Chapter Text
So, apparently NASA left another one. Another whole astronaut that they sent up to space and is now completely alone on Mars trying to keep himself alive. His name is Mark Watney, and the Hail Mary is supposed to swing by on our way home to pick him up.
I’ve been staring at the Hail Mary’s display, watching the space station flash morse code at me for more hours than I really want to think about for my own sanity. Rocky is not pleased, because I was supposed to be going to sleep about halfway through the whole ordeal, but his camera-translator isn’t nearly sensitive enough to pick up on the dust mote sized yellow flashes that Mary is showing me, so he occupies himself in the corner and hums grumbly chords about me being sleep-deprived and this being a desperately inefficient method of communication.
It is, in fact, a horrendously inefficient way to communicate trajectory and orbit instructions. However, I was supposed to die in space 11.9 light years away from home, so naturally they didn’t give me a way to communicate with anyone on Earth and our radio is for ship to EVA range only. Now I have several hours worth and a few dozen pages of dots and dashes written into a word doc on a laptop, which I will have to spend almost as much time translating.
I wait for five more minutes, staring at the empty display. No more flashes, thank god.
“Okay, we’re finally done. I’m gonna have to get another laptop out to translate this-”
“Grace sleep now. Statement.”
No, the alien-enforced bedtime has not changed now that my sleep deprivation isn’t as likely to kill both of us and our planets.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I am tired, just let me-”
“Not question. Statement.”
“Calm your farm, I have to let them know we got the message or they’re gonna keep flashing. I promise I will go to bed after that.”
He grumbles, but lets me pull up the morse code letter chart for reference and flick the spin drive on and off for ‘Thx. On it’.
Then I do finally go to bed, and Rocky settles next to me in his new xenonite suit to watch.
***
Okay, so, NASA wants me to do something completely insane. Granted, not more insane than the Adrian Fishing Incident, but insane for NASA as an actual space agency with like, professionals and standards. They’re going to put Watney in a space shuttle that he has gutted like a fish with a tarp on top and fling him into orbit for a slingshot maneuver, where the Hail Mary will intercept and take him on board. He’s apparently also bringing potatoes with him. This is obviously obscenely dangerous, but I have no place to judge. And of course, the other option is letting Watney die on Mars.
That’s not going to happen if I can do anything about it.
“Excited to see another human, question?”
“Ohmygosh, yeah, yes-” I’m tripping over myself. I’ve known that I’m going back to Earth, best friend by my side, and I will be able to talk to people again but the suddenness of this mission woke up that part of my brain early. I knew it in theoreticals, but now it’s here. We’re getting company. “Are you interested to see what humans that aren’t me are like?”
“Yes yes yes.” Rocky chimes, “Won’t be as good as Grace,” Aw shucks, this guy. “But hopefully less stupid about sleep.” Nevermind.
Rocky’s scuttling about the ship, using his echolocation to check everything works as it should. We’ve experienced about three years since I went back for him and although we’ve had some bumps along the way and I’ve been working on the Tau-chow (what I have been calling the process of trying to make Taumoeba a better food for me) pretty much the whole time, it’s easy to get bored and go a little stir crazy. At a certain point, Rocky got paranoid about the ship and drove me insane with questions, so we sat down and spent a while getting him up to scratch with how the Hail Mary works, and now he knows the ship better than I do. No surprise there. He does checks regularly and when things need fixing I just do whatever he tells me to without question.
He comes back up to the control room, using the tunnel. His xenonite exo-suit is a new invention, and we’re slowly testing it in increased periods of exposure to work out any kinks. Rocky was so excited when he fixed the circulation issue and it held up without issues for six hours, he wanted to be able to be with me while I sleep like humans, so I didn’t put up a fuss about the less-than-reliable test conditions of going straight from six hours to eight. We both agreed that was where we would cap it for now though until he has the time to go back and check it under scrutiny.
“Question.”
“Fire away.”
“Why Earth want astronaut home so much.” I haven’t given Watney a name translation for Rocky, I figured that was something he could do for himself once he gets here.
