Page 15 of Alien on the Moon (Thryal Mates #3)

Elena

Elena’s comms beeped, and a message from Rylan popped up. Come see me.

A part of her didn’t want to go, but she knew the sooner this was resolved, the sooner they would no longer be in this uncomfortable limbo. They would either stay together and work on this project or break up and accept their failure in both science and romance.

She got to her feet and dragged herself to the conference room Rylan had asked her to meet him in. Hesitating, she steeled herself before knocking on the door.

“Come in,” Rylan said.

She slipped inside and paused, just taking him in for a moment before sitting down in the chair across from him. Instead of thinking about the memories of the day before this dredged up, she focused on him.

Rylan looked exhausted, like he hadn’t slept at all the previous night. But his jaw was clenched, and his back was straight. Something had pissed him off.

“I would appreciate it if you didn’t undermine my messages to my crew about this project,” he said. “Do you want them to have enough morale to try and fix this or not?”

She crossed her arms. “Well, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t eavesdrop on private conversations.” It was a weak defense of her venting, and she knew it, but she was too mad to fully concede to his point.

Crossing his arms, too, his posture matched hers. “Well, I was going to apologize, but then I heard you talking about what a condescending ass I am and thought you wouldn’t want to hear it.”

She blinked, his comment putting her on the wrong foot. “You what?”

“I was going to apologize.” He sighed, scrubbing his face with his hand as though fighting off a headache. “Not for being willing to accept that the project is coming to a close, but for not seeing what our fight really was about.”

Her eyes narrowed behind her round glasses. “And what’s this fight really about?”

“That you feel like me giving up on the project is the same as giving up on us.”

Her mouth gaped. He was right, of course, but she assumed he hadn’t picked up on the subtext of their argument. Still feeling too obstinate to fully agree with him, she averted her gaze. “Well, I am also a bit upset about the project being shut down.”

He raised his brows. “But…”

This was so embarrassing. She knew she had been acting like an ass in the past day, but pride kept the words stuck in her throat.

Taking a slow breath in and out, she forced the words from her lips. “But you’re right that I was more upset because I felt like you giving up on this project was the same as giving up on us. I know that it’s not logical and you’ve reassured me plenty of times before that you care about me beyond this project, but—”

He held up a hand. “I understand. Someone very intelligent told me that you’ve probably been hurt before, and that makes it difficult to trust again.”

“Who?” she asked, a flicker of a smile crossing her face. “On a base like this, that hardly narrows it down.”

“We’ll worry about that later. First, I want to make it clear that I care a lot about you, Elena. You have one of the brightest minds I have ever met. You’re funny, beautiful, and kind. I would be a fool to lose you.”

Her eyes misted with tears as her throat tightened. “Thank you. I’ll try harder to believe you.”

Sighing, she shook her head. “But I owe you an apology, too. I shouldn’t have implied that you don’t care about this project, especially not to Jaku. And I should have been straightforward about what was really upsetting me instead of leaving you alone to guess. And I’m sorry for being so petty while we were fighting. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

He waved her off with a flick of his hand. “Already forgiven. And for the record, I do believe in this project. We have another chance, so let’s not waste it by fighting.”

“I love you,” she said. It surprised her the way it slipped out yet still felt entirely natural. The sky is blue, plants eat sunlight, and Elena loves Rylan.

His face lit up in a broad smile and he held his arms open as an invitation. “I love you, too.”

Grinning, she crossed behind the table and sat in his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him. Giving a little moan of appreciation, he deepened the kiss, his tongue and hers performing an elaborate dance.

“I missed this,” he mumbled when he came up for air.

She giggled. “It’s only been a day.”

“It’s been far too long.” His lips hungrily met hers again. A message on his comms dinged, interrupting the moment.

With a sigh, he opened it. Apparently, he had taken soil samples the night before because these were readings that she had not seen yet.

“Did you collect these last night?” she asked.

