Chapter Text
More happens to Grace on the trip back to Erid than he could’ve ever anticipated. Three and a half whole years of travel, just him and Rocky, and more than enough ramen to comfortably ration while figuring out a propagation system in the main hallway.
And those first few weeks?
Way more stressful than he ever could’ve anticipated.
Finally, going to some kinda home is really. Something.
A relief, mostly, tangled in there with the weird nauseating realization that Grace just. Won’t ever set foot on planet Earth again. That’s disappointing. Like a lot, when he actually thinks about it. Despite the circumstances that it was very likely Earth would be a frozen-just-recovering husk by the time he returned. He’d be remiss not to admit he cried about it. Even if he tells Rocky that he’s to terms with it, he insists it even— as always, Rocky doubts him. Rocky can just tell these things. That’s what friends are for anyway.
So, Grace tries really hard to be optimistic.
And more importantly: to distract himself with anything. By any means necessary.
Which means a lot of stargazing.
Research. It’s actually research. But it’s shit to do, information to bring back to Erid considering they have so much more to learn about space in general. Radiation, even! That’s a huge deal! So Grace puts his all into it. With the whole link up system Rocky has going to ‘watch’ the computers, explaining relativity through some simulations is an easy enough thing to do. After that? Particle accelerators, dark matter, the whole package deal.
Getting asked about wormholes out of the blue isn’t all that surprising.
“What worm hole look like question?”
“Uhh…” swiveling back from his lab chair, Grace falters. Rocky is shockingly stationary in his little lab hovel on the other side of the room. Oh-so lightly setting down the containers he’d been trying to put together for better long term storage of the taumeobas; he runs a hand through his hair. “Like a donut, a little bit? At least from our models. But also like a lot of light and space bending into itself.”
“What is–” a resonant sound rings out. “-question?”
Oops.
Fiddling with his hands, he slumps as far back in his chair as he can muster to figure out how to articulate it.
“Donut?”
”Yes.”
“It’s uhm… food. For us it’s food, but I was thinking more about the shape.” Quickly, he pushes himself forward to palm after anything he can find, settling on a round of duct tape to hold out. Rocky scuttles forward, and the translator somehow manages to catch a tone of sarcasm.
“This is food question?”
Grace huffs. “No, it’s duct tape. Just the shape, bud. But smoother, rounded all the way around.” Just for the sake of making sure Rocky gets it, he holds the roll out and gestures to the sharper edge where it should be rounded. After a moment of consideration, Rocky turns back to his setup and taps his jaggedy fingers along his floor.
”Rocky looking through records. Find data before meeting Grace, statement.”
That’s intriguing. Interest piqued, he leans himself forward to listen. Rocky grumbles to himself, waving an arm about as if struggling to articulate what he’s trying to say. Then, the sing-song comes out.
“Rocky think saw worm hole.”
“Wait, wait, wait, what–”
”Will share data. Grace confirm, question?”
“Well yeah, obviously, of course!” Grace manages out again, splaying his hands out. “You’re totally sure it wasn’t a black hole? Or a mass or–”
”Rocky not know sure. Grace confirm.” Almost dismissive in his focus, Rocky hurriedly turns back to his system to start pulling out whatever information he deems most important.
Mind reeling at the prospect, he feels he could go spiraling away in his spinny chair. Or zero gravity. One of those. It still sends him scrambling to his own computer terminal eagerly, tapping through to get the process started. It’ll take work- Eridian translations to English are still janky, but most of it’s numbers, and anything else they can’t figure out- they can. They’ll work through the calculations if they have to, Rocky’s a certified genius. What data can’t be translated properly by their jerryrigged computer system is made sense of with a several hours of long back and forth of calculations scrawled out a whiteboard.
Then, he checks it.
And double checks it.
And yeah, there’s definitely a something in that data. At coordinates with a shocking vicinity to Adrian and far in their dust; but yeah. It doesn’t have as strong of a gravitational pull as he’d anticipate. But it, in essence, is a wormhole.
Or some kind of hole that light seems to fall… not into.
Out of.
A pinprick of very, very, very dull light by his assumptions. It’s one of the coolest things he’s ever seen. Which is pretty high in the running considering meeting sentient life, and then finding and breeding (and evolving) nonsentient life with said sentient life. In space. Really, the prospect of a real provable wormhole is something that should have him way more giddy than it does.
But by now, it’s in their dust. And they can’t really know for sure unless they try to chuck something into it.
So Grace files that potential discovery away among the many dozens he’s come across thus far, vaguely disappointed that it’s far too late to send the data to Earth on one of the Beetle probes.
‘ᴅᴇʙʀɪꜱ ꜱʜᴏᴡᴇʀ ɪɴᴄᴏᴍɪɴɢ.’
Groaning, Grace rolls over in his cot and attempts to halfheartedly tug his quilt over his head. It doesn’t do much, considering he can hear Rocky pattering around the habitat suspended across practically the entire ceiling of the room. Likely prepping to hop into his biosphere.
‘ᴅᴇʙʀɪꜱ ꜱʜᴏᴡᴇʀ ɪɴᴄᴏᴍɪɴɢ.’ The ship’s computer warns a second time.
Well aware he likely won’t be going back to sleep for a bit, he blindly palms for his glasses and manages to haphazardly put them on.
Debris showers are to be expected while leaving a solar system’s oort cloud. It’d vary in density and content by the gravitational pull, of course, but none are anywhere near as compact as The Magic Schoolbus depiction of the Kuiper Belt would have one believe. Most space debris is just loosely hanging out in the gravitational pull of its nearest sun, falling into step with a club of other misplaced debris. Most, he anticipates, will be icy bodies of frozen gas and possible liquids with no place to go, rocks strewn around here and there. He trusts the Hail Mary’s autopilot is more than capable of avoiding anything that would pose a considerable threat, and her hull hefty enough to handle a stray cloud of smaller vapors and objects. Especially after the total thrashing she’d gone through almost plummeting into Adrian’s atmosphere.
Still, he groans again when a faint tapping sounds from further down the ship. Like rain on a tin roof somewhere.
”Good morning friend.” Rocky greets impatiently. Still, he sounds pleased. ”Grace finish sleep cycle early, question?”
“Ugh… yeah, bud. Just wanna check out if there’s anything interesting before I hit the hay again.”
”Hitting what hey.”
“S’a phrase for ‘go to sleep’.”
”Oh, okay.”