“Uh, well, why wouldn’t they? I mean, they couldn’t explain a lot to me but they thought he died, and they didn’t mean to leave him behind.”
“Sent Grace up in ship without plan for return, but use so many resources to get astronaut home from Mars. Does not make sense.”
Ah, jeez. Rocky has a… grudge, with the space agencies of Earth responsible for the decisions that went into Project Hail Mary. Some days he has a grudge against the Earth itself, which caused a couple arguments when I first came back for him and we were deciding where we next go together. I’m not even going to try to talk him out of hating Stratt for the next five centuries of his life (honestly why would I), but I am going to make sure they never end up in the same building. If I didn’t come from a fascinating alien planet and it wasn’t practically impossible for me to survive in Erid’s atmosphere, I think Rocky would have smugly spirited me away to his home planet and spat in Earth’s face that he gets to keep me.
It’s sweet, it is, that he’s so protective of me. I just hope he doesn’t take it out on Watney.
“Honestly, Rock, it’s probably because of that exact thing.”
“Explain.”
There comes a time as a teacher where you think that this time, really, you’ve hit your limit of insane stuff you have to explain to another being. You’d be wrong, because you haven’t had to explain the concept of PR to an alien.
Here we go. “Well, when the public first knew about Project Hail Mary, and the fact that it was a one-way trip, they weren’t angry. It made sense to knowingly sacrifice a few good people, when so many more on Earth were going to die if we didn’t solve it. It was noble, not unfair. But now that they know I survived, sending me up to space probably seems cruel instead of necessary. It’s a bad look on NASA, and even though it might be a lot of effort to get Watney home, it’s worth it to keep the public’s favour. For organisations like NASA that are supposed to be in service of everyone, if the people don’t think they’re doing a good job, it limits what they can do.” And then I say, “And they probably do feel bad and do care about not sending more people to an unnecessary death in space.”
Rocky hums. “There is specific word, for change easily without logic.”
I see where he’s going with this. “The word you’re probably looking for is fickle.”
“Human opinion very fickle.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
The Hail Mary has been continually decelerating since we approached the edge of the milky way, because the 11,000 kilometres per second we have been going to travel through galaxies is almost twenty times too fast to not be flung out of the sun’s gravitational pull and back into the depths of space. We’ve now slowed all the way to (what feels like) a glacial 24kps to get us into Mars’ orbit. NASA said that Watney is going to be lifting off from the Schiaparelli crater and reaching low orbit at 4kps, less than half of what it takes to get off Earth, although he’s still going to be whammied by the G-force of liftoff and likely unconscious by the time we get him. There wasn’t a lot but barebones explanations and numbers that NASA were able to get to us over morse code, as well as an estimated UTC time. I’ve been in deep space moving so fast for so long that time kind of means nothing to me at this point, but presuming that the solar system hasn’t been knocked off course since I’ve been on Earth, I’ll be able to calculate the interception time in days and hours relative to the Hail Mary using the everything laptops Stratt sent up with me.
After some mental math (with a calculator, a whiteboard, and multiple tabs up on the laptop to make sure I’m doing it right), the number is 61 days and 21 hours - or 59.9 Martian Sols - until interception.
I wonder how Watney feels about it. I got barely any information about who he is and I’m trying not to apply my own experiences onto his, because as much as I ultimately am glad that what happened to me did and I got to meet Rocky and save my home, I was dragged kicking and screaming onto the ship. Watney is actually a real astronaut, the kind who trained for and signed up to go into space. I don’t know what he’s like, but I can’t help but imagine Yao, a level, brave man in a hard situation trusting that he can do what he needs to. To be honest though, my reference point for astronauts isn’t nearly as encompassing as my experiences with scientists, and Yao was just about the only guy I interacted with who was a commander more than he was a scientist. You have to be in STEM in some capacity to be an astronaut, but most of the people I interacted with while working on Project Hail Mary were ginormous nerds who would rather argue about Panspernia with me than do the physical training necessary to go to space. Maybe then Watney’s more like Ilyukhina, who came straight from Roscosmos’s candidate pool of potential astronauts, and certainly didn’t fit any of the stern stereotypes that Yao did. Or Rocky, who I couldn’t have possibly predicted in any way at all.
