Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Get some sleep,” SABRINA told her. “Growing kids on alien planets need their rest.”

  That was going to be hard. Or maybe not hard enough. She wanted to stay awake—had to stay awake—but her body had other ideas.

  Jillian darted a look back toward her parents, then down in the direction of the pod. “No sign of the worms?”

  “Oh, plenty,” SABRINA said. “Down there.” An appendage reached up from the blanket at Jillian’s shoulder and pointed at the pitch-dark ridge. “See?”

  The appendage lit up, a thin beam SABRINA aimed toward the ruin of the pod.

  No—not toward the pod. They’d finally abandoned that. They’d moved on, drawn toward the puddle of water from the broken container. The worms had long since overflowed the puddle, but they were still wriggling toward it from all directions, trying to shove their heads down past the crowded mass of worms to the dregs of mud below. Worms piled onto that wet spot until they made a hill taller than Jillian.

  “Yes,” Jillian said weakly. “I see.”

  The already-slim chances of her getting any sleep at all were rapidly going down the toilet. But SABRINA was right. She had to try. She’d be useless tomorrow if she was too tired to think.

  At least the worms were making no move to approach the boulder. She wasn’t sure why, after they’d so thoroughly annihilated the pod, but whatever the reason, she’d take it.

  “Sleep,” SABRINA said, seconding Jillian’s thoughts. “The substitute medbot insists. I’ll keep watch.”

  True to its word, part of SABRINA detached and made a kind of telescope on a tripod, stationed at her parents’ feet. Except that at the end of the telescope, instead of a lens, there was an eye. The telescope panned around in a full circle, then gave a soft click and panned back the other way, tracking the landscape relentlessly with that one unblinking eye. The soft click—and the whirring, humming noise it made as it spun its slow circle, back and forth—wasn’t necessary. SABRINA wasn’t that kind of machine. It took Jillian a moment to realize SABRINA was doing that for her benefit. To give her something to listen to that wasn’t the night noise of a lonely distant planet, and the quiet rustling of the worms.

  So Jillian took her SABRINA blanket and squeezed in between her parents. The high point of her whole day ended up being that when she finally fell asleep, she didn’t dream.

  Chapter 8

  At first when Jillian woke up, she didn’t know where she was. She lay there, eyes shut, sunlight shining through her eyelids. Mom and Dad left on a work trip yesterday, she thought blearily. I’m at Aunt Alex’s. The mattress in her guest bed is harder than I remember. The light is weird.

  Then it all came crashing back. She shot upright.

  That was a mistake. Dizziness made her vision go all swirly, and her head was pounding. Had she ever been this hungry? She wasn’t sure. Her mouth felt like she’d brushed her teeth with sand, and used more sand as mouthwash.

  Something nudged her knee. She looked down, and there was a six-legged dog sitting in front of her, tongue hanging out.

  “Morning, sunshine!”

  Jillian stretched. She wanted water. No. She wanted orange juice. Just a few days left. She could do this. “Morning, SABRINA.” She knuckled sleep out of her eyes and inspected her parents. They were still out cold. Her mom was mumbling something in her sleep like she was arguing with someone in a dream, and her dad was lightly snoring.

  “They woke up a few hours ago,” SABRINA said. “A while after you finally fell asleep. They didn’t want to wake you. I gave them another dose of the medicine. They were still quite . . .” SABRINA paused carefully. “Uncomfortable.”

  “Uncomfortable,” Jillian echoed. It’d probably been a whole lot worse than that. Whatever pain they’d had, they hadn’t made enough noise to wake her. Jillian remembered all those burns and imagined how difficult that must have been for them. The thought rooted her to the spot for several seconds in which she could do nothing.

  Feel sorry for them later, she scolded herself. Do something to help them now.

  “Hang on,” she said, leaping to her feet. “I’ll mix up some more stuff with water for them.”

