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…”

Chapter 29

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….

I ran the numbers again and again. Though I’d already proven my formulae correct by daily observations of his progress. Now there’s nothing. No blip from the Blip-A.

He’s derelict out there. His Taumoeba escaped their enclosure and wormed their way into his fuel bays. From there, they ate everything. Millions of kilograms of Astrophage gone in a matter of days.

He’s smart, so he surely has the fuel compartmentalized. But those compartments are made of xenonite, right? Yeah.

Three days.

If the ship were damaged, he’d fix it. There’s nothing Rocky can’t fix. And he works fast. Five arms whipping around, often doing unrelated things. He could be dealing with a massive Taumoeba infection, but how long would that take? He has plenty of nitrogen. He can harvest as much as he wants from his ammonia atmosphere. Let’s assume he did that as soon as he noticed the contagion.

How long would it take him to get things back online?

Not this long.