With a long stretch, Grace sleepily palms his face and wraps his quilt around himself, finally slipping out of bed. He doesn’t bother changing at the moment regardless of how he’ll likely (rightfully) be nagged about it a little later. He fully intends to meander to the cockpit, watch out the window until something interesting happens, note it, and meander right back to bed.
Peering after him in a lean, Rocky finally skitters to his side as he yawns. ”Humans sleep too much.”
Grace side eyes him. “Like you’re one to talk. You’re asleep for days sometimes.”
”But not for days once per day.”
Grunting sleepily, Grace shrugs. Fair point.
“Did you guys ever find anything interesting in the oort cloud coming in? I was hibernating.”
”Hm. No. Debris is mostly small rocks and ice water.”
“No dwarf planets or anything?”
”Why dwarf planets question? Not real planet. No life, not big for living. Just rock. Boring!”
“Hey, we humans happen to be very protective about our dwarf planet Pluto.”
Together, they make their way into the cockpit. Skirting around the pilot’s chairs, Grace plops onto his normal seat on the floor and is already leaning for Rocky’s biosphere as support by the time he scuttles up. Rocky doesn’t particularly seem to mind at the moment, instead tentatively clicking for a read on his sleepy blinking and yawning and smacking.
”Pluto like the dog question?”
It’s too early for this, but Grace can never give up a chance to explain things. Letting his eyes adjust to the view and the scattered starfield beyond, he gives in to blearily lean against the xenonite biosphere. It’s warm. Of course on the inside its a couple hundred degrees and some, but Eridian engineering is really just. The best. To Grace? It’s like leaning against a heater. At some point it’ll become annoying, but for now it’s comfortable.
“Nope,” he hums, popping the ‘p’. “Same naming convention. Pluto is the Roman god of the underworld, which is named after the Greek god of death, since they’re essentially the same thing. Romans were really into stealing the mythologies of other cultures so it’d be easier for territorial expansion. It just made it easier for them to say ‘hey, same gods! No way. Come be one of us’. Usually it actually was easier–”
Rocky interjects. ”What is under-world, question?”
“Oh, uh…” Have they ever really had the religion talk? Maybe a slight discussion on cultural morals, but… “Some humans believe that after death, there is another life. ‘After life’. Like their physical body will stay on earth but the spirit, the personality part, that all goes to some greater place.”
”So when humans die, go to… under world.”
“Not exactly. Some humans believe it, but it’s not necessarily true. And all humans believe it a little differently. The Greeks just believed in the ‘under world’. Some people call it Hell, or sometimes if you’re extra good you get to Heaven. Sometimes people think it’s purgatory, sometimes people think you die and come back as something or someone else depending on how you were in your last life.”
As if shuffling away the concept, Rocky shifts to settle on his forelimbs with the Eridian equivalent to a sigh. It comes out a faint resonance, low, a near purr. That doesn’t need translation.
”Does Grace believe in under world? Or after life, question.”
Scanning the void beyond the viewport, he shrugs and draws his quilt closer around his shoulders.
“Probably not. I’m scared to die.”
”Not too scared,” Rocky posits. “Grace is brave. But… Rocky think, is normal to not want to die.”
Smiling faintly, he nods. “Me too, bud. What about you guys? Any thoughts about the afterlife?”
Tapping a finger against the floor of his biosphere, clearly considering how to phrase his question. But eventually he pipes up. ”Eridians do not think after. There is memory.”
“That’s good. That’s something. Sometimes humans don’t even believe in that.”
Nearly affectionately, Rocky continues. ”Humans never decide. Always think different.”
“Don’t get me started. It was a miracle if any of us could decide on anything.”
A snicker of amusement filters out, shared between them, and Grace turns his attention towards the window. As they fall into a comfortable silence, he spots a few shapes drifting in.
They’re iceforms. Blobs about the size of his fist at most, scattered in flung streaks like misshapen dark pearls on the horizon. For a moment, he simply watches them. It likely is water, or some other gas caught up– if not water, then carbon, or even helium. But a stray drop drifts past a line of starlight and makes him frown.
It’s red. Light casts red through it. At least for the split second it drifts by.
It’s mind boggling for a moment. Grace wracks his brain for anything that naturally occurs as red liquid and comes up with only fruit and veggie juices or something remarkably rich in iron.
Like blood.
He shudders, just a bit, gritting his teeth.
No way blood could end up drifting this far into the middle of nowhere through the vacuum of space, unless…
Unless another carbon and water based life form happened to use iron rich circulatory systems, and subsequently had also been exposed to the vacuum and popped (disgustingly) like a water balloon in the hands of an angry toddler, or…
Grace is very suddenly more awake than a cup of shitty coffee would have him.
He’d sent Yao and Ilyukhina off, they’d become solid ice in mere seconds, but the decompression hadn’t been fast enough to destroy their remains. That would’ve been too awful, far too much a disrespect after their sacrifice. He’d made sure they were intact because that’s what they’d deserved, it was only fair. He knows for a fact they would’ve done the same for him.
Had something happened? Had one or both of them collided with something? Had it shattered them and sent their remains scattering across the cosmos and, horrifyingly, back towards the Hail Mary?
No. No, that couldn’t be. They were jettisoned in the opposite direction, and they would’ve been pulled into Adrian’s atmosphere before pieces of their remains big enough to be seen (or compared to his fist) could be found.
Jeez, it’s an unnerving thought.
So, uneasily, Grace tries to shake the image of what he thinks are blood clots floating around their vicinity.
That and what he swears is the faintest ruby glimmer of astrophage darting alongside the debris.
He focuses instead on the warmth radiating from Rocky’s sphere, and his friend’s rumblings as they rest contentedly side by side.
The Hail Mary makes noise.
Of course it does. It’s a giant rotating cylinder in the vacuum of space McGyvered via Xenonite in a ‘theoretically’ impossible state to pieces of another (formerly) similarly rotating and noisy spaceship. Grace has become accustomed to it by now. There’s the gentle pulse of the engines, the precarious creak of the hull that totally doesn’t freak him out, the distant occasional whirrings of Armando running routine maintenance on itself. Even the computers make noise sometimes, Grace is beginning to realize– moreso than offering him answers or calculations or dinging around in automation. And then, of course, there’s all the sound Rocky makes.
