Chapter Text
They're a year away from Erid (and two years out from Tau Ceti), and Grace is tinkering with his latest batch of Taumoeba soup in an attempt to make it taste less like cow farts when he hears Rocky's voice approaching quickly.
“Grace Grace Grace! New toy complete!”
Grace's head snaps up and he spins on the lab stool as Rocky scuttles in through his tunnels, clutching the small device he's been messing with for months in one hand.
“You're kidding! I thought you were never going to finish that thing,” Grace grins at him as he scurries closer and waves it through the transparent xenonite. “Are you finally going to tell me what it does, question?”
“Yes yes,” Rocky says, holding it still so Grace can lean over and get a better look. It's about the size of a TV remote, glittering with strands of xenonite woven through Eridian steel and wires that Grace couldn't begin to guess the purpose of. The whole thing looks...off, like it's not showing quite clearly enough through the xenonite panel. Grace tilts his head, then moves over to look at it through a different panel, but the slight distortion remains the same, almost like light is bending around the device. “What you think, question?”
“No, no,” Grace scoffs. “I've already guessed everything I can think of. You've been working on it for a very long time. What is it?”
Rocky raises himself up and tosses the device from one hand to another like he's seen Grace do. Of course, he catches it perfectly, and holds it out again. “This,” he says proudly, “is to move from one place to other.”
Grace's brow knots. “Um...what?”
“Like in 'Star Trek,'” Rocky says. “Transporter, but in hand, not ship.”
“You built a teleporter?” Grace swallows. “You – did I know you could do that? Did you know you could do that?”
“Could not do that.” Rocky lowers himself back down, fiddling with the device. “Had theory. Much trial and error. Build long time. Should work.”
“Should – it should work?” Grace sputters. “You haven't tested it?”
“Not without you,” Rocky says, as if that should be obvious. And maybe it is – they've been partners in science since they met, sharing every discovery. It makes sense that Rocky would wait to test his device until he could do it with Grace.
“How did you even come up with this?”
“Human technology. Human thinking machine. I listen much, look at many design. Many blueprint. Then I come up with own design. Better. Should work.”
Rocky is the best engineer Grace has ever known – better than any human engineer by miles, and centuries. And his theories are usually right. But this is a lot, even for him.
“How are you going to –”
“I get ball,” Rocky interrupts. “Grace stay here, statement.” Then he's gone, scurrying down through the tunnel network, presumably toward the airlock in the dormitory that his hamster ball is attached to.
“Sure,” Grace says, tossing his hands in the air. “Fine. Why not? I stay here.”
Rocky is back moments later. He can't roll the ball up through the ship when there's gravity like there is now (because the spin drives are on since they're on their way to Erid), but he had Grace attach magnets to various surfaces throughout the ship, and now his ball can roll in any direction anywhere it can fit.
Grace counts his lucky stars every day that the tiny bathroom cubby is too small.
“Wait, you're going to try to teleport yourself?” Grace realizes, once he sees that the ball is empty except for Rocky's ever-present toolbelt and the teleporter device. “You're not starting out with an object or something? What about a wrench? Or a bit of trash?”
“Transporter not for moving things,” Rocky replies. “Transporter for moving people.”
“Why?” Grace asks.
“People inside things,” Rocky says. “If this work, can maybe transport ship to Erid. Once there, can maybe transport Grace home to Earth.”
“Buddy,” Grace starts, then swallows thickly. He can't let himself imagine something that seems so impossible. “Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We should see if it even works, first.”
“Should work,” Rocky repeats, clearly exasperated.
Grace waves his hands. “I'm not doubting your engineering, Rock. I'm just not sure about the science.”
“Theory good,” Rocky says. “I try now.” And before Grace can do anything, he holds the device in one hand and twists part of it with another.
“Whoa whoa whoa –” Grace lunges forward and grabs the ball. “Where are you even trying to go?”
“No matter,” Rocky says, in the low pitch of disappointment. “It fail.”
