Xenonite is a complicated chain of proteins and chemicals I have no hope of understanding. But I guess Taumoeba has a way to worm its way in. There’s a nitrogen apocalypse going on in the breeder farm. If you can get into the xenonite walls deep enough that the nitrogen can’t reach, you get to survive!

Taumoeba can’t get through ordinary plastic. It can’t get through epoxy resin. It can’t get through glass. It can’t get through metal. I’m not even sure if it could get through a ziplock bag. But thanks to me, Taumoeba-82.5 can get through xenonite.

I took a life-form I knew nothing about and used technology I didn’t understand to modify it. Of course there were unintended consequences. It was stupidly arrogant of me to assume I could predict everything.

I take a deep breath and let it out.

Okay, this isn’t the end of the world. In fact, it’s the opposite. This Taumoeba can permeate xenonite. No problem. I’ll store it in something else. It’s still nitrogen-resistant. It doesn’t need xenonite to survive. I tested it thoroughly in my glass lab equipment back when we first isolated the strain. It’ll still do its thing on Venus and Threeworld. Everything’s fine.

I glance back at the breeder farms.

Yeah. Fine. I’ll make a big farm out of metal. It’s not hard. I have a mill and all the raw materials I need. And God knows I have time to spare. I’ll salvage the operational equipment from a farm Rocky made. Only the casing is xenonite. Everything else is metals and stuff. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I just need to put it on a different car.

“Yeah,” I reassure myself. “Yeah, this is okay.”

I just need to make a box that can maintain a Venusian atmosphere. All of the hard stuff is already done, thanks to Rocky.

Rocky!

I feel a sudden surge of nausea. I have to sit on the floor and put my head between my legs. Rocky has the same strain of Taumoeba aboard his ship. It’s stored in xenonite farms like mine.

All critical bulkheads of his ship, including the fuel tanks, are made of xenonite. There’s nothing standing between his Taumoeba and his fuel.

“Oh… God…”

I made the new Taumoeba farm. Sheet aluminum and some basic milling on the CNC mill. It wasn’t a problem.

Rocky’s ship is the problem.

I’ve been watching his engine flare every day for the past month. Now it’s gone.

I float in the control room. The spin drives are off, and the Petrovascope is set to maximum sensitivity. There’s some random Petrova-wavelength light coming from Tau Ceti itself, as always. And even that’s dim. The star, almost as bright as Earth’s sun, now just looks like a fatter-than-usual dot in the night sky.

But aside from that… nothing. I’m way too far away to detect the Tau Ceti–Adrian Petrova line and the Blip-A is nowhere to be seen.

And I know right where it should be. Down to the milli-arc-second. And from here, its engines should be lighting up my scope….