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The journey home had started out pretty well once we’d figured out the practical logistics. A few weeks in, when it really sank in that he wasn’t going back to Earth, Grace had a complete meltdown that lasted a couple of Earth days, but once that was out of his system and he came to terms with his new reality, things settled down and became almost humdrum. Or as humdrum as life aboard a spacecraft travelling well beyond its lifespan ever could be. Grace tried to treat the whole thing like he was going on an adventure from one of the many movies and books he consumed, and for a long time, that seemed to work.
It was only in the last few months that I noticed things starting to go wrong. Grace had warned me years before about the effects of long-term isolation and incarceration on the human brain. There was a reason his crew had been put into dangerous comas for their voyage to Tau Ceti after all. He was gradually becoming angrier, quicker to get upset, and constantly on edge. The food situation didn’t help. For years he had lived exclusively off the ship’s dwindling supply of coma slurry, which provided him with adequate nutrition but none of the varied textures and flavours his species required. He forced it down three times a day, becoming fractionally more miserable with every meal. It was awful to watch, but there was nothing I could do beyond assure him that once we reached Erid, my people would prioritise figuring out his nutritional needs. He seemed less and less inclined to believe me.
In fact, Grace was becoming more and more stressed about our arrival at Erid the closer we got. What had begun as him showing me fictional Earth stories about aliens: War of the Worlds, Men in Black, Independence Day, Metalstorm, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and others had slowly mutated into an obsession with alien conspiracy theories. I would find him reading late into the night. Whenever he finally succumbed to sleep, I would ask Mary to show me his history only to find it filled with horror stories. Aliens captured on Earth, held prisoner at their Area 51 and subjected to terrifying experiments for years on end. None of it seemed believable, but Grace was clearly succumbing to it.
On the rare occasions he brought the subject up with me, I assured him over and over again that such ideas were an entirely human construct. Erid had no such fiction, no history of cruel experimentation on those deemed 'other'; he had nothing to fear. It was clear that he didn’t believe me. On good days he would accuse me of simple naivety; I was too good and too kind, incapable of believing that my species could be capable of such horrors. On bad days he saw me as complicit. I gave up trying to reason with him; logic was no longer capable of penetrating the prison of fear he had constructed inside his own mind. The only thing that would get through to him was the proof when we finally arrived.
However, as the final months of our journey became weeks, that arrival started to feel increasingly out of reach. I could barely talk to Grace any more; he lived permanently inside his own head, jumping at imagined monsters in every shadow. Screaming in his sleep and begging me not to let them take him. I knew what he was imagining but was powerless to stop it. I watched as his heart rate climbed, his resting rate climbing with every passing day and his bloodstream permanently drowning in cortisol. Mary was concerned too, repeatedly calling out alerts about Grace’s health that he ignored.
Today was the last straw. I had awoken to find Grace missing. The final thing from our routine that he had stuck to was watching me sleep, but now he was gone. I fought back the hurt and went to look for him, eventually finding him in the pilot’s seat. He was doing something with our navigation screen.
”Grace?”
He startled, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read even after years together.
”What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer. I looked over at my reader, which replicated his readouts, and felt a sense of panic.
“Grace adjust course so miss Erid?” I asked carefully through the translator.
Grace’s heart rate skyrocketed.
”I won’t let them take me,” he ground out. “I won’t!”
”Grace,” I started slowly, but he was up out of his seat and pacing.
“I adjusted it to a wider orbit. They can send out a ship and you’ll be able to figure out some way to transfer from here to there without us having to dock. That way no one will be able to get me.”
”Grace needs to come with Rocky to Erid. Grace needs food, needs doctors.”
”No!” He screamed, putting his head in his hands and shaking back and forth. ‘No, no, no, no, no…”
”Cardiac distress detected,” Mary piped up. It shouldn't be possible for her to sound worried, but I could have sworn that was happening now.
”Grace must relax,” I tried hopelessly. I could see the way his heart was beating so fast it seemed like it might take flight. All his muscles were tense, his body positively aflame with every possible biomarker of stress and abject terror. He was going to give himself heart failure or a stroke if he kept this up. I couldn't allow that to happen. To get so close to home and for Grace not to make it because of something that wasn’t even real, a feared scenario made up completely in his own head.
I had planned for this. We both had to some extent. After the fishing incident, when we knew we would be travelling together for the long haul, Grace had decided it was important that I be able to pilot Mary too just in case anything were to happen to him. I had designed myself an EVA suit like Grace’s that would allow me more manoeuvrability in his atmosphere, and he had taught me the controls until I was almost as good as he was. We had also built several more translator screens that attached to the cockpit and gave me permanent displays of all the critical readouts. It wouldn’t be a problem for me to correct whatever adjustments he had made this morning. The problem was Grace himself.
I was significantly stronger, so I could easily overpower him and get to the nav screens, but he would just readjust them again next time I slept. He might even figure out a way to lock me out of the system; his brain clearly wasn’t capable of rational thought anymore. The worst-case scenario, the one I’d planned for but hoped and prayed I’d never have to use, was becoming a reality.
Grace was still screaming, ranting about how he wouldn’t let them take him, how he would rather die than spend his life locked in a cage being experimented upon. There was no sense in trying to talk to him; I knew that now. My friend was lost to me. Erid would save him; I knew it would. My people were good, kind, they would do whatever it took to care for the saviour of the planet and restore him to health, both physically and mentally. But first I had to get him to them.
One of the experiments I had conducted while Grace slept was to learn whether Mary could hear instructions from me that were spoken at frequencies outside of Grace’s range of hearing. Thankfully, this had been a success. I gave her an instruction now that only she and I could hear, hating myself as I did so.
I saw Armando appear behind Grace and wished briefly that I were able to cry. Had some visual way to show Grace how much this was hurting me too. I stepped up in front of him with my arms open like I was trying to hug him. As I predicted, he backed away, straight into Armando. He didn’t even have time to react before we had him pinned.
If I’d thought the screaming was bad before, it was nothing on now. Grace howled and fought like a wild animal. I’d never seen him this strong, this terrified. He almost succeeded in pushing me away from him because I simply hadn’t prepared to encounter this level of resistance from my beloved squishy space blob. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he realised that Armando was holding a needle. The way his expression morphed between terror and hatred.
“You’re one of them!” He screamed, fighting harder than ever, still sobbing. “Please, please don’t!”
“Rocky sorry,” I told him, “Rocky need Grace to live.”
I gave Armando the final instruction, and he carefully stuck the needle into Grace.
His eyes never left my carapace as he fought a losing battle to keep them open, and all I could see in them was betrayal. I was forcing him to relive the worst moment of his life, and I couldn’t make him understand that this time, it was only to keep him safe.
“Is for Grace own good,” I whispered gently, stroking his hair as the drug won over and he sagged in Armando’s arms. “Rocky hope one day soon, Grace understand.”
I told Armando to take Grace to the dormitory and make him comfortable, with instructions to keep the sedative topped up for the time being, and then I made my way to the cockpit screens and began to undo the damage and restore our trajectory to arrive at Erid as fast as possible.
Once again, I was alone.