“Of course it matters! Do you program in a destination? The ship is moving, you'd need to control for that –”
Rocky waves an arm in irritation. “Did all that. Already done. Theory good. Why no work, question?”
“Well,” Grace says, leaning on the hamster ball and peering down at the glittering device between Rocky's hands, “how about you explain to me more about how it's supposed to work, and maybe we can figure it out?”
Rocky launches immediately into an explanation that Grace does his best to follow. He's learned a lot in the last few years, but he's no engineer himself, and some of what Rocky is saying goes over his head. It sounds like he's trying to spool spacetime through the device in some way Grace can't interpret, and he's not entirely sure Rocky fully understands either. He's already working well beyond his peoples' means. His species didn't know about radiation or relativity before they left their planet – they're so young, technologically-speaking.
At some point Rocky leans his carapace against the side of the ball so they're hip to hip through the xenonite. He's going through what should have happened, and Grace is thinking about how something like this could have changed both of their lives. If Earth could just teleport a ship to Tau Ceti, they would have been able to find out immediately what the problem was. And if it was Erid that could do that, they would have been there and gone before the Hail Mary arrived. If that had happened...Grace couldn't have solved the problem on his own, just like Rocky hadn't been able to solve it after spending nearly half a century alone in the system. In the end, it was only possible as a joint mission between the last survivors of two different alien spaceships. If Grace had arrived to an empty system, he would have tried his best, and he would have failed. He can see it in his mind's eye: the Mary going dark after he starved to death, and around her, star after star fading, Earth chilling into an iceball world, every planet falling to dim cold, the blood-red streaks of the Petrova line expanding like a virus, like a plague, like a slowly-spreading pool of blood...
“...Then I do this,” Rocky says, spinning the device again – and the world warps.
Light twists around the device, then Rocky, then Grace himself, and then the ship is falling out from under them. Grace only has time to tighten his arms around Rocky's hamster ball where he was already draped over it and start to scream before they are suddenly dropped into hell.
Grace's joints are jarred and Rocky is thrown to the bottom of his ball when they come to a stop. They're knee-deep in a sloshing crimson liquid that immediately begins to burn Grace's legs through his flight suit pants. The lighting is red and flashing, some specks of green and yellow and blue at the edges of Grace's vision, which is contained to the long, pipe-lined hallway they appear to be in. At one end is a chair and a control panel, and at the other end is a wall of buttons and switches. The entire surface above the flooding and the whole of the low, curved ceiling is covered in rust and saturated in red and black gobs of gore. As Grace inhales in shock, the air that tears into his lungs is thin, hot, and putrefying, the scent of blood and heated metal burning his nose.
Between him and the far wall with buttons and switches stands a man. Grace assumes it's a man – he's humanoid, bipedal, and covered in red. He also looks like he's actively undergoing some kind of mutation: half his face is lumpy, the eye on that side as fiery orange as his other eye is dark. The shoulder and arm on his left side are also covered in lumps, uneven textures bulging through his threadbare shirt. He's holding a tubular object, and there is what appears to be a life jacket floating on the waves next to him, wrapped around something blocky and dark, its emergency beacon glowing.
The floor and ceiling both are studded with meter-long off-white spikes that end in sharp tips. The man seems to have been winding up to strike one with the tubular object in his hands, but he drops it when Grace and Rocky appear. Grace's evaluation of the whole situation took about a second and a half, and now the man bellows and lunges for him. Grace screams and stumbles backward, tripping over unseen lumps and coils under the opaque surface and almost going down. Whatever liquid this is, it is hot, and Grace doesn't want to touch it with any more of his body than he has to. He's already considering climbing up on the console to get out of it and give his legs some relief.
Rocky leaps in front of Grace, his ball tumbling over to block the man's attack. The man lowers his feverish gaze to the the new obstruction and his face twists. When he bares his teeth in a grimace, pale slashes stand out under his orange eye – long, sharp teeth either embedded in his cheek, or growing through it.
“Fucking aliens,” he snarls, and slams his left fist into the xenonite ball.
