Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Come on,” she said, changing the subject. “Let’s get this stuff back up the ridge before dark.”

  One time Jillian had seen a roadkill raccoon. It had made her a little sad and a little sick to look at, but she’d had a hard time looking away. This swamp had the same effect on her, except multiplied by a million. She had to give herself another shake before gathering the packages in both arms and trudging back up the hill.

  It was the hardest thing in the world not to keep that swamp where she could see it. SABRINA must have noticed that Jillian kept glancing back over her shoulder, because after a moment Jillian felt it landing and settling itself on her head. Whatever shape it had taken, it felt like it had a lot of legs and was taking a few seconds to arrange them.

  “Don’t you fret, partner,” came SABRINA’s voice from above. One leg gave a languid little wave at the edge of Jillian’s field of vision. “I got your six. Anything back there so much as looks at you funny, I’ll light it up.” A series of cartoony pew pew pew sounds followed. Despite everything, Jillian found that she was grinning.

  She kept her eyes forward and climbed.

  Chapter 7

  Back up on the boulder, Jillian took inventory of her find.

  INSTANT SPLIT PEA SOUP, one thin, notebook- sized pouch.

  INSTANT NOODLES AND SAUCE, same.

  INSTANT BLUEBERRY CRUMBLE, same.

  POWDERED SOY PROTEIN BEVERAGE, one brick-sized package.

  HIGH-CALORIE FOOD BAR: EMERGENCY USE ONLY, two brick-sized packages.

  WATER PURIFICATION TABS, one tiny packet.

  MULTIVITAMIN/ELECTROLYTE TABS, one even tinier packet.

  Jillian had been way too excited to eat much breakfast before coming to the facility that morning, and she was starting to regret it. Now that the worms seemed to be staying down by the pod, and she and her parents were safely up on the boulder with at least a fighting chance of making it through the night, what she really wanted was to tear open the bag labeled INSTANT BLUEBERRY CRUMBLE and pour it directly into her mouth.

  Instead, she spread everything out before her, then sat back on her heels and considered her strategy. Each food pouch said it contained four servings. Each brick of food bars said it contained enough calories for one person for two days. The brick of powdered soy milk would probably see them through another day or two if they were a) careful, and b) really hungry by the end of it. And there were the vitamin tabs to supplement it.

  She did the math in her head. They’d be hungry, but they weren’t going to literally starve. All they had to do was stay put and wait for the portal, somewhere away from the worms and hopefully out of sight of that swamp. They wouldn’t need a ton of food for that. And they’d order a stack of pizzas as tall as Jillian the minute they got home.

  But her parents were out cold, SABRINA curled up in its cuddly dog-shape beside them. Thanks to those painkiller pills, they might not wake up for a while. There’d been two dozen pills, which would see them both through six days at most. And that was if she didn’t waste any by waking her parents partway through their healing sleep. They weren’t going to be chewing any noodles or blueberry crumble or food bars anytime soon.

  So she took those out of the pile and set them aside. Then she took out the water purification tabs, because while they were super important, they weren’t food. That left the powdered soy milk, the soup mix, and the multivitamin/electrolyte tabs.

  And one very large burning question. Everything—the soup, the noodles, everything but the food bars—was freeze-dried. The soup was a bunch of shriveled peas and seasoning granules. The noodles were a dry nest in a pouch of powdered sauce. Each package had a big orange label on it reading, JUST ADD WATER. She skimmed the directions. One cup of water per serving. Four cups of water per package.

  That was a whole lot of cups of water she didn’t have.

  Jillian’s stomach growled. By now she was kicking herself pretty hard for not eating a huge breakfast before leaving for the facility. A tower of blueberry pancakes instead of the one lousy piece of toast she’d managed to get down. She thought back on all the food there’d been in her kitchen back home to choose from. It was all still there, however many light-years away, and here she was, stuck on a rock in outer space with freeze-dried peas.

