"Take a left at the next existential void…"
Famous last words of a navigator, right? Except, somehow, it worked. Or Eva made it work. She had this uncanny knack for translating my often-bizarre, feeling-based directions – "it's a bit more… hollow-feeling over that way," or "that direction has a distinct tang of regret with a hint of forgotten starlight" – into actual astrogation.
The Wanderlust glided through the quieter, older-feeling tracts of the Orion Sector, a tiny, silent ship chasing ghosts.
The Felid hunter patrols seemed to be thinner here, their angry, buzzing presence fading into the background, replaced by that pervasive, ancient sorrow I was locked onto. It was like navigating by a distant, mournful song, one only I could truly hear.
We were still on edge, of course, silent running protocols strictly observed, but the immediate, heart-pounding tension of our encounter with the command ship had eased into a more watchful, introspective quiet.
It was in this vast loneliness, surrounded by the silent, uncaring stars and the faint, sad hum in my soul, that the big questions started to gnaw at me again. Not just about the symbol, or where this sorrowful thread was leading, but the whole, stupid, galaxy-spanning mess.
Dogs and cats. Back on Earth, yeah, we had our moments. A chased tail here, a hissed warning over a prime spot of sunlight there. But mostly, we coexisted.
Annoyed each other, sure, but we weren't locked in some kind of eternal, species-defining blood feud.
How did that – a bit of backyard bickering, relatively speaking – escalate into… this? Progenitor races, bio-engineered Canids and Felids, cosmic wars, command ships a kilometer long filled with cold, calculating feline rage?
It was a leap in scale that boggled the mind, even a mind like mine that was getting increasingly used to boggling. What could possibly have happened to turn a natural rivalry, if that's what it even was, into something so absolute, so… genocidal in its undertones?
Eva, for her part, was a picture of calm focus at the helm, her face illuminated by the soft glow of the nav-charts she was constantly cross-referencing with my… well, my 'vibes.' But in the quiet moments, when the ship was steady on a course I'd indicated, I'd see her gaze drift to the star-dusted viewport, a distant, thoughtful look in her eyes. What was she thinking about? Was it just the mission, the danger? Or did this ancient sorrow we were chasing resonate with something in her, too?
She'd been so quick to follow my lead, to take this insane risk. It wasn't just trust in my weird abilities, I sensed. There was something else there, a flicker of… understanding? Or maybe an echo of her own hidden hurts.
Everyone out here in the void, scraping a living between the stars, had a past. Most kept it locked down tighter than a Class-5 biohazard container. Eva was no exception. But this journey, this shared vulnerability, felt… different.
"Eva?" I ventured, breaking one of the long, comfortable silences. She turned, an eyebrow raised inquiringly.
"This… this whole dog-cat thing," I began, trying to phrase it right. "This intergalactic war, or whatever it is. It's just… so big. So absolute. What makes someone, a whole species, hate that much, for that long?"
She looked at me, her expression unreadable for a moment. Then, a faint, sad smile touched her lips.
"Hate's a powerful engine, Bolt. Sometimes it's all people have left. Or all they think they have left."
Her gaze drifted back to the stars. "You asked before why I took you in, why I wasn't… more surprised by a talking dog. The truth is, after a while out here, you see enough strange things, and 'talking dog' starts to seem almost… quaint." She paused.
"My usual run isn't chasing ancient symbols based on canine intuition, you know. I'm a freighter captain. Officially. Small-time stuff, mostly. Independent. Hauling goods from core worlds to the Outer Rim, the places the big corporations don't bother with much.
That's the job that pays for the fuel and the occasionally-less-than-stellar coffee."
"But?" I prompted gently, sensing there was more.
She sighed, a sound that seemed to carry more weariness than I usually heard from her.
"But sometimes… sometimes the cargo isn't just components or luxury goods. Sometimes it's people. Refugees. Whistleblowers. Anyone who needs to disappear from one part of the galaxy and reappear quietly in another, with no questions asked by the authorities they're running from."
My ears perked. That wasn't in any official freighter captain's job description I'd ever heard of.
"It's not… sanctioned," she admitted, her voice low. "Definitely not legal in most sectors. But someone has to do it. There are a lot of… bad situations out there, Bolt.
Petty tyrants, corporate exploitation, old grudges flaring up between systems. And it's always the ordinary folks who get caught in the middle, who lose everything." Her eyes hardened for a moment.
"I've seen what happens when hate gets out of control, when one group decides another doesn't deserve to exist. Seen it up close. Too close."
A shadow passed over her face, a fleeting glimpse of a pain she usually kept well hidden. "My family… we were on a colony world, caught between two factions that had been feuding for generations over resources, over ideology, over things no one probably even remembered starting. It didn't end well. For anyone."
So, that was it. Or part of it. The 'tragic past' wasn't just a trope; it was a scar she carried beneath her captain's composure. The urge to 'end it' – maybe not this specific ancient Canid-Felid war, but the kind of senseless, destructive conflict it represented – it was personal for her.
"This 'job,' Bolt," she continued, "this quiet ferrying… it's my small way of pushing back against that. Of giving someone a chance they wouldn't have otherwise. It's not much, in the grand scheme of a galaxy full of messes.
But it's something." She looked at me. "And who assigned me? No one. Just… a promise I made to myself a long time ago. To not stand by. To not let the bullies win, if I can help it."
Her gaze softened. "So, when you talk about ancient wars and a grudge that spans millennia… yeah. It resonates.
And if there's even a vanishingly small chance that understanding why this one started could stop it, or stop another one like it from kicking off somewhere else… well."
She shrugged. "Call me crazy. But that feels like a cargo worth chasing, even if the navigator is a husky with a head full of ghosts."