All Dogs Go Where?

No one can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. No one can hear bones breaking either.

I should know, I've done both.

In the last two minutes.

Excruciating pain radiated up my left arm as it dangled uselessly at my side. It was an ugly break. I'd felt the unnatural pressure and then the snap!

Nausea from the pain churned around in my gut while my mouth flooded with saliva, the burn of acid crawling up my throat. Oh, those eggs had been a bad choice this morning.

I was so screwed.

Yellow bile dotted with clumps of freeze-dried yolk and wheat toast ran down the inside of my helmet as I went into shock.

Maybe I'd just close my eyes for a bit. Yeah, just a teeny, tiny bit...

*

A hard jolt roused me from unconsciousness. I peeled my eyes open and lifted my head, but the streaks of vomit made everything blurry. Eww. The stench wasn't much better. It overwhelmed my helmet, riling my poor stomach up once more.

Unfortunately just those small movements brought a fresh wave of agony rolling up my arm and down my spine, almost to the point of blacking out again.

Some shallow breathing, or in my case panting, helped me manage the pain long enough to focus on my shitty situation.

The last thing I remembered clearly was putting on my Azotech suit and exiting the module. No sooner had the outer bay door closed than something came at me from the side. Whatever it was didn't do more than blunt trauma, because my suit hadn't been compromised, or I would be a husk already.

Another hard nudge came at my leg. I froze. Thankfully not many things scared me–which I'm sure is why I was fast-tracked to my current position. It surely wasn't for my winning personality.

Instead of panicking, I descended to that cold, detached place inside my mind where pain and fear turned to focus and cunning.

Stretching shaky fingers, I reached my right hand across my chest and opened the small panel in my suit, fumbling around until I hit the right button.

Every movement made me want to scream in agony, but I stuffed that pain down, down, down into an itty bitty box of 'nope' at the back of my mind. It resided right next to a box of 'childhood trauma' that I didn't like either.

A few seconds later, a small noise blared in my comm warning me to hold my breath and shut my eyes just as a cleaning mist floated out, dissolving the mess on my visor and simultaneously going right up my nose. Azotech needed to work on their cheap ass gear.

My eyes snapped open as I half snorted, half choked. Blinding pain tried to resurface, but the crystal-clear view before me was so unexpected, everything else became white noise.

I almost wished the breakfast mural was back.

Uh...so I was not next to my module anymore. If what I saw could be believed, I'd been transported to another world? Or maybe dimension was a better fit?

This was not the barren, crap-tastic landscape of Migda3. The happy, twin suns shining in the sky were all wrong for starters as was the lush green grass blowing gently to and fro.

What in the arm-breaking, egg-vomiting, body-snatching fresh hell was this?

Something nudged my leg again. Hard. Slowly tilting my helmet down to look, I caught the first glimpse of my assailant slash kidnapper.

Holy crap!

It was an honest to goodness dog. Like an Earth dog.

Okay, maybe it wasn't a normal dog per se, because it was about two to three times the size of its Earthy cousin, but the rest of its features were so similar.

Except for maybe a few other things.

A furry face with a triangle of big brown eyes gazed up at me with so much love, I felt my cold, dead heart give a squeeze. It had been a long, long while since that thing had actually beat. Not since Saran. But that didn't matter now.

I wanted this space dog to be my new alien squishy.

I would love it and brush it and feed it junk food. We would roll in the grass and laze around in the sunshine. Two peas in an alien pod.

I was still mapping out the rest of our lives together, when it suddenly yelped and dashed off like its tail was on fire.

There in its place stood another mutt, one whose face I'd sorely missed.

It looked exactly like my childhood dog, Mitzie.

The longer I stared into her eyes, the more the chains on my 'childhood trauma' box rattled.

I needed to get out of here.

Just as I pressed the comm button to try to reach headquarters, she tilted her head and spoke.

"Hello, Erth. We need to talk."

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