Outside his ball and in his enclosure, Rocky’s foot(?)steps are a constant ‘thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk’ that reminds him of the galloping of a horse. Sometimes when he’s exceptionally lazy, Rocky’ll just. Fling himself summersaulting down declines in the xenonite pathways over Grace’s head and scare the everloving shit out of him. It echoes when he does that. Resounds through the entirety of the ship, and it stumps Grace entirely how he doesn’t give himself a proverbial headache being so sound sensitive.
Most of the time though, Rocky’s noise is him talking to himself. A semi-constant hum of discordant notes drifting through the air, occasionally intermittent with properly translated words. None of them were directly intended for Grace, at least not like that. He knows this. Just like how Rocky’s gotten used to him mumbling to himself despite hearing every single word.
Thankfully they get to talk a lot. Hash out the details of language and such, the cultural things Grace’ll have to deal with when they arrive on Erid. Not that he’s complaining.
“–so long as I’m not dissected once I get there, I think we’ll get along fine.” He jokes for the dozenth time.
If a rock could scowl, Rocky just might’ve.
”Will not–”
“I know I know.” He snorts back.
Rocky pauses. And then amusedly chitters. ”Sarcasm.” When he earns a shrug, Rocky continues. ”You watch the movie too much. We watch more Dirty Harry.”
“Dirty Harry movies can still be crazy!” Grace turns in protest. He’s taken to pacing for the sake of exercise. “They’re all like– murder mysteries. That’s intense.”
”Yes, but mystery is fun.”
“Fine. Why not something uh… The Da Vinci Code. Or Sherlock Holmes!”
”These are mystery question?”
“Only the best mysteries ever are Sherlock Holmes. And Agatha Christie, but I’m more biased towards Sherlock Holmes.”
”And what is that question.”
Right. Sometimes they talk so much he completely forgets that Rocky just doesn’t know all the things he does. He stutters in his tracks and turns, catching where his buddy was tilting his body to and fro to follow.
“He’s uh… a really genius guy who figures out all the little details nobody else notices to solve crimes.” There’s a pause, a consideration, and Rocky nods himself for the explanation to continue. “And it’s like in the 1800s, so it’s older, but it’s still fun because it’s all gritty. Oh and he’s got his sidekick Watson!”
Grumbling, Rocky plays with the word.
“Don’t get any ideas.”
”Grace no tell Rocky what” the same grumble sputters out, “is.”
Oh-so-dutifully, but groaning all the same, he inputs the word into the computer. They have this down to an actual science now.
”Sidekick…” Rocky determines.
“Yeah. Watson does all the social medical stuff Sherlock can’t do, Sherlock’s all about the details.” With some humming, a little more typing, Rocky holds up a decisive hand.
”Rocky is details and Grace is sidekick.”
“I am– I’m not!”
”Yes.”
Glowering over, Grace defiantly crosses his arms. Okay. Sure. Rocky is entirely more on the details side of thing. In fact, he’s miles ahead of Grace’s ability to process, well, anything; from coming up with the puppet-show idea to re-engineering Blip-A’s bridge to suit the Hail Mary’s hull once they arrive to Erid. That and managing to piece together some sort of frequency scanner that lets him read into computer systems. Actually, yeah, Rocky’s the smarter one of either of them, and Grace’s the one who tends to be able to take a beating even when he’s stupidly pretending to be stoic about the more terrifying circumstances of their research requirements. But those are far behind them.
“Fine. Whatever, you’re Sherlock and I’m Watson. Do you wanna watch Sherlock Holmes or not?”
Delighted, Rocky straightens right up in his biosphere and sways. ”Yes, I like that. We go now, or after cleaning?”
“Let’s at least get the lab organized.”
”Good. Not dirty anymore,” Rocky teases, rolling back towards his side of the lab. ”Grace learning.”
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up.”
Earning the squeaking rattle of a chirp equivalent to laughter, Grace allows himself a smirk and turns back towards his lab table. Most of what he’d been doing today was paperwork, putting some vague plan in place to make the propagation area more efficient and get a long-term food source in the works. He’ll take mini potatoes over conna slurry any day.
”You know, I wish we had popcorn. If I knew any better I would’ve asked to bring that, I bet they would’ve let us. A bag of popcorn with all those surround screens? Sheesh, that’d really do it for me I think. Perfect movie viewing experience–”
As much as Rocky mumbles and chatters to himself, Grace does to.
They tend not to mind this, together. But apparently today isn’t one of those days.
“Shut up.” Rocky grinds out quickly.
Grace stops. And then blinks. “What?”
“Be quiet,” he rearticulates firmly.
Turning sharply to face his friend, Grace catches Rocky stood on wide-splayed limbs, thorax tilted oddly up and ‘out’. It looks vaguely like it could be interpreted as a tilted head, so that’s what Grace opts to do, lamely setting down his sheaf of notebook paper to observe.
As if the ship were reading Rocky’s mind, it calls out lightly.
‘ʙʟɪᴘ - ᴀ ᴅᴇᴛᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ.’
Okay, that can’t be right. That really can’t be right, because ‘Blip-A’ is currently orbiting Adrian as a glorified piece of space trash. Unless somehow it remained attached, but he’s pretty sure they both would’ve noticed that a while ago. A long while ago. There would’ve been a jolt of some sort, a rattling, blatant drag in their movement speed, something. But there wasn’t, hasn’t been, and Rocky remains stalwart in his biosphere.
‘ʙʟɪᴘ - ᴀ ᴅᴇᴛᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ.’ The computer repeats with a complete lack of urgency.
A jolt shoots up Grace’s spine at the sudden realization.
There’s something else out there.
In immediate tandem, he and Rocky scramble for the cockpit. Grace manages to get ahead a few feet, launching himself down the hallway and towards the room in question, more importantly towards the window, feverish panic catching up along the back of his neck. He even manages to tug his glasses up off his ear to sit skewed on his face in anticipation.
There’s something else. Something else, something big, and for the life of him he can’t decide if it would be better to see yet another ship or a meteoroid.
Stampeding into the cockpit and past the chairs together, what Grace finds out the viewport is not, in fact, a meteoroid.
Floating in the bowels of space is a submarine. An honest to god submarine, the kind he would’ve played with as a little kid with its stumpy torpedo shape and pathetic propeller, even the hatch on the top. If more… brutal. There’re some kind of engines or propulsion systems strapped to what he thinks is the bottom, a chunk of latticework that leaves the immediate impression that something had been ripped from the front of it. There’s even a telltale glimmer of red lights trailing behind, clinging to the backside of the hull in varied clusters. Astrophage. It’s emitting some kind of energy. Energy enough that stray colonies only the size of his fist are hanging on for a joyride.
