[Issue 2026.77]

“A New Shell”, Mahaila Smith

Art © 2026 L.E. Badillo

---

My knife scrapes the last strings of pale meat away from its armour. Through my helmet I can smell the rotting fish scent of Kepler Crab. Its shell is warped, like wet pages. The thorn-sharp spines along the edges are dark as cobalt, fading to a pale forget-me-not blue center freckled with black stars. My breath fogs the glass of my visor. “Ready?” Commander Hiram asks, and we nod. It takes all five of us, bending at the knee and lifting, as if we’re moving a piece of furniture. One of the claws is slung across my chest, and I’m trying to hold it under my chin. The feed inside my helmet shows my BPM and blood pressure ticking up as we walk the shell back to our ship.

All around the ground, desiccated fronds of seaweed and molluscs and bones get caught in the treads of our boots. Tiny beings that once skittered over the ebbs and groundswells, now crushed by our clumsy steps into fine white sand.

I try to ignore them. I’ve seen enough photos of the Great Barrier Reef at home to know when coral isn’t coming back. Maybe you’re judging me. Maybe you think you wouldn’t kill another planet. But I promise you, you would drain another world’s sea to save your own.

We’re a cleanup crew, of sorts. After the mouth of the steel pipe descends through to the surface to suck out the seawater, like a rocket-sized siphon pump, we have a bit of time to collect the shells left behind, before the water droplets jelly back towards the planet’s mass and rain down like golf balls, hard enough to knock you out.

The work reminds me of a beach, decades before, on the coast of Maine, walking with my grandmother, on the sand. The tide was out; I could see it in the distance, like a thin blue thread. We knelt down, covering our knees with pale sand. I looked at the grains covering the pads of my finger and imagined each was a tiny planet, housing creatures only I could hear. My grandma raked her hands through the beach, looking for moon-coloured sand dollars. She showed me how, if you broke one open, a flock of tiny doves flew out to nest on the sand.

It’s rare to find a crab fully intact like this one. Most of the time other native fauna find them first, and we’re left to pick up the pieces of pierced shells from the feathered crab flesh, sprayed across the former seabed.

When we climb aboard our ship, the crab is taken by the lab techs, wheeled on a trolley through the echoing halls. Our hold is full, and we are ready to fly home. I plan to rest in stasis for the journey, but I’m not ready to lie down, yet. I dawdle around the galley with First Officer Reid, ripping open a bag of potato chips and letting the crisps spin up and away. Each of us floating to catch them, chewing with our mouths open.

When I was a kid, the ocean brimmed with waves of bright plastic. Broken pails and shovels. Gauzy bags like jellyfish. Bottle caps and vape pens. Broken condoms like mermaid’s purses, yellowed and split open on the shore. We saw videos on TV of birds landing on floating islands of trash. Saw gulls building their nests out of zip ties and cellophane. Heard their bodies crunching with each step they took. Saw their bodies sliced open and spilling shards of lego bricks and fork tines.

The solution started with global bans and biodegradable plastics melted from the crabs, molluscs and fungi, until Earth’s species were depleted. Then shortages everywhere. Not enough medical equipment in the hospitals. Water filters failing and making their owners sick. People begging to go back to petroleum-based polymers. I blame nostalgia for the bright silver wrappers and plastic action figures.

Kepler Crabs were first spotted by a rover toiling across Jupiter’s moons. One was brought back from a mission on Io, as big as our biggest king crabs on Earth. Its shell was stripped and studied, cut into cross-sections and shipped across the country to every government lab and Ivy League. After analysis, it was determined that it was close enough to the chitin we were used to that our microorganisms could break it down at the end of a product’s lifetime. But it was different in other ways. It was malleable, able to withstand intense pressure in open space as it scuttled between asteroids, searching for a mate in new seas. Here was our plastic. Able to be formed and reformed into everything we needed.

I unscrew the lid of my water bottle and take a sip. Under the bright LEDs of the bridge, the clear blue cylinder sends spots of aquamarine along the rubber-treaded floor. Reminding me of the aquarium in my hometown.

I used to visit the octopus there, in a large glass case at the back. Her name was Ace. Sometimes you would see her curled in the corner, her skin mottled to a beige grey, rough like sand. Hiding behind swaying seagrass, eyestalks reaching towards the glass, looking for someone to spot her. Other times, if a jar was lowered into the tank, she would darken to deep fuchsia, jolting towards the surface to grab the glass with her tentacles, twisting the lid to scoop out the scrabbling treat inside.

I reminded myself about the other octopuses in the ocean. The wild ones swerving through the mess of spilled shipping containers, floating urinal mats, vacuum cleaner nozzles, bike helmets, and empty cups. The oil spills darkening the seafloor. This was for them, our new chitin stolen from the seas of distant worlds. To give the ones left a chance, a better one, at least, than we gave their ancestors.

© 2026 Mahaila Smith

[Issue 2026.77]

Comment on the stories in this issue on the TFF Press blog.