  Which was, she had to admit, a whole lot better than being stuck on a rock in outer space with nothing. She knew from her hiking and camping books that she wouldn’t starve to death in five days.

  But she might die of dehydration.

  Which meant she had to let herself use the water they’d rescued from the pod. That was a big one. A big, scary, paralyzing dilemma that looked equally bad whichever way she cut it. When that water ran out, she didn’t know what would happen. She’d have to drink that drowned-animal swamp-water. But how? Even if she dumped the whole packet of water purification tabs into it first, she’d still almost rather drink her own pee than that water. Real life, movies, video games, whatever—that swamp was the creepiest thing she’d ever seen in any of them.

  But . . . she needed water. Her parents needed water. Death by dehydration was a definite if they didn’t drink something.

  People did drink their own pee in the wilderness, when they were lost and desperate. She’d seen that in some real-life survival video. But did they do something to it first? She couldn’t remember. Absolute last resort, she told herself. Other options first.

  She glanced over her shoulder toward the swamp. All that water, taunting her. In this light, the bottom of the crater was in full shadow. A bowl of darkness. Anything could crawl out of it, and she’d never know until it had made its way up the ridge, onto her boulder, and—

  Not helping, she told herself.

  She opened the soy milk package decisively. Air hissed out of the vacuum seal, turning it from a brick into a resealable pouch. Jillian ripped off the rest of the seal, careful not to spill any of the powder. Trying not to wonder if the jagged tearing sound of the perforated plastic would sound like a dinner bell to the worms, who’d already eaten all the other plastic—and everything else—in the pod.

  Jillian dared a peek toward the pod, half-expecting a green wave to be making its way up the boulder—but no. The worms stayed put. For now.

  “SABRINA,” she said. “You know how you made that funnel thing earlier? And you were using it to feed water to my mom and dad?”

  “I remember everything that has ever happened to me,” SABRINA replied, but without its usual peppiness. It sounded almost depressed. “If I couldn’t remember what I was doing”—here the barest eyeblink of a pause—“seventy-four minutes and sixteen seconds ago, you’d probably stand a better chance of survival out here if you’d brought a calculator and a Swiss Army knife instead.”

  Jillian held out the soy-milk powder. “I want to mix some of this in.” She picked up the multivitamin tabs in the other hand. “Actually, I want to dissolve one of these in water with the powder and feed them that. Can you help me? I don’t have a container.”

  “Can do,” SABRINA said dully. It stood up on five stubby legs, holding the sixth one out toward Jillian. The next second, SABRINA’s dog body was a little less chubby, and there was a container like a lemonade pitcher balanced on top of that sixth leg, which SABRINA had flattened out into a little platform.

  “Thanks.” Jillian shook some soy-milk powder into the pitcher, paused, then added a little more. Then she dropped in two vitamin tabs. Last, as carefully as she knew how, she hefted the broken water container and poured in enough to cover the powder, then added the tiniest bit more.

  That done, she stuck her hand into the pitcher and stirred the mixture with her pointer finger. When she pulled it out, she went to wipe her hand on her suit leg, then stopped and licked her finger clean instead. She couldn’t let even a tiny bit of nutrition go to waste.

  Jillian nodded, satisfied with her work,
and the pitcher floated back to her parents. There a chunk of SABRINA turned itself into a pedestal for the pitcher. Elaborately curly straws appeared from the sides of the pitcher, which it fed into Jillian’s parents’ mouths.

  “How can they drink that?” she asked SABRINA. “If they’re asleep.”

  “I’m just dripping it in,” SABRINA said. “It’s slow, but it’s better than nothing.” SABRINA seemed to realize Jillian was still standing there, arms folded, brow furrowed, watching her parents. “I got this, new kid. Eat something. You won’t starve to death before the portal gets back, but you might pass out, and another of my faults, along with breaking water containers and not knowing about killer worms before giving my field crew access to a site, is that I can’t carry water very far.”

  “Um,” Jillian said. “Right. Okay. I’ll get some food.”

