Chapter Text
BLIP-D DETECTED…
BLIP-D DETECTED...
BLIP-D DETEC—
Grace gasped awake. Red flashed in his eyes. He was back on AT-5. The Blood Moon. Simon. The Black Box. A thousand thoughts ran through his mind, thinking on none of them for more than a second before moving to the next.
A discordant series of noises wailed all around him, and Grace tried to move his body but couldn’t. He was strapped down, trapped. He felt his right arm suspended high above his head, unnaturally.
Focus, Ryland. He shut his eyes, doing his best to ignore the pure chaos around him.
Over the sound of an alarm—Mary’s alarm—he realized, Grace could make out words in the noise.
Rocky. He was saying something, calling his name maybe, or Adrian’s, or—
Simon.
“Simon!” He shouted, putting two fingers to the communication device snuggled in his ear.
Nothing but the wail of the alarm and the shuddering force outside the Hail Mary answered him.
“Simon! Rocky! Adrian! What’s—!”
BLIP-D DETECTED!
He shouted in frustration, finally able to take in what was going on around him. He wasn’t on AT-5, just the flashing red of the alarm system making it seem so to his disoriented brain. What had happened to him?
BLIP-D DETECTED!
Finally, it registered to him that maybe all this chaos was happening because they were headed straight for something. Maybe they’d hit something? Maybe Grace had hit his head, and that was where the confusion stemmed from?
BLIP-D DETECTE—
He put his hypothesizing down and slammed the ‘mute’ button on the controls in front of him, silencing that noise, at least. The alarms still blared, though, annoyingly. He tried to reach for the joystick, get them steady again, but his arm didn’t move. “Gosh dang it,” he cursed, reaching with his free arm to untangle it from his seatbelt that had wrapped itself around his right one. Or, more likely, he had wrapped around it. Grace couldn’t remember in the moment.
Struggling, he managed to wriggle free, calling out for anybody to respond to him, but all he could hear was Rocky’s distant, static-garbled cries. He’d handle that after he figured out what the heck was going on.
Reaching for the controls, Grace still felt that pull on his body, making him strain forward. If it wasn’t the harness impairing his movement, then what…
Oh, fudge.
Blip-D, the alarms, a new, incredible gravitational force pulling on him…?
They were in orbit, weren’t they?
“Shoot, shoot, shoot,” Grace chanted, a full-on panic washing over him now. “Mary! Coordinates! Where the heck are we?!?”
“Coordinates unknown. Rapidly approaching the atmosphere of an unidentified moon. I highly recommend that you abort mission and do not land.”
No crap, he thought, but had no idea what ‘mission’ she was talking about. He struggled forward, but was finally able to get a hold of the controls with great effort. Gritting his teeth, Grace angled the ship to the side, aiming to counteract the force of gravity and propel them diagonally, avoiding the most structural damage. It was actually working! Whatever was happening, Grace was preventing it. He just hoped that was a good thing.
“...lan…ry…an…d!”
A low, panicked voice cut through his comms, shouting something he couldn’t make out. He wanted to look around, see who was calling his name, but realized it was Simon when his brain registered English.
WARNING! Entering moon’s atmosphere!
“Simon!” He cried in relief that the man was awake and okay. Well, as okay as he sounded. Grace needed to devote all his focus to getting them the heck out of this situation, and looking around for Simon wouldn’t help in the moment. “What’s going on?! Where are we?! Are Rocky and Adrian okay–??”
Before he could finish blurting out questions, a big, muscular arm came on top of his and yanked down on the controls, sending the Hail Mary plummeting down again. Grace slammed back into his seat with a shout, the wind knocked out of him, and his glasses skewed to the side of his face. “Simon! What are you doing!?”
The massive man clinging with all his strength to the pilot’s seat glared down at him, and Grace saw something truly alien in his eyes and flinched. “We need to go down there, Ry! There’s somebody who needs help! And you’re gonna send us right back into the meteor storm!”
Memories came back to him like a slap in the face. The distress signal, of course. He was the one who had insisted on going to check it out! Oh, Simon must be so peeved at him.
“Shoot, shoot,” he repeated, trying to regain command of the ship that was currently spinning out of control. “I’m sorry, I must have hit my head or something! Where’s Rocky and Adrian? I need to stop the rotating before—before—” he took a deep breath and convulsed like he was about to puke, but Simon slapped him not so gently across the face, snapping him back into it.
“Don’t pussy out now, Ryland! Get a hold of yourself for Chrissake or we’re all going to die! Adrian and Rocky are trying to fix the radio, the one that you broke!”
Grace didn’t really remember that part, but took Simon’s word for it. It was something he’d do, after all.