It punches through.
It's Rocky's turn to scream as the man's hand closes around his closest leg – the one holding the device, which he drops as he tries to jerk his limb out of that alien grasp. Grace has no idea how the man isn't burning his skin off – Rocky's atmosphere is mostly ammonia, and superheated compared to Grace's own. The lumps on the man's arm seem to be moving, writhing like he's got snakes under his skin, and Grace hopes that means it's hurting him. He staggers back toward them, clueless as to how he can help, but certain he needs to try.
The hallway jerks and rolls, throwing Grace, Rocky, and the unknown man across the room. Grace yelps as more burning liquid splatters across his arms before he's able to claw his way upright, looking around frantically.
It's not a hallway, he realizes, his panicking brain hysterically trying to make sense of what he's been seeing. It's either a spaceship or a submarine – and judging by the fact that it's currently flooding, he's going to go with submarine.
If they're in a collapsing submarine on an alien planet with a berserk man, clearly the teleporter worked. However, this also means they're going to die.
“Rocky!” Grace yells. “Use the transporter! Take us back!”
Rocky screams something in reply, but he's so frantic that his pitch is higher than Grace can parse right now. He can see into the red-streaked ball enough to tell that Rocky's scrabbling for the device with two hands, even as he uses the other two to try to pry the man's grip loose from the last.
The sub creaks and groans around them, and the man shakes his head violently, his long dark hair splattering liquid. A drop of the spray hits Grace's cheek and he flinches, sure he can hear his skin sizzling.
“Shut UP!” The man roars, teeth flashing and right hand braced against the edge of the hamster ball as he draws Rocky closer with his left. “You did this! What, you think this'll make me give you what you want?”
“Whoa, hey, let go!” Grace shouts, stumbling to a halt next to the ball and grabbing the man's right shoulder. His palm burns, but he refuses to let go. At least the guy speaks English, even if he's making no sense. “We just wanna go back, man!”
“Not you,” the man spits, then twitches like he's been struck. Movement catches Grace's eye and he turns in the surging waves, boiling liquid up to his hips now, to see a tracery of dark, vein-like tendrils growing across the ceiling.
Your ship is alive, a woman's voice whispers from all around them, and Grace screams.
“Who is that? Who's out there?”
The man's head snaps up to stare at Grace. The whites of his eyes show all the way around both mismatched irises, and he seems to actually be looking at Grace for the first time.
“It's more than me,” he mutters, then jerks again and whips his head around to glare at the ceiling. “Why won't you fucking DIE?”
Metal crunches and the pale spikes punch further through the hull. They're teeth, Grace realizes in horror. There is some kind of creature outside, something big enough to eat this submarine, something that is already eating this submarine. Rocky's habitat is breached, Grace's legs are burning off, and this strange man is going to kill them both before they find out who he is or what's happening to him. Grace wishes fervently that Rocky never finished his new toy. Barring that, he wishes they were back on their own ship, where no monsters were trying to chew through the bulkheads.
In all the noise and chaos, they shouldn't have been able to hear it – but the high ringing sound of glass shattering draws both humans' attention to the man's arm inside Rocky's ball, where one of Rocky's hands is trying to pry his grip loose. The man rips his arm back, releasing a burst of highly-pressurized ammonia into the already sickening atmosphere of the sub, and several shards of something bright and shining fall from his wrist into the red tide, lost below the surface immediately. The man roars and slams his arm back into the ball, locking his fingers around Rocky's closest limb again – but in that second of freedom, Rocky's gotten hold of the device. Grace, half-dangling over the ball with one hand tight around the man's bicep, sees Rocky's hands lock around the teleporter and twist just as a new light begins to grow beneath the surface of the crimson liquid around them, a light that is such a pale green as to be nearly white, a light that is burning through the liquid and the submarine hull both. Grace hears the beginning of an immense, fluting shriek, like if a whale could scream – and then the world warps around them again and they hit the floor of the Hail Mary's dormitory in a heap.