Her parents climbed into their bunks after her, and one of the techs closed them in. First, though, as expected, they each had to wedge some loose packages of supplies in around them. Jillian couldn’t see what her parents got, but someone reached up and handed her some vacuum-packed bags with labels like MULTIVITAMIN/ELECTROLYTE TABS and WATER PURIFICATION TABS and INSTANT SPLIT PEA SOUP and HIGH-CALORIE FOOD BAR: EMERGENCY USE ONLY. She rolled over onto her back and tucked them in as best she could between her sides and the walls.
It got even more tight and uncomfortable, but nothing she couldn’t handle. She decided to focus on the fun parts. Camping in space. Exploring in space. Even having space picnics with this weird-looking food sounded, honestly, pretty great.
She wondered if SABRINA needed to eat, or what its fuel was. She decided it was probably solar-powered, like a space telescope. But then, what did you call solar-powered when the star you were closest to wasn’t the Sun anymore?
This stumped her for a few moments, which was a nice distraction. Then she realized she hadn’t seen SABRINA get into the quadpod. It might have made her pretty nervous to start with, but she realized she was disappointed to realize it might not be coming with them.
“Where’s SABRINA?” she asked into the voice intake on her suit.
“Present,” SABRINA chirped through Jillian’s earpiece from who knew where.
Jillian glanced down curiously at the packages wedged between her and the tube. If SABRINA was hiding among them, camouflaged, would she know? “It’s in the pod?”
“Nah,” came her mom’s voice from the next bunk down. “SABRINA’s still out in the lab, waiting just like us. This is just a normal Friday for it. We’ll see it on the other side.”
From Jillian’s earpiece came the sound of SABRINA’s swarm-voice humming “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
“Okay,” Jillian’s mom continued, “we’re going to be waiting here for a few minutes, so let me walk you through what happens next. Comfy?”
Jillian shifted irritably. “Um.”
“Me neither. Don’t worry, nobody likes this part. All you can really do is put up with it, and you’re way ahead of me. There’s an itch on my back that’s killing me, and I can’t reach it at all.”
“Same,” Jillian said. Mentioning it only made it worse, so she decided to change the subject. “What’s going on out there?”
“Well, not a whole lot at the moment. The techs will have all cleared out of the enclosure. It’s just the quadpod in here, and SABRINA.”
“I’m on the roof!” SABRINA cut in merrily, followed by knocking sounds from above. Like SABRINA was knocking with many fists together. Musically. It sounded more like a short drum solo than anything. A short, elaborate drum solo.
“SABRINA’s always liked it up there,” Jillian’s dad said. “It’s like a cat. A big, weird, shape-shifting, talking cat.”
“The portal’s not fired up yet,” Jillian’s mom continued. “Right now they’ll be, like, quintuple-checking their calculations before initiating the actual endpoint projection—”
“The enclosure being the big cage thing?” Jillian asked. “Cleared out why?”
“Standard operating procedure,” her mom said.
At the same time her dad said, “Safety precaution.”
Then Jillian remembered something she’d noticed earlier. “That cage thing wasn’t even in the documentary.”
“There was a miscalculation,” her mom said. “Once. October 7, 2109. The containment system—the enclosure—is us learning from our mistakes.”
“What happened?”
“Eleven casualties,” SABRINA said. It was still humming “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in the background with another part of its voice as it spoke. “The environment on 82 Eridani b was”—it paused delicately, still humming—“incompatible with human life. At least during the flood season. Turns out.”
“Needless to say,” her dad said, “we don’t go there anymore.” He nodded toward something in the direction of the portal. “StellaTech doesn’t talk about it, and the official story is it never happened, but here in the lab we remember. No matter what they say.”
Jillian squinted toward whatever he was nodding at.
There, beside the portal, was a single sheet of paper tacked to the wall. A list of names. Someone had written them lovingly, with big, bold, fancy lettering, in what looked like glitter pen. Beneath it, on a little shelf, was a single flower in a tiny vase.
She couldn’t read the names from here, but they were written one per line, and she could count them easily enough. “You said eleven casualties. There are twelve names on that paper.”
Jillian’s mom sighed. “We lost one surveyor. Back in the early days of the program.”
“What do you mean you lost—” Jillian cut herself off. “Lost how?”
“She never rendezvoused with her portal,” her mom explained. “Nobody knows what happened to her. But she never came home.”
Jillian looked at the list again. “That only happened one time?”
“That’s right.”
She chewed this over for a moment. Something else was bothering her, deep in the back of her mind. She didn’t know what it was yet, only that it was there, like something uncomfortably stuck between your teeth.
In a moment she put it together.
“Flood season.”
“Very violent ones on 82 Eridani b,” her mom said. “Not like Earth. Think like a cross between a flash flood and a tsunami.”
“And all this water poured through the portal and into the facility?”
“All is a bit dramatic,” SABRINA said. “Only until they closed the portal. Which they were very quick to do. I have never seen humans move so fast. It was quite a sight to behold. They were like little—”
“But that won’t happen today,” her mom said. “Remember, surveyor crews have been going to 80 UMa c for eight months now. You can sleep directly on the ground there. Lick a rock if you wanted to. It’s fine.”
