Boris woke from a light sleep. What had Jenna said? He replayed her sentence in his mind. “How far away do you think the founder’s ship is?”
The vocalizer had played them into his auditory canal, and his brain had deciphered them and marked their meaning. Everything was taking much longer than usual, because he had lowered his circulatory system, something like a dimmable lamp that consumed less energy when it shone less brightly.
Jenna had asked him how far away the ship, their ship, might be. The others had probably noticed the powerful explosion. There was nothing more to see of (158) Koronis. In its place was a giant cloud of dust and rocky chunks, all moving in the direction of Titan. But there was no reason to worry anymore. Titan’s thick atmosphere would transform the small, shattered remnants of Koronis into shooting stars, maybe even visible from Titan’s surface.
Maybe the stellar fireworks display would make the Titanians think of them, Jenna and Boris, who had given their own lives to ensure that their home survived. It was a touching thought, even though they hadn’t intentionally sacrificed themselves. It had merely been a consequence of a plan that hadn’t worked out quite as they had imagined.
“Boris?”
Oh, he needed to respond to Jenna. “I don’t know,” he said. “We were going to agree on a rendezvous point after we’d deflected the asteroid.”
The ship hadn’t responded to calls via the helmet radio, but that wasn’t a surprise, because its range was not far enough. If only they still had the shuttle, which had almost certainly been ripped apart into fragments that were just then spreading out across the solar system!
“If they... If they saw the explosion...”
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“If they saw the explosion,” Jenna continued, “they would be trying to get here at top speed.”
“Definitely.”
“I... I wonder if there’s anything we can do.”
“I’ve programmed an automatic emergency beacon to be broadcast every 15 minutes,” Boris said.
“Anything else? Could we increase the range somehow? Build something that would help us? Just waiting here without doing anything is terrible.”
“I don’t know. But you sound... weak.”
“I’m cold,” Jenna said.
Yes, that was to be expected. Her spacesuit would have lowered the heating output to save energy, while simultaneously decreasing the oxygen content in her breathing air.
To idly wait, not doing anything. Jenna’s thought would not let him sleep, even though it was essential to rest as much as possible to reduce his oxygen consumption. He didn’t want to wait without taking some action. Their arrangement wasn’t optimal. They were floating in a tight embrace, but the surfaces of their two bodies were still giving off much too much heat. They needed a cocoon that could give them shelter, trapping their body heat.
A cocoon or a second skin.
“Do you trust me, Jenna?”
“Yes.” She answered his question without hesitation, without conditions, without asking what he had planned. What a great feeling it gave him.
“Good. It’s going to get dark around us. Even darker than now.”
“Understood. Or no, I don’t understand, but that doesn’t matter. I trust you to know what you’re doing.”
Yes, he knew. He pulled Jenna even closer against his body, then loosened the straps of her jetpack. They didn’t need it anymore. He took the rail gun out of her hand. It was out of ammunition, so he let it float away into the darkness.
Boris established contact with the fungus. He had only tried it twice before in his whole life. Once, just after he had become a Snarushi, to thank the fungus, an old ritual that every Snarushi had to perform. And then one other time after an accident to ask it for help. That time he hadn’t been successful.
Boris closed his eyes and turned his mind’s eye inward. His thoughts wandered through his arms into his hands and through his legs into his feet. His skin tingled. His thoughts reached his fingertips and toes and then started to flood outward into his outer skin, into the fungus. It was not a thinking creature that he could talk to with words. But it had moods and needs, and he could communicate with it by using thoughts to convey the feelings he wanted to share.
Boris imagined loneliness and then death—sad thoughts—and he felt like he needed to cry, but the tears didn’t flow. He thought of loss, and the ultimate, final loss that would occur when they froze and suffocated.
The fungus couldn’t answer him. It was incapable of communication. But it could react, it could grow, it could try to delay the loss as long as possible. Instinctively it knew what to do. It expanded and grew around Jenna, enclosing her. Slowly it crept over her limbs, first forming a fine mycelium that grew thicker and thicker so it could withstand the cold and vacuum of space.
It had been the founders’ gift to the Snarushi, but what the fungus was doing, expanding and growing, it had been able to do for billions of years before. It was much older than the species that had accepted him as a symbiotic partner and had given him these new capabilities. The fungus transformed two bodies into one. It brought the two Titanians closer than any other creature could possibly have accomplished.
Boris could feel his outer skin growing. Only his arms were still free, and he knew he had to act now. “I’m going to disconnect your oxygen tank now,” he said. “You’ll have to breathe the air that’s still in your suit for a few minutes.”
Jenna nodded.
He pulled the tube off her helmet. Then he inserted it into the breathing opening for his outer skin. The pure oxygen from the tank flowed into him and spread out under his outer skin. There it was captured by the fungal membrane and stored to be released to the two of them later.
Then the tank was empty. He threw it away, as they no longer needed it. Boris pulled his arms in next to his body. The fungus continued to grow, enclosing Jenna’s upper body, climbing over her head, and merging there with the outer skin that encased his skull.
Jenna was having difficulty breathing. The oxygen in her suit had to be almost out.
“Can you hold on?” he asked.
