Chapter Text
Even with the evidence of his own eyes and most of the instruments on board, he still can’t quite believe it when it happens.
“Can you see it?” asks Rocky, with the same hushed tone of reverence Grace himself feels.
“Yes,” he says, and swallows thickly. “Erid. It’s right there, bud. We made it.”
Erid’s surface is blue-grey, entirely covered with a layer of swirling clouds. And it has rings, like Saturn does, and it’s so darn beautiful Grace can barely see it through the tears in his eyes.
“Your face is leaking again,” Rocky remarks drily.
“I’m just—” Grace pauses. “Actually, I don’t know what I’m feeling. It’s just—a lot of it.”
“Yes yes,” Rocky says. “Many feelings. Always many. What do we do now?”
“Huh?”
“We should contact Erid. Send a message.”
Probably a good idea. Their approach couldn’t have gone unnoticed, but through a petrovascope a decelerating Mary wouldn’t seem different than Blip-A. He imagines this was initially a cause of celebration on the surface, but they are so close now, Eridians probably noticed it’s a different, alien space craft. They must be freaking out.
At least they don’t have orbital cannons. He thinks they don’t have orbital cannons. Oh, God. What if they have cannons?
Rocky rolls his ball gently into Grace’s legs to get him to move. And move he does. He fiddles with the radio detectors, scrolling through different frequencies, but Rocky can’t hear anything resembling an Eridian communications channel. He transmits a few crude, simplified signals – probably the local equivalent of a Morse code – but doesn’t get a response.
“We may be too far,” Grace says.
Or maybe there is no one left to respond. Maybe they are all gone.
He shudders at the thoughts but doesn’t give them voice. Even so, he can tell Rocky is having similar doubts, with how unnaturally still he is-- listening to something that just isn’t there.
Grace lowers his hand and taps it briefly against the xenonite. It’s not the same as touching someone’s shoulder, but hey, this is as close as they can get with someone getting horrifically injured.
“Let’s find the space station,” Grace says, in an attempt at reassurance. Because really, how hard can it be?
He adjusts the trajectory until they are orbiting the planet’s equator. Erid revolves slowly underneath them; Earth has all sorts of junk drifting in space at various altitudes, from ISS and all the way to the GPS satellites on the geostationary orbit, but in theory all he should see now is—
“Oh. Oh, damn.”
“What?” Rocky chirps. “Need word.”
“Wha—wait, really? I never said that before?”
“No.”
“It’s, umm—never mind that now. We found the elevator.”
To his tiny human brain, “space elevator” is still mostly an abstract concept. Insanely cool, yes. Possible, no; at least, not with any currently available materials on Earth. And yet there it is – the tether, a complicated structure of interwoven xenonite fibres, raises from the sea of clouds and climbs steadily towards the stars.
It doesn’t look real. Even with everything else that’s happened within the past few years, Grace still has trouble believing that it’s real. The upper station itself is absurdly massive; orders of magnitude larger than Mary herself, larger than ISS, heck, even Blip-A would look puny in comparison. Even a space-faring civilization has no business building anything at this scale. It has to be a natural satellite with some xenonite stuck on top.
“Took decades to build,” Rocky says. “Many modifications along the way. I used to work there.”
“Oh!” Grace says. It makes sense in retrospect, given Rocky’s area of expertise. “It’s magnificent,” he says. “But, uh—they don’t have weapons on board, do they?”
“Weapons? Why would they have weapons?” Rocky says. “It’s for science! Research! Astronomy! No sense in adding weapons!”
“Oh thank God,” Grace says, slumping down in the pilot chair.
Rocky is silent for a moment, and then says, “Although there is {~~~~}. For shooting down oncoming meteorites and other debris.”
Grace sits up ramrod straight.
“What?”
“Meteorites. Could damage structure—“
“What???”
“{~~~~}? Oh, it’s like—“ Rocky proceeds to describe an array of devices designed to launch high-velocity projectiles using an explosive propellant with maximum possible accuracy.
“That’s a weapon!” Grace shrieks.
“For defence! You said ‘weapon’ is ‘a tool for killing people’!”
“Oh, God,” Grace mumbles, flipping every switch he can find and opening all available transmission channels. “Call them now.”
Rocky grumbles softly while Grace sits there, hyperventilating. Eventually he taps the xenonite when they reach the correct frequency. “That. We transmit now?”
“Yes,” Grace says. “Go on.”
After another short pause, Rocky says, “This is Mechanic Rocky, last survivor of the Tau Ceti mission. We found a way to kill Astrophage. Approaching the station now.”
“Hold fire,” Grace adds hopefully.
“They won’t understand you,” Rocky points out while they wait for a response. “I don’t understand you. What does that mean?”
“It means ‘don’t shoot’. Or ‘stop shooting’.”
“Why would they shoot us?” Rocky asks. “We bring solution to the Astrophage problem!”
