Are We On Mars?

Chapter Forty-Five

"Woohoo!"

Shadepelt flinched at the over-enthusiastic voice of Lionshine and turned her head to glare at the loudspeaker in her room.

"Announcement: we will be shortly landing on our final planet before returning to Earth: Mars. Meet me at the control room right now!"

To be completely honest, the black she-cat could not agree with her captain more. Just one more planet and they're back home. Giving her chest fur a good lick, she headed off to the control room. One more planet.

Outside Alderwood's room.

"Come on! I know you want tuna!"

"No! That tube of tuna's been sitting in the basement for three years and a day! It's expired!"

"How have you been keeping track of it that closely? And since when have you cared about the expiry date?!"

Lionshine, who had resorted to feeble attempts at blasting Alderwood's door with her super laser-beam glare, decided to give up. It's all that stupid alien she-cat's fault, she concluded sourly.

"Fine, then. Go and sulk like the loser you are. Just don't lock us all out of the ship when we're on Mars or something unproductive and childish like that."

There was no reply aside from a resentful sniff.

Lionshine pivoted around, head raised purposefully, and strode back to the control room. A brief glance informed her that Shadepelt was already waiting in there, tail twitching irritably. Pebblepounce emerged from a door to the right of Lionshine and they padded into the control room side by side.

"All right, folks, it's time for our last mission."

In Alderwood's room.

Alderwood's ear twitched. Was that the sound of the ship entrance closing down? They must have left then.

As soon as his sister had left, Alderwood had wasted no time to formulate his next course of action, which was, of course:

1. Lock the rest of the crew members outside.

2. Take a nap (counting his sister's corpses was the standard procedure before every nap).

Seething silently, the brown-and-white tom locked up the door and stomped back to his room to take the well-deserved nap.

Outside, on Mars.

"Have you checked over there?" Lionshine pointed in a direction with her tail.

Greenface nodded his head. "I remember feeling staggering waves of nausea by that giant crater."

"TMI," the golden-furred she-cat muttered. "None of us have found anything. Maybe there isn't any alien cat race on Mars."

She couldn't help but feel slightly disappointed. Sure, she'd hoped for an easy finishing mission, but this felt a little too easy. They'd scanned most of the planet with a special detector recently developed by the engineers, and excluded the areas where habitation was impossible — the only areas unable to be scanned with the device, left for manual search, were completely barren of any hint of life.

Behind her, Pebblepounce sighed. "Yeah. I thought Mars would have the most diverse range of aliens and be the most populated planet in this galaxy after us, but nothing here tells us that."

He tried to kick the rock samples he'd collected and discovered that it, in fact, hurt more than he'd thought and that maybe he shouldn't have kicked it to express his frustration after all.

"I guess we're going back home now."

Written by Saph! 🍩✨