But it’s– it’s intact, as far as he can tell.
Silent, the pair of them stare after it.
It’s moving. Slowly. Very slowly. A little bit in the same direction as them too, far slower, oh-so-slightly rotating. But the direction is off. It can’t be headed towards Erid just by its rate of travel, if it keeps going it’ll be more than a few clicks off in its trajectory.
And then, Rocky jolts.
”Another ship, life! Life! Life!” He’s almost frantic as he scuttles back and then right into Grace’s leg. He yelps.
“That’s another ship– oh wow, okay–!”
”We must communicate. Move! Drive!”
“I’m on it, I’m on it!”
Throwing himself from the window to the pilot’s seat, Grace pays little mind to the computer’s customary detection and greeting. Instead, he wildly reaches for the controls and swings his head right back towards the window. The ship hasn’t changed its speed or direction since they came up on it, and they’re up on it, it’s all but falling into the vicinity of the collapsed gangway. But nope. It just keeps teetering through space as if they weren’t there at all.
That would’ve been Grace’s second plan, all things considered.
But as soon as Rocky’s dropped his hamster ball into the neighboring seat, he pushes the throttle a hair.
Forward forward. Just like before.
Zip.
Rocky rattles. ”Ship not see us.”
“They saw us! They’re seeing us, they have to see us, we’re huge!”
”Go again!”
Fighting down a complaint, Grace pries his eyes back towards the ship. Even Rocky’s angled towards it, monitoring it as best he can. He goes again. Forward forward.
Still, nothing.
Unease is starting to gnaw through his gut now. Not the same kind he’d had when he’d first– when the real Blip-A came across the Hail Mary. Any thought to reassign blip titles is well out the window anyway, not with what he’s seeing. Feeling. Some creeping nausea clamoring up in his gut like it wants to shoot up his diaphragm, a little pukey, entirely wrong.
Something’s wrong.
”Grace Rocky make message.” Rocky asserts hurriedly, already swaying in his biosphere to teeter himself out of the chair.
No. No, something tells him that’ll take too long. Or… god, actually, all of his insides and instincts are screaming to get to that thing as soon as possible. Even if it does happen to be a coincidence that this other ship looks like a humanoid submarine, there’s a near desperacy in this.
“Wait.” Grace manages. Rocky’s already scurrying for the door. “Wait. Wait, wait, wait!”
Throwing himself from the pilot’s chair, he sprints down the hall after Rocky’s biosphere.
”No wait, it is time go!”
“No no, I mean, I don’t think it’s gonna respond.”
Skeptical, all but scoffing, Rocky turns briefly. ”Why question?”
“I just have a bad feeling.” Grace offers lamely. “I just– can we put an arm out to it?”
”Grace want connection if not know danger question!?” Stomping a flailing leg, skepticism is grating but no less uneasy– he’s freaking Rocky out, obviously. Really obviously.
“Can you please just!–” he sucks in a breath. “You heard it. You did, what did you hear?”
For a moment, Rocky actually hesitates. He raises the previously stomped leg as if to posit some answer, pauses again, and then stiffens.
”Uh oh.”
Grace thinks he could rip his hair out actually. In fact, his hands fly to his head as if he could do just that. “Uh oh!? Uh oh, what’s ‘uh oh’!?”
”Outside is vacuum. No sound in vacuum,” he turns wildly to start skittering down the hall again.
“Obviously– did you hear me?” Rocky’s gaining ground, and jarringly, Grace realizes he’s probably gonna have to throw on his spacesuit. Crap. This was not how he wanted today to go. “Did you hear me!?”
”No!”
Determined as ever, Rocky practically flies through the lab, past the crew’s quarters, through the propagation hallway, the screen room, the medical wing, and finally towards the decompression chamber. Impatiently, he sways on his legs as Grace scrambles.
”Grace need go out, bring it close. Then Rocky can attach arm.”
“I thought you just said that was a bad idea.”
”Did not say anything,” Rocky insists hurriedly, as if he’s suddenly been swept up in the exact same frantic fervor Grace has.
At least they’re on the same page.
“Okay. Okay, okay–”
”Rocky go. Meet Grace there. Be ready statement.”
Grace is entirely not ready.
In all honesty, Grace thought he was done with spacewalks. He could effectively retire from it unless things went catastrophically wrong and exterior repairs were needed, but that was incredibly unlikely. And yet, here Grace is, strapped into his spacesuit again on another tether the length and some of the ship, clips strung to his belt to secure to the hull anchors.
And, the ‘fishing line’.
They have plenty of fuel. So much fuel actually, a little under eleven years worth of fuel at this point; so he knows they can circle around a little bit if they absolutely must. But the centrifugal system had been shut off just to prevent any opposing forces in the ‘fishing’ attempt. It’ll be more like lassoing the thing, yanking it in enough to settle it, and attempting a controlled maneuver to bring the hatch of the other ship in close enough for Rocky’s bridge to attach. Then, they can Mcgyver a secondary decompression chamber.
Just in case.
Now all Grace needs are some space chaps and a cowboy hat and he’ll be perfect for the part.
”Grace ready time go question?” Rocky’s translated voice rings over the comms.
“Ready as I’ll ever be, bud.”
Total lie. That’s a total lie, because he did not expect to be straddling the Hail Mary again in an attempt to lasso another ‘ship’, but hey, at least they don’t have to worry about the gravitational force of a planet dragging them to a brutal death exploding on Adrian’s surface. Nope. It’s just him, Rocky’s remote assistance, and the actual submarine sailing through space.
”Rocky will watch. Be careful.”
“That’s the plan.”
With that, the outer doors open.
The thing about space?
It smells. There’s just something about the unmoving void that has a metallic staleness to it. Some other astronauts, he’s heard, refer to it like gunpowder. But Grace isn’t really a gun guy, so that concept evades him. Instead, it smells like untouched stainless steel, an abandoned old freezer packed with beef and steak and bacon. It invokes the image of his pre-doctorate days, working off part of his bachelor’s degree by working in the campus kitchen four days a week. There was a particular freezer he’d always walk by and wonder if anyone ever touched it. Crusted over with ice on the inside, everything within had become practically fossilized– he was sure, and still is sure, there were some health code violations there.
But that’s what space smells like. And that’s what he gets a faceful of (visor notwithstanding) as he drifts out the door.
Delving through the wall of ozone, the expanse welcomes him.
