Voyage of the Dogs

by Greg Van Eekhout

  “And we’re too distant from the star to get solar power,” Lopside said, saving Bug the trouble.

  Champion’s eyes looked strong, but her tail sagged. “We have to conserve those batteries. We’ll run on absolute minimum power from now on. Maybe . . . somehow . . . we’ll figure out a way to get closer to the star.”

  “We have to keep the dome heated or we’ll freeze,” Bug said. “We need gravity, because the dome’s not designed to be a zero-gravity environment. There aren’t enough straps and pawholds to keep us from just floating around all over the place.”

  Champion turned to him. “What else can we cut to save energy?”

  “The freezers,” Bug said, bowing his head to avoid meeting Lopside’s eyes. “They use a huge amount of energy. We’d save a lot of battery power by shutting them off.”

  Lopside felt heat rising to his head. Losing the crops was one thing. But this was a step too far. The freezers contained the embryos of sheep, goats, pigs, and cows. When the Laika landed they were intended to be as important a part of the outpost as the crew and the crops.

  “Shut off the freezers and we lose the livestock,” he said. “The cows. The sheep. All of them.”

  Bugs ears flattened. “Would you rather lose Daisy and Champion?”

  Daisy looked back and forth, from Lopside to Bug.

  “Bug,” Champion said, her tail drooping sadly. “Go turn off the freezers.”

  Bug took a step toward the freezers, and in a flash, Lopside was in front of him, his muzzle wrinkled in a snarl. He felt ancient instincts welling up in him. An urge to solve this with fangs, to latch on to Bug’s jaw and take him to ground, to tear into his soft throat, the way he would a rat’s belly.

  A powerful woof snapped him out of it. “Stop!”

  It wasn’t Champion. It was Daisy.

  She was dancing with nervous energy, her tail a wagging blur. “Stop fighting. We shouldn’t fight. We’re a pack. Aren’t we still a pack?”

  Her outburst was enough to knock the violent urge out of Lopside, but his paws still tingled with anger.

  “Of course we’re still a pack,” Champion said with steady calm. “Of course we are. What if . . . what if we put this to a vote?”

  Lopside’s heart continued to hammer, but a little bit of the tension left his muscles.

  “Okay,” Bug said. “Lopside?”

  “Let’s be clear what we’re voting on,” Lopside said. “It’s not just whether we keep the freezers on. Our mission from the beginning has been to establish an outpost on the planet. We’re voting on whether we keep trying to complete our mission or not. Barkonauts are dogs who complete their missions. We’re voting on whether we’re still Barkonauts. And if we’re not Barkonauts, we’re just a bunch of lost dogs.”

  Lopside couldn’t read Champion’s expression. He couldn’t even read her smell.

  “Then we vote,” she said.

  Bug planted his little round paws firmly on the deck. “I’ll go first. We can’t complete any mission if we’re dead. I vote we turn the freezers off.”

  “And I vote we keep them on,” Lopside barked back.

  Daisy bowed her head and tail. “Do I have to vote?”

  “No,” said Champion.

  “Then I don’t want to. It’s . . . it’s too much.”

  That left Champion. Lopside knew she would make the difficult choice, the one that he would hate, but the one that held the best hope of keeping them alive. And knowing that, Lopside felt like an abandoned puppy, tied to a tree in the rain. He’d come so far, billions of miles across space, only to end up right back where he’d started.

  Champion struck a commanding pose. Even wounded, famished, exhausted and battered, she managed to look magnificent. She took a breath, and Lopside prepared himself to say good-bye to his hope of completing the mission.

  “I vote we leave the freezers on and keep the livestock alive,” Champion said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  Lopside gaped at her. “But . . . a minute ago you ordered Bug to shut them off.”

  “I ordered Bug to do it because I couldn’t face doing it myself. That’s how I know shutting them off is the wrong thing to do.”

  Bug relaxed his posture. He came over to sniff Lopside’s butt to make the peace between them official.

  “Then it’s settled,” Champion said. “I’m going to see if there’s anything around here we can use for beds. I don’t want to sleep on cold deck plates.” She limped away.