She nodded.
“It will be done soon.”
The cocoon had to be completed before it could give her relief. He could still sense gaps that had to be closed. The fungus continued to expand, and finally his outer skin was complete again. The cocoon was ready.
Boris’s face was just in front of Jenna’s visor. “Release the lock,” he said.
With her last breath, Jenna gave the command to her helmet. He used his nose to push the visor upward a bit, and Jenna took a deep breath. They were okay, breathing the same air. The outer skin still had reserves. It was using the sparse sunlight to generate additional oxygen and to purify the exhaled air.
They would survive for however long the oxygen lasted, and when it was gone, it would be over.
4804.14
“There’s nothing here, Anna. Nothing but dust and dirt.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s not a question of belief. I’d like nothing more than for us to find Jenna and Boris waving at us from some remnant of the asteroid, but you saw the explosion too! Even Blane and Sara don’t think any human could’ve survived that.”
“There you go again. No human.”
Geralt sighed. He had analyzed the explosion over and over again. He had calculated the unbelievable speed that the millions of pieces of the asteroid had flown apart—and how quickly Jenna and Boris could have tried to get away with their jetpacks. He kept coming back to the same conclusion—their two friends must have been ripped apart by the forces of the explosion, or been pulverized by the millions of flying remnants.
That had become clear to him two days ago, and he had tried to explain it to Anna clearly with his numbers. Nevertheless, she had immediately contacted their new Earthling friends. Blane had accelerated to them with his shuttle as quickly as possible, so that they had reached the area o
f the explosion only two orbital periods after the catastrophe. Even if Boris and Jenna had somehow magically escaped the explosion, the only thing they could hope for would be to recover their bodies. Neither Jenna’s suit nor Boris’s systems could have kept them alive for this long.
“We should get away from here and return to Titan. Our friends just saved our world. They’ll be heroes forever, whether we find their bodies or not.”
“I shouldn’t have let him go. It was my job. But he wanted the time with Jenna so much.”
“They were together for a few days. And just think, if he had stayed here and then lost Jenna and you... That would have killed him. You know it.”
“You can’t know that, Geralt.”
Then they heard a beeping sound. Anna pulled herself over to the center console. “That’s the metal sensor,” she said.
“Probably scrap from the shuttle,” Geralt guessed. “I’ll try to image it with radar.” He swung himself onto the right seat and fed the position data from the metal sensor to the radar. A small, bright, rapidly rotating bar appeared.
“Could be part of the ship’s hull,” Geralt said, “but we’re still too far away to identify it.”
“Looks like a cylinder,” Anna said. She was staring at the screen with an intense look on her face. The object was only 100 meters away now. “A shuttle tank, maybe?”
“It’s too small for that. Wait a minute. There’s something attached at the front.”
Anna was practically trying to crawl into the screen. “Looks like a tube,” she said. Then, “It’s a... It’s an oxygen tank.”
“Maybe a spare tank from the shuttle,” he said, but he didn’t really believe it. There were no tubes attached to the spare tanks.
“Nice try,” Anna said. “But you know it’s got to be Jenna’s oxygen tank.”
“Yes,” acknowledged Geralt sadly. He had known the entire time that Jenna was dead. But seeing actual evidence now had a very different effect on him. He felt angry. “When I find the asshole responsible for this!” he thundered.
“We set off the explosion ourselves. Sara thinks the asteroid must’ve had an anti-matter core for an energy source, and we briefly knocked out its shielding when the magnetic field was generated.”
“She should’ve said something about that before.”
“She didn’t know. I don’t blame her. Who would have thought someone would put an anti-matter core inside an asteroid?”
“Won’t you just let me be angry?” Geralt insisted.
“After you take a look at this,” Anna said, pointing to the screen. “I happened to see it near the tank on the radar image.”
Geralt examined the object. It was pretty much round, its shape reminding him of a walnut. “An exploded part of the asteroid?” he guessed.
“It’s too cold for that. The explosion would have released a lot of heat. It’s at almost ambient temperature. Under normal circumstances I never would have even noticed it.”
“How large is it?”
“About two and a half meters, I’d guess.”
“Could it be another asteroid that happened to be orbiting here?”
“It’s too warm for that,” Anna said. “But hold on, that’s something I can test.”
The object was just passing through the spot of minimum distance between its trajectory and the ship’s.
Anna pointed an outside lamp to shine on the object and then measured the reflection. “It’s definitely not an asteroid. It’s much too dark for that.”
“A carbon asteroid?”
“No, Geralt, it has the same reflective properties, let me check, yes, the same as fungus—like our outer skin.”
Anna jumped up, and her sudden burst of energy got Geralt up, too. An object, out in the middle of space, with the same reflective properties as the outer skin of a Titanian? That would be an unbelievable coincidence.
“I’ve got to get out there right now,” Anna said, and with giant steps she fled the command center.
“I’ll get the tank ready,” Geralt yelled after her.
Working together, they maneuvered the walnut-shaped thing through the loading hatch into the cargo room. Close up, its shape actually looked more like a peanut. Geralt closed the hatch and let the ship fill the cargo room with breathable air.