“On an alien spaceship!”
“Still not a reason to shoot at us!” Rocky says. Then some horrible realization dawns on him. “Why? Earth would—“
Thankfully, musical notes cut through the radio static - a voice, an actual, Eridian speech pattern, saving Grace from a potentially unpleasant conversation. He can’t make out individual words though - he thinks he recognizes Rocky’s name, but that’s about it.
Rocky is stunned for a moment, completely motionless—and then he jumps, as if the weight of all those decades of stress and grief and solitude left him all at once, and does a little dance, vibrating at glass-shattering frequencies, making all sorts of disjointed noises that do not resemble his usual speech patterns in the slightest.
“You okay there, buddy?” Grace asks, laughing along with him.
“Yes! More than okay! Happy happy happy!” But then he sags down and says, an octave lower, “Wish the rest of my crew could still be here.”
Grace swallows, throat painfully tight. “Yeah. Me too.”
Rocky speaks with the other Eridians for a while longer, negotiating their approach. The manoeuvre is simple in theory: bring Mary close to the station’s hangar bay, match its velocity, and wait for them to build a tunnel to their airlock. Except Grace has no idea how to find the hangar bay, and Eridians don’t know how to find their airlock. And Grace’s pilot skills are questionable at best.
“They are sending coordinates,” Rocky says.
“Great. Fantastic. What do they mean? How do your people navigate in space?”
“I don’t know! Wasn’t part of my training!” Rocky listens to the transmission for a while. “They are asking why we transmit from a single point in space.”
“Because Mary has only one transmitter!”
“Ah.” More urgent speak-singing from the other end of the radio. “Now they say go {~~~~}. Up front left—no, uh, not that way… four hundred sixty five meters… no, {~~~~}, I heard what you said, but Grace needs different units… what? No, Grace is a person—yes yes I explain later…”
“No! Don’t tell them about me! What if they—”
“Oh, shut up. No, {~~~~}, apologies, I didn't mean…”
Great. Great. Now they have to nail a delicate docking manoeuvre without sparking an interstellar war…
“Yes, there is an alien on board,” Rocky says. “What?! Yes, very intelligent! Very friendly!” He pauses, listening. “No, I did not lose my mind!”
Mary lurches forward; Grace narrowly avoids breaking his nose, and Rocky cowers in the corner, trying to shield himself from the horrible screeching noise. Then the alarm begins wailing.
“We hit something? We hit something!”
“{~~~~}!!!!”
“What happened? What happened?”
Okay. Okay. Deep breaths Dr Grace, deep breaths. Look at the screens. All the flashing warnings… he dismisses them one by one, not really taking anything in. He calls back the external cameras: they are still going too fast, and the impact has them spinning uncontrollably.
“Rocky? Is the hull damaged?” Grace asks.
The alarm stunned him momentarily, but Rocky manages to get a hold on himself.
“No. Can’t hear breach. Just a scratch in the outermost layer.”
“Good,” Grace says, breathing out through his nose. “That’s good. Did we damage the station?”
“Definitely not,” Rocky says, but he opens the radio again to check. “They say we hit one of the antennas. Not a problem.”
Ah. Of course. An antenna. A very long, very narrow spike pointed directly towards them, dark against the pitch-black sky. Of course. They’re lucky it hasn’t skewered them like the world’s first interplanetary kebab.
“Okay,” Grace says. “We will try that again, slower this time.”
“Slower,” Rocky agrees. “Try not to crash?”
“Will do, buddy. Will do.”
He’s trying really, really hard not to make a fool of himself in front of an entire alien civilization. Really. So he approaches at a snail’s pace, and tries not to panic when Mary fully enters its shadow.
“They are asking why we slowed down,” Rocky says.
“Because I can’t see!”
“Ah.” Rocky appears to consider this for a moment before responding over the comms. “Sensor malfunction.”
“My sens—eyes are fine! The station is blocking sunlight!”
“And I explain to them how?” Rocky asks.
Fair enough, Grace thinks.
The last few minutes are agonisingly slow, but he’s not taking any chances. There’s too much at stake.
“Okay. Enough,” Rocky says. “We wait now.”
Grace still can’t really see what’s happening, so he watches the radar - what he assumes is xenonite scaffolding, reaching out to anchor Mary. Meanwhile, Rocky is fuming in the corner.
“Can you believe {~~~~} said I’ve gone mad and imagined you?” he asks.
“I mean, yeah? It’s probably easier to believe than the existence of aliens.”
“But that’s {~~~~} stupid! If I made an alien, he wouldn’t be that wet!”
“…thanks.”
“Look at you! You’re leaking all over!”
It takes him a moment to understand Rocky’s meaning, and then it dawns on him: he is, in fact, drenched with sweat. His shirt and hair are plastered to his skin, and now that he’s calmed down, he’s getting cold alarmingly quickly.