  SABRINA produced another bowl, and Jillian set about making breakfast for her parents. It was just watery soy milk with vitamin/electrolyte tabs, but it brought back memories of making her mom breakfast in bed for her birthday, and for a second Jillian didn’t know whether she was more likely to laugh or cry.

  But she didn’t end up doing either, just nodded at the bowl when she was done, and it grew another pair of twisty straws. “Breakfast is served,” SABRINA sang out, feeding the straws into its patients’ mouths.

  Jillian watched, arms folded like she was hugging herself to stay warm on a cold day. Then she shook it off and mixed herself up some blueberry crumble. It was the most breakfasty-looking thing there was in her pile. It wasn’t half bad either.

  As with dinner last night, she was still bottomlessly hungry after her carefully measured ration was gone. But she couldn’t let herself eat another, no matter how much she wanted to. She still had days to go.

  “When that packaged stuff runs out,” SABRINA chose that moment to inform her, “you’ll have to eat the worms.” Then, misunderstanding the look of horror on Jillian’s face, it added: “Don’t worry. I can cook them. They’re very nutritious.”

  “I’ll eat my shoes first,” Jillian declared. “I’ll eat my podsuit. Just, I don’t know, just boil it up and eat it with some imaginary ketchup.”

  “You would need at least two quarts of water to boil the podsuit,” SABRINA said.

  Do I even have that much? Jillian didn’t ask. She wasn’t sure what she would do if SABRINA said no. Instead she went to investigate the situation herself.

  The container was noticeably emptier than yesterday. She ran this over in her head. SABRINA had given her parents some water, then two meals of soy-milk/vitamin mix. Jillian had mixed up two meals for herself. She hadn’t even let herself drink any plain water on top of that, but she couldn’t keep that up forever.

  She lifted the container up and weighed it between her hands. It was scarily light. Maybe the weight of a jug of orange juice was left. What was that, half a gallon? That was two quarts. Some must have evaporated overnight. Or maybe they’d really just gone through it that quickly.

  She made herself lift it to her mouth and take a tiny sip. Then another. It didn’t even begin to take the edge off her thirst. It felt like the water was just running off her, like rain off a raincoat, never being absorbed.

  She wanted to drink that whole container down and put a good dent in another. Instead she set it carefully back on the boulder. Stared into the broken top corner. She could see her face down there, shakily reflected in the disturbed water. It was biting its lip with worry.

  There was no way around it. They needed more water, and they needed it now. But from where? The swamp? It was so close. It was right down the ridge. It’s just water, SABRINA had said. But it wasn’t. It was water full of dead things. Things that had chosen to die in that water.

  What if drinking that swamp-water was what made the worms get so confused? Local fauna, behaving very abnormally, her mom had said. Understatement of the year. But what if Jillian drank that water and went wrong the way the worms had? What if all she had to do was touch the swamp for it to happen?

  “Hey, SABRINA, question.”

  “Oooh. I love questions.”

  “When you came through the portal. Before the pod. You sent off some little bits of yourself to check out the area nearby. Little flying probe thingies?”

  “Like this?” A swarming burst of little somethings lifted off the tip of the dog-SABRINA’s tail. They were almost but not quite like the firefly it had made yesterday to lead Jillian to the supplies in the pod. They hovered a few inches in midair, drifting like dandelion fluff, b
efore poofing back out of existence. “Yeah, that’s a thing I can do. Ask me another. Oh! I know four hundred and thirteen different card tricks. Want to see?” A deck of cards appeared in front of Jillian, fanning itself out. “Pick one. Any one.”

  “Maybe later,” Jillian said.

  “Oh. Well. Sure. Okay.” The cards vanished. SABRINA circled three times and lay down, curled into a comma with its flamy tail over its nose.

  “Right now I kind of urgently need a water source. One that isn’t”—Jillian pointed violently in the direction of the swamp—“that. But I don’t want to get lost out there just kinda vaguely wandering around until I find one. I’ve seen enough movies to know that’s . . . not the best idea.”

  “You said it,” SABRINA said solemnly. “Next thing you know, you’d be trapped in a cave somewhere eating your own frostbitten toes for nourishment.”