  Lopside almost let her go, but Champion was wrong. Things weren’t settled. Not as long as Lopside was still keeping a secret from her.

  “Wait,” he said. “There’s something I need to show you.”

  He led her to the crop rows, where a silver thermal blanket covered the eggs.

  “Good,” Champion said, misunderstanding. “At least we have one blanket to lie on.”

  Lopside took a corner of the blanket in his mouth and peeled it back to reveal the heating packs. Champion cocked her head, still not getting it, until Lopside moved the packs aside.

  There, safe and toasty in the dirt, lay the six eggs he’d rescued from the EggHab.

  He dipped his head and tucked his tail. “I’ve been hiding these from you,” he said. “I’ve been a bad dog.”

  Champion looked from Lopside to the eggs and then back at Lopside. Awkwardly and painfully with her splinted leg, she lowered herself to her belly and ever so gently nudged the eggs with her nose.

  “Chickens,” Champion said at last. “Do Daisy and Bug know about this?”

  “Don’t blame them. I made them promise not to tell.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Please don’t order us to eat them,” Lopside pleaded, starting with a bark that became a high-pitched whine of begging.

  Champion remained silent a long time. Then, “We’ll let them hatch,” she said.

  “And once they hatch?”

  “We’ll help them grow up into chickens.”

  Lopside wagged his tail and rolled over to offer his belly in gratitude.

  “Don’t thank me. Raising chickens was part of the outpost’s mission. Since we’ve decided to remain Barkonauts, we have to do everything we can to fulfill the mission.”

  “But I should have trusted you,” Lopside said. “I shouldn’t have kept anything secret from you. That’s not what Barkonauts do.”

  “Hmph,” was Champion’s only response. She looked at the eggs, and she looked around the dome. She looked everywhere but at Lopside. When she got back up and limped away, Lopside noticed her tail was tucked.

  Twelve

  THE PACK HUDDLED TOGETHER ON a plastic tarp that served as their bed. It wasn’t much, but it was better than lying on the hard deck or the chilled farm soil. To keep their spirits up, they listened to stories from Roro’s The Great Book of Dogs. Lopside still hoped he could figure out how to find the full story of Laika, the first space dog, somewhere in the book’s memory.

  They’d heard all the other stories multiple times and contented themselves by relistening to old favorites, like the story of Bobbie the Wonder Dog.

  Before he was Bobbie the Wonder Dog, he was just Bobbie, a collie mix belonging to the Brazier family of Silverton, Oregon. When the Braziers took a cross-country road trip to Indiana, they brought Bobbie along. It was a fun adventure. Bobbie enjoyed sticking his head out the window of the family’s land-based vehicle and smelling air redolent with wildflowers and prairie grasses and desert sand warmed by a hot sun. The world was filled with more varied wonders than Bobbie had ever known, and the family was happy they’d decided to bring him along.

  Until they reached a fueling station in Colorado. That’s where Bobbie was jumped by a trio of aggressive stray dogs. Even though Bobbie ran off, the Braziers weren’t worried. They were sure he’d be okay, and he would return soon to the fueling station.

  But he didn’t.

  Maybe he would turn up at the house in town where the Braziers were staying.

 
; But, no, he didn’t.

  The Braziers searched for him. They asked the locals if anyone had seen him. They put advertisements in the paper-distributed news source. But there was no word.

  Days went by, and eventually, the Braziers had to begin their journey home without Bobbie. They knew they’d probably never see him again.

  But Bobbie didn’t know that.

  He walked.

  He sought out bare traces of the Braziers’ smells, and the smell of their vehicle. He couldn’t have known it, but every night the Braziers stopped at fueling stations along the road, leaving behind a few molecules of scent. And once Bobbie found those traces, he kept going.

  He swam across rivers. He walked down back roads. He crossed high mountain passes through winter chill and snowstorms.

  Six months later, the Braziers’ daughter was walking down the street back home in Silverton. And there, halfway across the country from where they’d lost him, she spotted Bobbie. He was thin, starving, his paws raw and his nails worn down to nothing, but Bobbie ran to her, crying and yipping with excitement, his tail flapping in a blur. That night Bobbie feasted on steak and whipped cream, back home with his family.