There isn’t anything relatively close by. They’re navigating their way out of Tau Ceti’s system, it’s loose oort cloud, and into the dead space between solar systems. At this angle, the Kapteyan dwarf star is a bit ‘above’ and ‘in front’ of them. DENIS-P is a lifetime away ‘below’, and whatever comet field he can make out is scattered and far between. There’s only one thing blatantly in view, and that’s the impossible submarine.
Consider his heebies absolutely jeebied.
Up ‘close’, it’s easier to make out more details.
The submarine, ship, whatever it is they ultimately elect to call this thing, is a tin can. Completely and totally. Ice crystals cling to the frontside and backside. Whatever improvised propulsion system it has has been strapped onto what he assumes is the bottom of it, two trunks attached in a janky latticework. From here, a good… thirty yards away? It looks like it’s about to fall apart.
That frantic feeling crawls up in him again.
Making a hurried effort to strap the first anchor along the hull points, readying the fishing chain. As much as he knows the line can hold his weight (after being flung around by Adrian’s atmosphere and almost falling out of the Hail Mary on his first effort to catch Rocky’s messages) but he still hesitates. Grace takes a breath, steels himself, and gives a light push off the Hail Mary’s hull towards the object.
Being away from a surface or without the safety of containment makes Grace a little nauseous. He won’t lie. It brings a skip to his heart, like he’s swimming in the deep end for the first time all over again. On top of that, his riddling and extremely realistic anxiety keeps imagining some stray chunk of space debris flying through his line and disconnecting him from the Hail Mary forever, left to spiral into the nothingness past the submarine, right off into an unnamed section of astral sea.
Yeah. Better to not imagine that.
Grace tries to measure his breathing for that sake, floating closer and closer to the submarine by the second. He has to be careful, to look for handholds, to not do anything stupid and knock their target away either.
That’s when he sees it, scrawled along the side of the ship-sub.
“Uh. Rock, I’m seeing something,” he manages out through the comms.
”Grace needs to say what seeing.”
“Letters.”
”Intelligent language question? Message, question?”
“No, no like– like Latin letters. Human language letters.”
Rocky’s silence speaks volumes. But there it is. Caught under chunks of ice and rust, there are very human letters –Latin letters, English letters– titling the ship-submarine as the ‘SM-13’. Then, finally, Grace manages a grasp on what entirely seems to be rungs along the side of it. Carefully, very very carefully, he starts to loop the fishing chain through after a light tug proves it sturdy. Now all he has to do is spiderman around this thing, anchor the end of the line, and crawl back over to not tangle his own slackline.
“Bring close first, then time for study. Will be sure.”
Grace can do that. He can do this.
“First anchor set.”
”Good, good, good!”
Oh so slowly, he manages to navigate his way around the top, the far side, and under side through what he now imagines are fuel tanks. Once the end of the fishing chain is secured and quadruple checked with Rocky’s fitting insistence, Grace starts the slow process of clambering backwards and making sure his line isn’t going to tangle. It’s a bright orange-red streak across the surface of the structure, and he carefully clambers forwards with gentle tugs to heft it overtop.
The closer to the front he gets, the heavier that smell gets. The deeper an unspoken dread grows.
Dread. Is that what this is?
Swallowing for probably the millionth time in the past twenty minutes it’s taken to secure everything, Grace gives into curiosity. And then, he immediately regrets it.
Some kind of grill or shattered pressure cage hangs out of the front, topside of the vehicle. It was probably spherical once, but most of it’s gone, revealing the bottom to match, twisted inwards as if by pressure. Not outwards. Weird. Within that space is somewhere barely big enough for him to float, but Grace isn’t brave enough for that. No way. Instead he peers cautiously around the flattened front face of the ship-submarine to see… a window.
That’s a window. An actual window, glimmering in distant starlight, framed with unmistakable ice crystals. Evidence of fluid, gone black and deep red in the sub-freezing temperatures. Crystals of it stick out in every direction like spikes in front of a castle gate, but Grace can only look past that. Towards the ice-crusted surface, towards what’s trapped behind the cracked glass. It’s thick. Inches thick, as it should be, but beyond that is a solid metal wall. Coagulated in the slit of space between the glass and that is– it’s blood. Gore. Flesh. Flecks and roiled chunks of it that make him kinda wanna blow chunks in his own helmet, but that won’t help anyone.
Oh boy.
”Grace move faster.” Rocky calls out over the comms again, and he jolts.
“Sorry– sorry, just checking it out.” Prying his eyes from the sealed window, Grace clambers up towards the top and hefts his safety tether over a literal actual hatch with an actual rudimentary twist valve.
This thing’s practically medieval compared to the Hail Mary.
Of course, it inspires plenty of questions. It’s obviously from Earth. But somehow also going their general direction despite it logically having to be flying somewhere a few weeks past Adrian and further into Tau Ceti’s solar system. But it’s here. Here and Earthen and covered in human language, and it sends him thinking just as much as it sends him climbing back along the fishing chain to haul it in.
This is manmade. It’s a submarine.
Had something happened back on Earth? If it’s here now, it had to have been sent no less than a couple months after the Hail Mary was launched, but there’s absolutely no way anyone could’ve survived for eleven years of lightspeed space travel in what’s essentially a tin can. Was the situation that desperate? Were the Beetles even returning to a planet that was still savable? If this is here, it must be for a reason, and that reason is the ultimate shot in the dark blind grab after the official one had been shot up to be never seen again.
Palming back for the surface of the Hail Mary’s hull, Grace tugs himself to its safety with the other end of the fishing chain in hand. Carefully maneuvering to the next anchorpoint, he gives himself a short enough slack to remain relatively steady, and calls in.
“I’m in position.”
”Good, good, good. Rotate it so hatches are together.”
“Got it. Got it,” he grunts. Bracing his boots against the hull, he starts to reel the ship-submarine in by the topside. It groans precariously, but begins to drift closer in a slow partial rotation in their favor. But the bow end of it leans awkwardly away as it goes.
”Slow! Grace go slow!”
“I’m going slow!” He huffs. “I am!”
”More left!”
“I’m trying!”
With a bit more of Rocky’s instruction and his manhandling the chains, the ship-submarine drifts closer. Closer, closer, dangerously so, but he reaches out with a foot to stem any jostling collision between the hulls.
“If there’s a xenomorph in here, I’m just taking my helmet off.” Grace offers half-jokingly. “Popping like a grape’d be better than all… that.”
