Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

In front of her was a low hill. In fact, the face of the hill seemed to be on all sides of her. It was like she was sitting in a soup bowl made of dull yellow-orange dirt, and the swamp was the soup. Some kind of crater?

  The pod—and her parents—were nowhere to be seen.

  “Mom!” she yelled. “Dad!”

  “Up here,” came the reply. It didn’t sound like her parents.

  “SABRINA?”

  “Hurry.”

  All the goofy sarcasm was gone from its voice, replaced with smooth urgency. This brought Jillian’s what-ifs up on full alert. “Where are you?”

  “I said—” There came a kind of blue firework from high on Jillian’s left. It rose and glittered and solidified into the shape of an arrow, blinking on and off, pointing to the top of the ridge. “Up here.”

  Jillian had sort of expected SABRINA to come fetch her. At least make a rope to throw down to her. Something. But she was on her own.

  “Okay,” she said. She started clambering up the hill as fast as she could. The ground was drier here away from the swamp, at least, and the crater wall wasn’t too steep on this side.

  When she got to the top, at first she wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking at. The ground looked crumpled, like a giant hand had grabbed it and squeezed. Green stuff showed through the cracks, like it had boiled up from underground.

  The pod must have landed right on the peak of the buckling ground and slid off, because it was lying on its side next to it, in a patch of more of that green stuff, fully twenty feet to the right of the portal. It had split somehow, like something had torn its belly open, spilling supplies. Her bunk must have shot right out of the rupture and over the ridge.

  But that wasn’t the worst part.

  The worst part was that Jillian realized—immediately, horribly—why SABRINA hadn’t helped her.

  It looked like SABRINA was already pretty busy just keeping her parents alive.

  “Mom!” Jillian yelled, tearing across the rocky ridgetop as fast as the suit would allow. “Dad!”

  What exactly was going on over there? She couldn’t really tell. Her parents’ bunks were empty. She could see the open doors through the rupture in the pod. There was something up on top of a wide, flat boulder. She could only see one end of it, but it looked like a giant cocoon. No. Two giant cocoons. Made out of something that could only have been SABRINA.

  Looking at them drove all the air from her lungs.

  No, she thought. No, no, no—

  “This way,” something said near her face. Jillian was so freaked out that she swatted at the thing reflexively. It dissolved to let her hand pass through, then reformed.

  “Hey,” it said. “Quit that.”

  “SABRINA? Where are my—”

  “Shush.” It was just a tiny fragment of SABRINA, vaguely mothlike, hovering at her shoulder. “Follow me,” it told her. “Eyes forward. If I’ve analyzed your personality correctly, which I have, I’m at least ninety-nine-point-eight percent sure you don’t want to look to your left.”

  So Jillian looked to the left. Toward the pod.

  The hole in its side looked bigger than it had even a moment ago. That green stuff was not just under it now but inside it. And it wasn’t one green something but a lot of green somethings, the way SABRINA was a lot of little somethings moving together, except that these somethings were much, much bigger than SABRINA’s nanobots. They were like fat green worms. If worms swarmed like bees. Which Jillian was quite certain they did not.

  There was something oozing out of the pod now, bright orange against the green stuff it had landed in. Then she realized it was the pod. The outer skin of the pod. Their home for a week. Where all their supplies were stored. Their food. Their water. Everything.

  It was melting.

  “I told you not to look!”

  “What is that? What happened to my parents? Are they okay? Is that them over there on that big rock?”

  “Less talk, more follow,” said SABRINA. “Your parents are in stable condition. And it’s me who’s keeping them there, so I can’t carry you. You’re going to have to climb.”

  All Jillian knew of stable condition was that it happened on the newsfeeds a lot, after things like really bad traffic accidents. You ended up in a hospital, with tubes coming out of your body, or all wrapped up in bandages. Or in a cocoon, she thought, and broke into a sprint.

  It wasn’t far to the boulder. The next thing she knew, she was standing at the foot of it.

