Chapter Text

Grace had become quite comfortable in the silence of space, thank you very much.

He’d had to, really - as much as talking with Rocky had kept him sane throughout the actual work of the mission, it was absolutely a luxury in the void of space. Just one more item on the list of things that he simply had to learn to live without, for fear of having completely lost his mind by the time he got back to Earth (back to Earth - the words alone gave him chills).

Even Mary didn’t have much to say to him anymore. In his first waking days upon the ship, he’d forgotten how a person was supposed to care for themselves and deferred all responsibility onto the ship’s medical protocols, the constant chiming-in of the mechanical presence offering him some degree of company. But with Grace finally settling into a diet and regimen that kept him healthy (leaving out as much coma slurry as possible, that stuff was nasty) and the ship on a steady autopilot, the robot really didn’t have much reason to interact with him anymore.

This is all to say that when he was woken up by alarms blaring from the ship’s speakers, it gave him a far bigger fright than it normally would’ve.

He falls off his bed with a yelp, quilt tangling around his flailing limbs. “Mary…” he grumbles, face still pushed into the floor in his half-asleep stupor, “Turn that off. I’m up already.”

The alarm doesn’t stop, but the ship’s voice gets added to the noise. “Warning. All crew please report to the cockpit. A critical error has occurred in the fuel tanks. Repeat, all crew please report…”

Oh.

Oh, crud.

That gets him scrambling off the floor, picking up his glasses from where he’d knocked them to the ground moments before. He gets to the cockpit in record time, adrenaline flowing through his heart at the thought of his journey home being cut off so soon. He’d handed over the plastic-wrapped taumoeba breeding tanks and parted ways with Rocky only a few months ago, the loneliness still a fresh wound to his psyche.

“Please report to the-”

“YES Mary, I’m here. Could you actually tell me what’s happening?” An edge of frustration creeps into his voice despite his panicking. He runs his fingers over a couple of screens, trying to get the ship to tell him what’s going on.

The alarms die down, and the ship’s voice breaks its monotone repetition. “During the mission on Adrian, the structural integrity of the Hail Mary’s fuel tanks had been compromised in a way that was undetectable to the ship’s diagnostics.” Mary explains to him. “This would have been negligible, but the gravitational pull of the planets we most recently passed has weakened the fuel tank’s surfaces further. It caused enough damage to rupture portside fuel tank compartment 10, creating a chain reaction throughout the rest of the ship’s fuel compartments.”

He glances over at the star map displayed on one of the monitors. Sure enough, he can see a gas giant that he’d just passed, and the dotted line showing the ship’s flight path had been pulled in tighter towards the planet.

A sickening coldness runs up his spine. Surely not…

His brain was going too fast to try and do the calculations himself. “Mary,” he began tentatively, “how far can the remaining astrophage carry the ship?”

“At this moment, the Hail Mary would be able to travel roughly 2 trillion miles. However, until the tank ruptures are repaired, this figure will exponentially decay at-”

Grace tunes out at some point after that.

Not even half a light-year.

It almost makes him laugh, honestly. How cruel for the universe to have tricked him, letting him believe that a life - a real life, where he was loved and safe and he was completely, utterly mundane - was within his reach. He stays on that self-pitying thought for a few agonising minutes, letting it circle around his head until he can bear thinking about his next steps-

And the full weight of it hits him again like a physical punch to the gut, making him curl up with his head between his knees. His breaths come out wracked with sobs, doing little to alleviate the intense pressure he feels closing in around him. He could figure out what to do later. So much damage had been done already, he could afford to spend a while mourning himself.

—---—

Eventually, he kicks his analytical brain into action. He’d fought to live on Earth up until his last moments, and the last thing he’s going to do is lay down and accept death from a simple mechanical error.

The remnants of the tunnel between him and the Blip-A had been cut up into wide, curved strips and stacked in the lab’s shelves (along with some of Rocky’s spare tools - though he’d been too scared to touch those yet). Their curvature seems similar to the tanks, he reasons, I should be able to weld them down easy enough.

The intention was that just as Grace had taught Erid about radiation, Rocky would teach Earth about their more advanced material chemistry - but they wouldn’t be of use to anyone if he didn’t even get the damn ship back in one piece, so he thinks it’s a reasonable enough usage of resources.

If he didn’t think about it too hard, then the whole thing was perfectly logically sound!

“Thanks, Rock…” he mumbles, lugging the panels into the airlock. “Second time you’re saving my life and you’re not even here to see it.”

…

“Showoff.”

He tries to pull his muscles to smile at his one-sided banter, but the dead air surrounding his words only disquiets him further, dampening the little hope and energy that was driving him.