  “I, um, I don’t think I saw that movie.”

  “Me neither,” SABRINA said, shrugging its first two legs. “But I would see that movie.”

  “You mapped this place. Tell me about other water sources.” Then, remembering the very key feature of this water source that had somehow utterly escaped SABRINA’s notice, Jillian was quick to specify: “Water sources that are not full of dead animals or anything else besides just plain regular water, please.”

  “Take your pick.”

  The whole side of SABRINA’s dog body lit up like a screen, displaying little thumbnail pictures of various landscapes. Jillian squinted. “I just touch one to blow it up, or . . . ?”

  “Go for it.”

  Jillian poked one that looked like a pond. Please be clean water, she thought at the picture as it blew up and rendered into focus. Please, please, please.

  It was the swamp. SABRINA must have taken that photo from very high up in the air. Apart from the water in the bottom of it, it looked like the craters on the moon. Jillian knew what that meant. Craters on planets were caused by impacts. Meteors, asteroids, space debris. Something had slammed into 80 UMa c like a fist punching a pillow, and then the swamp had formed in the hole.

  Even the blown-up picture wasn’t close enough to give her much detail on what was in the swamp, which was a relief. Just clumps and clots of darkness on the gray water. That was plenty. She shrank that picture in a hurry.

  “It didn’t used to be there, you know,” SABRINA said.

  “What didn’t? The swamp?”

  “The swamp. The crater. That impact is recent. It wasn’t there when they were running preliminary diagnostics on this site six weeks ago. See?”

  A new picture appeared on SABRINA’s side. This one was an empty field of orange dirt. Some scraggly purple plants grew on it. A few spiky black rocks. Jillian recognized the image from the lab. She’d seen it on a screen there. The image was time-stamped: 03/14/2113 11:39 AM.

  Then that vanished, replaced by the picture of the crater. That one was time-stamped to yesterday. One of SABRINA’s little probes must have taken it while Jillian and her parents had waited in the pod.

  “So between six weeks ago and yesterday, something hit the planet. A meteor or something. Right?”

  SABRINA gave another shrug. “Whatever it is, it either vaporized on impact, or it’s sitting at the bottom of everybody’s favorite swamp right now. If you’d like to dive for it, I’d be happy to outfit you with a breathing tube.”

  “I’m good, SABRINA, thanks.”

  After another minute or two of skimming through the thumbnails, Jillian found one that looked promising. She blew the picture up, and her breath caught. It was a waterfall, spilling from a high black rock. It was absolutely beautiful. It was the kind of place she would have loved to hike back on Earth, if her parents had ever gotten a chance to take her.

  Well, she could take herself now. That was running water, clean and clear. Running water meant nothing was lying in it, bloating and rotting, on-purpose-drowned.

  “That. There. Where is that?”

  SABRINA went still, like it was thinking. It didn’t take long, less than a second before one stubby leg had lifted and pointed into the distance to Jillian’s left. Away from the swamp, thankfully. “One-point-nine-seven miles north-northeast.”

  Less than two miles. That was nothing. She could do that, no problem. It was something she could get up off this rock and go out there and get done.

  “What do you say?” she asked SABRINA. “Want to go with me on a field trip?”

  But Jillian couldn’t just march off the rock and down the ridge into alien wilderness. She had to be smart. She had to prepare. Lucky for her, she loved preparing. How many hikes and camping trips had she made careful checklists of supplies for, carefully packed extra layers and voice-activated headlamps and energy bars for, only to have the trip canceled by her parents’ busy schedules? She could do this in her sleep.

  At least, if today’s hike were on Earth, she could. Where there were marked trails and rescue services in case she got lost. Where there weren’t thousands of worms, hidden just underground, waiting for her to make a wrong move.

  Suddenly she wasn’t so sure.