  In all, he had walked 2,500 miles, in the worst weather, over punishing terrain, armed with nothing more than a good nose and an overpowering desire to be with his family.

  The morning after the Barkonauts listened to the story of Bobbie the Wonder Dog in Roro’s book, the Laika crossed the nine-hundred million-million mile mark of the mission.

  To equal that distance, Bobbie the Wonder Dog would have had to repeat his journey 360,000,000,000 times.

  Thirteen

  AN EAR-GOUGING SHRIEK, LIKE A tooth scraping metal, startled the pack awake.

  Lopside was up on all fours in a flash. “What was that?”

  Champion winced and struggled to get up with her wounded leg, but Daisy gently used her weight to keep her lying down.

  All four dogs sniffed, noses twitching, trying to scent out the source of the noise. Except for the smells of urgency coming from himself and his packmates, Lopside didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. But when he looked up at the dome, he spotted a thin white line in the transparent ceiling, like a scar. The shriek rang out again, and the scar lengthened.

  “There’s a crack in the dome,” he said with a sense of horror that bordered on wonder.

  Bug grunted. “If the dome’s support struts got shoved out of shape, the plasteel panels have been under stress since then. I guess we’re lucky the dome hasn’t cracked before now.”

  “This doesn’t feel lucky,” Daisy said.

  It seemed like a cruel thing to happen. They’d survived being abandoned by the crew. They’d lived through a hull breach and an engine explosion. But if the dome shattered, they were dead.

  Champion nudged Daisy away and rose shakily to her feet. “Suggestions.”

  “The freezers,” Lopside said. “We can hole up in there.”

  Champion shook her tail. “They’re not airtight. If the dome breaks, we’ll be just as dead in the freezers as here.”

  “Also, we’d freeze to death,” Bug pointed out.

  “The secondary airlock, then,” Lopside suggested. But even as the barks left his mouth, he knew that wasn’t a solution. The secondary airlock was a tight space, barely big enough for a Rover and two dogs, let alone four. They’d run out of air in hours.

  Another shivery noise came from above, drawing a dreadful yelp from Daisy.

  Lopside titled his head to look at the fissure at the crown of the dome. “Maybe we could seal it with emergency foam. We just need to figure out a way up there.”

  “How?” Bug said. “The ceiling is forty feet up.”

  “I can make it,” Daisy said. She jumped but only reached a couple of feet in the air. “I just need practice.”

  “What if we fashioned something like . . . like a cannon?” Bug said. “A dog cannon. And we used the dog cannon to shoot me to the top of the dome with a tank of emergency foam.” Bug’s nub of a tail vibrated. He really liked his own idea.

  Champion leveled her gaze at him. “Do you know how to make a dog cannon?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Does anyone here know how to make a dog cannon?”

  None of the dogs spoke up, though Lopside had to admit that the thought of firing Bug from a cannon held a certain appeal. But they needed an idea and they needed it now.

  “What if we shut off the gravity?” Champion said. “One of us could drift up to the top of the dome with a tank of emergency foam.”

  Daisy took another galloping leap. “I bet I could jump pretty high without gravity.” She rolled onto her back and wiggled in the soil with enthusiasm. “I can do it! I can save us! Let me save us!”

  She smelled like plant fertilizer and she was drooling again, but Lopside realized their lives depended on her.

  The emergency foam tanks were designed for a human user to sling over their shoulder by a strap, and they were operated with a handheld nozzle.

  “Daisy’s big enough to haul the tank, and another one of us will have to aim and control the nozzle,” Lopside said.

  Champion nodded. “So that’s me and Daisy, then.”

  The other three dogs looked at her and her broken leg. Her ears went limp; she got the message. She was in no shape for a zero-gravity ordeal. That left Bug or Lopside to manage the nozzle.

  Champion made her decision. “Bug, you’ll work the gravity controls. Daisy, Lopside, the rest is up to you. Affirmative?”

