Free No Place Like Home by Dana Stabenow Page B

had water, about a liter, melted down from a core sample Hiroshi and Kirsten pulled out of the ground three meters off the starboard bow.
    By thirteen hundred, Betty had run it through a filter, boiled it in the microwave and we all had a ceremonial sip of reconstituted freeze-dried coffee.
    By sixteen hundred, Hiroshi, Kirsten and Aya had installed the drill, the liquifier, the pump, the filter and the catch tank and Boris had attached the flow line to the ship’s potable water coupler.
    By seventeen hundred we had running water.
    By seventeen-thirty Betty was boiling more water for dinner.
    By eighteen hundred, Betty was dead.
    · · ·
     
    Grady had the crew assemble in the galley the next day at oh-nine.
    “Let me get this straight,” Grady said. “You slammed Betty’s hand in the microwave door, and when she tried to fight you, you slugged her. Which blow, Aya reports, knocked her into the bulkhead, where she suffered a severe injury to the brain and died almost instantly.”
    Aya, our medic, nodded confirmation.
    “Talk,” Grady said. His face was set, and his skin was a dull red all the way up over his scalp.
    “I didn't mean to kill her,” Esme said. “But she wouldn’t listen to me. I had to stop her.”
    “From doing what?”
    “Committing mass murder.”
    There followed one of those silences that smells like a riot in waiting. “Okay,” Grady said finally. “You mind explaining that to the rest of us?”
    Esme was more than ready to. Like Betty, Esme needed water for his hydroponic system. He’d run a sample through the scope and detected what he unilaterally decided were bacteria, single-celled micro-organisms, the lowest order of life, but life nonetheless.
    And we hadn’t brought it with us, it had been here.
    “Wait a minute,” Grady said sharply. “There isn't enough oh-two on this rock to sustain life. The imagers, the probes, our own scans from orbit proved that over and over.”
    “Bacteria don’t need oxygen, or at least some of them don’t. Facultative anaerobes prefer it, but they can live without it.”
    “It’s as close to absolute zero out there as I ever care to get,” Roberto said. “What lives in that?”
    “Maybe nothing we know of, yet,” Esme said. “But bacteria live in ice in the poles on homeworld. And one of the reasons bacteria survive so well is that they can go dormant for long periods of time.”
    It was about here that I pretty much zoned out of the discussion. Like I said, I was a mechanic. Mine was the care the gear engages. Mine was not the care and feeding of microbes.
    For the next hour we sat as Esme showed us pictures of what looked to me like worms, displayed next to a red blood cell pictured in the same scale. It looked like a penny next to an eyelash. Roberto had to be restrained until Esme explained it was his own blood, not Betty’s.
    Esme juggled words like “heterotrophs,” and gave an impassioned disquisition on the subject of cyanobacteria, which according to him had single-handedly created the atmosphere back home.
    Esme looked Grady in the eye and said firmly, “I think we should shut down operations.”
    “And do what?” Grady said. “Esme, if we shut down operations, we stop acquiring water. Even with recycling every ounce of body fluid, we nearly ran out on the trip here. We won’t survive.”
    “Then we don’t,” Esme said. “There is life indigenous to this planet, I have proved it, and I don’t care if we die for it, we don’t roll over the top of it just because we can. Life is sacred, Grady. Any life.”
    “They have eyes?” I said.
    Esme's head snapped around. “What?”
    “These bacteria. They have eyes?”
    He flushed, almost as red as Grady. “They are,” he said carefully, “the building blocks of life, of all life. Who knows how they will evolve, what forms they will take?” He drew himself up. “The point is, they are life forms, indigenous to this planet, and we don’t shove them out of the way just