Orbital Chemistry

“Hey Hal, there’s something wrong with the generator again, can you go take a look?”

I stumbled out into the cold of the airlock. The heavy duty rubberized plastic shuddered and crackled in the winter wind outside. I stripped down to my base layer, then put on the heavy, clunky, winterized maintenance suit. The yellow rubber weighed more than it should have, but it was triple insulated against the roaring chemical winter of Europa.

Jupiter loomed somewhere overhead. I could tell from the shadow, even if I couldn’t see through all the flying ice chips. I fought to put one foot in front of the other. I turned the corner of the barracks and saw an enormous shape looming above the generator. The darkness, the wind, the icy hail… it could have been a hallucination, but I was sure. It was a carapace-covered worm. Scaly and unthinkably massive, feeding on the energy and warmth from the generator.

I couldn’t think. I stared for at least a minute before my wireless radio hummed and snapped with the static of Sugiyama’s voice again.

“Halpert, where are you? We’re starting to lose our life support in here!”

The set was broken and I couldn’t respond, but it snapped me out of my stupor. I trudged forward towards this horrible, bus-sized parasite. It noticed me. I dove back around the corner as it turned the dull sheen of its eyes towards me. My suit caught on a hardpoint that was meant to be used to tie down a warm-weather awning. The awning had sat in the back of the store room since we got here. Apparently this barracks was a reused Mars model, and nobody had thought to ditch the convertible top when they winterized the package.

The worm was on me before I could stand. I felt my feet dissolve in alien acid. The nerves disappeared too quickly to react or to feel pain. It bit down further, and I tried to roll over so I could hack at it with my knife. By the time I rotated my body, my waist had been dissolved as well. I melted away inside my suit, pooling in frozen red puddles inside the acid-scorched rubber of my suit.

“Hal, life support is down. It sounds like there’s something outside the barracks.”