Chapter Text
Dr. Jasper “Rocky” Rockwell wakes up a long way from home. The rest of his crew does not.
Once he’s finished wiggling away from the robot arms and regaining the use of his limbs, he climbs the bunks to find Dubois and Yao curled in their beds, shriveled, cold, and so terribly small. When Rocky sees them, he pukes thin, watery, bitter bile. Then he cries.
The first few days are the worst. He spends those going through Yao and DuBois’s personal items, preparing their bodies, and thinking about them. Rocky loved them both so much, so intensely. They were supposed to accomplish this mission together. The three of them against the universe. What a joke.
On the third day awake, Rocky eats his breakfast of rice porridge with hot sauce, tucks Yao’s bucket hat and Dubois’s ancient iPod among his own things, and finally brings their remains to the airlock.
“Yao,” he starts without further ceremony, ignoring the crack in his voice, the lump in his throat. “You were a brave, kind, encouraging commander. You had great taste in karaoke songs, a good laugh, and… you never stopped smiling. Even when everyone around you couldn’t. I wouldn’t have agreed to this mission without you leading it. I don’t–I’m not sure what to do now.” Rocky pauses, looking at Yao’s dry, gnarled hands wrapped around his photos and letters. All that kindness, all that bravery and intuition. Gone, and Rocky could do nothing to stop it.
He clears his throat and turns to DuBois. “You were so, so smart, Martin. I couldn’t even believe it when I first met you. You carried yourself with this confidence I was always jealous of. Like you knew who you were, what you were meant for. And your humor! God, at first I thought you were one of the most boring people I’d ever talked to. But you taught me not to confuse straightforward with humorless, because you’d get this twinkle in your eye, and then you say something with such an even face that everyone in the room would crack up. And you’d smile this little self-satisfied smile.”
Rocky looks at one picture he’s holding onto: the three of them a few days before launch. Yao grins wide, while Rocky and DuBois’s smiles are more subdued. “I’ll never see either of you smile again,” he says to himself.
And the tears drip down his cheeks again, silent and unyielding. “I can’t do this by myself. I don’t know how.” The words gasp and warble with Rocky’s sobs. “I’m not smart or brave. I was only here to fix stuff.” His knees weaken, then hit the airlock floor. He ignores the pain shooting through them, just grabs Yao’s hand, then DuBois’s. The last time he will ever hold a human hand, and they are leathery and dead against his palms. He squeezes them tighter.
“But I’ll still try. I have to,” Rocky says, swallowing his tears before he can drown in them. He lets go of Yao’s hand to dab off his face. “They believe in us back home. You guys believed in me, too.” He stands up, steps back and lets himself out of the airlock. With the click of a few buttons, the depressurization begins. “I won’t let you down.”
There’s another ship out here. And Rocky is hiding in the dormitory because of it.
He’s a big enough man to admit that this shit freaks him out. They’d barely discovered unintelligent alien life. Now Rocky’s gotta go make First Contact? He was never the Star Trek fan. That had always been DuBois’s thing.
But it’s Rocky here, curled up at the very back of his sleeping cubby, thinking about that break in Tau Ceti’s Petrova line. Mapping out the sharp angles and boxy design that made the ship incredibly fuel-inefficient(Why would they build it like that?). Wondering if he should roll up and introduce himself or make a break for the other side of the solar system.
The Hail Mary blares “Blip B detected” into the dormitory with little ceremony. Rocky jumps, and then, very reluctantly pokes his head out and heads for the cockpit. If his ship is talking to him, that means something is happening, and he can’t be hiding in the back while it is.
They’re sending him something. A small something, the size and shape of a thermos is tumbling head over heels at him. That means someone is gonna have to go out there and get it. Rocky groans and goes to pull on his EVA suit. The spacewalk practice comes back to him, so the Hail Mary only provides him with minimal instructions.
“Two tethers,” he reminds himself, hooking one to a loop nearby. “Always one attached.” With a couple taps of the control pad, the air lock depressurizes and opens.
It’s so cold and empty and dark out here, Rocky’s stomach turns in his suit. No matter how many pool walk simulations he did on Earth, the fear still lurked in the corners of his mind. There’s no lifeguard to pull him out of this one.
The glint of the silver container forces him to look away from the endless pit of stars below. It’s approaching fast, and still maybe 30 feet from hitting the ship. So Rocky hooks his second tether to the outside of the ship, detaches the first, and makes a break for his prize.