I guess I’ll find out.
We spend the two months in Mars’ orbit the same way we’ve spent all our space travel so far, regularly checking the ship is doing what it’s supposed to, working on respective projects, and hanging out.
The Tau-Chow is… coming along. The flavour was easier than the nutrition is proving to be, it’s just chemistry to trick my brain into not throwing it up. As opposed to the complicated and obscured processes of how nutrients interact with each other and the biochemistry of my body for me to stay healthy. Wikipedia provided most of the guidance on flavour, and while formulating Ocyl Acetate for alien lifeforms doesn’t make it taste like oranges, it definitely makes it more tolerable. Which is good, because I realised I needed to start eating it as soon as I made sure it was edible. I’m now three years into an evenly balanced diet of artificially flavoured Taumeoba, coma slurry, and real food. Yum. It wasn’t a fun choice, but it was far and away the most logical, otherwise I’d be forcing my body to switch from scientifically designed and perfectly nutritionally fulfilling meals to the empty calories of Taumeoba like quitting cold turkey. Except instead of drug withdrawals, I’d be getting scurvy and osteomalacia. As it is, I’ve lost all the muscle mass that Armando had been stimulating for me while in the coma, and I’ve steadily been getting slower and more consistently exhausted as the days go on. The Taumoeba padding out my meals means I know I won’t die of starvation before I get to Earth like I thought I was going to, but the malnutrition is more of a slowburn issue I’m hoping I can sort out before it becomes really detrimental and irreversible to my health. And while my specialty in microbiology and how cells work is helping, it’s not the same as being a nutritionist.
Although if Watney is bringing special, Martian-grown potatoes, that might solve a few of those problems.
When the frustration of scientific stagnation and the encroaching dread of my own worsening health gets too much, I turn to whatever recreational project I have going at the moment, which is usually making games that Rocky and I can play together. The first time that the boredom of space travel really hit, a few months in and realising with the Taumeoba how much I was not a chemist, Rocky and I got into a blowout fight about something really stupid. I can’t even remember the point of it now, but the resolution of that fight was a joint project to make an adapted controller so he could play videogames with me in the don’t-go-crazy room from inside the xenonite ball. Unsurprisingly, Rocky likes Minecraft best, but we have some good fun with It Takes Two and MarioKart as well.
I have been trying and failing to come up with a way to play cards with him for the whole trip. I want to show him the quintessential human experience that is having to draw 16 cards in one turn during Uno and declaring war against your closest companions because of it, but he can’t see colours and there’s no way to make the cards textural without him being able to sense all of my hand as well. We’ve also 3D printed and adapted a lot of board games for a split atmosphere, but you don’t realise how many games are based in cultural experience until you try to play them with an alien. Risk and Monopoly were both busts unfortunately. Jenga was a hit, but I think that’s just because Rocky enjoys winning against me every time without fail.
I once had some students back on Earth who were really into Dungeons and Dragons and liked to tell me about their campaign (probably because even as a teacher I still broadcast ‘I am a ginormous nerd’ to everyone in a five mile radius), and I do think Rocky would enjoy playing. In particular I think he’d like the tactile aspect of rolling dice, and he’s said before that Eridian culture is one of oral storytelling. It’d be really easy to do from each side of the atmosphere barrier too. However, we encounter the same roadblock that’s always stopped me from playing before, which is that we’d need more people for it.
Hmm… is three enough? Two players and me running it?
I decide to wipe my whiteboard clean of its collection of miscellaneous equations and out of context notes, and I start writing a list of questions to ask Watney when he gets here. I put ‘would want to play DnD?’ at number one, then I wipe it off and add it under ‘how’s Earth doing?’, because it just feels kind of wrong to rank Dungeons and Dragons above the state of our home planet. I’ve certainly got other questions too, like ‘potatoes?????’ and ‘what happened on Mars?’ which get scribbled underneath. Rocky also has a couple that he wants to ask other humans, subjective experiences I don’t have universally applicable answers for. I tell him that some of them are personal and he might have to wait a bit before bombarding Watney, but they go on the board anyway.
