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.

No. No time for science questions. I can speculate on the cause later. Right now I have an engineering problem. I wish Rocky were here.

I always wish Rocky were here.

“Nitrogen,” I say.

I don’t know how the Taumoeba got out, but I need them dead. Taumoeba-82.5 can handle 8.25 percent nitrogen at 0.02 atmospheres. Maybe a little higher. But it definitely can’t handle 100 percent nitrogen at the crew compartment’s 0.33 atmospheres. That works out to be two hundred times its lethal dose of nitrogen.

I float to the breaker box and shut off everything related to life support. Immediately, the emergency alarm sounds and red lights turn on. I kick across the control room to the emergency system’s breaker box and shut those all off as well.

The master alarm is annoying, so I silence it on the main interface panel.

I fly down to the lab and throw open my gas cylinder supply cupboard. I have about 10 kilograms of nitrogen gas in a single canister. Again, I owe my life to DuBois’s preferred method of suicide.