  “Up you go,” SABRINA said.

  Jillian had to tilt her head way back just to see the top edge of the boulder. There were no handholds or footholds, and the rock face was sheer. But her parents were up there, and almost all of SABRINA was taken up with helping them, so she had to try. She thought for a second, then ran around to the back of the boulder. There were some smaller rocks piled up next to it, which she was able to climb. That put her about halfway up the main boulder. From there, the adrenaline was driving again. Her parents could be dying up there, for all she knew. She jumped and grabbed the edge and somehow pulled herself up.

  She fell to her knees beside her parents. She couldn’t really get a good look at them because they were mostly covered by SABRINA. It had split in half to enclose each of her parents individually, like sleeping bags. Only their heads poked out. Their helmets were off, and there was more SABRINA wrapped around her mom’s forehead like the kind of bandage you wrap around a sprained ankle. But the only actual wound Jillian could see was just below her dad’s eye, a kind of burned-looking patch of skin, almost perfectly circular, which there had apparently not been quite enough SABRINA to cover.

  “I got her,” SABRINA was saying to them. “She’s here. They didn’t get her. She’s all in one piece.” Tiny moth eyes squinted at her. “You are in one piece, aren’t you?”

  Jillian didn’t know what to do. Or say. Or anything. She collapsed across them, hugging them both at once. She knew it probably hurt them, but she couldn’t stop.

  They couldn’t hug her back, because SABRINA was pinning their arms, but they kept saying things over and over again like Jillian and You’re okay and Are you hurt? and We didn’t know where you were.

  “I’m okay,” she told them. “I’m not hurt, I’m fine, I’m okay. I think my bunk fell down the hill when the pod broke.”

  The pod. A little ways away, that mass of green things was still in there, squirming.

  “What happened to you guys?” Jillian said. “What are those things in the pod?” Then she saw the look on her mom’s face. “Mom?”

  But when her mom spoke, it wasn’t to her. It was to SABRINA. Her voice sounded weird, thick, like she had something stuck in her throat. It took Jillian a second to realize she sounded like that because she was trying not to cry. Her blood ran cold. Whatever this was, it was really, really bad.

  Her mom fastened her Do What I Say Now or Else stare on SABRINA. “Get her out of here.”

  Jillian’s heart slammed up against her ribs so hard it hurt. “Mom?”

  “You got it, boss,” SABRINA said. The sleeping-bag shapes dissolved and re-formed, and now SABRINA was a floating pancake again, just like it’d been in the lab. It even made Jillian a helpful little stepladder. “Hop on.”

  Jillian scrambled to her feet, took a step back. “No.”

  Now that SABRINA wasn’t covering her parents, Jillian could see there was something very wrong with their suits. There were holes in them, lots of almost perfectly round holes, with burned skin underneath. Just like what was on her dad’s face. It looked painful in the extreme. They needed a hospital. All that was here was the supplies. Which were in the pod. Which was dissolving right before her eyes.

  They didn’t get her, SABRINA had told her parents. They who? The worms? But the worms didn’t bite people. None of this made any sense.

  “Jillian, l
isten to me very carefully. The portal will only remain open for another two minutes.”

  “One minute, fifty-eight seconds,” SABRINA corrected. It projected a countdown clock in midair. “One minute, fifty-seven.”

  “SABRINA’s going to take you home. The site is compromised.”

  “What are those things?”

  “Local fauna, behaving very abnormally. I don’t know why. What I do know is it’s not safe for you to be here. You have to go. Don’t take off your helmet or touch the ground between here and the portal.”

  “SABRINA can carry you,” her dad said. “Like a flying carpet. It’ll be cool.”

  Jillian looked at the portal. Then she looked at her parents. “What about you?” she said in a tiny voice. Though she already knew the answer.

  Silence.

  “No,” she said. Then she said it louder. “No.”

  “Jillian—”

  “Why are you pretending like it’s okay that I just go without you?”

  “We can’t walk,” her dad said gently. “And SABRINA can’t carry us all.”

