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Some number of days into his manic-depressive tour of the Hail Mary, abetted in part by Ilyukhina's idea of an appropriate personal-item allowance (vodka), Grace finds an ammunition can on board.
It is, in his eyes, a crate. It's sealed; about the size of a classroom box file but three times the weight, and steel. It's that awful brown-green colour he associates with the military and printed with a block of Chinese characters he can't read. When he cracks open the lid and pops that bad boy off, a dozen little plastic containers housing a thousand golden pellets rattle about inside.
That's a lot of ammunition. Grace plucks a single bullet out of the crate with Ilyukhina's vodka-born confidence and rolls it about his palm. He has never actually touched a bullet before, let alone an approximate myriad of them. He takes a swig of the vodka and then picks another bullet, and they clink like dice in his hand.
He would prefer another crate of vodka. If his vague memories of grad school are to be believed, Grace isn't much of a drinker – special occasions only, and even then only beer. Ilyukhina's vodka is potent. Really, it's awful. But at least he can try to enjoy it. This is just… bullets. A steel box of bullets.
"Yeah. Nope."
Grace lets the bullets roll from his palm and clatter back into the pile. Then it's another swig of vodka and the lid back onto the box. Yikes on a bike, this stuff is nasty. His face scrunches with four kinds of discomfort as he shoves the ammunition can back into the Tetris game of storage cubes going on up-down here in the hold. He hopes the next one he stubs his toe on isn't steel.
He pauses with the pouch of vodka against his lips. Through the haze of alcohol and the ship's white lights, he sees NannyBot sliding along her track, passive-aggressively reorganising the mess Grace has made in the hold. He only came up here in search of something warmer to wear. The orange jumpsuit is neat and all but it wasn't designed for drunken lounging. Nothing on this ship was designed for drunken lounging. It's a miracle he even made it through the hatch. (It's a miracle he woke up at all).
The ammunition can. It is just an ammunition can. Grace pops the stopper back into his vodka pouch with his thumb and double-checks – and yep, he may not know Chinese or English at the rate he's drinking, but there's definitely a box of bullets stacked in this part of NannyBot's Jenga tower and nothing else.
So… Where's the gun?
If there's a gun on board the ship – loaded or otherwise – then he really ought to know where. Also, why. And how. No, not how. He knows how: Commander Yáo. Apparently, the crazy personal-item allowances don't just start and end with the Russian. Yáo was preparing for the xenomorph!
Okay, no, not that. Yáo seemed like the down-to-earth sort of man. Not Earth earth, obviously, flying off on the Hail Mary, but the-ground-earth. The ground. Yeah.
Grace squints at the puddle of vodka left in the pouch.
So, he's not sober enough to go looking for a gun. All he wanted was a sweater. His crewmates might have been the kind of maniacs this project needed to get off the ground (ha!) but surely Grace packed, like, normal things with his allowance: keepsakes, music, books, cardigans. He hasn't actually found the cube(s) with his personal belongings in, yet, unless the one in the lavatory containing a new toothbrush and floss sticks counts.
Who packs floss on a suicide mission? Ilyukhina had the right idea. Yáo packed a gun. There aren't many other reasons to pack a firearm if Mission Control wasn't counting on a xenomorph.
Grace decides he needs the last of the vodka after all. He pops it back open and knocks back what's left, shivering as it burns down his throat. Geez Louise, Ilyukhina sure knew how to pick her poisons; Grace remembers there is heroin on board.
Heroin, a firearm, and… something else. It's fuzzy. He remembers a couch in the break room, he thinks it was red. Ilyukhina was sipping a beer. Commander Yáo was beside her, both of them in yellow. And there was someone else: a crinkle of paper, a calm voice, Grace spinning a pen about his hand.
(It's a ------ matter.)
Man, his memories are toast. Just five (four, six, three?) days ago, he couldn't even recall his name. Doctor Ryland Grace. Yep, doctor. It would be nice if he actually remembered doing the PhD that earned him that title because he sure as pie never went to medical school.