He nodded, grimacing. “Made the mistake of trudging through the field without my envirosuit. It was covered in that disgusting slime. I even took a sample of it to see what it was made of and whether the composition differed there. The squigs seemed to be eating the compost again, at least.”

She sighed. “Well, if we’re going to solve this, we should probably stop making out and look at these.”

“You’re just far too much of a distraction.” He nibbled on her ear, giving her goosebumps.

Elena opened her mouth to retort, but then something on the comms caught her eye. “Hang on…what’s this?”

She read through the analysis of the plant samples he had collected. A jolt of excitement and possibly hope passed through her. “It says the nutrient value in the leaves is almost equivalent to the bral on Thryal.”

He blinked and read where she pointed. “Wait, then why is it still yellow?”

Squinting at the screen, she bit her lip as she thought. “Maybe it has something to do with the atmosphere.” As the words left her mouth, ideas began to swirl in her head, and electricity pulsed through her, urging her to move as though that would somehow help the flow of her thoughts.

She got to her feet and paced circles around the office as she voiced her theory. “On Thryal, you have several miles worth of atmosphere and an ozone layer, which shield the planet from your sun’s rays.”

“But on Kheros, the atmosphere is much thinner,” he said. “The envirosuits are more to protect from the sun now than to help us with breathing. But if they’re getting too much sunlight…”

She grabbed one of the leaf samples and headed to the lab with Rylan following close behind. As expected, when she looked at it under a microscope, she saw fewer chloroplasts than on bral grown on Thryal. The same applied to the vreben as well.

It wasn’t that they were dying. The plants were simply being overfed by the sunlight, so they were producing fewer chloroplasts. “Come and look,” she said, gesturing for him to stare down the microscope.

Picking up his head, he grinned. “They’re not sick. They’re just getting too much light.” But then his face fell, and he sobered. “What about the squigs, though? If the soil is fine—more than fine, actually, it’s better than ever—why are they dying?”

That was a good question, one she didn’t have an immediate answer for. But it was close. So close. It was there at the tips of her fingers. She just needed to reach out and grab the thought.

Then his words about the night before came back to her. “You said they were eating the compost again?” she asked.

He nodded. “I thought it was strange because you would have thought they’d all be dead after going for so long without food.”

“What species of squig is this?” she asked. “I couldn’t find much about them when doing research.”

“They’re splices,” he said.

“Splices?”

He shrugged as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. “We didn’t think a normal Thryal squig could survive on the moon, so we had that group genetically engineered. They’re a mixture of several different but genetically compatible species we created to make them hardier.”

Her blue eyes widened. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“It’s standard practice for introducing fauna to terraformed land,” he said, furrowing his brows. “It didn’t seem important.”

“Didn’t seem important? It explains everything.”

He stared in naked confusion. “How so?”

How could he not see it? “Rylan, I’ve been looking at databases of naturally occurring species on my and your planet in order to get an idea of their basic traits. But I’ve obviously been looking in the wrong place, so nothing matched. What are the species that contributed to their gene pool?”

“Upper and lowland squigs. Plus Thrac’s squig and Galan’s squig.” He scratched his chin, which had grown stubble over the past few days.

“Perfect!” She jumped onto her comms and began searching up the species he mentioned. They looked like the upper land squig but carried internal traits more similar to Galen’s Squig and the Thrac’s Squig. Like the Galac’s Squig, they could survive in extreme temperatures, and like the lowland squig, they ate a lot and needed very little oxygen or water to survive.

“The slime inside the one that burst on me…” she said, pulling up a slide. “I thought that it was filled with parasites, but really—”

“It’s eggs!” Rylan exclaimed. His eyes bright with excitement, he began typing into his comms so quickly his fingers were a blur. “So, if we look up the life cycle of all four species…there. Thrac’s squig lives and dies in broods. All in the brood hatch at roughly the same time. And then they live, mate, and then all die off together.”

“And they’re intersex, capable of mating and being mated with,” Elena read.

