Chapter Text
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute had undergone something of a renaissance in the decade since the return of the Hail Mary Beetles. It turned out that confirmation of actual, real-world intelligent life created a funding boom for organizations dedicated to finding it.
The Allen Telescope Array, or ATA for short, had finally reached its goal of 350 instruments in 2060, almost a century after its initial conception. After a long lapse in coverage during the 21st century ice age, suddenly every radio telescope on Earth pointed at 40 Eridani, waiting to hear from their neighbors.
As the years passed with no signal, most telescopes turned toward other targets (a not insignificant number of them toward Sigma Draconis, a star whose luminosity had been increasing for the last eight years, prompting speculation about another intelligent neighbor).
Not SETI, though. As long as the Earth’s rotation pointed them in the right direction, the ATA was listening. For three hours every night, they listened to nothing else, waiting for their only confirmed neighbors to contact them.
It had been something of a depressing decade for Elias Thorne, as the silence stretched on. He’d waited years for their neighbors to just talk to them, and yet, nothing.
May 14th, 2064, was just another late night away from his wife for Elias. There was no reason to think anything special would happen — it had been radio silence since the first telescope had turned on nearly a century ago, after all.
That’s why he was utterly unprepared when the alert for a signal from the direction of Eridani went off behind him, making him jump and splash lukewarm coffee all over his lap.
He cursed, grabbing the carefully folded napkin his wife had sent with his packed dinner to mop up the mess as the alarm continued pinging in the background.
It was a very special alarm. That alarm only went off when a signal was strong, suggesting either a direct message or a glitchy microwave in a nearby house.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, moving to shut off the insistent pinging. “I hear you.”
Pulling up the notification on his screen, the pop-up “High-Confidence Non-Random Signal” made a shiver run down his spine. It was what everyone working in the office dreamed of seeing.
He couldn’t jump the gun, though. Being the guy who cried ‘alien’ only to be wrong would be grounds for professional ribbing until the end of time.
Slicking through a series of LabVIEW panels, Elias saw that the incoming frequency was drifting higher — a blue-shift, consistent with a signal coming from an object moving toward Earth.
Provocative.
Tuning in to the strongest signal frequency, Elias turned up the sound, hoping to hear some kind of rhythmic, non-static noise indicative of a purposeful signal.
What he got instead nearly knocked his socks off.
“... -lling all Earth frequencies. Repeat, this is Dr. Captain Ryland Grace of the Hail Mary… -turning to Earth with a contingent of intelligent life forms from the 40 Eridani system. I will arrive ahead of them in the Mary in approximately three weeks. Please respond…”
What.
If this turned out to be a prank, he was killing someone. He didn’t know who, but he would figure it out.
If it wasn’t a prank…
Ryland Grace was a legend. The man who saved the sun, then went on an interstellar road trip to save his alien friend and his star.
Common consensus was that he’d succeeded (obviously, since 40 Eridani’s luminosity had been increasing for years), but that he’d likely died in the attempt. There just hadn’t been enough resources on the Hail Mary to support a journey of that magnitude.
Hearing his voice on the radio was like hearing from a ghost.
Elias would need to confirm this with somebody before broadcasting anything, either notifying the world or replying to the Dr. Captain Ryland Grace, holy shit.
He’d start small. First, he’d call the other members of his team to confirm he wasn’t hallucinating. Then he’d call the director, and if the message was confirmed…
There was a number tacked to an absolutely ancient red phone that they’d never dialed, not once in the history of the project.
Elias felt faint at the idea that he might be the first to use that phone, to call that number…
He was getting ahead of himself. The first step was to verify. Then verify again, then send the signal out to other institutions to double, triple, quadruple check.
He had calls to make.
Go time.
~*~
With the number of connections, contacts, and outright spies she maintained throughout the various governments of the world, it was no surprise that Eva Stratt learned of the message from Neptune well before it was even brought before the United Nations.
No, what was surprising was that it was almost a week between Elias Thorne intercepting the message and the transcript landing on her desk.
She was slipping in her old age, it seemed.
So, Ryland Grace was returning to Earth.