Something in Simon’s voice gave Grace a boost of courage, and he gripped the controls like a lifeline, using all his strength to steady them and the astrophage stored in the Eridian-built stabilizers on the sides of the ship to even out their trajectory.
“Simon, where is the distress call coming from?” Grace shouted over his shoulder to where Simon was still clung to the back of his chair, nails close to ripping the material. He could just see the glint of his protruding teeth peek out from the side of his face, washed in red. He was glaring at the monitors, looking for something, completely focused. But Grace needed him to answer.
“Simon!”
Simon’s head snapped to face him. “There. Right there,” he let go of the chair for half a second and jabbed a finger at one of the screens showing just how close they were to entering the moon’s upper atmosphere. Sure enough, right where his finger was, a bright red dot pulsed. It was coming from an area southwest of them. Too far for them to make it from where they currently were. On another screen in his peripheral vision Grace saw what looked like audio logs or—well—a distress call.
“I can get us close, but Mary's sensors must be broken or something 'cause I can't detect any ground! Simon, where are we?”
The alarms kept blaring, his ears kept ringing, and Simon just kept staring.
They weren’t making great progress, but the ship was starting to even out, the tail was easing back up and Grace felt the force keeping him pinned to the chair lighten. Simon loosened his grip, but only slightly.
WARNING: Entering thermosphere, hull damage imminent at current velocity. High-power jet streams detected below. Gain altitude or brace for turbulence.
Mary’s voice was a humming in his head, absently registered among the chaos and calamity happening all around him. He still didn’t know where Rocky and Adiran were, but Simon made it seem like they were okay. Grace just hoped he wasn’t knocking them around with all the shuddering and sporadic movements he was trying his best to prevent.
“That’s it, you’re doing it, Ry,” Simon said above him, eyes still fixed on the screen. “Easy does it. We’re almost there.”
There was something in his voice that felt trance-like, but Grace chalked it up to the stress of the situation. He hated that Simon was in a position like this again, but he seemed to be taking it well enough.
“Right, yeah, this isn’t too bad. I’m trying to slow our velocity but the gravity is too strong to do much. The only thing I can really do is angle us in a way that counteracts our current trajectory, but even then, we’re gonna take some serious G.”
Simon looked at him funny, but returned his focus to the monitors. Grace realized he was actually charting something he couldn’t make out fully, but it looked like a map of some kind.
WARNING! WARNING! Entering mesosphere, ship temperature increasing significantly.
It was just like when he and Rocky went fishing. He could do this. If anything, the stakes were much lower this time around. The astrophage would catch fire, he knew that, but he only needed a few more minutes to get their angle right. If he could do that before they entered this thing’s stratosphere, they’d be alright.
Grace didn’t want to think about the alternative outcome.
Cranking the thrusters, Grace made his decision. As soon as they made it into the stratosphere, he’d turn the Hail Mary around and use a crap ton of fuel to propel them backwards, effectively nulling their velocity as much as he could. He’d done it before. He could do it again.
“You better hold on to something that isn’t me, Si,” Grace shouted over the sound of the roaring turbulence in his ears. Simon looked to him, then back to the screens, then back to him again, and gave Grace a curt nod.
“Just don’t get us fucking killed, okay!”
Grace rolled his eyes, smiling in spite of the situation.
“You’re sure Rocky and Adrian are okay?”
“Yes I’m fucking sure! They’re with Armando, probably the safest place they can be!” Simon shot back, and as Grace risked a glance over he could now fully see the red light gleaming on the exposed teeth protruding from his left cheek as the man strapped himself into the makeshift co-pilot’s seat. Grace never told Simon, but he thought the teeth were kind of endearing, in a way. But maybe now wasn’t the best time to mention it.
“Good! Okay! Here we go!”
Doing some lightning quick mental math, he was able to guesstimate how long it would take them to fall through the stratosphere and finally onto some land. There was little to no visibility where they were now due to dense clouds and what seemed like hail pelting the Hail Mary, so Grace just hoped that whatever Simon was doing with the maps Mary had been able to generate would come in handy.
If he was correct, they would have about four minutes–give or take–until they hit the moon’s surface. That was enough time to get them set in place and turned around, but it would be a close call getting to the exact velocity needed to counteract their current speed and direction.
WARNING: Cabin pressure increasing. Oxygen levels dropping.
Shoot. That wasn’t great. He mentally kicked himself; of course the pressure would be different here than on Earth or Erid! Grace guessed that even after all his time on Erid, he still couldn’t shake defaulting to Earth measurements.
“Mary! What’s the pressure outside!”
External atmospheric pressure is 60 atmospheres of Earth. It is composed almost entirely of xenon. Are you sure whatever you’re here for is worth it?
60 atmospheres, jeez. But he could work with that. It was only roughly twice that of Erid, and with a planet this size it made sense.
