The spider sleeps with its jaws around my neck. Even through my evo-suit, I feel its enormous mandibles flexing and relaxing, flexing and relaxing with the rhythms of its dreams — if these things can be said to dream. It doesn’t eat me itself, perhaps saving me for its children.

Helpless, but still alive, I hang suspended on a web strung between asteroids, mere meters from my ship.

 

Asteroid Spiders — an invasive species, probably descended from a research colony near Pluto where they were bred and then illegally jettisoned. Scientists believe they evolved to survive off photons instead of air and meat. They still ate meat, though, when they could get it. They had a vestigial digestion system, could deploy a paralytic toxin, and had especially strong jaws that could chew through cheap space suits. Aerodynamic bodies let them slip in against air pressure. They even re-sealed the suit with webbing after they entered, following some instinct scientists didn’t fully understand.

 

Nobody considered Asteroid Spiders when my wife and I were sent to investigate disappearances around Saturn. Because they barely give off heat, and their webbing doesn’t show up on radar, it was near-impossible to track how far they’d spread, but so far there had only been encounters as far in as Neptune.

 

“Captain?” Sal, my wife, calls over the suit radio. It buzzes the web, and the spider behind me wakes up, shifting its bulk. “Captain, the rescue ship is two minutes out.”

 

I want to warn them away. This is far, far worse than anyone could have predicted. The spiders have grown massive feeding on waste from the Saturn colonies, weaving near-invisible webs all the way around the rings. It only becomes visible for a few minutes every day, when the sun’s light is refracted through atmosphere, revealing black lines against black sky to be a dazzle of red and orange and yellow wires that form tunnels and canyons and mountains, vast topographies unbound by gravity.

 

It’s mid-day now, and the rescue ship, once I see it, is a smear of red against the vast wall of planet. It seems to catch sight of us and decelerates, the retro thrusters flaring, bright. Do I see webbing catch fire? Do they see it? It’s too far to tell. My spider — the one who sleeps with its jaws around my neck — scuttles away. I lose sight of it almost immediately.

 

“Don’t worry, I warned them,” Sal says. Sure enough, the ship is using its thrusters, or perhaps some other flammable substance that needs no oxygen, to clear a path. For a moment I’m taken back to a day on Earth early in our relationship.

 

Sal liked spiders back then. She would pull dead flies off sticky paper with tweezers and drop them into the webs around her apartment. Then, one day while she was working in the kitchen, she saw dozens (she claimed hundreds) of hatchlings in the corner, shooting string and being pulled aloft by a breeze from the window, spreading out all around the room.

 

She called me screaming. I drove over and killed all of them I could find, though many of the babies had already curled up and died as soon as they’d left the nest. I swept up the rest with a broom.

 

“They’re more scared of you than you are of them,” I told her. “It’s alright, they’re just little.”

 

The rescue vehicle is making progress, slowly burning a path towards us, but as I watch, an enormous spider — perhaps mine — lets out a spurt of silk and, maybe catching an electromagnetic gust from the sun, drifts onto the ship. It scurries this way and that, looping over the shell, launching connecting strands to the main structure. The ship fires wildly, but it can only burn forward, and spiders are now coming in from every direction, spinning and spinning until the craft has stopped completely, cocooned. Safe inside their metal shell, but doomed to starvation, they will not save us. I avert my eyes.

 

“Captain,” Sal says after a few minutes. It sounds like she’s been crying. “I’m coming to get you.” My heart sinks as a hatch opens on my ship, and Sal emerges in her evo-suit. If I could move I would wave her back, tell her to hold out hope for herself, to let me die alone. But all I can do is watch.

 

“I’ll be there in just a moment,” she says, pushing herself out. She’s moving slowly, holding one hand in front of her to find strands, burning them away with her suit’s laser. She’s next to me soon enough. Her eyes, golden brown and rimmed red, meet mine, anxiously looking for signs of life. I can barely manage a blink.

 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, her voice breaking, and she takes my hand. The webbing on her glove glues us together. Inside my suit, tiny mandibles stop chewing and tiny legs start crawling. 

Within moments I can see them emerging and crawling down my arm, towards hers. She doesn’t look.

"I’m going to try to get us back,” she says, pressing a button. A winch in the ship activates, dragging us. She winces and goes to scratch at her arm, but can’t reach. They’re inside. The poison is entering her system. She turns and takes my other hand, trying to say something else, but it acts too quickly.

 

As we’re dragged along we become tangled, and the motor gives up. We float together in this strange hanging world, looking into each other's eyes until the rings spin into the planet’s shadow.

 

I’m selfishly glad she came to me, glad I won’t have to die alone. I can’t feel anything, but now I do feel her. I feel her squeezing my hand, pressing against my chest like she did that day back on Earth, kissing my ear. Then, unexpectedly, squeezing my neck. Gently, very gently, flexing and releasing, flexing and releasing, with the rhythm of one last dream.