Rocky groans, the tinny voice of his translator leeching over the line. ”No ‘popping like a grape’. That sounds bad. Rocky does not like that.”
“I’m kidding!”
After another dubious pause (if Eridians could roll their eyes, Rocky certainly would be), and another direction is called out over the air. ”More down, more right.”
Relenting to those commands, he angles the hatch in a bit closer before finally letting up to slip in. It’s awkward, he didn’t give himself much space to work with; but he unclips his anchorpoints and weasels his way past the ship-submarine hatch and safely makes it to the decompression chamber. Only once their hatches are hovering in line with one another does he seal the door for Rocky to work his engineering magic.
And that he does.
After some reconfiguring and griping and debating whether to fully encase the thing, et cetera et cetera, they connect. In fact, they end up with another xenonite encased backup chamber in a few arduous hours. Every second feels like a century though. Thoughts go swirling in his mind, thankfully unprodded with Rocky’s focus, but soon enough they’re both in suits hovering at the mouth of the Hail Mary’s decompression chamber exterior door. Once the chamber is properly sealed, it opens to Rocky’s improvised chamber. There’s a xenonite division, but there’s a door with it. And they’re both tethered to the Hail Mary just in case the ship-submarine decides to explode and disconnect.
Hopefully if it does explode, they’ll be excluded in the blast radius. But explosions don’t really work on thoughts and prayers, so they forge on. Their collection of tools is equally as improvised, their path lit (at least in Grace’s case) lit by one of the very same LED square spotlights he’d used after he and Rocky first met. It illuminates the cramped space from which they begin the painstaking process of cracking the ship-submarine open.
Mostly because they’d found it truly sealed shut. Welded shut under all the rust and crystallized ice.
It’s loud. Grating. It likely would’ve warranted a response by now, but knocking hadn’t worked either, so there’s nothing like extremes. Right?
If he hadn’t already met intelligent life and quite literally saved the universe, Grace would’ve found his current circumstances unbelievable. But here he is, sawing open an unknown spacecraft (?) of most-likely-human-origin without knowing a lick about what’s inside.
Finally getting the door open proves that they’re hit with a veritable wall or iron stench. It’s stark, rancid even, like old pennies and that terrible abandoned freezer of meat, and inside is dark.
It’s dark. Like a horror movie.
Not that Rocky knows that, because he drops his laser tool in favor of stamping an uneasy foot.
”Ship is from Grace home.” He starts, surmising, before quickly correcting. ”Earth.”
The breath he lets out in his helmet fogs it up. Man, he’s sweating.
This ship, the SM-13 apparently, makes noise. A low groaning, a strain against the bridge he isn’t entirely fond of. Somewhere in there, the ghost of an audio warning system wheezes, crackles, and dies.
“Most likely,” he offers, reluctant to think that. The dread is back. Overwhelming and all encompassing, freezing him there with his feet twelve inches off the floor. Rocky teeters in his biosphere again, drifting companionably closer. “Most likely, which doesn’t… make sense. This is a submarine.”
”Submarine is for water. Ocean.”
“Exactly.”
A hum escapes, disconcerted, maybe even a little sad. ”Maybe there is important message for Grace.”
What the hell kind of message couldn’t’ve been sent to the terminals? Especially if this’d been sent from Earth, again in what had to have been a very short impossible window.
“But the trajectory would’ve been off. This thing’s way too small to propel itself at lightspeed.”
Rocky must agree, because he shifts back in his biosphere and lightly bumps against the wall. ”That is true, statement.”
Something’s very wrong.
As bravely as he can, Grace drifts down for his spotlight and raises it to the mouth of the hatch. Rocky leans in with him, tapping out into the air to get a feel for the space.
The first thought Grace has is that there don’t appear to be any astrophage lights inside the SM-13. Which is excellent news.
The second thought is terrible news, because it looks like a massacre inside. Suddenly, he knows why it’d smelled so much like… blood.
It takes all of him not to blow chunks in the helmet again.
“Oh my god.”
It’s barely seven feet across in any direction, ten or twelve feet long at best. Shadows betray the shapes of pipes running parallel to each other along the length of the interior, a grated floor caked solid with something indescribable directly before him. It’s dented here and there. To the right is some kind of terminal system, and from it comes a gentle crackling, the shimmering of grey and white dots darting through black space like dust in a night vision camera. A screen. A screen mostly caked over with hardened heaps of congealed matter. To the right and at the wrong angle (he’s facing the floor, he realizes, the hatch really had been the top) is a control panel of sorts, the inside of the window he’d seen, cracked internally too. But there is no vacuum, no alarm bells ringing from the Hail Mary computer. It’s a sealed space. With some kind of atmosphere that hadn’t caused any disturbance on opening. Beside the console is a chair with the back broken out.
The entire interior is coated with blood. Hardened, solidified, coagulated blood to the best of his assumptions; and the entire cramped space reeks of it. Flinching back, Grace almost misses the one thing that sends his heart into his throat.
A body.
A body strewn against what must’ve been the floor, caked into it, pinned down with a thick film of the gore and entirely undisturbed by their presence.
Panic lances up his spine, wordless, and Rocky comes spiraling in after him in a whirl of clicks and distinct apprehension that either hasn’t been translated yet or doesn’t have meaning at all.
That’s a person. A person, a whole person in this thing for who knew how long, and the very human part of him is pulled, no, compelled to track tacky gravity-light footsteps in towards the figure.
“Oh my god. Oh my god–”
It looks like a crime scene.
”That is human, question?” Rocky sounds– concerned. Not frightened, he definitely can’t see the deep ochre of the gore, but he can see the state of the interior, he can see the body.
“Oh my god I think so. Oh my god oh my god–”
Three steps in and Grace is right in front of the figure. He’s standing on pipes that’re who knows how volatile, but he slings the light over his shoulder with shaking hands to reach out and– and what? What the hell can he do here, what is there to do? There’s no way the person’s alive, there’s–
A lot to take in.
The stranger is mostly indistinguishable, but they’re sprawled on their back. Legs tangled, twisted to the side slightly, their face is angled straight up towards the would be ceiling. Whatever hair they have is pasted against their scalp with the film coating everything. Grace thinks he can make out the implication of facial hair under there, but he isn’t certain. The person’s right arm is clutched to their wide chest, shoulders broad against the floor; fingers balled tightly. It reminds him very distantly of the carvings on top of sarcaphogi or kingly stone casket covers. If not for everything else, there would’ve been a strange serenity to the stranger’s entombed face. A strong nose, lips pursed, eyes shut lightly. A nobility, almost.