“I sure hope so,” he replied distractedly.
Now with his new calculations, Grace felt his shaky confidence give over to strict determination.
He tried one more time to contact Rocky and Adrian, but the radio was still flooded with static, and he could only barely hear Rocky’s voice over the commotion going on all around them. But if they were with Armando, that meant they were safe in their tunnels. Simon was right: they were in the safest place they could be.
“Ready to punch it, Si?”
Grace heard him grunt something sarcastic, so he took that as a yes.
As soon as they entered the moon’s troposphere–-the lowest point they’d get still staying in the air–-Grace began his mental timer and started to gently rotate the control stick to the right. He shut off the fuel, letting their acceleration do the most of the moving for him. Every ten seconds or so Grace would manually pilot the ship, giving it a sort of boost.
Halfway into their descent they were already almost to where he needed them, but all of a sudden a great wailing sound pierced through the noise. Grace immediately knew it as Adrian’s deep baritone.
They were below the airlock, but Grace heard them loud and clear.
“Simon! Grace! Cannot land! Planet has no land, statement! No land!”
"Adrian?!? What are you doing out of the dorms? Wh--Nevermind, Mary can't detect anywhere to land! Where the heck are we??"
“It is ocean planet! Ship not built for water!”
“What the hell are they saying, Ryland?” Simon called.
“There’s nowhere to land??” He said this to both Simon and Adrian, not really sure who he was addressing.
“What?!”
“No!”
There was no time to adjust their trajectory; anything he could do would rip apart the ship at this speed and pressure, let alone send them crashing into whatever ocean was waiting below them. He needed to crank the thrusters now or they’d all be dead in seconds.
“Adrian! Get back to Rocky and hold on to something tight! Let’s hope you guys installed some floaties on this thing.”
Adrian trilled nervously. “Adrian and Rocky detect shallow biome 141.94 Earth kilometers west! Grace can land there, question? Have time, question??”
He looked outside at the clouds rushing past, then to all the sensors and screens and buttons. He had time. He could make it.
“I got it, Adrian! Thank you! Now get back to Rocky and hold on!”
He heard them agree, then Grace shouted over to Simon. “Adiran says it’s some kind of ocean planet! Right now there’s nowhere to land, but they think there’s a shallow area that Mary can withstand! Are you sure that the distress call is coming from here??”
Simon’s brow furrowed, that look coming on his face again. He was questioning things, which in this case wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but Grace still hated to see him doubt his abilities. Simon surprised him, though.
“Yes, I’m sure. As long as your ship isn’t bugging out or anything, those should be the exact coordinates.” He nodded to one of the screens above Grace’s head.
Yeah, Grace thought to himself. As long as Mary isn’t 'bugging out.'
“Alright then! Hold on tight!” He didn’t need to look over to see that Simon obeyed. He could practically feel him grinding his teeth. But as long as his math was correct—which he was about 97% sure it was—Grace would have them landed safely in no time.
The noise from the turbulence had given way to a howling sort of noise and the hail had let up significantly. Hopefully that meant they were somewhat in the clear.
Grace cranked the engines to full blast, sending them out of their seats slightly and then right back down. He felt his stomach rise into his throat like it did on rollercoasters, just this time he was inside a spaceship heading directly into the ocean. Simon let out an ill-sounding hurk!
But there were no alarms or warnings, no Blip-Whatever detected, no external damage bad enough to kill them all. He had done it.
Sure, the ship still rattled and the wind didn’t let up at all, but they were on course to wherever Adrian said they should go, and would be arriving any minute now, given their speed—which reminded him to shut off the engines now as to not put them any farther off course than they already were.
Grace let out a relieved, heavy sigh and let his face drop. He hadn’t realized it was scrunched and squinted up so tight until he finally felt comfortable enough to take a proper breath.
“Is it…are we good? Everything’s okay?”
He swallowed. “Y-yep, yeah, I think so. Are you breathing okay? How’s your heartbeat?”
Simon just nodded and turned his shaken face back to the screens. “M’okay. Breathing fine, feeling like shit, but that’s no anomaly.”
Grace didn’t have it in him to laugh at Simon’s attempt at a joke.
“Good, that’s good.”
“Looks like we’re coming up on the spot, Ry,” he observed, struggling to point to where a new light-blue dot pulsed above Grace’s head.
“I see it. Should be able to just—”
Something loud struck the back of the ship, and hard. Grace shouted as he was jerked back into his seat, knocking his skull on the headrest again. Simon made a similar noise. He could faintly hear the Eridians panicking, too.
“What the–!”
They were struck again, significantly harder than the first time, and before Grace could get ahold of the controls, the Hail Mary began to spin.