“You—it’s a temperature regulation thing! And a reaction to stress! I can’t help it!” Grace says. “Listen to me, mister, next time we’re flying somewhere, how about we put you in the pilot seat! See how you like it!”
He slumps backwards and wipes the sweat from his brow. It’s getting into his eyes now, which is, admittedly, a bit disgusting. And now he notices that his hands are shaking quite badly.
“You’re vibrating,” Rocky remarks.
Grace grimaces. “That’s not the word I would use.”
“See?” Rocky says. “Your body made sweat to cool down and now vibrates to warm up. Inefficient! Wasting energy!”
“It’s the—the stress! I think! Why are we yelling?”
“Don’t know!”
“Me neither!”
The radio comes back, thankfully. Rocky says, “Yes, the airlock. We open now, show you where it is.” He gestures at Grace, ever bossy, and Grace follows his instructions with only minimal complaining.
It takes him a couple of tries to lever himself out of the pilot chair, though. The past few months, well—they haven’t been pleasant. He has lost weight, and it’s getting increasingly difficult to move. Even now, it feels like he’s wading through deep water, and he needs both hands to push himself upwards.
By the time he reaches the airlock control panel he is out of breath and sweating, and his legs hurt like he has just ran a marathon instead of crossing a few feet of distance.
“Grace?” Rocky asks in worried tones, tapping the xenonite twice. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I think,” Grace says. “It’s, uh—the gravity isn’t agreeing with me.”
“Is not gravity—”
“Yes, yes, I know.” Grace waves him off. “Still. How do you feel?”
Rocky considers this for a moment. “Strange. Been a long time.”
“Hey, you have the rest of your life to get used to it,” Grace says cheerfully.
“Grace—”
But Grace is already stepping into his EVA suit. Rocky grumbles but rolls his xenonite ball into the airlock.
“Ready?” Grace asks.
“Yes. You?”
“Yep,” Grace says. “Here it goes.”
He attaches a tether to his suit and Rocky’s ball before depressurizing the airlock, and then opens the other door. They are in the vacuum now; Rocky rolls around anxiously, before pressing himself to the end of the corridor.
“I hate this,” he says; his voice sounds strange coming over the radio. “Hate hate hate. Can’t hear properly. Nothing outside the ball. Grace? Where are you? Grace!”
“I’m here,” Grace says. “It’s okay.”
The ball design is convenient in many ways, but it means very few xenonite panels are in direct contact with the floor. In a vacuum, that would be Rocky’s single point of reference to his surroundings. No wonder he’s freaking out; as soon as he shifts his weight and the ball moves, he loses even that.
Grace crawls along the wall at an agonizing pace; the EVA suit wasn’t really designed to facilitate movement in higher gravity, with all its extra weight and stiffened joints. But he somehow makes it to the other side of the airlock.
“Oh—oh wow.”
The main bulk of the station is hidden in shadows. Pieces of xenonite scaffolding extend towards Mary’s hull, creating something between a cradle and a cage. He should perhaps be freaking out about this, but they have been so careful, he barely felt it when the clamps secured them in place. They can’t risk damaging Mary while she still holds their only hope of salvation. And there, high above them, is Erid: a sea of swirling clouds and gasses, with the long, arching shadows of the planetary rings and the elevator cable.
“Grace!”
“Still here, Rocky.”
It’s so beautiful; he desperately wishes Rocky could see it, or that he had the words to describe it…
“Too far, too far… can’t hear…”
Yeah, vacuum of space certainly isn’t good for an Eridian. Grace drags himself backwards using the tether, and tries to convince his failing body into keeping it together a little while longer.
“I’m here,” he says, sinking to the ground and draping himself over the xenonite. “See? This is me, hugging you. You hate that, right?”
“Don’t hate,” Rocky says. “Don’t hate. Stay.”
“Sure.” Honestly, he isn’t sure he’ll be able to get back up. Ah well. “How are they doing, do you think?”
Apparently it takes them no time at all. The tunnel is not unlike the one Rocky built between Blip-A and Mary, just larger and fully reinforced. Rocky stands up straighter, tapping all five of his hands on the ground.
“I hear them now! We can go!”
“Uh, maybe I should hang back,” Grace says. “And you could, you know. Ease them into this whole situation. Make sure they won’t panic and start shooting when they see me…”
“Grace,” Rocky says. “If I can hear them, they can hear you. They already know you’re here.”
“Ah. Fair point.”
Slowly and painfully, clinging onto the wall for support, Grace pulls himself upwards.
“You sure it’s safe?”
“Yes! Very sure!” Rocky pauses. “Is Earth not safe?”
“Erm. Well—it depends.”
“On what?”
“Oh, um… The circumstances, I guess.”
“That answer isn’t helpful.”
“I know it isn’t,” Grace sighs. “Let’s not worry about that, shall we?”
They are a long way from Earth, after all.