“Breathe the air, eat the fruit, get the runs,” her dad added. “Remember? Besides, the pod itself will protect us in pretty much all scenarios.”
“Like what?”
“On 80 UMa c? I don’t even know. No floods, that’s for sure. There’s not a whole ton of water. A few ponds, some streams. Nothing that’s going to try to drown a building. They’re always extra careful about germs, though.”
“Like the showers we had to take.”
“That’s right. We do that all over again when we get back, except this time the pod gets cleaned too. Then the entire enclosure gets hosed down with about a dozen different kinds of neutralizers and disinfectants while we fill out paperwork about whether anybody on the mission so much as sneezed. Boring, yes. Dangerous, no.”
For a long moment Jillian thought this over. In the silence SABRINA’s humming came through loud and clear.
“There was only one accident?” she asked finally. “One accident and one missing person, and everything’s been safe ever since? That’s all of it? No more secrets?”
“That’s all of it,” her mom said solemnly. “No more secrets. We didn’t want to worry you about things that had a zero-percent chance of happening today. That accident happened before we had the enclosure, or the containment doors, or today’s diagnostics, or a book of emergency protocol two inches thick. And it was before we had SABRINA. If it’d been there on 82 Eridani b, they’d never have made that mistake. It would have seen the flood coming from a mile off. Literally.”
“Literally,” SABRINA echoed.
“But it just said it watched—”
“The surveillance feed,” her dad said. “SABRINA’S watched the whole archive, like, fifty times by now. They’re like action movies to it. It loves them. Sometimes it even makes popcorn.” He paused. “It can’t digest it, exactly,
but . . . ”
“Well,” Jillian said, and then stopped cold. Something was humming, and this time it wasn’t SABRINA. There was no beehive sound to this, no mistaking it for anything but pure machine. It could only be one thing.
The portal.
Jillian strained to see out the washing-machine door of her bunk. Where before she’d seen a blank wall, now she . . . still saw a blank wall. Except now there was a kind of flickering, the way the air got wavy over a fire. The wavering slowly intensified until it was hard to look at without getting dizzy. The humming sound got stronger too. It buzzed deep in Jillian’s ears and vibrated in her teeth. It got worse and worse and worse and then—it was gone.
Jillian opened her eyes. She hadn’t realized she’d closed them.
Out the transparent front wall of the quadpod, her view was no longer toothpaste-commercial white. And it wasn’t flickering. She caught glimpses of pale purple something, black something else. Something orange, not as bright as the pod. It looked familiar, but she couldn’t place from where.
“That’s my stop,” SABRINA said. “Later, gators.”
Then, humming some kind of parade-type marching music, SABRINA floated through the portal. Jillian could only see a little of its current form, which seemed a little like a jellyfish, a tendril-y umbrella shape. It drifted through into that other place like it was going through a door. If Jillian squinted hard at the biggest gap between supply stacks, she could just see bits of SABRINA lift off the main body and go drifting away in all directions like tiny drones.
“Hold for clearance,” came a new voice through Jillian’s earpiece. She recognized it as the man who had argued with her mom outside the pod. All the nastiness was gone from his voice, though. Now it was all business.
“Field crew holding,” her dad replied.
“What does that mean?” Jillian asked.
“It means,” her dad said, “we wait.”
Jillian tried to wait. It was hard. The bunk wasn’t exactly getting more comfortable. “What’s SABRINA looking for out there?”
“It’s making sure there were no errors in the preliminary diagnostics,” her mom said. “At the same time there are about a zillion sensors in the enclosure and on the outside skin of the pod that are double-checking the same things. Okay temperature. Breathable air. Everything we already know, but check anyway. We do this every time.”
“Nothing incompatible with human life,” Jillian deadpanned.
“No indeedy,” her dad said.
“Why isn’t it talking anymore?”
“SABRINA? It can’t hear us from there. And we can’t hear it from here.”
“But it’s right there. I can see it.”
“Looks close, right? There’s nothing right there about it. SABRINA’s eighty-three light-years away,” her mom said. “Total comms blackout. When the portal closes after us, that goes for us too. We’re on our own for a week until they send us a new portal. Just us and SABRINA. Like camping!” Jillian could almost hear her mom beaming. “But okay, so. SABRINA just fired off a bunch of recon probes. Those things you saw hover off of it like tiny helicopters? Little blobs of light?”
Jillian nodded. Then she remembered her mom couldn’t see her. “Yeah,” she said. “I saw.”
“Right now they’re panning over an area of six square miles. Our harvesting site. They’re constantly reporting back to SABRINA’s main body.” Her mom paused. “Actually, reporting back isn’t entirely accurate. SABRINA can receive data from each of them simultaneously.”
“Yeah, but what if those parts find something dangerous? What happens then?”
“What happens then is that if even one of them finds something even slightly dangerous, SABRINA abandons the probes. It drops them from its network, and only the main body returns.”
This made Jillian think of salamanders abandoning their tails to predators. “Can it grow them back?”