He does his best to compartmentalise the anxiety coursing throughout his mind and body, grabbing the first panel and hooking his tether to the railings running along the hull.

After a painstaking walk to the ship’s, trying not to fumble the bulky panel - I should’ve tied it to my belt or something, Rocky would have some choice words for me - he finally sets foot on the first tank, and sure enough he can see a number of gouges littering its surface.

Even without the petrovascope, he could imagine it now, the same beautiful glimmering arcs that he’d basked in while orbiting Adrian. He pictures the billions upon billions of organisms flooding out of the ruptures, weaving together into a brilliant red string connecting his ship to the stars around him.

There’s some sort of poetry in it, he supposes, how he so wholly believed that he was above fate - and yet it was still going to be a petrova line that killed him.

(That’s a bad thought, he distantly reprimands himself. I'm making it sound like I've already died.)

The procedure actually goes remarkably well. He methodically cuts down the panels into smaller patches and welds them to the hull, trying to still his shaking hands when using the foreign tools.

He gets himself back into the airlock in one piece, slipping out of the outer shell of his EVA suit and trudging back to the cockpit. Now that the initial adrenaline was well and truly out of his system, he could feel the fatigue washing over him in waves. He was still way too stressed to actually go to sleep, but god did he just want to lay down for a while.

He sighs, sitting back in his pilot seat and pulling the petrovascope’s viewfinder down towards him.

Well, the panels seem to be holding just fine. Great! That means that now…

He lets go of the viewfinder, burying his face into his palms.

That means absolutely nothing.

He’s quite literally given himself a bandaid solution. It’s all well and good that he’s stopped the astrophage from being vacuumed out into space, but he couldn’t begin to imagine how he was supposed to repopulate the fuel tanks. He can think of a few rudimentary farms, sure, but he certainly didn’t have the machinery he’d need to ferry the astrophage back and forth from the tanks.

Yao’s gun is still in its case, he suddenly remembers. Starvation is hardly a pleasant way to die, maybe I could just-

He scowls. No. No, absolutely not. Where had that thought even come from?

Refusing to entertain the idea further, he drags himself into the lab, pointedly ignoring the chill he feels settling throughout the rooms. What he’ll do in there, he’s not quite sure, but he remembers an old saying about idle hands and figures he’ll be less - whatever that emotion is - when he’s working.

—---—

“So, good job Stratt. You were right about everything. At least I never have to hear you say ‘I told you so’.”

The screen shows an unusually tired-looking man. The last videos he’d recorded had shown him in good spirits, and while it’s clear what changed, the difference between them is still unnerving.

His eyes dart to something sitting off-screen, to his right. They linger for just a second too long as he takes a deep breath and stares down the barrel of the camera again.

“This…” he closes his eyes to deliver the final blow. “Has been Doctor Ryland Grace of Earth, and Captain of the Hail Mary.” His eyes flutter open again, and even in the camera’s low resolution they’re noticeably wetter.

The corner of his mouth upturns ever so slightly. “As the Eridians say:” he whispers before rubbing a fist along his forearm and reaching forward to turn off the camera.

It’s unclear if he delivered a mission report or a eulogy.

—---—

He does end up sending the beetles ahead of him.

There’s a voice telling him that it’s wrong, that it’s him giving up hope, that some miracle will befall him yet. But there’s a louder, and more reasonable, voice telling him that it’d be the same data reaching Earth - might as well make sure it gets there sooner. (If it gets there at all, the smaller voice snarks to himself.)

It’s easier to pack them than he thought it’d be. He’s pretty sure he sends a significant surplus of the taumoeba required, but it’ll be all the more helpful for the scientists waiting for it. He’d ejected most of Yao and Ilyukhina’s mementos during their space funeral, and he hardly thinks it’d be fair to only put in his own artifacts, so most of the probe’s physical compartments are taken up with sheafs of notes, breeding tanks and whatever xenonite scraps will fit.

He double, triple checks that Rocky’s figures haven’t been caught up in the collection of scraps somehow. With the care he shows them, he doubts they would’ve been anywhere near the other xenonite pieces, but he still obsessively checks that the figures of he and Rocky (and their ships) are accounted for before the probes are sealed.

And so, with many of his last rites taken out in one day, he lets himself rest. With his pillow and quilt, he curls himself up against one of the ship’s circular bay windows and settles down for sleep. The cosmic insignificance he feels, the thought that all his issues and the rest of his life will be confined to the ship, is strangely calming to him.

He’d been preparing himself to wait for years, after all. There was some sick comfort in the fact that his journey would be over sooner than he’d thought.