Chapter Text
Grace squinted at the radar readout, trying to parse what he was seeing.
“What the heck is that?”
Rocky jittered in his ball, holding his light translator up to the feed. “Fuck what?? Question!? Amaze, amaze, amaze.”
“Hey, language.” Grace regretted having exchanged fun facts about swear words. He swung himself into the pilot chair. “Hey Mary, how fast is the uh—” he craned his neck towards the screen “How fast is Blip-M going?”
24.9 kilometers per second.
Grace twisted back in his chair. “Rocky give me some quick math, if we slow down enough to match it, will we have enough Astrophage to get back up to speed and still make it to Erid?”
“Why Grace not do it. Question?”
“Time is of the essence here, bud. You can do it faster.”
"Grace just lazy.”
Grace started swapping the displays on the various screens, preparing to slow down and do some delicate maneuvers. “How’s that math looking, Rock?”
“Math not look like anything.”
Grace suppressed a groan. (It only encouraged him)
“Can we slow down?”
"Yes. But Rocky and Grace in space for 16 extra days.”
Grace weighed that. On the one hand, he was already running on pretty thin margins for food. Rocky had plenty, but Grace was working with a limited supply that he only had because Yào and Ilyukhina hadn’t survived the journey.
On the other hand... weird space object... pretty tempting.
“Hmmmm....Rocky, heads or tails?”
“Heads or tails. Question?”
“...Never mind. Mary, slow to match Blip-M's speed.”
***
They were passing through the deepest section of astrophage infected space. The stars here were faint, and the Petrova lines were thick and irregular. They weren’t just singular curves between planets and stars. Instead, the view through the Petrovoscope was a web of splitting lines like tree branches. It created a thick canopy of stippled red dots.
Grace had to guess there just wasn’t enough in-system energy left for the astrophage to sustain themselves. They seemed to be absorbing the light reaching them from distant stars too, reducing them to rare glimmers before they disappeared again. The inky expanse around them was dark. Grace was sure the rest of the stars were still out there, that the hungry astrophage was just soaking up the crumbs of light before it could reach his eyes, but the dark was unnerving. It was so eerily dark that Grace could barely make out the shape of “Blip M” using the Hail Mary’s external lights.
Blip-M was three cylinders bundled tightly together. It was one large cylinder and two smaller ones making it vaguely Mickey-mouse shaped when viewed head-on. It was obviously man-made, or alien-made... somebody-made?... Grace mentally went with “not-naturally-occurring”.
It looked like a ship of some kind, but it was tiny. Like two-and-half Graces or seven Rockies from end-to-end. (Fuck metric and imperial. Grace was using no standardized measurements today!) It was in rough shape. It didn’t seem to have any power and there was a huge gash on one side, like something had exploded out of it and depressurized it.
It was also tumbling, long end over long end, which was going to make this next part difficult.
“Okay Rock, hold on.” Grace said.
Rocky released a low clicking sound like he was blowing a raspberry. “Bad Joke. Bad bad bad.”
The last time the Hail Mary had spun, it was under less-than-ideal conditions. But if they wanted to get a good look at this thing they’d have to match it in velocity and spin.
Grace had done the math this time. (He’s not lazy.) And he had asked Rocky to double check it. (He’s not stupid.) Everything seemed right. It was going to be fine. Easy! No reason to worry.
Grace plugged in all the commands and carefully wrapped his hand around the joystick. “Gotta match it, to catch it!” he said, and hit ‘commit’ on the controls.
Rocky made another trumpeting raspberry sound.
As the Hail Mary started spinning Grace’s stomach clenched. Was ‘gotta match it, to catch it’ going to be the last words out of his stupid mouth?
Their spin sped up to match Blip-M's and after a few moments of panic Grace’s body adjusted to the force. It was manageable. Nothing like the tailspin that had nearly gotten them killed at Adrian.
“See, not so bad.” Grace said, swiveling back towards Rocky.
“Little bad.”
