I open the BOCOA and—

“Ugh!” I wince and draw away from the container. It smells horrible.

“Uh…” I say. “Why does it smell like that?”

Then it hits me. I know that smell. It’s the smell of dead, rotting Astrophage.

The Taumoeba are loose again.

I leap from the stool, but I don’t have a plan.

“Okay, don’t panic,” I tell myself. “Think clearly. Then act.”

The BOCOA is still hot. That means there’s a lot of living Astrophage still in there. I caught it early. That’s good. Not because of the BOCOA—it’s toast. I’ll never be able to sort out the Taumoeba from the Astrophage in there. But it means that however the heck the Taumoeba got in there, this is very recent and hopefully hasn’t reached the ship’s fuel.

Yes. That’s priority number one. Don’t let Taumoeba into the fuel bays. Last time they got in was because of various microscopic leaks in the system. But it had to have gotten there from the crew compartments where I had brought it aboard. There isn’t much overlap between the fuel system and the crew compartment. There’s just one place that’s the likely culprit for transfer.

Life support.

If the ship is too cold, it runs air across coils filled with Astrophage to warm it up. A breach in one of those coils would do it. Lucky for me I’ve had a big pile of 96 °C Astrophage in the lab keeping the crew compartment so warm the ship has to use the air-conditioning system.

Okay, now I have a plan.

I scamper up the ladder to the control room. I bring up the Life Support panel and look at the logs. As I suspected, the heater hasn’t been turned on in over a month. I deactivate the heater entirely. It shows as disabled, but I don’t trust it.

I go to the primary breaker box. It’s under the pilot’s seat. I find the breaker for the heating system and flick it off.

“Okay,” I say.

I get back in the seat and check the Fuel panel. The fuel bays all seem to be in good shape. The temperature is correct. It wouldn’t take long for Taumoeba to run wild and eat everything in a fuel bay—I know that for darn certain. If they were affected, they’d be colder than that.

I bring up the spin-drive controls and shut the engines off. The floor drops out from under me as I return to weightlessness. I probably don’t need to shut them off, but for now I don’t want the fuel doing anything. If there’s Taumoeba in a fuel line, I want it to stay there, not get pumped all over the ship.

“Okay…” I say again. “Okay…”

More thinking.

How did it get loose? I sterilized every part of this ship with nitrogen before getting a gram of Astrophage from Rocky. The only Taumoeba aboard are in the sealed mini-farms on the beetles and the sealed, xenonite breeder tanks.