Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  A thing like a fat green earthworm. About the size of a big slug.

  Acid for saliva.

  But if they’d never attacked a field crew before—why today?

  Jillian pushed the question away. It was a huge one, and took some serious shoving. But their supplies were literally melting away while she stood there doing nothing.

  “Actually, forget the first part. We need to get our stuff out of there now.”

  “Sounds good,” said SABRINA. “Kinda busy here, though.” It spoke from the cocoons, not the moth on Jillian’s shoulder, so she’d get the point loud and clear. “Or are you ordering me to reallocate?”

  Jillian wasn’t a hundred percent sure what reallocate meant, but she figured she got the basic idea. There wasn’t enough SABRINA to go around—to be bandages and moth and whatever went down with Jillian to the pod.

  “They’ll be okay for a few minutes without you while we go down there and grab medical supplies,” she said. “I mean, probably? Right? Can you just real quick fly down there and do, like”—Jillian rooted through more movie-based vocabulary—“do some recon? Maybe pick some stuff up and fly it back? Like you were going to fly me down to the portal a few minutes ago? Can you do that?”

  Even as she asked, it felt like a long shot. A one-way trip to the portal carrying Jillian was one thing, but going back and forth with hundreds of pounds of supplies was another. And SABRINA had barely been able to raise her off the ground.

  “I am shatteringly awesome,” SABRINA admitted, “but I was not designed for heavy lifting. If I could carry that much stuff, I could carry three humans no problem, and we’d be back in the lab right now sitting through decontamination protocol, and I would be telling you jokes. I know twelve hundred and nineteen jokes, all of which are excellent. Don’t listen to Dr. Park. They’re excellent.”

  Jillian wasn’t really listening to SABRINA’s chatter. A new idea was coming to her. The longer she looked at her parents, cocooned in the SABRINA bandage, the more solid that idea got.

  “The worm things. The acid. Does it . . . hurt you? Damage you, I mean?”

  SABRINA seemed to consider this. “I don’t know.” Then it perked up. “Do you want me to find out? I love learning new things about myself. I could go annoy one of them. See what it does. Oh! I could poke it with a stick. Isn’t that a thing you humans do?”

  Jillian tilted her head at it. “Not . . . really? Okay, when you were getting my parents out of the pod, did the worm things attack you at all?”

  “They did not. They were very busy attacking your parents. Would you like to see?”

  No, Jillian thought. But she had to know as much as she could about those worms, and quickly. Going down there knowing nothing was only going to get her hurt.

  She nodded.

  SABRINA began a replay video for Jillian, just like the one of it catching bullets in the lab. Except this one played on the side of her dad’s cocoon. There wasn’t enough extra SABRINA to make a screen.

  So Jillian watched as the quadpod shot through the portal, toward a patch of normal-looking yellow-orange dirt. It landed and slid forward—and the ground shoved up beneath it, cracking and heaving and vomiting up thousands of fat green worms.

  It happened so fast. Like the weight of the pod had pressed some unseen button labeled worm volcano. Why hadn’t SABRINA triggered it when it’d come through first?

  Oh, Jillian realized, remembering the floating jellyfish form SABRINA had taken. It never touched the ground.

  The pod tumbled sideways off the violently buckled ground, rocking backward hard. As it did, the foot end of Jillian’s bunk ruptured the soft skin of the pod, fell out backward, and slid out of view.

  Jillian could hear someone screaming in the replay. Then she realized it was her.

  “Skip forward,” she said.

  SABRINA obeyed. Next there were her parents yelling her name even as SABRINA provided cover for their escape toward the boulder, shielding them from the onrushing wave of worms. They were fast, faster than any worms she’d ever seen before. They moved more like startled snakes, whispery-silent and whip-quick.

  Jillian’s mom helped boost her dad up, and he reached back to help her climb. SABRINA hovered up behind them.

  Too slow. Fat green worms suckered onto them like leeches. Their suits began to bubble. Then their skin. They ripped the worms off themselves and each other and threw them off the boulder, back into that seething green sea.