“With some help from the guys in the lab,” her mom said. “So SABRINA comes back, they close the portal, and we sit here through two solid hours of decontamination protocol. SABRINA’S still out there, which is promising. Usually if it’s coming back, it’s back by now.”
As if on cue, SABRINA’s main body sprouted an arm, raised it in the air, and flashed a thumbs-up back through the portal. This struck Jillian as a shockingly casual way to determine whether or not they were about to be murdered in cold blood by a hostile planet.
They’ve been going here for eight months, she reminded herself. They’d know if it wasn’t safe.
Instead she focused on what she could see through the portal. Orange dirt that looked a bit like Mars. She pictured hiking her way across it, looking for ponds, gathering this special algae that might help save the world.
Camping in the pod. Cooking rations over a fire. Looking out at the stars. But she’d be on a planet orbiting a star in the Big Dipper. She’d see different stars from there, she realized, or the same stars from different angles. She wondered if she’d recognize any of them.
She opened her mouth to say as much to her parents when the man’s voice broke back in. “All checks clear,” he said. “Base is go for launch.”
“Field crew is go for launch,” Jillian’s mom said.
Something under the pod began to whir softly.
“Launch is go,” he replied. “Initiate on my mark.”
“That’s it?” Jillian hissed. In old space travel movies there was always a much longer series of checks. This was almost as outrageous as the thumbs-up.
“Well, we’re not being strapped to a giant rocket and shot through five layers of atmosphere while doing our best not to explode,” her mom whispered back. “We’re just going through a door.”
“Easy peasy,” Jillian said, her mind still on SABRINA.
“Exactly.”
“Launch in ten. Nine. Eight.”
It’s really happening, Jillian said to herself. This is really, actually, finally happening.
“Seven. Six. Five.”
“Better than school, right?” her dad said.
“Four. Three. Two.”
“You’re going to love it,” her mom said. “We’re so proud of you.”
This confused her. “But I didn’t do anything yet!”
“You’re here, aren’t you? You were scared, but you said yes, anyway. That’s—”
“One. Good luck out there, field crew. We’ll keep the home fires burning.”
And just like that, the pod shot forward on its runners, and the entire Earth disappeared.
Chapter 4
Jillian opened her eyes.
It felt like she’d been asleep for a few seconds. Like she’d dozed off during a boring movie, then snapped awake. Except she hadn’t. She was in the bunk. In the pod. There were food bars digging into her ribs. Her head hurt. Why did her head hurt? They’d gone through the portal and—
“Mom? Is it okay to come out of the bunk now?”
Faint static through the earpiece, but no reply.
“Mom? Dad?”
Nothing.
“Mom!”
Silence. Her scalp prickled. Something wasn’t right.
“I’m coming out.”
Jillian got her feet braced on some packages and pushed the door open. The mechanism was still functional, and it swung open at her touch. That was the good news.
The bad news was: it didn’t swing out. It swung up.
Easy enough to picture the quadpod’s interior. Jillian was standing upright, so the pod must have landed on its end somehow, everybody’s feet pointing toward the ground. But she didn’t remember the pod rolling backward. She didn’t remember it arriving. It was like someone had reached into her memory and deleted everything between portal and now.
She jumped for the opening, grabbed at the edge, missed, and fell bac
k. She did this twice more, then paused, gasping for breath. Her head was one big storm of worry. What was wrong with the pod? Where was SABRINA? Why weren’t her parents answering her? Why weren’t they helping her get out?
It didn’t matter. They were probably busy doing something important and would get to her in a minute. Maybe they were preparing another surprise. Getting ready for their first family hike on 80 UMa c. Setting out stuff to make space s’mores.
Jillian waited for a few seconds before realizing she didn’t want to sit around waiting to be helped. Just like giving her the choice to come here in the first place, maybe her parents were waiting to see what she would do in this situation for herself. How independently and responsibly she could solve this little problem on her own.
Well, she wouldn’t be much of a space explorer if she couldn’t figure out how to get out of a bunk.
The tube was too narrow for her to easily maneuver inside, but she managed to work all the packages to the bottom, where her feet were. She kicked them into a sort of pile with her clunky boots. When she stepped up onto it, the pile sank a little under her weight, but still raised her up a few inches.
It was enough. This time when she jumped, she caught the edge, and the grippy gloves helped her hold on. Maybe gravity was lower on 80 UMa c, or maybe Jillian had a good dose of the same adrenaline that was supposed to let you lift a car off an injured person, but she thrashed and scrambled and eventually got her elbows locked around the rim. Bit by bit, she hauled herself up.
There her weight made the bunk top-heavy. It teetered and tipped over, rolling her out into the mud.
Mud?
Jillian stood up, breathing hard, ears ringing. She didn’t want to believe what she was seeing. Her bunk was no longer in the pod. It was lying on its side in several inches of gloppy orange mud at the edge of some kind of swamp, gray water overgrown with lumpy blackish muck that was probably the alien algae they were here to collect. From here it didn’t look like algae at all. Just alien.
Jillian vs Parasite Planet Page 5