Grace wasn’t sure if that was a concurrence or a rebuttal.
The Hail Mary was now rotating perfectly parallel to the blown-out mickey-mouse ship. Up close it almost seemed smaller. Was it for teeny-tiny aliens? There was no reason all intelligent life would be roughly human or Eridian sized.
Grace clamored down to the airlock to get a better look. “Do you think we could connect to it?”
“Why, question.”
“You know, science.”
“Not enough xenonite. Need to stop Blip M spin.”
“Hmmmm,” Grace mused, pulling his glasses on from where they dangled around his chin.
Through the port window, he had a good view of the rip in the Blip-M's hull. Some sort of glittering reddish substance, possibly a frozen liquid, coated the entire thing. It was thicker in some places and thinner in others, letting a greyish brown metal peek through. He could see a little of the interior, but it was too dark to make out anything other than a vaguely dendritic/fractal structure inside.
Maybe Rocky was having better luck. Sound wave based “sight” had its advantages over light-based sight, like seeing through walls. And the scanning equipment he had lugged aboard the Hail Mary was crazy-good.
“Well buddy, you getting anything interesting?”
Rocky made a high-pitched trill that Grace had come to learn was basically an Eridian “UHHHHHHHH” equivalent.
“What—” Grace started to turn towards Rocky when something just below the Blip M’s rupture caught his eye. There was writing on the hull. He blinked, and pulled his glasses up from around his chin. He pressed his face against the glass.
Partially buried under the frozen red gunk, but still clearly legible were Latin characters, and Arabic numerals. Earth writing.
The slightly raised black lettering on the ship’s hull read SM-13.
“Grace.” Rocky was waving his display doo-hickey at him, gesturing emphatically towards the ship. “Grace, human shape. Human shape on Blip-M."
“Oh my God.”
Grace’s heart leapt before it instantly crashed again. A Human, another human— a dead human. There’s no way anyone could survive in such a catastrophically depressurized vessel. And looking at it, it didn’t even look like a rocket. Was it a... submarine?
“Grace! Urgent, urgent, urgent. Human shape alive. Human shape has—” Rocky waved three of his arms pointing at Grace’s chest. “Human’s inside liquids moving!”
“What?!”
“Inside liquids moving! Only little moving!”
"Jesus Christ!” Grace scrambled to the EVA suits.
“What Grace doing. Question?”
“I’ve got to get over there! We’ve gotta—”
“Need to stop spin first!”
“Aghhh!”
Grace’s brain was spinning. How the fuck were they going stop the SM-13's spin. They had to figure it out and fast.
“How do we— Could we–” Grace picked up the EVA suit and put it back down “We could — No. We’d have to —” Graced picked up the suit again, pacing.
“Grace not making sense. Statement.”
Grace dropped the EVA suit, finally finishing a thought. “Rocky, could we tie it to the Hail Mary? Attach it to us firmly enough that it would stop spinning when we do?”
“No.” Rocky said almost immediately. “Friction make both ships hit together. Both break. Bad, bad, bad.”
Grace slumped to the floor against the airlock. “What do we do?!”
“Stop Hail Mary spinning. Grace apply xenonite adhesive to outside of Hail Mary. We spin with Blip-M again. Slowly make contact. Ships connected. Maybe stay together.” Rocky paused. “If not stay together, ships break.”
Grace processed that. There was a chance. He might see another human again. An alive human.
“The hull around the cable faring is the thickest,” he said, quickly jumping back to his feet. “If we connect there, there’s a good chance that even if we don’t stay stuck together, we can seal off that part of the ship.”
“And not die. Yes yes yes!”
“Oh my God, okay. Oh God, okay! Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Grace hauled himself back up to the control room as fast as he could. “Rocky, start on that adhesive I’ll stop our spin!”