  SABRINA helped, going octopus again and growing extra arms for the purpose. But the worms never bit SABRINA. Never even tried.

  “Okay, here’s your next order,” Jillian said. “I want you to get off of my mom and dad. Leave just enough of—um, of yourself?—there to keep the worst of their wounds covered. The rest of you is coming with me.”

  Immediately SABRINA was a floating pancake again. It waited in silence for Jillian to climb aboard. But she shook her head.

  “You don’t want me to carry you?”

  “I have an even better idea,” Jillian said. “Your handler told me you watch a lot of TV.”

  “Yeeeesss,” SABRINA replied warily. “I suppose you’re about to order me to read a book or somethi—”

  “Then I guess you already know what a mech suit is.”

  SABRINA brightened. “Please tell me you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

  “How fast can you make—whoa.”

  All at once, SABRINA swarmed her, just like the bees shape it had made back in the lab. Except this time there was nothing scary about it. Jillian couldn’t even feel it through the podsuit. Then, before she could even get another word out, SABRINA was done.

  Jillian looked down at herself. “Wow,” she breathed.

  Mech-SABRINA was candy-apple red and shiny. The twin suns of 80 UMa c gleamed off its glossy shell. Her hands looked suspiciously like rocket gloves. One of them was holding a sword. A really big, really awesome sword. It looked like red glass with a razor edge. Like it could cut through anything.

  “Fast enough for you?” came a voice at her ear. Jillian reached up and felt a helmet that definitely didn’t feel like the podsuit helmet. For starters, it had a shark fin.

  “Maybe not the rocket gloves,” she said. “Or the sword.”

  “Go big or go home, right?” SABRINA said. “And we can’t go home, so . . .”

  “SABRINA, I need my hands to climb. If there’s extra of you, make it into more armor, or send it back to my parents.”

  “Aw,” it said. SABRINA sounded genuinely disappointed, which made no sense.

  “You can put the sword back on when I get off these rocks,” Jillian compromised. “After all, I might need it to fight the worms.”

  “You think so? I thought so.”

  “Yeah,” Jillian said. “I do. Now let’s go rescue our stuff.”

  What Jillian really wanted was to jump down off the boulder, come crashing down like a meteor, land in a cool action-movie-ninja stance, and take off running so fast she left scorch marks. But she remembered the replay of the landing SABRINA had shown her. The way the ground had looked utterly normal until the pod put its weight on it. She climbed down the boulder the way she’d come up, from rock to rock, and made very sure to touch down lightly.

  Inside the jumpsuit, the podsuit, and the outer armor of mech-SABRINA, Jillian expected to feel like the solid center of a nesting doll. Or like some kind of walking, talking, armored, weaponized, giant turducken. But it really wasn’t that weird at all.

  SABRINA was smart. Really smart. And apparently super adaptable. It moved when she moved. Gave her extra grippies on her gloves when she climbed down the rocks. Sent part of itself to the soles of her boots to absorb the noise and vibration of her footsteps. It did all this without being asked.

  And it gave her back the sword. She felt about a hundred ti
mes safer with it. Like something out of a movie. Something invincible.

  But she knew better.

  Jillian paused at the base of the boulder, getting her bearings. It was almost a straight shot to the pod, rocky but doable. The pod, however, was leaning to one side like a scoop of ice cream on a hot day, slowly dissolving into a green pond of worm things maybe fifty feet across. From the edge of that puddle to the pod there was no clear path at all.

  “Okay,” Jillian said under her breath. She bounced on her toes a little, trying to work up the nerve. This was easily, hands down, no contest, the scariest thing she’d ever done. “Okay.”

  “I don’t think the worm things, as you insist on calling them, are using visual guidance to track you,” SABRINA said, “but I’m gonna go ahead and make you invisible anyway. Partly because I thought it might reassure you. Mostly because it’ll be cool.”

  There was no sound, no noticeable change. But when Jillian looked down at her body, it was gone. She had turned into a vague person-shape made of the now-transparent jelly of SABRINA.