Stratt couldn’t say she’d expected this outcome, but she’d prepared for it nonetheless.
Or, at least as well as one could prepare for the colleague they’d murdered to return from the dead.
She’d known his return was possible as soon as she’d gotten his message telling her he was going to save his alien friend, Rocky. If he’d survived long enough to do that, which all evidence pointed to, he was persistent enough to haunt her in person.
She’d told him he’d be remembered as a hero, and she’d made good on that promise. Almost as soon as the Hail Mary launched, the statues, memorials, and tributes began.
She’d made sure Grace was as well remembered as the rest of his crew, even if he hadn’t been their original choice. If anything, the heroic story they’d woven about him volunteering at the last minute made him the most beloved of the three souls she’d sent to die in space.
It was a lie, but it was hardly the only one she’d ever had to sell.
When the Beetles had finally returned 26 years after they’d left with the Mary, Stratt had been as surprised as anyone else that Grace was the only one who’d survived the journey.
She’d privately thanked god it had been him to survive — if any one member of the crew was vital to the mission, it was him.
There had, predictably, been an explosion of new memorials and celebrations — not only had the solution to the astrophage crisis been found, but it had been found by a charismatic, self-deprecating, vlog-recording school teacher with a wacky alien sidekick.
She’d made damned sure that Grace was honored for his bravery and sacrifice.
His actions at Tau Ceti even meant she was telling the truth this time.
Dealing with the increased scrutiny of everything related to Dr. Ryland Grace, Stratt set out to ensure that her account of his departure was the only one ever told.
He’d already been a hero — so she made him a legend.
A beloved school teacher, leaving his calling to find and stop the menace threatening his students' futures. A passionate and brilliant scientist, discovering the secrets of astrophage and teaching the world’s leading experts how to use it. A brave volunteer, stepping up at the eleventh hour to replace his colleague on a mission he’d never imagined himself undertaking.
And, above all, a volunteer.
Nobody who knew otherwise had dared to contradict her narrative. Being the person to cast doubt on the bravery of Earth’s legendary hero would have made them immediate pariahs, and nobody was willing to risk that.
She held no illusions that her word would hold against Grace’s if he decided to tell his side of the story, but she’d made sure it would be difficult for him to do so.
She didn’t think he’d be able to look at generations of young scientists inspired by his ‘bravery’ and be willing to break their hearts.
At the end of the day, all she could do was hope that would be enough.
~*~
Grace had been a nerd his entire life.
Well. At least the entirety of what he could remember, which was unfortunately not a lot.
He did remember reading the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) rules for replying to contact from extraterrestrial life, though. He remembered being a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) nerd. He’d run SETI@home in the background on his clunky laptop as often as he could.
The point was that he knew there were many committees necessary to respond to contact from an alien intelligence. He’d hoped the message coming from him would bypass most of that, but he understood that it would take time for them to verify the message was real and decide what to do about it.
He hadn’t expected it to take this long, though.
It had been almost a week since he’d set his message to broadcast continually. They’d settled into orbit around Neptune to wait for a reply, but there was still nothing.
They were all getting a little impatient.
“Rocky tired of wait for stupid Earth respond,” Rocky complained. Now that they were sitting in orbit, the only gravity came from the ship’s rotation. For the first time since they’d left Erid, the entire ship was open to Grace.
They were all gathered in Rocky’s workshop, watching him putter around listlessly. Grace was in his EVA suit, with a thinner, much more flexible xenonite suit around it, allowing him to explore without getting crushed or boiled. It was a huge improvement over the suit Rocky had made him for the Blip-A, and he intended to take advantage of it as often as he could while it was still relevant.
“Rocky-mate,” Adrian rumbled, moving to stand in Rocky’s path. “You are being unreasonable.”
“Earth is being unreasonable,” Rocky responded, grumbling wordlessly to himself. “It’s been six Earth days, statement! What is taking so long?”
“They have to talk to the various world governments to decide how to respond,” Grace said, sighing. Fidgeting with his glasses was impossible when he was in a suit inside a suit. It left his hands with nothing to do. “There are a bunch of them; they’re probably all arguing about what to say.”