But this body is encased in blood, and the left arm is entirely missing just below the shoulder.
Whatever happened here was bad. Irrevocably, inexplicably, inarticulably bad in a way that the most basal parts of his being wants nothing more than to escape from.
He can’t. Despite that, Grace just can’t draw away.
Rocky is the one of them to jump into motion. Jolting against his biosphere, a franticness comes to his translation as his forelimbs batter in wild gestures towards the figure.
”Human! Is human! Grace Rocky need to help!”
How does he explain this? Rocky hadn’t ever seen him dead. He’d seen him near it, saved Grace’s life for it, and the back of his mind leans towards the inclination that Rocky does, in fact, have an understanding of what a dead human would look like.
“Rock,” Grace croaks listlessly.
He’s now at a count to three dead people in space. It feels unfair. Of course he’s accepted he won’t be going back to Earth, that’s something he’s been fighting for the optimism for; but this? It must be some kind of cruel joke. Bad luck. One last hoo-ra before the planet gave out, a desperate escape attempt left for him and only him to find. Something that never would’ve worked, without enough space, enough oxygen, enough anything to reasonably support a human being.
”–move human to the medical bay, Armando can help. We will fix. Grace Rocky fix.”
“I don’t… Rock, we gotta let ‘em go.” He hates saying it out loud, it escapes in a lump.
Another cursory glance proves there’s no clear point from which to retrieve information, whatever data might’ve been crammed in here. And if there’s a way, there’s a very high chance that the explosive results of whatever crime scene had occurred had long since corrupted it. Will he ever know who this was? Will there be a message that comes into the terminals far too late? What does he even say? With Yao and Ilyukhina, he’d had belongings to comb through. Distant but distinct memories by which to recall them as they were in life, something to send them off by.
This… he and Rocky linger in a tomb, and a tomb it’ll stay.
Struck, still remarkably concerned, Rocky protests. ”Why question.”
“For one,” he gestures faintly. “There’s an entire limb missing here. And that doesn’t look like it was clean. For two, we decided this thing couldn’t go lightspeed so…” The math isn’t entirely adding up, but that’s a background thought right now. Grace is more focused on the corpse in front of him as he sighs. “We don’t even know where the arm went.”
That’s morbid.
Drifting back as if to allow some space, Rocky hums, and then, pointedly, tilts back in his biosphere. His chain tether clinks against the hatch wall.
”Is here,” Rocky prompts simply.
Already opening his mouth to question, Grace turns to say something. And then, he spots exactly what Rocky had been drifting towards.
There’s the arm.
It really is a miracle he isn’t totally destroying the inside of his helmet with puke, but this time? It’s the closest call. He turns sharply away from the disembodied arm just as preserved as everything else within the ship’s interior. This really is some horror movie, he could see where the fingers were wrapped desperately around a pipe that must’ve been near the ceiling, now instead uncomfortably close behind him.
“We need to set ‘em loose. It’s the right thing to do, they’re gone.”
”Gone? Gone, dead?” Rocky warbles out, resonance almost shrill with shock beyond the translation.
“Yeah bud.”
”But there is still– not dead. Not dead, no no no no, human not dead. Rocky hear it. Human not dead, human not dead, human not dead–!” Cycling over with wild limbs against the walls of his sphere, Rocky all but slams into his shoulder with a stubborn, wild insistence.
Sweat returns full force along the back of Grace’s neck, his hair standing on end. He turns sharply.
“Hear? Hear– hear, bud that’s a dead body! I don’t–”
”There is life! Rocky hear–!” his friend scrambles for the right word. ”Heartbeat! Heartbeat. Rocky hear heartbeat, not dead, not dead, not dead–”
Grace’s heart might’ve been in his throat before, but it drops straight to his stomach at the prospect. He stares, slack jawed at Rocky with just how frantic he is. Heart beat. Rocky’s hearing a heartbeat, which should be quite literally impossible– not that Rocky could hear it, no, he has no doubt Rocky can hear his heartbeat on the regular, especially if he can hear Grace whispering on the other side of the ship without strain. No. This person’s a corpse.
”Grace need to move, we need to fix–!”
Oh no. Oh no, oh no– if that’s the case, which it shouldn’t be, they’re floating here next to somebody pretty much completely encased in some kind of blood cocoon in a submarine that’d been flung into space, got splattered like the set of a Saw movie, and somehow got to their front doorstep.
And the person’s alive.
Jolting, he reaches out. A titter of relief breaks out of his companion, who drifts down with a bump against the lower wall of his sphere. He’ll help. Grace knows he will, but right now he’s not the one with opposable thumbs. Sucking in a wild breath, he reaches wildly towards the mess in an attempt to pull. His hands go fluttering over the shapes of those shoulders, away from the arm stump, and finally to work between the stranger’s body and the ‘floor’. Wall. Floor. It’s a floor.
With shocking ease, it gives. The gloves of his suit break through like he’s poking through saran wrap, baring space for him to cling. Working through more of it, it starts to give way, and he hopes, hopes beyond all hope that the atmosphere in here really is survivable for humans. He’s not brave enough to test that out, not with the stench permeating his helmet, but he works. There’s a person in here. There’s a person, and as gross and strange as this is, he’s dealt with bodies before. This person’s alive. Must be, because Rocky would never lie about that.
More room for a hold is revealed, around the head, baring tangled dark hair, around the shoulders, the right arm down to the elbow where it’s not clung to the stranger’s chest.
”Be careful statement,” Rocky bleats. “Heartbeat slow.”
“How slow?” Grace’s voice comes out more than a little shaky, working to grasp onto anything as he finally manages sink the fingertips of his gloves into… clothing. That’s clothing.
”Very slow.”
Maybe Rocky’s mistaken. He wouldn’t lie about it, but human biology had to be something weird to adjust to, right? There’s a chance he’s just wrong, or that he’s just as desperate as Grace for it to be true. For it not to be something terrible. For this to be salvageable like he’d hoped for two split seconds after waking he could help his crewmates.
Their crewmates.
They’d watched their crewmates die and seeing one more go isn’t fair.
It isn’t fair.
With that thought, the need to preserve what little life might be left in this person, Grace pulls.
The film gives. It comes apart in pieces, retaining its shape, not unlike acrylic paint on palettes in his classroom, the ones kids would leave to dry instead of covering up only to have to pop the top for the gooey insides.
