But what if. What if she could escape this hell without dying? What if she could get back to her ship and find her way to HQ, warn them about the state of the Brigantine and go through a few rounds of decontam and a rigorous scan, a physical, quarantine, whatever it took to scour every trace of Foxfire from her and the suit . . .

Even that very unlikely scenario required murder. The crew would never let her escape, and the technical readout and schematics confirmed that all emergency pods had been jettisoned. Destroying the Brigantine was the only way to make sure Foxfire went no farther. It was the most responsible, if hardest, thing to do.

Her forefinger hovered over the touch screen, the words LIFE SUPPORT glowing just below. She could cut that and see if it made a difference, since her environmental suit had plenty of oxygen left in the canisters. Sighing, she tilted her visor against the edge of the panel. No, she had seen Rayan’s wound. He should be dead. The Foxfire might not even need oxygen to keep going. Plenty of fungi were anaerobic. She sincerely doubted the growth could survive the frozen vacuum of space.

She had climbed up into the engineering ducts so confidently. Sure, her hands had been shaky from lack of sleep and her eyes and brain throbbed with exhaustion, but there had been a certain fire under her feet that shoved all of that discomfort aside. Now, faced with actually ending the lives of four strangers and her own, Rosalyn hesitated.

A wave of nausea rippled through her stomach, and she clenched her abdomen to keep from vomiting. What if they could be cured? What if all this mess could be used for something good? The fungus could knit wounds back together, perhaps even elongate human life . . . No. No, no, no. There was no silver lining to this disaster, only suffering. It was pure arrogance to think she could somehow spin this around and make it out okay. You can’t turn shit into sunshine, Angela liked to say, usually when Rosalyn came by her office to vent.

“I’d say this qualifies as shit all right,” Rosalyn whispered, pulling her head back and scrolling down the readout panel. Cutting off the core functions to solar power might bring up the RTGs quick and hot, bypassing gradual transference of power and forcing the ship to call too fast on the RTGs to keep life support and other key systems online. It was a long shot, Rosalyn decided, but a long shot she had to take, and take immediately.