The silence on the bridge of the Wanderlust stretched, thick and heavy with the ghost of that colossal Felid command ship. Eva's question – key to understanding, or key to a door better left unopened? – echoed in my head. My tail gave a nervous twitch. Easy for her to ask; she didn't have a library of ancestral trauma doing the conga in her cranium.
"Well?" she prompted gently, her eyes still fixed on me. "Doorway or disaster, Bolt? What's your gut – or your ancient, dusty library – telling you about that 'key'?"
I let out a slow breath. The primal urge to recommend we turn the Wanderlust into the fastest streak of light heading in the opposite direction was strong. Very strong. But that symbol… that fleeting, crystalline data-packet I'd sensed from the command ship… it hadn't felt like a threat. Not in the same way the ship itself, with its cold, predatory intelligence, had.
"It's… different, Eva," I said, trying to piece together the swirling impressions. "The ship, that presence? Pure 'don't-mess-with-me' vibes. Apex predator stuff. But that symbol? It was… older. Calmer, almost. Like finding an ancient, perfectly preserved artifact buried deep beneath a battlefield."
I looked at her, trying to make her understand. "It didn't feel like their active tech, not entirely. It felt like something they might also be… aware of. Or following. Or maybe even guarding, in their own twisted way."
"So, you're saying that symbol, that 'key,' might not be a Felid 'keep out' sign?" she clarified, her gaze sharpening.
"I don't think so," I replied, shaking my head slowly. "It felt more like… like a marker. A point of origin, or a signpost. Remember how I said Orion was the Forge, the Cradle, maybe the Battlefield where things went wrong?"
Eva nodded, her attention absolute.
"That symbol," I continued, the impression solidifying in my mind as I spoke, "it felt connected to the before. Before the schism, before the hate became so… ingrained. It tasted of… of what was lost. Of the questions my ancestors have been howling into the void for millennia: What happened? Who broke it all? Who got the short end of the cosmic stick when the pieces fell?"
A new kind of energy sparked in my chest, not fear, but a deep, resonant curiosity, an echo of that ancient longing for answers. "Eva, that symbol… I don't think it was a warning from the Felids to us. I think it's a breadcrumb. The very first thread of a very old, very tangled story. A thread that might just lead us to understand why this ancient war even started.
Why they hate us. Why, maybe, my kind has this lingering sorrow buried beneath all the growling and posturing."
I met her gaze directly. "It's a doorway, like you said. And yeah, it could lead to disaster. But it might also lead to… truth. And maybe, just maybe, a way to understand what the 'Last Bark of Orion' truly means, before it becomes our reality."
Eva was silent for a long moment, processing. The pragmatic, risk-assessing captain was no doubt doing mental overtime, weighing the life of her ship and crew (me, basically) against the pull of a mystery that was literally as old as the stars.
"A trail of clues," she murmured, almost to herself. "Starting with an ancient symbol sensed by a talking dog from a passing Felid dreadnought…" She gave a short, dry laugh. "Sector Command would have a field day with that report."
Then she looked at me, a new resolve hardening her features. "Okay, Bolt. You're the one with the direct line to the ancient weirdness. If you truly believe this 'first thread' isn't just going to lead us into a cosmic meat grinder… if you think there's a genuine possibility of understanding something vital here…" She took a deep breath. "Then tell me, how do we follow a symbol that only you can perceive?"
Eva's question hung in the air, sharp and practical as a laser scalpel: "Then tell me, how do we follow a symbol that only you can perceive?"
How indeed? It wasn't a scent I could track or a sound I could pinpoint with my ears alone. This was something else, something woven into the strange tapestry of what I'd become. My gaze drifted around the Wanderlust's bridge – our sanctuary, our roaming patch of controlled chaos in a galaxy that wasn't always friendly, especially to… well, to things like me.
Thinking back, it still felt surreal. How does a husky, even one with an unusually pensive look, end up co-piloting a freighter through the Orion Arm?
Flashes again. Not just the sterile white of the lab, but the intent faces behind the reinforced glass. 'Project Chimera,' some of the whispers in my awakening mind had labeled it. They weren't just 'unlocking ancestral memories' for kicks. They were searching for something – a lost edge, forgotten knowledge, maybe even a weapon encoded in the DNA of species they deemed… promising.