After that, I go and clean up the dormitory area, feeling buzzy and excited at the prospect of sharing space with another human being. This has happened several times over, I’ve settled into a routine of waiting and space travel that isn’t really all that different from what it’s been like for the past few years aboard the Hail Mary, and every now and again something happens that seems to reintroduce my brain to the reality of what’s about to happen. Human brains are extraordinarily good at adapting, and thus, also quite bad at holding onto the things that are not currently happening to you. But I’m cleaning my living space for a guest, and I’m thinking about what we’re going to talk about once he gets here, and so my brain remembers to activate the happy emotions instead of just the rational parts.
Rocky does not clear up what’s on his side of the xenonite, because he’s a hypocrite.
***
“You ready for company, pal?” I strap myself into the pilot’s chair with T minus three hours and 30 minutes until interception. We won’t know Watney’s true final orbit until his engines are cut, and we’ll have to do some maths on the fly to find the exact velocity and distance we’ll need to cover to reach him. The intercept has to be within 100 metres, because that’s how much safety tether we have for me to do an EVA to catch Watney. It’ll be a slim margin of error, but I saved my planet, I’m deciding I've earned some optimism here and I believe we can manage it.
“Yes. Very ready. Collect astronaut time go”
“You heard him, Mary, let’s go get our astronaut.”
I adjust the sensitivity on the Hail Mary’s external scanners so to better reflect the distance we need to be working with. Being in deep space rewires your brain, it makes you think that several million miles is equivalent to walking distance and asteroids as big as a city are unobstructive little dots on a screen, so I need to manually scale it in as far as it will go. Else we could fly right by Watney without even seeing him through the window because 10 miles apart looks like we’re practically on top of each other in the display.
It’ll be fine… probably.
Slowly and gently, I dip us further down to Mars, checking all the while that nothing crazy is happening. Miraculously, nothing crazy is happening. The numbers all check out, we have the engines off in orbit and we’re set to be the right altitude over the Schiaperelli crater and crossing paths at the same velocity and time we’re supposed to. Rocky’s on engine duty, making sure that the power of astrophage isn’t obliterating anything it shouldn’t. We really do not want a repeat of what we did to the fuel tanks at Adrian, nor do we want to set the atmosphere on fire with the IR light.
T minus two hours, everything is as it should be.
T minus one hour and 20 minutes, Watney should be a little dot at the edge of the display any second now.
T minus 58 minutes, Mary is not informing me that we have detected a Blip-A. Something has gone wrong.
“Rocky, is the ship doing what she should be?” I ask, half hoping it’s a ship problem, because at least then we could fix it.
“Yes. I perform checks, Hail Mary functioning perfectly.”
“No damage to the radar or external sensors at all?”
There’s some scuttling from Rocky and a few more moments of silence while he seems to ‘look’ at them under scrutiny, before he says “No damage. All wires and small parts sound healthy. Something is wrong, question?”
“Watney’s not showing up on Mary’s radar, he’s not in range even though he should be by now.” I say, my heart sinking into my gut as I talk. “I hoped it would be a mechanics problem you could handle.”
“Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh.” Rocky chimes. He picked up that particular quirk of speech from me, and it usually makes me laugh, but not this time.
Okay, I’m stressed now. My heart and my brain are both going very fast in a very uncomfortable manner. Is this what it felt like when I figured out I was alone in space, or when we went fishing at Adrian, or when the Taumeoba ate all my fuel? It’s been a while since I’ve been stressed like this, I’m out of practice.
Think, Grace, think.
