A crew of uplifted rats servicing and living on board a spaceship learn that there is more to their life than they had been led to believe

Today’s story is the first of two parts of “You Are Our Lifeboat” by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, or just leinir, who can usually be found relaxing in the English Midlands, where they split their time between cooking usually delicious food, writing various bits of social realism and science fiction, or creating free and open source software in the KDE project. Sometimes all three happen at the same time, and they tell me that sci fi epic they’ve been working on the last most of a decade is getting closer to wrapping up.

While waiting for that to land, if you would like more after this one, you can find more of their stories in the anthologies found on their GoodReads profile at goodreads.com/leinir. This story in particular can be found in the FurPlanet anthology Exploring New Places, where a variety of animal people go out and explore a wide variety of new places.

Read for you by Khaki, your faithful fireside companion.

You’re listening to The Voice of Dog. I’m Khaki, your faithful fireside companion,

and Today’s story is the first of two parts of

“You Are Our Lifeboat”

by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen,

or just leinir, who can usually be found relaxing in the English Midlands,

where they split their time between cooking usually delicious food,

writing various bits of social realism and science fiction,

or creating free and open source software in the KDE project.

Sometimes all three happen at the same time,

and they tell me that sci fi epic they’ve been working on the last most of a decade

is getting closer to wrapping up.

While waiting for that to land, if you would like more after this one,

you can find more of their stories in the anthologies found on their GoodReads profile

at goodreads.com/leinir. This story in particular

can be found in the FurPlanet anthology

Exploring New Places,

where a variety of animal people go out and explore a wide variety of new places.

“You Are Our Lifeboat”

by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Part 1 of 2 Excitement and delight.

That was the feeling which seemed to flow around me those twenty eight years ago.

That was when I first stepped out of the transport case

and put my paws on the deck.

The day I and the rest of the thousand-strong crew of

engineered caretaker rats

had been brought from the training facilities and onto the ship

we had trained to maintain our entire lives,

and which would soon

be headed for Proxima B.

We had entered the ship,

expecting a lot of rooms with equipment that would need tending,

the way our training cabins had been laid out.

Instead we had been met with a maze of twisting tubes,

splitting and combining.

Endless runs of corridors for us to scamper through

to get between pieces of kit.

It had been much more like our recreational areas,

the fun runs that we had run through as pups,

just much larger

and with equipment for us to work on.

It all remained as wonderful to us through the journey as it had seemed to us that first day.

Our home to be for the nearly two decades worth of a trip

to that distant star

had been designed to not simply support us physically,

but challenge us mentally as well.

To keep us fit and in shape,

so we would be able to perform our maintenance duties.

Training had given us the skills needed to maintain the equipment,

and the leader of the team which had created us

had ensured we would be able to adapt,

trained us to understand changing circumstances

and to deal with them.

In space, you had to deal with what you had.

Couldn't just order in some new bits from a shop,

because the nearest one might very possibly be literal light years away.

We had never seen the outside of the ship,

but when we boarded, we soon learned the layout of it;

at least we technicians did who had the task of keeping it running.

Most of our crew did basic maintenance of the systems

or any of the other many things which needed to be done to maintain the crew itself,

but the oldest of us had been able to train longer.

We had known more about the systems of the ship

than our shipmates.

We knew there were parts of the ship

that not everybody was aware of,

but even we who had been granted such knowledge

did not really know what it was.

How could we have known.

We had been taught to adapt,

but you could hardly adapt to something you were not aware of.

We had not been taught about the world that brought us into reality.

Our creator had made sure we had been spared the realities of that world

until finally, one day eighteen years into the trip,

she had no choices left but her final one.

The choice she made

was to give us one of our own. #

I flicked an ear at something that sounded like panting and claws clicking rapidly against plastic.

I pulled myself out from underneath the gently humming air cycling unit I was working on

and sniffed at the air.

As my nose tried to detect whose claws it might be,

my gaze searched for the source of the sound,

following the soft, sweeping line of the transit tube which snaked its way

through the insides of the ship.

The soft, nobbly surface allowed air to travel with less turbulence

than had it simply been smooth.

It also allowed the claws of our paws to propel us along both speedily and safely,

the way someone was doing now,

approaching me at what sounded like a fair clip.

"Twentree!" came a familiar voice from down from the tube,

the same direction the sound I had heard had come from.

The voice was rapidly followed by the scent,

and the scampering, white-furred shape of one of my crewmates.

A junior tech, one of those who had been made towards the end

just before we had left Earth.

One of those I had helped train,

and who would take over for me

when I finally became too old to perform my duties. "Twentree," he said again, the nearest he was able to get to saying my name, the number

twenty three.

"Quick!" Our mouths were hardly designed for speech the way our makers had it,

but we still managed something recognisably like words.

A great deal of information could be conveyed through body language, which of course we did,

but sometimes words were just more useful.

Our paws lent themselves even less to the sign language

some of our creators' creations employed

than our mouths did to words,

and so, adding in a little gesturing and body language, we had chosen the lesser of two problems.