Her face twisted in disgust. “It says here that once they’ve fertilized their eggs, their whole bodies focus entirely on growing the brood in its earlier stages, using all internal organs and processes for fuel to keep them alive until the skin splits and the eggs burst out. Ugh, and I thought human childbirth was bad.”

“The reproductive cycle seems to be unique to the species. It looks as though the nutrients in the slime also enrich the soil for the newborn squigs.” He turned to her. “Elena, can I say it?”

Smirking, she inclined her head. “By all means.”

“Eureka!” He picked her up and twirled her before pulling her into a kiss. “Eureka!”

“Oh, good, you’re back together,” Jaku said, poking his head in the doorway. “What’s going on?”

Elena stepped aside with a laugh, letting Rylan take the floor. “Don’t tell anyone until we’ve confirmed it,” he said. “But we think we’ve figured out what’s going on. And it’s all good news.”

His eyes widened. “Really? What is it?”

They explained their theory about how the fact that the light was stronger than usual on Kheros caused the plants to produce fewer chloroplasts and that it wasn’t a disease killing the squigs but rather that they had a unique life cycle and were nearing the end of it. The new brood already seemed to be hatching.

“So, that means all we have to do is stagger the introduction of squigs into our compost areas and make sure there are always a couple of living broods while the others are dying,” Rylan said. “As for the bral and the vreben, they both appear to be nutritionally identical to the crops we grow on Thryal. The only difference is the color.”

Elena nodded to the door. “We were just about to head out to the new compost pile to see if we could find any young squigs. Do you want to come?”

“Hmm, go out and wade in rotting food, or stay in here and do paperwork?” Jaku tapped his chin in exaggerated thoughtfulness. “You two lovebirds go have fun.”

Elena, now extremely mindful of the potential for skin cancer, donned her envirosuit and walked with Rylan to the compost pile. The odor of the squig slime combined with rotting food made her want to gag even with the oxygen regulator. She had no idea how Rylan was able to stand it out there the night before.

Digging through it was much worse, kicking up the smell whenever she moved dirt or a rotten scrap of food. She saw no sign of the young squigs.

Were they still too small to see without a microscope? Or was she wrong, and this was a disease rather than a reproductive cycle?

“Found one!” Rylan said, showing her his hand palm up. The squig was no longer than her pinkie nail, but it was there, and it was proof that the population was going to survive.

“Eureka!” Laughing, she threw her arms around him, knocking him over with her tackle. He fell into the rotting compost, and she landed on top, practically straddling him. For a moment, she had the urge to kiss him…and potentially do something more than kissing.

But then she remembered where they were. And she was not going to explain an infection like that to any doctors. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, getting off him and helping him to his feet.

She laughed, her cheeks flushing in embarrassment. “I guess I just got overexcited.”

Smirking, he shook his head. “Elena, you can tackle me like that any time.” Then he smelled himself and crinkled his nose in disgust. “But I would appreciate it if you did it somewhere other than a compost pile.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. Again.” She took his hand and began to lead him back to base. “We have to tell the others, though. The project is a success. We did it!”

She glanced at his back, still covered in dirt and things she didn’t want to think about. “Erm, after you shower, of course.”

Suddenly, she remembered that she hadn’t showered yet, either. Her hair was probably greasy, and though not as bad as him, she also wasn’t fresh as a daisy.

“Make that two showers,” she said and then saw the look on his face. She knew what he was about to say. “Separate showers. We’ll have time for that later, but first, we need to tell Arccoo and the researchers what we’ve figured out.”

They reached the base doors and helped each other remove their envirosuits. They tossed them in the pile to be cleaned.

Before they parted ways, Rylan caught her by the arm and pulled her in for one last kiss. “First, we make the announcement. Then, we celebrate.” He winked. “Both with the crew and privately later.”

“God, I missed you,” she said, kissing him one last time before heading back to her room. She felt lighter than she had in weeks, like gravity had turned off in her heart and it was bouncing in the air and back to Rylan.