  She was as ready as she was going to get. Which was not very. “All right,” she said, as much for herself as for SABRINA. “Let’s do this.”

  Quick and light, they tiptoed their way across to the edge of the worm-pond. Jillian squinted, peering into the dim interior of the quadpod. All the crates and containers of supplies were labeled clearly, but a lot of the labels—along with the things they were stenciled on, and the stuff inside the things they were stenciled on—had already dissolved.

  Her stomach twisted. Her eyes prickled. I’m too late, she thought, and then shook her head fiercely. Won’t know until we try.

  “Send in one of your little probe things,” she told SABRINA. “Find out where the medical supplies are.”

  “Your wish is my command,” SABRINA said, and a speck of Jillian’s invisible mech suit detached and zipped through the air into the darkness of the pod, blinking on-off like a firefly. “Found it,” the suit part of SABRINA said into Jillian’s ear. “Follow the beacon.”

  The SABRINA firefly blinked faster now. Somehow it was already visibly farther off than before. If Jillian stood there hesitating for one more second, she was going to lose it entirely, so before she could change her mind, she charged in, worms squelching under her boots.

  This seemed to get their attention. Green worms boiled out of the pod and toward the vibrations of her footsteps. Jillian froze.

  “They didn’t want to bite me,” SABRINA chose this moment to clarify, “but chances are fair to excellent that they can easily smell you. If you can move just a teeny bit faster, now would be an optimal time to do that.”

  Worms were scrambling over one another, barreling at Jillian in a wave.

  Panic seized her. Panic and anger combined. It ran up through the soles of her feet, along her spine, out the top of her skull. It blasted out of her mouth in a huge, wordless yell.

  Jillian hefted the sword and charged.

  Together she and SABRINA went through the mass of worms like a chain saw. She kicked and stomped and slashed her way to the pod, scattering and splattering.

  She tried not to think of how her parents would have made a path through the worms to get her to the portal safely. She thought of it anyway and started slashing harder.

  Acid saliva or no, they were just worms, and she felt almost—almost—bad for them by the time her mucky boots hit the floor of the pod. Then she realized how few supplies were left intact, and all her pity shriveled up and died.

  One crate of medical supplies, half turned to sludge.

  One intact five-gallon container of water.

  A few orange tarps, made out of the same stuff as the pod exterior, partially melted but maybe salvageable if she cut the damage away.

  A couple of sealed packages that had no stenciled labels, which she wasn’t about to hang around and identify.

  That was all. Most of the containers were ruined, their contents turned to slop. Even the bunks that remained in the pod had been chewed through, and anything left in there was long gone.

  She slapped worms off the least damaged-looking crates and grabbed what she could while SABRINA flicked more worms off her legs and shoulders. They just kept coming, up and up from underground.

  “Persistent,” SABRINA said. “You have to give them that.”

  Suddenly, the sword was gone. SABRINA had absorbed it. Within about half a second that material had been repurposed to cover Jillian with long, sharp quills, like a porcupine. It bought her a few moments, but the worms seemed disturbingly unconcerned with their own safety. They were trying to wriggle down through the quills, impaling themselves on the quills and still trying to bite their way toward Jillian.

  Like in a zombie movie, she thought. And just like that, she hit her limit. It was all she could do not to escape back up that rock to safety. But she needed those supplies. She dug her feet in and bit her lip so hard she drew blood.

  “Get them off me!” she yelled at SABRINA. Even though she could see that SABRINA was busily doing exactly that already. “Make some hands and grab something.”

  “Something as in worms, or something as in supplies?”

  “As in I don’t care! As in both! As in we need to get out of here!”

  “Specificity,” SABRINA said primly, “is the essence of efficient communication.”

  “I order you to shut up and help me.”

  Then she remembered. It might watch cartoons and tell jokes and design excellent mech suits, but it was still a robot. It needed orders. Orders that she, with her blue clearance wristband, had to give.

  She struggled through the panic and made herself think. The worms—so far—weren’t biting through the SABRINA armor. She had time. More than the supplies did, anyway. Most of them were already lost.