Putting a medic on board for a suicide mission would have been fantastically shortsighted, wouldn't it? If everything fails in a spectacular ball of fire (or doesn't, let's be honest), then they're all just going to die a slow and miserable death orbiting Tau Ceti anyway, so they might as well catch pneumonia or cancer or the crazies. Grace even has a head start.
"Hey, Mary?"
NannyBot slams a cube back into place with open hostility and then swings ninety degrees towards him with a look Grace can only compare to his mother, and not in a nice way. He quickly checks his shoes for mud as she zips across the rail with her single camera lens spinning – zzrrcrunk.
The NannyBot is really just an extension of Mary's other systems and therefore is supposed to keep him safe and well on this doomed flight of theirs, but that doesn't stop Grace from curling into a ball to avoid the robotic arm as it barrels towards him. It already took his toga – it can't have his alcohol!
"Yes, Doctor Grace?" replies Mary's disembodied voice.
In many ways, it's easier to look at NannyBot when talking to the Hail Mary's computer, if only because otherwise Grace is talking to thin air and it weirds him out. Like, okay, having a big screen with a smiley face on it or something would also be weird, but at least Grace would feel like somebody else was on board.
"What's your EOM protocol? Or are you just gonna –?"
Grace waggles his fingers in a way that suggests explode.
"The Hail Mary is programmed to shutdown all systems once an end-of-mission command has been triggered."
So, decommission. She'll become a cold, dark satellite around Tau Ceti until something burns her to a crisp or knocks her off course, and presumably Grace's emaciated dead body will be along for the ride.
That doesn't sound so bad for a spaceship. The alternative is a controlled planetary impact, or letting the Hail Mary burn up in atmo, provided there's the fuel to do it. Grace has already done the math: there won't be.
"What about me?" he asks, wondering if Mary expects him to freeze-starve-dehydrate to death in her powered-down hold. "I mean – the crew?"
(Good thing you already ---- -- your mind.)
Mary be-beeps. "Crew are advised to follow their personalised end-of-mission procedures."
"Which are…?"
"Please refer to your end-of-mission protocol."
Grace gives his pouch of vodka a quick shake, hoping to dislodge a few drops from the corners. "Thanks Mary."
"You're welcome, Doctor Grace. May I assist you with anything else?"
He shoves the dismally empty pouch into his jumpsuit. Chemistry was his least preferred of the big three: chemistry, biology, and physics. It's a shame, really. If he was a better chemist, he might be able to synthesise some more vodka. He might probably maybe have enough time.
"Yeah. Where would you keep a gun on board?"
##
Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. Lefty-tighty, righty-loosey.
Grace takes a faceful of ammonia from the alien cylinder and remembers, almost as quickly as his eyes and mouth curdling into prunes, DuBois on that red couch wearing yellow, a passing of paper, an awkward smile: nitrogen, not ammonia. He might asphyxiate all the same.
(What -- - looking at here?)
"God!" Grace cries, throwing the cylinder into the fume hood. Lab Safety 101 is just for science classrooms, apparently!
He might be blind. He might be crying. He can taste with his eyes. It's not a good sensation. It's actually the complete opposite of a good sensation and then the cylinder pops out an alien throwing star that sends Grace crashing across the room.
Okay, it's not a throwing star. It's a star map.
This time, Grace puts on safety goggles to have a closer look. It doesn't help the way his entire olfactory system is weeping right now, but at least he won't take a tiny version of Tau Ceti to the eye.
He sends the solid xenon cylinder (yep, that famous noble gas) back with an addendum: Sol, coloured in with a Sharpie, with a teeny flag for Earth. The aliens obviously can't read English but he hopes the point is clear.
Then he scours the lab for DuBois' nitrogen. It won't be anywhere else but the lab if whoever loaded this spaceship had any sense. Grace doesn't want to admit that he hasn't spent much time in this lab and so hasn't taken inventory, but he will admit it, and he'll chide himself for it, and he'll remember the explosion of Baikonur's research centre in momentary flashes as he opens and closes cupboard doors.
"A milligram instead of a nanogram… Holy Christmas."