Even then, sometimes it was awkward.

Sevenhundredandfourtythree had an annoyingly large number of sounds in it

that a rat's cleft lip did not allow me to easily produce.

Our creator had taught us to adapt,

so we improvised. "Sehunsotre,"

I replied and pulled myself all the way out from the machine.

I moved to stand upright on my hind paws in the low gravity,

because composure was important.

Especially with an overexcited junior technician before you.

I deliberately perked my ears

and calmly raised my muzzle just a little,

a slight frown on my brow as I sniffed at him inquisitively.

Detecting a strong taint of worry through his scent,

I did my best to retain my own calm,

in part to help him.

"Junior. Relax. What happen?"

The young rat calmed himself

and sat up on his haunches,

curling his tail around his feet in embarrassment

but still managing to remember to rub the top of his muzzle in greeting.

He was panting hard,

and I thought he had likely run all the way from command.

It would not be anything normal:

If there was something urgent in need of fixing,

the ship's intercom was plenty capable of conveying this need.

If he was here panting like this,

either a superior had sent him here for some claw polish

and was currently laughing with the rest of their team,

or it was something distinctly out of the ordinary.

Our location was nowhere near any of the equipment stores,

and while he was a junior,

he had been one for eighteen years.

It did not seem likely to be the former.

"Excuse, Sir," he said between breaths,

his bright, red eyes glistening in the light as he spoke.

He breathed in deeply,

eyes closed, and exhaled slowly.

He opened his eyes and looked at me more directly, properly.

"Control said go, get you. Tell alarm.

Ring zero alarm."

"Ring zero alarm?"

I enquired. No claw polish.

My twitching whiskers betrayed the worry I attempted to keep inside,

and doubtless my young friend realised this,

his own whiskers twitching in solidarity.

"Not know," he said

and got back down on all fours,

and crawled closer.

"One said get. Tell run quick.

quick." He pointed his nose to the unit I had been working on.

"I handle cycler." The last he said with a more confident air about him,

and I realised I might have misinterpreted his mood.

Not so much worry as perhaps just straight forward exhaustion.

He had just run a fair distance,

one of our youngest on a mission from the oldest rat on board.

"K. Nearly done.

Clean to do. Then done,"

I said, attempting to relax my own expression,

and nodded to the young tech before heading off in the direction he had come from.

He might well have been junior,

but he was practically as skilled as me.

I had been ten years old when we left Earth,

and had five years of training on tech before we left.

He had been a part of the last five hundred to be created

and had only just got his eyes when we left,

and had grown up on board the ship.

I'd spent the last thirteen years teaching him everything I knew.

That air cycler was in safe hands.

We knew the humans had realised they could not go themselves, because,

so our creators had told us,

they were fragile.

No human was physically able to take the strain of such a journey.

Those who had created both us and the ship had told us this,

and that they had taken the opportunity to construct us together.

Design a crew that fit a ship which could in turn be designed for that crew.

With no need to fit in support for the fragile human physiology,

they had build a ship

which would prepare its cargo,

as well as its crew, us,

for the conditions we were likely to encounter at our destination.

It would spend the first half of the trip

burning to get up to speed,

and then flip and spend the rest burning to slow back down again.

It had run almost entirely on auto,

with only slight adjustments from our command crew.

Since we would be on our way for a fair few years,

it had been decided that running life support as a closed system was the best idea.

A simplified biosphere,

with tightly controlled members:

Just us, and a selection of plants and bacteria as designed as us and the ship.

The plants and bacteria supporting us,

us supporting the ship,

and the ship supporting all of us.

As far as we knew,

this is how it had been intended to work.

Everything we had been told from we were born,

everything the techs and our trainers had suggested nothing else.

The first ship containing life to go to another star.

Built with great speed, following the excitement of the discovery that there were several stars with habitable planets,

and that the nearest of those

was even at the nearest star to Earth.

The ship was a long stack of rings with engines at one end.

The rings were separated by empty space

but connected by our tubes and a central hub

by four spokes each.

The entire thing was covered in large tanks, full of

water, protecting the delicate biological entities inside the ship from radiation,

and the tanks in turn

protected from impacts

by thick outer bulkheads.

The rings were numbered zero through nineteen,

and the majority were cargo.

Just a big bunch of container holds which the thousand of us took turns patrolling

to make sure were stable and intact.

Numbered from the middle, with zero in the centre of the ship,

the uneven numbered rings were towards the engine end.

The rear, so to speak,

though for latter half of the journey it was pointed in the direction of travel.

Ring nineteen contained control and engineering where I was headed to meet One,

and was at the far rear.

The even numbered rings were towards the other end,

which might be called the front,

and ring eighteen at the tip of the ship was our habitat.

A thousand large rats comfortably holed up in warm nests

at the front of the ship.

This, of course, was been where I had been working in one of the spokes to the central hub.

