The hardest thing was dealing with the broken food recycler. They had some stores of Emergency Rations Pellets, but they didn’t know how long those would have to last. So, on Champion’s orders, they restricted themselves to one meal a day.

  It wasn’t a good meal. The pellets were formulated for human digestion and tough on a dog’s guts, and Roro said they were really named for the sound people made after eating them: “Urp!” But a single ERP provided a day’s nutrition, and they were better than starving.

  When the dogs slept, the kennel echoed with the rumbles of their empty stomachs. Daisy, already by far the biggest of them and still growing, suffered from hunger the most, and Lopside would sometimes share some of his ration. He knew Bug and Champion did the same.

  When he wasn’t helping Bug troubleshoot the pulse engines, Lopside kept busy patrolling the ship, sniffing for burning wires or the hiss of an air leak. And, of course, for rats. It was good exercise for his body. And it was important that he keep doing his job. It was important that he keep being a Barkonaut. Meanwhile, Bug worked on trying to bring Laika’s engines back to life. He knew the ship’s systems best, and he figured when the meteor had hit the ship, it didn’t only breach the hull. It had also probably cracked support struts and snapped cables and shaken power junctions out of place. Each of these small injuries was causing other systems to fail, like a pebble rolling down a mountain and knocking into other pebbles until there’s a great big avalanche. Bug spent long hours in the engineering module, all by himself, and Lopside knew it must get lonely there, so he made sure his patrols took him to engineering even more often than usual.

  “Hey, Bug,” he said, his nose skirting the perimeter of the engine chamber.

  Bug was sitting on his haunches, staring up at a control console.

  “Lopside. You’re just in time to give me a hand. Or a paw. Actually, I need your back.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Being a corgi, Bug had been bred for herding cattle. Herding dogs were good at keeping complicated systems like groups of giant cows organized. They were good at deciding what to do when things went haywire, like when a cow got scared by a bee and started a stampede. These traits made Bug well-suited to engineering. But since he was so stubby and short, he had a hard time getting up to the control consoles. Smaller dogs like Bug and Lopside were rare picks for space travel, so they had to try a little harder and be a little more stubborn than the others. They’d learned quickly that only by depending on each other could they do some of the things the other dogs could do, and their partnership had helped both of them qualify for the Laika’s crew.

  Lopside positioned himself at the foot of the control console and stiffened his legs as Bug climbed on his back. Even with Lopside’s help, Bug could barely reach the control panel, and there was some grunting from both of them as Bug scrabbled his way up.

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I think . . . I think there’s a problem with the singularity core.”

  The singularity core was a crucial component of the Tesseract motor, and even though none of the dogs had said it aloud, they all knew Earth might instruct them to cut short the mission and return home instead of going for Stepping Stone. None of them wanted the mission to end in failure like that. Besides, they were in a planetary system now, and activating the motor here was extraordinarily dangerous.

  Bug growled with agitation. “The core contains a micro black hole, so if it goes critical the entire ship could fold in on itself and smoosh us down to smaller than a grain of sand.”

  “How do we fix it?”

  Bug took a moment before answering, and his stress odors grew even stronger. “It’s a complex mechanism. Once it’s broken, there’s no fixing. There’s only replacing it.”

  “There must be a plan. We have a plan for everything.” Every problem was supposed to be solvable. That was what the Barkonauts learned in training. Barkonauts were dogs who solved problems.

  Bug’s ears twitched. “If something happens to the core, there’s only one other to replace it.”

  “That’s great!” Lopside said with a tail wag. “Where is it?”

  “On the lifepod.”

  Lopside’s tail drooped. “Oh.”

  Bug sighed. “We have to tell Champion.”

  “I was going to look for rats in the command-and-control module. I can tell her if you want me to.”

 
Bug’s ears shot up, and he wagged his nub tail with gratitude. It was never fun giving Champion bad news.

  “You’re a pal,” Bug said.

  Lopside found Champion in the command-and-control module at the ship’s bow. The lights were turned down, but Champion’s golden fur gleamed in the glare of a tablet screen. Most of the crew carried tablets containing information they needed for their jobs, and also music and games and movies and books for their off-duty hours.

  Lopside caught an achingly familiar whiff.

  “That’s Roro’s tablet. What are you looking at?” It wasn’t against regulations to take Roro’s tablet outside the kennel, but it struck Lopside as a little odd.

  Champion shut it off. She sat in Commander Lin’s chair, his jacket draped over the back. Lopside knew she would have preferred to sit on it as if it were a blanket, but that would have been improper, and Champion didn’t do improper things.

  “There aren’t any rats in here, Lopside.” Champion didn’t even look at him. She just stared forward at the round window in front of the module.

  “There could be rats,” Lopside said, feeling defensive. “Wherever there’re people, there’re rats.”

  “Well, there aren’t any people here, are there?”

  Lopside’s eyes felt hot, and his jaws felt bitey. “I still think it’s worthwhile to look for—”

  “Have you completed your daily inspection of the agricultural dome?”

  “Not yet. I came here to tell you about the singularity core. Bug says it’s unstable. We can’t replace it because the only other one was on the lifepod. Bug says if the core fails we’ll be—”

  “Crushed to death as the Laika collapses down to an infinitesimal point,” Champion said. “There’s no need to panic.”

  “I’m not panicking.”

  “Panicking will only make things worse.”

  “I said I’m not panicking.”

  “Hmm,” Champion said with a tone of dismissal.