“That’s stupid, statement,” Rocky muttered. “It didn’t take so long with us on Erid.”
“Well, I was dying at the time,” Grace said, grimacing. “Things were a bit more urgent then.”
He laughed it off most of the time, but they’d really been cutting it close with their arrival at Erid. If there hadn’t already been a scientific interest in using bacteria to produce certain vital compounds for Eridian medical use, Grace would have died.
He nearly had, anyway. He was a tall man at six feet even, and he’d weighed less than a hundred pounds by the time they’d reached Erid. Any longer, and he’d likely have been too far gone to save no matter what the Eridians had done.
“We don’t need to remember that time, Grace-dear,” Adrian chimed softly, coming close and leaning the bulk of their carapace against him gently. “You are well now, and we are working to ensure you stay that way.”
“Right, yeah,” Grace murmured, shivering. It was always the perfect temperature inside the EVA suit, no matter the situation — the Russians knew what they were doing when they made the Orlans — but his body remembered what it felt like to be cold no matter what he did.
He was still very low on body fat. It had been lipids that had given the Eridian scientists the most difficulty, and he was still getting less than was best for him. With his coma muscles returned (they must have increased his protein and total calorie intake, taken the coma as an opportunity to get him back into reasonable shape…), he looked like one of those Hollywood actors who ate nothing but vegetables and lean chicken.
God, soon he’d be able to eat those things again… Food might be the thing that excited him the most about returning to Earth, aside from being able to show Rocky and Adrian his home planet.
“Movie time, question?” Rocky asked, breaking Grace out of his musing. “We could go back to Mary, finish watching Buffy.”
“Rock, we’ve watched Buffy like, four times already,” Grace groaned. He knew Rocky was only suggesting going back to the Mary for Grace’s sake, and he wasn’t about to let a bad memory ruin the day.
“Adrian hasn’t seen finale yet,” Rocky countered, stubborn as, well, a rock.
“You guys would have to go back in your suits,” Grace countered, leaning away from Adrian to make his point. He didn’t get far — one of Adrian’s long limbs wrapped around his shoulders and pulled him in close again. “Adrian, Rocky, you guys should enjoy your own environment while you can.”
“Our environment suits aren’t nearly as cumbersome or restricting as yours, Grace-dear,” Adrian replied, holding him close. Trying to escape now would be pointless — when Adrian decided it was time to cuddle, neither he nor Rocky could do much to stop them.
“It’s no hardship, Grace-dear,” Rocky agreed. He rarely added that suffix to Grace’s name, unlike Adrian. Grace had only been able to translate its meaning through context, with Rocky being unusually unhelpful when he’d asked. Grace assumed it was because he was embarrassed to be caught using it, like calling a friend ‘adorable.’ He’d entered it into the translator as ‘dear friend,’ and Rocky hadn’t corrected him.
It was hard to convince himself to stay in the Eridian half of the ship when they were both reassuring him that their suits were comfortable. The Orlans were the best of the best, he knew, but no one would call them loungewear.
“Do we have to watch Buffy again, though?” he asked petulantly, giving in. Rocky trilled a laugh at him as Adrian helped him stand.
“I want to know if Buffy and Spike kiss before the end,” Adrian chimed. “They should — they are stupid.”
Flailing as he tried to run his hand through his hair, only to encounter two layers of spacesuit, Grace sighed. “I should never have introduced you to romcoms. You’re an absolute menace, Adrian.”
“Thank,” they chirped. “Menaces are big and scary, right?”
“Yeah,” Grace responded. “Or generally troublesome people.”
“Even better,” Adrian said, herding Grace and Rocky out of the room. “I was a very troublesome pebble, you know.”
“Really?” Grace asked, letting himself be guided. “How so?”
“Well…”
~*~
“Dr. Grace, this is NASA actual. We will serve as your contact on Earth until you reach orbit. Can you confirm you are traveling with extraterrestrials from 40 Eridani? Repeat, can you confirm you are traveling with extraterrestrial life?
“Please send current telemetry data with the next message. This is NASA actual, please respond.”