  She thought back on every survival movie she’d ever seen. All the checklists in her hiking book. What did a person usually need to bring if she was going off into unknown wilderness? It was strangely satisfying to think about. Just going for a hike, she told herself. In space. You got this. She made a list in her head: Food. Water. Matches. Tent. Flashlight. Compass. Knife. Phone or radio or something. Rope?

  Well, she had pretty much none of those things to hand.

  What she did have, which those movie explorers did not, was SABRINA.

  Jillian made a separate little pile of supplies. She’d only be gone a few hours, so she wouldn’t need to take much.

  The day was warming up, so she shucked off the extra jumpsuit and put it in that pile. She could layer it back on later, but she didn’t want to get all sweaty while she walked.

  The smart bandages were used up, so she took the broken roll of industrial-strength duct tape. She could use it to tape her toes if they started to blister in the podsuit boots.

  All the food needed to be cooked before eating, so she almost didn’t bring any. Taking food on a two-mile walk seemed like overkill anyway. But if those survival movies had taught her anything, it was that there was no such thing as being overprepared.

  She picked up the food bars, hesitating only slightly over the label: EMERGENCY USE ONLY. “This is all an emergency,” she told it, and dropped them on the pile.

  That left the water. Once they got to the waterfall, she’d need something to carry some back in, and it would be too heavy for SABRINA, and use up too much of its material besides. She’d have to bring the container. But first she had to find a new home for the water that was already in it.

  Jillian picked through the various packages and empty wrappers on the rock and came up with the empty pouch that had held the spare jumpsuits. It didn’t have a resealable opening, but it looked sturdy.

  Would it hold water, though? She couldn’t exactly use any up to test. She thought for a second, then closed up most of the opening in one fist and blew air into the remaining hole, inflating the bag like a balloon. When she twisted the opening shut, the air stayed in.

  If it held air, it should hold water. She sat down and propped the bag open, holding it steady between her feet. As carefully as she knew how, she poured the water in, folded down the top as many times as it would go, and closed it with a few strips of tape from the broken roll.

  In the bag, their remaining water supply looked very, very small. Jillian locked the image of that waterfall in her mind and held it there. All that clean, fresh water. Hers for the taking.

  She dried the outside of the empty water container on her podsuit sleeve. Then she did it again. The last thing she needed was to leave a trail of water drops for the worms t
o follow.

  Next she stuffed the jumpsuit, tape, and food bars into the now-empty water container. Lastly she dropped the insta-stitches in there too, just in case. You couldn’t be too careful in the wilderness. She bet that was extra true in space.

  She inspected her little collection of supplies. It would help her in a general survival sense, but it wouldn’t protect her from the worms.

  SABRINA could. It had before. But that was when there’d been more of it to spare. This time was going to be trickier.

  As if it was reading Jillian’s thoughts, a fog of SABRINA particles was already gathering around Jillian. “I was thinking blue this time for the suit,” it was saying. “And maybe lose the fin and do wings instead? They wouldn’t work, but they’d look pretty cool. And keep the sword, obviously.”

  “No,” Jillian said slowly. Because as safe and protected—and awesome—as she’d felt in the SABRINA mech suit, there was only so much of SABRINA to go around, and a lot of it needed to be here, keeping an eye on her parents. Jillian didn’t like to think what would happen if SABRINA and she got back late for some reason and nobody had been here to give her parents their pain pills on time. “No wings. Maybe not even a suit, exactly? Just the parts I need most. And lose the sword.”

  SABRINA gave a little squawk of disbelief. “Who goes on an adventure without a sword?”

  Jillian laughed. “Everybody, unfortunately. I’m pretty sure that stopped in the Middle Ages or something.”

  “Well.” SABRINA sniffed. “Somebody should bring it back into style. I volunteer us.”

  “I’d love to,” Jillian said. “Later. Right now we lose the sword because most of you will need to stay here and take care of my mom and dad. Last time you just left them for a few minutes while we got the stuff from the pod. This time we’ll be gone longer.” She looked at her parents and then looked away, blinking hard. “I can’t help them,” she admitted. “You can. And, I mean, look at you. You’re doing an amazing job.”