Why me? Why a Siberian Husky? Perhaps it was the breed's resilience, our history of navigating harsh terrains, our deep-rooted pack instincts. Or maybe my particular lineage had some genetic marker that lit up their scanners. I'd heard snippets – "high psionic potential," "unusual neural plasticity." Maybe I was just the one-in-a-million shot that actually worked, or at least, worked in a way they hadn't fully anticipated. The others… well, the library in my head has some very quiet, very sad chapters about the others. Most just got broken. I got… loquacious. And a whole universe of inherited sorrow and wonder.
The escape hadn't been heroic; it had been terrified and desperate, a blur of alarms and shouts, ending with me, a talking, memory-filled canine anomaly, lost and alone on the indifferent sprawl of a fringe-world spaceport. Other strays gave me a wide berth. Even the usual port hustlers didn't know what to make of a dog that could articulate his hunger with precise grammar.
Then Eva. She hadn't recoiled. She hadn't called animal control or tried to sell me to a circus – though she jokes about it sometimes, usually when I beat her at Krellian chess. I'd found her mid-explosion with a particularly stubborn customs official, her face flushed, hands waving, practically radiating righteous indignation over some ridiculous impound fee. And I, desperate for an ally, for anyone who wouldn't just stare or scream, had offered a rather succinct legal counter-argument I'd overheard from a disbarred lawyer in a ventilation shaft.
The official's jaw had unhinged. Eva, after a stunned silence that lasted about three full seconds (a record for her), had just… tilted her head. A slow, appraising smile had spread across her face, the kind that usually meant she was about to do something incredibly impulsive and probably against regulations. "Well, now," she'd said, her eyes twinkling, "that's a new one. Stick with me, pal. You argue that well, and you can have half my protein rations."
It wasn't just about the rations, though. She'd seen me, not as a freak or a science project, but as… someone. She didn't try to dissect my abilities or pry into the horrors of the lab. She just accepted. She listened to my ramblings about ancient star-farers and cosmic cats, learned to trust the instincts that went beyond normal canine senses, and only occasionally threatened to put a muzzle on me when I got too philosophical during tense docking procedures. In return, she got a first mate who was fiercely loyal, had a built-in early warning system, and didn't complain about her singing. Our pack of two. It worked. Her trust in me, even now, when I was suggesting we navigate by space-magic-symbol-feelings, was a bedrock.
This trust, this bond, was why I had to dig deeper now, not just into the symbol, but into myself.
"I… I don't know exactly," I admitted, bringing my focus back to the dim bridge and her unwavering gaze. "It's not like I have a built-in 'ancient-symbol-o-matic' that pings. When I sensed that symbol from the command ship… it wasn't just a visual. It was a feeling. A resonance. Like a specific note in a huge, complex piece of music, one that my own strings vibrated in sympathy with."
I focused, pushing past the surface noise of my own thoughts, trying to recapture that exact sensation. "It was… distinct," I mused aloud. "It had a… frequency? A signature? If I could somehow… tune into that again? The lab, the experiment… it was all about accessing what was already there, deep in the blood, in the bone.
They just… cranked the volume way up. What if that symbol resonated with something specific they were looking for, or something they accidentally unlocked in me?"
My ears perked up. "When that command ship passed, Eva, and I felt that symbol, it wasn't just an external thing. It felt like it connected with a dormant file in that 'library' of mine. What if… what if that symbol isn't just floating out there randomly? What if its 'signature' is imprinted on certain places, ancient artifacts, maybe even old stellar phenomena tied to the Progenitors or that schism? If I can hold onto the 'feel' of that symbol, that specific resonance, maybe I can sense if we're getting 'warmer' or 'colder' as we move through space?"
I looked at her, the vulnerability of the suggestion plain, I'm sure. "The answers, Eva… I think they have to be buried deep inside this messed-up, ancestral hard drive of mine. That experiment, whatever its original, twisted purpose, might have inadvertently given me the key to this particular lock.
Maybe this symbol is the first real test of why I am what I am. I need to… meditate on it. Try to access that part of my memory, that feeling, more clearly, and see if it gives us a direction."
It was still a wild, unorthodox plan. But now, it felt less like a random guess and more like… a purpose.
My purpose.