Further out the rotation would simulate gravity at an Earth like level,

but that near to the hub

there was not a great deal of it.

Nice enough every so often,

but it wasn't healthy for very long,

so we tried to only go to the low gravity sections when we had to.

So not only had I been at the opposite end of the ship,

I had also been halfway to the hub.

You never seem to find yourself in a convenient location when you are suddenly required to be somewhere specific.

Ring zero, in the middle of the ship

and where I had to pass through,

was the ring that nobody outside of a few core people was supposed to know existed.

Just a gap in the maps between ring one and two

that only a few techs knew had something in it other than scurry tubes.

After all, since nobody was supposed to go into ring zero,

why should anybody know it was there?

Only the first thirty even knew it existed.

The Singulars and the tens because command was command,

and us twenties because well,

general maintenance of the energy feeds had to happen.

It had an impact on the structural integrity of the ship itself,

and so we had to know the mass distribution of it.

But if any of the other twenty nine knew what was inside,

outside of how much mass it contained, well,

they hadn't told me.

Not that I had asked, of course.

It wasn't something I needed to know,

and I had plenty of things to work on.

Panting as heavily as Sehunsotre had done,

I arrived at the intersection between command

and the much larger engineering section in ring nineteen,

and I made a quick stop at a wash station to clean myself up a bit.

The wash was a quick one,

because it seemed decidedly important I made haste,

but cleanliness being important, and this being One,

it was something I felt I had to do.

It had the side effect of allowing my breathing and my hammering heart to calm down again.

Feeling more relaxed,

and considerably cleaner,

two things that always seemed connected,

I made my way up the wide scurry tube from the intersection wash station

and around the ring to the centre of command.

About half way there,

I caught up to Twenty,

lead tech, and a good friend since we had got our eyes.

He was one of the few of us with a colour other than white in his fur,

one brown-tipped ear.

Even with our not exactly amazing vision,

he was visible at a distance.

We sniffed at each other in greeting,

both of us familiar with the scent of the other,

and I detected a touch of worry in his,

the way he surely did in mine.

"Lo Twentree," he said as we both continued towards command,

and frowned as he asked

"know happen?" "Not know,"

was all I could say,

though I was sure my own frown and my twitching whiskers told of my worry at the situation.

"Run quick command.

See One. Junior said.

Ring zero alert?" "Junior?

Know ring zero?" he asked as his brow shot up and his ears suddenly perked,

sounding about as confused as I had felt

when Sevenhundredfourtythree

had passed on the order.

"No," I said and looked at him as we entered the command deck and headed,

at a more calm pace,

over to the far end where One, Two and Three

laid when they were on duty,

on rotating shifts

the way the whole ship was.

"Not know. Ring zero alert what?"

"I tell," One said loudly from across the room as we made our way through the command deck.

It was difficult to remember, sometimes,

that her hearing was as good as it had ever been.

Fifteen years my senior,

One might well now be positively ancient,

well over fourty years old.

Her eyes had turned grey,

and her fur had faded from our usual white to a whispy near translucency.

Her mind, however,

was as sharp as it ever had been,

and her hearing as acute as her eyesight was not.

"Am sorry, Sir," I said as we reached her,

sitting up on our haunches

and rubbing our ears and muzzles in salute.

Both Twenty and I sniffed the air towards her,

and detected in her only the slightest hint of the worry the two of us shared.

"Get here. Tried quick.

Hope okay." "Quick okay.

Both," she said, sniffing at us as she rubbed one ear with a paw

in the more relaxed fashion her grand seniority allowed.

"My task. Soon done,"

she said and pointed with that same paw

to one of the large displays beside her.

Normally they showed a mix of sensor outputs that the bridge crew used for operations,

and feeds from cameras showing various parts of the ship's areas

like engineering or the rec areas,

or more commonly

cycling through a view of the many cargo holds.

The one she indicated to us, however,

was showing something

very different. I had no idea that there were cameras

outside the ship, but apparently there were.

It looked, I thought,

somewhat more bulky than I had expected it would.

More than that, though,

was what was hanging in the star strewn space above the ship.

We had arrived. Glancing to the side,

I noticed Twenty's mouth hanging wide open,

and I realised mine was as well, and closed it.

"Ring zero secret.

You know," she said,

and we both nodded.

"Hear now. It same secret.

This ring zero. We given.

End protocol change.

Important things gone.

We decide. What do now?"

This was the the first of two parts of

“You Are Our Lifeboat”

by Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen,

read for you by Khaki,

your faithful fireside companion.

Tune in next time to find out what our space-faring rat friends discover of their own lives,

and what their collective future holds.

As always, you can find more stories on the web at thevoice.dog,

or find the show wherever you get your podcasts.

And if this is a difficult time of your for you,

when you’d want to be as busy and cozy and snug as these space-rats’ nests,

and now feel as if you might as well be on Proxima B,

please know that you’re not alone.

You’re great, and I am your faithful fireside companion.

Thank you for listening

to The Voice of Dog.