It’s not the ship, and it’s not our course. I have to assume that we’re good for both of those, because Rocky would find any mechanical or technological problems and I’ve ran the numbers forwards and backwards and every other way I can think of to make sure they’re right when we don’t have Houston to guide us. So something must be going wrong on Watney’s end. Maybe the liftoff angle wasn’t accurate, it only takes one degree of error to end up totally off-course over hundreds of kilometres. Or something went wrong with the fuel and mass tradeoffs when they were modifying the shuttle, and Watney hasn’t made it as far off the surface as they thought he would by now.
Or an accident happened that no one could plan for and he’s just not here-
I go back to the override controls and scale the display back out. I hope Mary’s sensors can find him, one person in a gutted out shuttle is so small compared to the vastness of space. To reassure myself, I hang onto the memory of Blip-B when I made contact with Rocky for the first time, a canister no bigger than my head that the ship had been able to alert me to.
“Blip-A detected.” Oh thank god.
“Found astronaut, question?” Rocky asks.
“Yep, the good news is that the ship can see Watney now and he has lifted off of Mars.” I say. “The bad news is- well, I have to do the math on the bad news first, but we definitely won’t be within 100 metres and the right velocity for intercept.”
“Do calculations, then we fix.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it.”
I’m not an orbital mechanic. It takes me more time than I’m comfortable spending in a crunch to figure out Watney’s orbit, but I can use the Hail Mary’s radar to intermittently give me enough points of data about his location and how it’s changing, then use that to calculate his velocity and all the other orbital dynamics relevant to the body of Mars and to us. It’s good to have the numbers, but they aren’t promising.
“Alright, so the intercept velocity is 11 metres per second, which we can manage-”
“Distance, question?”
“I was just getting to that.” I cringe pre-emptively as I say, “We’ll be 68 kilometres apart.”
Rocky trills some expletives that I haven’t cataloged into my mental dictionary. “That is not good.”
“No, it really isn’t. We can speed up to get in range, but the intercept range itself is so small we absolutely do not have the ability to decelerate enough not to go whizzing by him. Not to mention the damage the astrophage engine output could do to Watney if the spin drives are still on once we do get in range.”
We have 42 minutes to figure out a solution and make it happen before we lose our chance and leave him floating in empty space with no way of rescue after that.
I will not leave Mark Watney to die alone in space, I refuse to let that happen.
“We could compromise intercept range.” Rocky offers up.
“How?” I ask, “100 metres is all the tether we have linked as one rope, that’s as far as I’m able to go.”
“Still have xenonite chains from Taumeoba fishing. Work very fast, link back together, then attach one end to Grace and other to airlock.”
Holy crap, now there’s an idea. It took an eternity with both of us working to make the chain the first time around, but we don’t have to make them one by one anymore. They get stored in 500 metre chunks for space, and we’ve been using them as a store of xenonite to melt down and remake as needed. There’s got to be at least six kilometres of it left. It’s an unwieldy amount of metal, but I have faith in Rocky. He’s a very fast worker and just as creative.
“Rocky, you’re a genius.”
“Not a genius. Just use tools available.”
“Okay well, we can argue about your humility later. For now, how long do you think it will take you to link them? I need to know our new intercept range before I can decide how we’re going to catch up to him.”
“There is 7.284 kilometres of chain left. I measure every time.” God, he really is the best alien engineer a guy could ask for. “Will take about 1200 seconds.
“Including the time it will take to attach to the airlock?”
“Yes. No more talking. Must work now.” He scuttles off. Godspeed, buddy.
Our intercept range is now 7284 metres, which is leagues more margin of error to work with and hopefully enough to succeed. I can do a short, intense burst with the spin drives to get our velocity up and make sure we don’t obliterate the guy, but there’s still the issue of slowing down once we’re in range. Seven kilometres of reach doesn’t mean anything if the intercept velocity works out to be 42 metres a second. Spaceships aren’t designed to break or decelerate in any rapid manner, why would they need to, across such wide distances? And the Hail Mary in particular is completely incompatible with the idea of going in reverse to cancel out the acceleration, we’d be vaporising ourselves with the Astrophage. I miss the beetles for a second, and their ability to be impromptu engines, until I remember that they were of course also Astrophage powered and if we pointed them in Watney’s direction, he’d be a goner.