  “Help me get this stuff out of here before it all melts. I can’t carry it all.”

  “Roger that, Boss.” With that, SABRINA shot out tendrils of material and wrapped them securely around Jillian and her oversized armload of stuff. “Like that?”

  “That’s great.” Jillian shambled forward, weighed down by the pile of supplies. She made it three steps and stopped. “Wait. I forgot the water. I couldn’t carry—”

  “No worries, new kid I got it.” Another tendril shot out, hardened into a hook, scooped the water container up by the handle, and slung it out the pod door.

  Jillian held her breath as that one remaining container of water sailed up over the sea of worms in a mathematically perfect arc—toward the edge of the green and past it into the safe zone of worm-free yellow-orange—and came crashing down in the dirt, breaking open instantly.

  Water glugged out, cup by precious cup.

  “Hmm,” SABRINA said. “That should have worked. There must have been a weakness in the container. Come to think of it, that makes total sense. What with the acid and all.”

  Jillian stared at the container for a moment, stunned into speechlessness. Then she found her voice. “SABRINA, get over there and plug that up quick.”

  A grapefruit-sized chunk of SABRINA peeled off and skimmed away toward the container. Jillian, arms full, hurled herself after, squishing worms as she went.

  By the time she reached the safe zone, SABRINA had the hole patched and the container set upright, but she couldn’t stop to pick it up with her arms pinned in front of her. So she kept running, certain there was a tidal wave of green worms right on her heels, and didn’t stop until she reached the boulder.

  There she dumped her armload of stuff and scrambled up, rock by rock by rock, pushing the half-ruined crate of medical supplies before her. The SABRINA suit dissolved as Jillian climbed, which freed the worms impaled on the spikes, and they rained down around her, plopping onto the dirt below. Meanwhile, SABRINA remade itself into a shield guarding her back as she climbed. She’d have to com
e back for the other things, the tarps and whatnot. That was fine.

  But SABRINA hovered up beside her as she paused on top of the boulder to catch her breath. Now it was a kind of floating net, carrying the tarps and mystery packages on its surface.

  “The good news is, these are light enough for me to carry,” it said. “The bad news is . . . well. Hmm. Pretty much the same thing, really, come to think of it.”

  “It’s not too heavy because we couldn’t save much stuff,” Jillian panted. “I get it. Can you bring the water?”

  “Sure. See, the good news, is the water container is now light enough for me to carry,” SABRINA said, levitating it easily. “And the bad news—”

  “Let me guess. It’s light enough because we lost most of the water.”

  “Right!” SABRINA set the crate on the boulder. “I didn’t mean to break it.”

  “I know.”

  “It was an accident. My trajectory calculations failed to take into account that the acid might have undermined—”

  “SABRINA. It’s okay. We’ll figure it out. Let me take a look at this other stuff first.”

  Jillian knelt beside the medical supply crate and pulled open what was left of the lid. Inside was treasure—or would have been, if half of it hadn’t been ruined. Worse, the foamy meltiness was slowly spreading from the damaged stuff to the undamaged stuff. The texture of the plastic looked like whipped cream that had sat in hot chocolate for a while. Jillian wasn’t one hundred percent sure what would happen to her hands if she touched it, but she had a pretty good guess. She thought for a second, then turned the whole crate over and dumped it out onto the rock. The undamaged stuff went into one pile and the damaged stuff went into another pile, which then got kicked off the side of the boulder onto the ground. She could still hear it fizzing from ten feet below.

  What was left was . . . not much. A couple little bundles of smart bandages in two different sizes. A tiny tube of antibiotic cream, its lid eaten away but mostly intact. A broken little case of single-use insta-stitches, mostly corroded, with maybe two or three salvageable doses. One tissue-thin self-heating blanket. A pair of tweezers. A roll of industrial-strength duct tape with a chunk eaten out of one side so it formed a letter C. A blister pack of pills in perfect condition, but unlabeled, and she’d already kicked the dissolving box over the side, so Jillian had no idea what they were for.