***
In all, it took them 40 minutes to stop the Hail Mary’s spin, make a xenonite adhesive plus an applicator, and get Grace into the EVA suit. (Getting Grace into the suit was 15 of those minutes. He hadn’t done it in a while and there were a lot of moving pieces, okay!) It took Grace another 30 to space walk to the cable faring, apply the adhesive, and get back inside.
Grace cycled through the airlock and wriggled out of the suit as fast as he could. They had 20 minutes before the xenonite adhesive froze and became a useless artistic statement on the port side of the Hail Mary.
“Grace go faster. Statement."
“I’m trying!”
During his spacewalk, Grace had gotten a slightly better look at the inside of the SM-13. He hadn’t had much time for ogling, but he had been able to make out a human shape huddled inside the dendritic branch structures he had seen earlier.
Still hauling himself up the ladder Grace called out. “Mary, re-run the spin sequence from two hours ago!”
The ship beeped in response, and he heard various clicks and switches repeat the sequence he had programmed earlier. He pulled himself into the pilot seat and double checked that everything looked correct. (He didn’t want to accidently kill them all, that would be embarrassing.)
“Okay, Rocky—”
“Holding on."
Grace turned around and snorted. Rocky couldn’t hold on to anything in his bubble, but he had wedged himself into a corner. He looked like a perturbed pebble stuck in someone’s shoe.
"Here we go!”
The Hail Mary started spinning and slowly matched the SM-13. Grace could feel his breath catching in his throat and his heart hammering in his chest. There was a chance. There was one chance, and he couldn’t blow it. He just needed to make contact with the SM-13 and stick it to the adhesive he had applied to the hull.
“Like a fly in honey.” Grace whispered to himself. He swiveled around taking in all of the directional information the screens were giving him. “You’re not gonna like this, Mary.”
Grace eased pressure on to the joystick and the Hail Mary careened towards the SM-13 with violent speed.
“AH!!!”
“Bad bad bad!!”
Proximity warning port side. 150 meters
“SLOW SLOW SLOW!”
“I KNOW!”
Proximity warning port side. 75 meters
“Mary! Mute proximity warning!”
Grace quickly corrected their trajectory and swallowed the taumoeba breakfast that had decided to make a return trip up his esophagus.
They eased closer and Grace shoved his glasses up over his eyes. He swiveled back to check the blip on the screen. They were practically on top of it, and he could see through the viewer that they were lined up to have the rupture in SM-13’s hull right above the airlock for easy retrieval.
“Rocky, can you see if their heart is still— If the human’s inside-liquids are still moving?”
Rocky shifted in his bubble to retrieve his device. “Yes. Alive.”
Grace fixed his eyes back on the screens. Scared to even blink during this last step. “We’re coming for you,” he murmured. “We’ve got you.” he pulled back on the joystick slowing the Hail Mary’s approach to barely a crawl. This needed to be as gentle as possible.
Grace was sweating like crazy. He would wipe his hands on his pants, but he didn’t want to let go of the controls for even a second.
The two ships made contact with a dull thunk and Grace held his breath. For five agonizing seconds neither he nor Rocky moved. Listening for the metallic screech or groan that would herald their demise.
“Not dead. Statement.”
“Not dead.” Grace agreed. “Mary, start modified spin down sequence one.”
The ship chirped acknowledgement and the Hail Mary started to pull out of its spin. Grace’s hand was still locked on the joystick but there was next-to-nothing he could do if something went wrong.
Slowly, the Hail Mary settled. A few stray Skittles floated up around the cockpit.
Grace craned his neck up to the displays. The SM-13 was still attached, and aside from a few stray ice shards sloughing off the outer hull, it was still in one piece. He peeled his hand off the joystick and let go of the breath he had been holding.
He was afraid to ask. Afraid that after all that...
“Rocky—”
“Human same. Inside liquid still moving.” Rocky had rolled himself halfway out of the control room, his body angled down the ship towards the cable faring. Now that the two ships were touching, he could probably “see” it through the vibrations.
Grace let himself feel relieved for just a moment. “Okay, time for spacewalk number two.”