I rack my brain for solutions, but I keep coming back to the beetles. What if we had another power source we could attach to the front of the ship? Our only fuel is Astrophage and Rocky doesn’t have the time to build something like another engine, but it could be doable somehow right? All we need is a way to generate thrust from the front of the ship and not just the back, it doesn’t have to be elegant or technological.
… I could make a bomb? All engines are kind of bombs, when you really get down to it.
I could make several bombs, and set them off intermittently so we slow down more gradually than we speed up. We have the chemical components, Rocky would attest that we have more than enough oxygen to make things blow up.
I activate the spin drives, feeling briefly lightheaded from the intense change in acceleration before I cut them off again and hurry down to the lab. It's not hard to make a bomb, and you tend to learn what things will blow up at you when you’re trying to make sure your 14 year old students won’t accidentally blow anything up in lab pracs. The creativity comes in making sure I can aim it, so we actually get the thrust we need and not just a blown up ship. The solution ends up being a long xenonite pipe that I don’t know why Rocky left on my side of the space (he’s focusing on the chains right now, better to ask forgiveness than permission right?) with a heck of a bomb at one end with a slow-burning fuse, and a propellant at the other to give it enough speed so that when it fires, it’s far enough in front of us to not damage Mary.
Basically, I’m making a massive, slap-dash gun and I’m going to fire it from the edge of the airlock towards the front of our ship to slow us down. It’s an inexact science, which is definitely not my favourite kind of science, but that’s what the 7284 metres of xenonite chain is for.
It says a lot about the stakes of this situation that Rocky doesn’t even call me crazy or stupid when he hears the plan.
With the new suit instead of just the hamster ball and the barrier, Rocky is able to link the chains together and carry them himself up to the airlock. They’re coiled onto a winch, fixed to the floor when I go up in the EVA suit with my slow-down-gun, and I attach myself immediately. Rocky proves himself once again to be the best engineer this side of every galaxy, because he’s managed to perfectly replicate the clips on my regular safety tethers for the chains. Once the airlock closes on the Hail Mary’s side, I’m not going back until we have Watney. Rocky can’t pilot, but he has his camera to see Mary’s displays and he’ll tell me the information when I need it.
I fire the slow-down-gun out the side of the airlock and then close the door. Even from inside I can tell the blast is massive.
“Ship slowing. Is promising.”
We love to hear it.
“I’m going to go out as soon as we’re within range.” I say. “Firing again now.” It takes two more shots, and then we reach 20 metres per second and slowing. We’ve managed a viable intercept range and it’s damn near a miracle. I open the airlock into space, and exit the Hail Mary.
Mars is a beautiful planet. All planets are stunning things when viewed up close. It’s a sight that very few get to see, and Mars is no different. A patchy, dusky red that looks like someone slotted a copper coin into the universe.
I only get to look at it for a few brief seconds, though, because Watney is coming in hot. And, wow, NASA really undersold the violence committed upon the MAV. It’s barely recognisable as a space shuttle, looking more like a giant plastic bottlecap that someone threw past the atmosphere. The tarp is gone completely, shuttle completely hollowed, which strikes me as the likely source of our intercept problem. It must have created unanticipated drag.
In the vast emptiness of space, the distance between Watney and I closes. I am tense the whole time I watch him approach, wondering if he’s going to go straight by me, just out of reach. But the closer he gets, the surer I am that we’re aligned.
We’re going to make it.
The contact, even through EVA suits, of my palm hitting Watney’s as we grab onto each other is something I feel in my whole body. Another human being, gripping my hand. This close, I can see Watney’s face through his helmet. His eyes are wide-eyed and wet with relief, and his hair is stuck to his forehead from stress sweat. I’m sure I look the same, and I can’t help but try to smile at him. I’m looking at a human face again, it feels unreal. I have an extra regular safety tether hooked to my suit at one end, and I clip the other onto Watney. I hold onto his forearms anyway.
“I got our astronaut, Rock. Reel us in.”
“Yes yes yes.”