  “But it can take you,” her mom said. “Just you. And only if you go right now.”

  “So tell them to keep the portal open!” Jillian shouted. “Or send somebody in to help you, or—”

  “Honey, they can’t,” her mom said. “We can’t talk to them from here, and we won’t make it to the portal without SABRINA.”

  Jillian’s mind raced. “So SABRINA can go through and tell them!”

  “SABRINA is getting you out of here. That’s the priority now. Once you’re through, they can figure out the rest. Get on it, and we’ll try to distract those things long enough for you to get away.”

  Jillian had seen enough movies to know what that meant. “No way. I’m staying here with you.”

  “It’s the only way. There’s no time. We love you so, so much, and we’re so—”

  “I’m not going without you!”

  “SABRINA. Get her home safe. That’s an order. We’re going down to clear a path.”

  “Acknowledged,” said SABRINA. “It’s been nice working with you.”

  “No!” Jillian yelled. She punched at SABRINA. It split and swarmed around her fist, untouched. She swung again. “I said I’m staying here, and—”

  Something grabbed Jillian’s shoulders from behind, not quite hard enough to hurt. Startled, she tried to turn. SABRINA had hold of her with its octopus arms, strong as steel cables, with a grip like glue. “Buckle up,” it said.

  She could feel herself being lifted very slightly off the ground.

  “Put me down,” she shouted. “Put me down!”

  “Sorry, new kid,” said SABRINA. “Orders are orders. This is going to go a lot more smoothly if you cooperate.”

  SABRINA began drifting toward the edge of the boulder. Jillian’s feet kicked at empty air. Like she was in a nightmare, she watched helplessly as her parents started to climb down the boulder. Back toward the pod. To give themselves to those things. To clear a path. To save her. While SABRINA let them, just because they’d told it to—

  Jillian froze.

  Because they’d told it to.

  She reached over and pulled off her left glove. She pushed up the suit sleeve, the jumpsuit sleeve underneath. It wouldn’t go up much, but it didn’t need to.

  Then she shoved the wristband up and in the direction of SABRINA’s face.

  “I have clearance,” she said. Her voice shook. She ignored it. “Security clearance blue. Just like them. Orders are orders. Like you said.”

  SABRINA paused, hovering.

  “And I order you to put me down.”

  The tip of one arm tapped Jillian’s shoulder pensively. “Interesting. This is a dilemma.”

  “No, it isn’t!” Jillian’s dad yelled at SABRINA from the edge of the boulder. “You get her through there now. I order you to—”

  “And I order you not to. I will go over there, and I will pull out their security chips, and I will throw them in that swamp before I let you leave them here to die.”

  “Ew,” said SABRINA admiringly. “Gross. Hardcore, but gross.”

  It lowered Jillian to the boulder and plopped down next to her, a friendly fire-colored dog with six legs and a crown of stars on the side of its butt.

  Jillian crumpled, both ears ringing. Her mind felt like lightning. It was looping one thought, over and over: it listened to me it listened to me it listened to me.

  Her parents were beside her on the boulder. They were both yelling. At SABRINA? At her? Jillian didn’t care. Let them be mad. It didn’t matter. She was mad. She was furious. Or terrified. Or relieved. She didn’t know what she was. She thought she might have to throw up. Or cry. Or pass out. She—

  A sound came from behind Jillian. Or rather, a sound disappeared. It had been so quiet, so much a part of the background, that she hadn’t really noticed it until it was gone. She turned to look, although deep down she already knew what it was.

  The portal had vanished.

  “Okay,” SABRINA said. “Now what?”

  Chapter 5

  I don’t know, Jillian thought. I honestly have literally no idea.

  About nine-tenths of her wanted to yell it out loud, then curl up into a little ball and wait for her parents to fix this mess and get them all home.