It’s close but he’s able to grab the thing, hold it back up to show the ship he has a hold of it(hopefully they’re paying attention), and then turn around to head back inside. “EVA walks,” Rocky mutters with distaste. So much work for so little reward. Oh well. At least he’s holding an actual alien artifact right now.
That breaks through the numbness that Rocky’s been feeling since leaving DuBois and Yao behind, and the corners of his mouth twitch upwards, a giddy laugh bubbling up from his stomach. Oh, wow. Aliens!
Aliens are real, and they want to talk to Rocky! “Jesus Christ,” he’s smiling genuinely now. “Oh my God. What a way to start the fucking day.”
He only bothers to take off his helmet before removing himself to the lab. Then he sits at one of the tables, sets the silver cylinder down, and thinks.
How would DuBois approach this? Gather some data probably, look at it with a little crinkle in his eyebrow, then announce some Holmesian conclusion he’d come to based off of the evidence in front of him.
The second part, Rocky probably couldn’t do. But the first…
He grabs a measuring tape out of one of the drawers and notes its dimensions. Then he takes a video of it from all angles, noting out loud the seam at the top and bottom. Finally, he breaks out the XRF spectrometer to see what the thing is made of. Xenon, it tells him.
“No, it’s fucking not,” Rocky says out loud. He may not be the science officer but Rocky knows the periodic table well enough to remember his noble gases. And the fact that they are gases. But a second and third scan reports the same thing, while scanning the table itself yields aluminum.
But who the hell cares? It’s from an alien planet, it might as well be xenon.
Okay. He’s too curious to wait any longer, so after a brief struggle with the screw threading(aliens prefer lefty-tighty righty-loosey, who knew?) Rocky opens one side of the container. Then gags, drops the thing and backs away.
“What the hell?” It smells like a litterbox that hasn't been cleaned in far too long. Rocky stretches the collar of his t-shirt over his nose and slowly approaches again to pull a lumpy metallic structure out of the container. An uneven sphere with a wobbly arc protruding from the top of it. Whoever made this isn’t familiar with sculpting in this medium. Huh. Maybe Rocky can do some deductions of his own.
He unscrews the other side next, bracing for the same foul smell(Ammonia! Why is this thing filled with ammonia?), and finds… a map of the stars! The halo of metal dots is extending from the central connector in a pattern Rocky wouldn’t be able to forget if he tried. One of the dots isn’t silver like its brothers, but instead clear. This must be the aliens’ star.
Rocky pulls up a second copy of the star map on one of his screens, and matches it to the aliens’. 40 Eridani. That’s a long ways away.
It’s only kind to return the favor, so Rocky double checks the position of Sol. The last thing he wants to do is fuck this up and accidentally tell an alien race that he’s from Alpha Centauri. Then he pulls out his soldering tools, adds a little arrow pointing to the dot representing his home, and packs the map back inside its cylinder. One more EVA walk sends the container clipping along at a steady pace back to the alien ship. Hopefully they don’t leave him on read.
They don’t. In fact, they set up a substantially sturdier connection, via a tunnel made of the same solid xenon connecting Rocky’s airlock to their ship. Rocky uses the Hail Mary to pressurize his side of the tunnel so he doesn’t have to meet aliens in his EVA suit. He wants to make a good impression.
The tunnel is dark, really dark. No matter how long it is, Rocky had expected to see some light from the alien’s side of it. But he’s not a complete idiot, so he grabs an assortment of flashlights, shoves most of them in the slots of his toolbelt and switches the largest one on. It bathes the tunnel in cold white light, and Rocky finally floats inside.
Not too long after starting down, something glints off Rocky's flashlight in the distance of the tunnel. As he approaches, the glint widens and fades to reveal a clear wall, and behind it…
“Holy shit!” Rocky can’t stop himself from saying, awed and a little frightened at the same time. He gets a bit closer and switches up the brightness on his flashlight for a better look.
Floating behind the wall is a dog-sized gray rock with five arms, fiddling with a tangle of silvery wire. He’s covered in rusty red patches, with a few brighter red crystals embedded in his shoulders and arms. As Rocky floats close enough to the wall to touch it, the rock-spider thing perks up and…whistles at him.
“Um, hello.” Rocky lifts a hand slowly. The rock spider chitters and attempts to lift one back. But it’s tangled in wire, and the force that the alien uses to tug it free sends his body reeling backwards and thumping against the side of the tunnel. Rocky tries to keep a straight face.
“I’ll call you Grace,” he says. “Clearly you have plenty of it.”