Bad. Bad image.
Still, Rocky squawks. His limbs fly up to the sides of his biosphere wildly. ”Be more careful! Bad, bad, bad! Bad!”
“What!?” There’s not much to see in the dark, but Rocky rounds on the stranger as soon as they’re freed from the crevice of gore.
”Blood. Injured– coming out, bad bad bad, need Armando now!”
Grace can’t tell the difference. Not in zero gravity, not with most of his senses dulled by the dark and the suit, so he moves. With a firm grip on the stranger’s shoulders, he backs towards the hatch and maneuvers them both from it, like a pair of divers escaping a deep cave. Rounding on the stranger’s feet, Rocky offers a push to float along with them, keeping them moving, keeping them propelled.
The light remains tucked to his shoulder, flailing blindly against the bridge ceiling, the walls, Rocky’s biosphere– anywhere but the stranger.
Making quick work of the transfer together, they finally make it out of the secondary improvised chamber, into the Hail Mary’s decompression chamber, and finally into the main hall.
‘ꜰᴏʀᴇɪɢɴ ʙᴏᴅʏ ᴅᴇᴛᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ.’
Not helpful.
”Armando!” Rocky calls out. ”Armando!”
“Armando, we need the med-bay open yesterday!”
A horribly unusual trio, he and Rocky jettison the stranger straight back from the hurriedly shut outer doors and towards the long hall towards the medical bay.
Grace doesn’t often visit it. Not after waking up in it, finding Rocky indisposed. In fact, he hadn’t even gone to patch up his arm or nose or temple, which had forced Armando to chase him around while he busied himself with stabilizing a breeding environment for the taumeobas and watching for Rocky’s stasis. Free floating down it feels at once like a bad omen and a shot in the dark, and Grace finds himself staring down at the stranger as he propels himself backwards kick after kick to this person’s– what?
Last stop sanctuary?
Final resting pace?
No. No, no, Grace can’t allow himself to be pessimistic. Not now, not when this person managed to be alive despite all the impossible odds.
There’s a person here.
Another person.
Another human.
Alive, at least he hopes, at least Rocky seems confident enough to be frightened; verifiably encased in what he can only describe as thick, thick clots and films and layers of blood.
Wildly, Grace reaches to yank off his helmet and let it float.
Yeah, that’s blood. He can smell it. But not death. He’s smelled death too, and this isn’t it.
”Armando!” Rocky all but bellows again. The medical arm is whirring their way down its only track, but Grace can’t rip his eyes away from the stranger in his grasp.
He can’t breathe. Grace thinks he’s hyperventilating a little bit, but he can’t focus on that right now, not as he haphazardly attempts to wipe some of the tacky ichor from the stranger’s nose and mouth. The gloves prove to be way too bulky for something that precise, so he haphazardly yanks off his gloves and sends them floating too, bouncing along the floor like a kid in the pool trying to surface for air.
“Hey, hey, can you hear me?” He tries, wiping again. More of the coalesced coating comes apart, again in thready tacky tears not-entirely-dried paint. Away from the nose, away from the mouth– ears, ears. “We got you. I dunno if you can hear me, but we got you, it’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”
That might not be true, but Grace aches for it to be.
”Human not awake. Unconscious. Not hearing.” Rocky tries, as if catching on to his worry. As if offering some rationality might help the overwhelming panic leeching in through his senses.
“Sometimes it works.” He blabbers back. God, he has a lump in his throat. “Sometimes people say they can hear, so– if you can, oh my god, you’re– we can help. Please– please live.”
By the time Grace’s hands reach back up the stranger’s shoulders?
The stranger makes noise.
It’s a mere croak, dry and disconcerting, a puff out barely parting chapped lips but it’s there, and oh god, oh god oh god Rocky was right, there’s life in this stranger yet. Hope leaps astronomically in his chest right alongside the wild panic of possible failure.
“Hey! Hey, hey!”
”Waking up, question!?”
“I dunno, I dunno, hey, can you hear us?”
Armando’s speeding up to them, pincer arm extended to drag the stranger into its care. It’s clicking away, already sounding off diagnoses that sound awful, inescapable.
‘ʟᴏᴡ ʜᴇᴀʀᴛ ʀᴀᴛᴇ ᴅᴇᴛᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ. ʟᴏᴡ ʙᴏᴅʏ ᴛᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴀᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴅᴇᴛᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ. ʟᴏᴡ ᴏxʏɢᴇɴ ɪɴᴛᴀᴋᴇ ᴅᴇᴛᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ. ᴇʏᴇ ᴍᴏᴠᴇᴍᴇɴᴛ ᴅᴇᴛᴇᴄᴛᴇᴅ–’
And there is. There, darting beneath those blood-caked eyelids, movement. The quiet stoicism of that face has gone, something caught in a dream, a reality Grace has to face as Armando’s pincer gingerly takes the stranger’s leg and gently pulls the body towards the med-bay. Rocky falls back then, rolling forwards to the best of his ability to keep pace.
Grace lingers. Again, the only way he can explain it is that he’s compelled to, bringing his hands up to the sides of the stranger’s face. The left side feels uneven under all that, his palms are already coated with stinking flakes of the stuff, and wow– wow, when did he start crying?
When he realized the stranger was alive, possibly?
When Armando confirmed he was?
Grace suddenly hasn’t wanted to be around another human being more in his entire life.
“We’re gonna help you out, just– don’t die. Please don’t die.” He pleads to the stranger in a watery whisper, clinging to that face. Upside down, he seems just as dead as he did inside; but the eyes twitch again. “That’s it.”
”Grace get in way, need let Armando fix!”
“I know! I know, I know, just please– please, please don’t die, please don’t die, please– you need to live!”
At the threshold of the medical bay, he finally lets go. There he lingers, surrounded by a trail of blood clots he hadn’t even known had been forming from the stranger’s stump. His helmet, his gloves, they all float lamely yards away. The air feels stale. His throat feels heavy.
Slowly, Rocky sidles up to him. Not even an aimable bump from the biosphere breaks his stare.
”Will be okay, Grace. Statement. Will fix.” It’s offered with great caution. ”Will be… okay. Will be brave.”
Grace lets himself hover in the doorway, watching Armando’s quick work in triaging whatever multitude of issues there are at hand. He has to will himself not to touch his face with the stains rubbed raw across his palms.
“I hope so.”