“They’re inside,” Anna said. “I can feel them. And I felt Boris move.”
They brought the cocoon to the tank in the zero-gravity.
“Wait, I’ll go in first,” Anna said as she crawled through the membrane into the tank.
Geralt moved the object against the membrane, and then Anna’s arms came out, grabbing onto it from inside. She pulled the cocoon holding Jenna and Boris into the tank. Then she came out again. Oily-looking fluid dripped from her body onto the floor.
“Thank you for not giving up on finding them,” he said with an apologetic tone.
“It’s too early for thanks. You can thank me later, when they crawl out of there.”
“They will,” Geralt predicted. “And, this time, I have a feeling I’ll be right.”
The membrane moved six hours later. Two thin, white hands appeared in its center. A head followed, coughing and spitting out fluid. Geralt and Anna jumped forward to help Jenna out of the tank. She was wearing the bottom part of her spacesuit and had her arms wrapped around herself.
“Brrr, you keep it cold,” she said.
Geralt dried her as well as he could with a hand towel and then placed a blanket over her shoulders. “Nice to have you back,” he said.
“Yes, I’m beyond happy to be here,” Jenna said.
“We were so worried about you, Jenna,” Anna said.
Boris’s voice came out of the tank via radio. “Hey, didn’t anyone worry about me?”
“Of course, little brother,” Anna said, “just as much as Jenna. But why don’t you just come out?”
“You know, I like it in here so much that I just don’t want to.”
“How long do you think he’ll need to regenerate in there?” Jenna asked.
“Maybe two days,” Anna answered.
“Good. Then we’ll still have a few days together before we get back to Titan.”
4815.4
One last vibration, and then the ship was still. Boris felt it immediately. It was an unmistakable feeling. They were home. The force of gravity that Titan exerted to keep him pulled down onto the mat on the floor was unique to itself. Like Anna, he had spent the descent from orbit in the storage room, each lying down horizontally and strapped onto a comfortable mattress. That arrangement allowed Jenna and Geralt to heat the command center to a comfortable temperature for them. Given the somewhat tricky task of getting the ship down through the dense atmosphere, that arrangement had seemed to make the most sense to everyone.
Nevertheless, the physical separation hurt. Was that a sign for the future? He should’ve known this would happen. It had been an exceptional situation, but now it was over and everything would go back to the way it was before. Jenna would go her own way. They would see each other now and then, whenever he couldn’t avoid it. At some point, she would meet some other Wnutri, who would be a better match for her than him. He hoped nobody would ever tell him when that happened.
Anna jumped up. “Hey, little brother, why so sad? We’re home!” She ran to the lever that would open the loading hatch. “Help me!”
He sat up, moved onto his knees, and then into a squat.
“Old man,” Anna teased.
She was right. He was an old man. Who would want anything to do with such a relic? Certainly not a beautiful, talented Wnutri. She deserved better. Boris groaned. It felt good to pity himself, even if nobody else was ready to. Slowly he got up, holding onto the wall, even though he didn’t need to. Then he walked to the second lever, groaning the entire way.
“You’ve also got to move it. Standing next to it isn’t going to do anything,” Anna said.
If he didn’t have his sister, he probably would have tur
ned to stone a long time ago. But Anna would leave him today, too. She hadn’t seen her girlfriend for many orbital periods. If he was lucky, maybe Frida had fallen in love with a different woman in the meantime. But no, that wasn’t what he wanted. If Anna was happy, that would be good enough. He himself wasn’t very important.
“Hello? Boris?”
He snapped out of his thoughts and moved the lever up. He had to really exert himself. It was time that he resumed his regular training. He had always been able to rely on his muscular strength before.
The loading hatch folded forward and transformed into a narrow overhang again. A thick mist came wafting into the ship. Boris tasted its chemical composition. There was an abnormally high amount of water vapor in it. The hot exhaust gases of the engines had probably evaporated some of the icy subsurface. But Geraldine had insisted that they land close to the base instead of looking for a landing site on rocky ground.
The ventilation system roared. Initially, it didn’t appear to be having much success, but slowly the mist was being cleared out of the cargo room. Moisture was condensing on the walls. A thin, oily film formed all over his body and limbs, as if he were sweating out a mixture of methane and water. He shook to get the moisture off his body and then wiped off the rest with his hands. Hopefully half of the base wasn’t waiting to greet them. Mist was still swirling around outside the ship. Anyone who wanted to shake his hand would get a rather wet reception.
Slowly, a dark ring appeared around the ship. It could almost be mistaken for the horizon, but it seemed too close to be that. Boris tried to see anything using his goggles’ radar mode, but the mist was still too thick. The fine, floating droplets reflected the radar energy, blinding him. He simply needed to be patient. They had time.
“You hear that?” Anna asked.
He listened carefully. Yes, there was a noise, some kind of pattering, as if it were raining on the ship’s hull, but he could see only mist, no rain, outside. A couple of spotlights, coming from the other side of the apparent horizon, penetrated the thick soup. The little fingers of light pushed against the mist and seemed to make structures visible that he hadn’t noticed before, like fine curtains blowing in the wind. They slowly faded away as the mist dispersed and became more transparent.
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