  But one-tenth of her knew she couldn’t do either of those things. She didn’t know SABRINA very well, but she remembered how it had watched her in the lab, like it was grading her on some secret test she didn’t even know she was taking. Even now she could feel it watching her. If Jillian wanted it to keep following her orders, she’d better keep sounding like somebody with order-giving authority. Somebody like her parents.

  But her parents had gone weirdly quiet. Weirdly still. Their faces were pale and sweaty, even though the air on 80 UMa c was cool as an October morning. Her dad’s eyes were shut, but her mom was staring blankly into the too-green sky. They lay there and said nothing, just taking fast, shallow, tiny sips of air.

  Jillian’s heart punched up in her chest like a fist. Everything she knew about badly injured people came from movies. Shock? Were they going into shock? Was that right?

  She swallowed her fear and stood up as straight as she could. SABRINA gazed up at her, head cocked, wagging the flame of its tail.

  “SABRINA. I order you to go back to, um, being bandages. The field crew requires medical attention.”

  “No prob,” SABRINA said. Within two seconds it had split in half and re-cocooned her parents. They didn’t protest. They didn’t do much of anything. She wanted them to wake up and yell at her some more for refusing to leave when they’d told her to go. This was infinitely worse.

  All that was left behind of SABRINA was the moth-thing. It landed on Jillian’s shoulder. “I am not equipped for advanced medical care,” it told her. “All I can do is keep them stable, and I can’t do that forever.”

  “Okay,” Jillian said, shoving down a rising panic. Nobody else is here to save them, she told herself. It has to be you. She pointed at the bandages. “What exactly are you doing under there?”

  “I neutralized and cleaned the chemical burns. I applied a self-cleaning layer of coverage, which will help prevent infection and introduction of debris into the wounds. But I’m not a medbot.”

  Jillian glanced at the pod. “Do we have one?” she asked doubtfully.

  “No.”

  “Will they be okay until the portal comes back if we don’t have one?”

  “No. They need days in an intensive care burn unit regrowing the damaged skin. All I can do is try to keep them alive as best I can until the portal returns. After that . . .” SABRINA went quiet, consulting some unseen diagnostic. “I give them fair to middling odds. Let’s say sixty-forty.”

  Jillian decided not to ask whi
ch outcome was the sixty and which the forty.

  “But you—” she said, gesturing at the cocoons.

  “Like I said, I’m not a medbot. This isn’t my field.”

  “No,” Jillian said, suddenly angry. The thinking part of her brain knew that what had happened to her parents had been an accident. Knew that when her anxiety spiked up, it made her irritable. But holding on to her terror felt like squeezing a balloon. She might be able to squash it down in one place, but it’d just pop back up somewhere else. And SABRINA was the only thing here. “Your field is making sure this place is safe for us to begin with. But it isn’t, and now we’re stuck here.”

  SABRINA just watched her blankly. Of course you can’t hurt its feelings, Jillian told herself. It’s a machine. It doesn’t have any. Still, she took a deep breath and managed to say the next part more calmly. “So we figure out how to get down there and get the medical supplies while we still can. I know we brought some. I saw them in the pod.”

  “I thought we weren’t going down there,” SABRINA said. “I thought we were very specifically not doing that very specific thing.”

  “Believe me,” Jillian said, “I don’t want to.”

  But she went to the edge of the boulder and looked out at the pod. It wasn’t too far. Maybe the length of a hallway at school. She could sprint that in a minute, easy. Not that the distance was even a measurable fraction of the problem.

  Fat green worms had burrowed into the pod like maggots into a peach, turning everything they touched into frothy goop. The medical supplies. The food. The pod itself, which was supposed to be Jillian’s family’s shelter for a week. Even the bunks were dissolving.

  “SABRINA, tell me what those worm things are, and how we get past them.” As Jillian watched, a water tank tumbled out of the pod’s storage bay and through the hole. Green worms clung to it, covering it almost entirely. The thick plastic walls of the tank began to look foamy.

  Suddenly she knew exactly what she was looking at.

  Something her dad had told her back in the facility. About life-forms on 80 UMa c.