  She opened up the instant noodles, broke off a portion, shook out some powdered sauce, and mixed it with a precious half-cup of water in a bowl SABRINA made and floated over to her. Jillian swirled the water into the powder, which kinda, sorta made a sauce, but the noodles didn’t cook. They just sat there. So SABRINA heated Jillian’s bowl and made a lid for it, holding in the steam as the noodles cooked and softened.

  It didn’t say anything the entire time. Everything was so quiet that Jillian could hear the night noises of 80 UMa c. Breeze, some kind of crickety bug noise, a small distant animal rummaging around in the dirt. It sounded almost peaceful.

  Still, something was obviously bothering SABRINA, and that was worrying. If there was some new problem, if things were worse than Jillian had thought, bad enough for SABRINA to have gone quiet, did she really want to know?

  But not knowing was worse. Not knowing was how the what-ifs got in, and that was always, always worse.

  “Hey,” she said lightly. “What’s the matter? Do you have, like, a low battery or something?”

  “Low battery? Do I look like a phone to you?”

  “If you were,” she tried to joke, “we could call back home. Hello, I’d like to place an order? One portal, please.”

  SABRINA made a moody little mm sound. Then Jillian remembered what it had said a minute ago.

  “Look,” she said. “The thing with the water container was an accident. There’s got to be more water around here. You mapped this place, right? You probably know exactly where it is. So tonight we rest up, and tomorrow we go out and find it.”

  Silence.

  Jillian had no idea if she sounded convincing. At first she didn’t feel very convincing. But a weird thing was happening. The more she tried to make SABRINA feel better, the more she started feeling better herself. More determined. More ready to face whatever 80 UMa c had left to throw at them.

  “And hey,” she continued. “Whatever’s happening with the worms, it’s obviously new. My parents would never have brought me here if there was danger. And I bet their bosses would never have let them go either. Whatever’s going on, it’s weird and scary, and we’ll figure it out together. You’ve already helped us out tons. We would have been worm food if it wasn’t for you.”

  She swiped the last of her noodle sauce and licked her finger. She could have devoured the rest of the package of noodles easily, but that was tomorrow’s food, and maybe the next day’s too. Instead, reluctantly, she gave the bowl one last swipe and held it out in the general direction of SABRINA’s main body. It evaporated in midair and floated off to rejoin her parents’ pillows. “I don’t care what you say, you’re the coolest medbot I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’m not a—” SABRINA began, but broke off as something in Jillian’s face or voice—or, more likely, Jillian realized as she remembered the worm by the swamp, the chemicals it could taste her skin exuding—made it realize she was teasing it. “Well,” it said instead. “You’re the most statistically nonstandard materials acquisitions surveyor I’ve ever seen, so I guess that makes us even.”

  It paused, giving her a moment to say, I’m not a materials acquisitions surveyor, but Jillian had clamped down on that reflex already.

  SABRINA pointed a twisty straw at her. “Gotcha.”

  Jillian grinned. “I didn’t say it.”

  “You thought it.”

  Jillian opened her mouth, then closed it. Friendly banter was one thing, but if she admitted defeat at friendly banter, SABRINA would never let her hear the end of it. Instead she made a show of zipping her podsuit the last inch up to her neck, making sure the cuffs at her wrists and ankles were tight enough to keep out the cold.

  And it was getting cold. And dark. 80 UMa c’s larger sun was long gone below the horizon, and the smaller one was well on its way to joining it. Good, she thought at the sky. Get out of here. One day down. Just four to go.

  Then she made the mistake of glancing up at SABRINA’s projected countdown clock and groaned. Four days, fifteen hours, eight minutes, twenty-one seconds. Somehow, dark though it was, stars out and everything, only a few hours had passed since the portal had disappeared. Everything that had happened since had only taken the length of time of a handful of movies. It felt unreal.

  Jillian already knew that a day was twenty-four hours on Earth just because it rotated at a certain speed. A day on another planet could look very, very different. A Mars day was only slightly longer than an Earth day, but a day on Venus was the same as more than half a year on Earth.