  “Affirmative,” they all said together.

  Daisy said it with great cheer, her butt shaking her tail so hard with excitement that if they could harness its energy they wouldn’t have to worry about dead engines and draining batteries.

  She rolled one of the foam tanks directly beneath the dome fissure, then pushed her bread-loaf-sized head into the loop of the strap and squirmed through it.

  Lopside examined the nozzle. It had a tapered metal end and a lever. He’d have to operate it by holding it in his mouth and biting down on the lever. His jaws were strong, but not wide, and it would be a stretch.

  All the preparation took precious minutes, but it was necessary. The dome could crack open at any moment, but they only had one chance to get this right, and slamming their bodies into the crack or hitting it with the tank might be a fatal mistake.

  “Take your stations,” Champion ordered.

  Lopside envied her calm. She was as steady as ever.

  Bug used Champion’s back to boost himself up on the control panel.

  “When I shut the gravity off, all you have to do is jump,” Bug explained.

  Daisy gave him a serious stare. “Do not turn the gravity back on until we’re safely on the ground. Because if you do, then Lopside and I will fall from the top of the dome and go splat on the deck and you would be a very bad dog. Affirmative?”

  “Affirmative,” Bug answered, raising one of his stubby white paws over the gravity control. “Here we go, on my three. One. Two. Three.”

  He brought his paw down.

  At first, Lopside noticed nothing different. But then his floppy ear, the one that always hung over his eye like a wilted leaf, slowly rose.

  “Lopside,” Daisy said, awestruck. “You’re not lopsided.”

  “Never mind that,” Champion barked. “Jump!”

  Daisy sprang with a mighty leap, and the two of them shot up like overinflated helium balloons.

  On reflex, Lopside paddled his legs as if he could swim through the air. But it was no use. Their course was set now, and they wouldn’t be able to stop or change direction until they made contact with the ceiling.

  He looked down. It was a long way. The dead crop rows in the vegetable field looked like brown stripes. Bug looked like a gopher. Even Champion looked small from way up high, one of her rear legs braced against the pedestal of the control panel to keep herself from drifting away.

  Lopside and Daisy continued to ris
e until Daisy’s spine made contact with the top of the dome. A few seconds later, the top of Lopside’s head clunked against it.

  “We’re here!” Daisy barked down to Champion. “We made it!”

  “Good dogs,” Champion called up.

  They’d landed with the crack several yards behind them.

  Daisy barked with pride, but not wanting to risk losing his bite on the nozzle, Lopside didn’t even grunt in response. He just held his body still and rigid.

  The next part of the mission was a delicate operation. Daisy used her tail and butt and muzzle to push gently against the dome and rotate so that her paws touched the ceiling. She’d have to keep just enough contact to be able to walk along and get over to the fissure. If she used too much force, she’d push off the ceiling and away.

  “Here I go,” Daisy said with confidence that Lopside didn’t share.

  Another screech of cracking glass almost launched Lopside’s breakfast ERP into zero-gravity.

  Daisy took step after careful step. She managed to get them close to the crack without losing contact with the dome, which was great. The problem was, even her lightest tread was enough to jar Lopside from his position. His body turned, and he ended up with his butt facing the crack.

  Daisy cocked one of her rear legs and let Lopside have it in the rump. The kick was insulting, but it had its intended effect. Lopside spun around, and when his nose was pointed at the crack, Daisy kicked him again to stop him from rotating too far.

  “I’m going to bite you now,” Daisy said.

  Lopside managed a warning growl, but Daisy ignored it. She clamped down on his haunch, hard. Her teeth didn’t penetrate his flesh, but it still hurt.

  As angry as it made Lopside, he understood that Daisy was just trying to hold him in place. Because once he squeezed the nozzle, the foam leaving the hose would act like a rocket engine and he’d be an out-of-control missile.

  Lopside closed his jaws down on the nozzle’s lever. Foam shot out with sudden force, propelling both Lopside and Daisy backward. A few wads of it landed on the fissure, but most of it went everywhere except for where Lopside wanted it to.