  And how did you measure a day on a planet with two suns? Now that one sun had been down for a while and the other one was just setting, did that make it early evening or the middle of the night? None of her space books or videos or simulator games had really covered that.

  She had to admit it was kind of pretty. The second sunset was blue, that smaller sun balanced on the horizon like a sapphire. The rest of the sky was already turning to full night. It was a color she didn’t even have a name for, full of stars she didn’t recognize.

  Unbelievably full of stars. It looked like somebody had spilled a whole jar of glitter across a piece of velvet that was so dark purple-green it was almost black. What kind of constellations could be made from stars like those? She found one that kind of looked like a dog, and another that kind of looked like a hoverbike, and one that could have been a person running and waving their arms in the air.

  A few of the glittery dots were bigger, more like sequins. It took her a moment to realize they were moons. Smaller or farther away than Earth’s moon, but whatever they were, there were four of them. Or were they stars? Bigger, closer stars than what she’d seen from Earth? She couldn’t tell, but now she was curious. Her parents might know, but that wasn’t an option. SABRINA would almost definitely know, but she didn’t want to distract it from taking care of her parents. She decided to look up the stars of the Big Dipper when she got home and find out for herself.

  The sky made her think about how lost explorers in movies would use the North Star to guide them. If she had something like that here, and somewhere to go, that would almost make her feel better. Being able to do something to solve this problem besides waiting for rescue. She’d almost rather take her chances with frostbite or alien bears or whatever, like those movie explorers, and feel like she was progressing toward something. One foot in front of the other. Instead of sitting still.

  She yawned, but stifled it. She couldn’t sleep yet. She knew SABRINA was keeping watch, but she still wanted to stay awake for her parents. If they woke up screaming in pain—or worse, if Jillian woke up to find them covered with a fresh layer of worms, already half dissolved, like the stuff in the pod—

  Something brushed her back, and she startled hard. But it wasn’t worms, wasn’t anything scary. It felt soft and cozy. She glanced up, almost blind in the darkness. A blanket was draping itself over her shoulders. Mom? she thought. But she knew better. “Hey, SABRINA.”

  “Hey, yourself.” There was a pause, which might have been SABRINA determining and following Jil
lian’s line of sight. “Stars, huh?” Another pause. “I’m not very good at small talk.” Yet another pause, while the fabric on Jillian’s shoulders got noticeably cozier. “I am good at blankets.”

  “You’re excellent at blankets,” Jillian agreed. “How’re my mom and dad doing? Don’t you need this, um, blanket stuff for them?”

  “Nah,” SABRINA said. “They’re good. If we keep them still, and keep them fed and watered, they should pull through A-okay.”

  Watered.

  Well, that was a problem for tomorrow. For now, “A-okay” had gotten Jillian’s hopes up. “So you did figure out how to heal them?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. They’ll be spending a lot of time around doctors when they get back, but at least they’ll get back, instead of trying to hold off the worms so you could go through the portal without them. It’s a good thing you decided not to do that. It really wouldn’t have gone well for them.” It paused. “At all.” Another pause. “I ran the calculations, and their chances of survival would have been roughly four-point-five percent.”

  Jillian shivered. She rubbed the wristband beneath the podsuit cuff. Still there. “I’m glad you decided not to do that too.” Then something occurred to her. “Will you get in trouble for not following orders? I mean, if you can even get in trouble. Can you?”

  “I’m not sure. We’ll have to find out together. Every day an adventure, I always say!”

  “There’s no way you can contact the lab back home?” Jillian asked, feeling like she’d asked already, or been told already. In any case, she knew. But she had to ask all the same. “High-tech thing like you can’t turn into a, I don’t know, a transmitter or something?”

  “The human brain is the most complex computing system that exists,” SABRINA replied. “You first.”

  Jillian yawned. Shorter days or not, she was exhausted. “Point taken.”