Grace makes a note to stay far away from the fuel. Very far. Ideally, eleven lightyears back in the direction he came. That's a safe distance from two bombs full of Astrophage – and an alien spaceship – and a star-eating Petrova line.
"It's fine," Grace says to himself, slumped against a workbench. "Yeah, it's fine. This is fine."
DuBois was the Hail Mary's science officer. He was supposed to be here, doing the science and saving the world, and if not him, then Shapiro, and if not her then –
"Blip-C detected."
Grace almost brains himself on the countertop, he stands up so fast. Maybe he should go back to zero g, it had its perks. He couldn't trip over anything, for starters. Someone should have painted the floors and doorways safety-yellow instead of hospital white. It could have been silver, at least. Enterprise chrome.
No, he is grateful to have remembered the centrifugal system – while trying to stuff the xenonite star map back into that funny tube, no less. Lokken is a genius. It would have been nice if she had left amnesia-friendly instructions on how to find and operate the centrifuge because the Mary sure wasn't any help.
Grace rushes to the airlock to collect the second alien tube. DuBois wouldn't have opened the first one outside of the fume hood. Shapiro wouldn't have punched herself with ammonia. Grace wouldn't have tried to melt a metal block with one milligram of Astrophage but blowing himself up sure beats slowly starving to death eleven lightyears from home. Alone.
The explosion would have been quick. Painless. They wouldn't have known it was happening before it did. That's not quite how DuBois had chosen to die but it has to be the next best thing.
Grace would take that over a heroin overdose. He would take that over a gun. Mary wouldn't grant him access to Yáo and Ilyukhina's end-of-mission protocols for confidentiality reasons, which is funny because Grace was the one on the other side of that couch.
She wouldn't give him his own protocols, either. Couldn't. The data must have corrupted. He can't think of any other reason why she wouldn't be able to reel that off on command. She's awfully chatty about his meals. And his rusty piloting skills.
(-- not some -------- explorer.)
Grace opens the second cylinder with more due care than the first. He swears he can still smell the ammonia from inside the fume hood, or maybe his eyes just wrinkle every time he pops open a tube of Pringles now. The star map is a model of the Hail Mary, now, attached to a model of the alien ship. A little xenonite man falls out of the lid. Grace shakes the cylinder with his giant blue gloves to see if a little alien comes out too.
No dice. Once the ammonia has all been extracted, he lines the models up along the workbench. They are all made of solid xenon wires woven together into startlingly accurate miniatures. The little man doesn't have any facial features or clothes, but he is waving, and Grace did look like an idiot flapping his arms in the EVA suit along Mary's hull.
"You want to meet, don't you?" Grace asks, bobbing the little man across the workbench.
It could be dangerous. It could be the Borg. He always imagined First Contact like it is in Star Trek, with the Vulcans finally revealing themselves when the time was right. They'd come to Earth in their fancy starship and throw up a ta'al, make peace.
Funny how things turn out.
"Blip-D detected," says Mary.
"What? What now?" He grabs the nearest wall-mounted screen. "Show me the camera!"
Something else is approaching the Hail Mary – not a cylinder but a tunnel, bridging the gap between the two ships one xenonite panel at a time. The Blip-A's hull-mounted robots zip up and down the colossal ship fast enough that they'll be knocking on the airlock before long.
Grace screeches. "Don't I get a choice!?"
"Blip-D approaching," says Mary.
"I can see that! What should I do?"
"Clarify query."
He throws his goggles onto the counter. "Oh, you're no help!"
He climbs the ladder from the lab and dons his EVA suit once again. Surely, this wasn't in the job description when he volunteered? Ilyukhina had joked about PR stunts once, but Grace can't recall what was so funny. There's nothing funny about turning back around at the airlock and seeing an empty ship through the fog of his helmet. If this alien eats him, no one will know.
No, Earth will know. Earth will die knowing.
He can't fail. That's his lot in life now. Don't fail.
Grace's helmet thunks against the airlock. He closes his eyes. He's on a beach somewhere. California. The sand is white-gold in the winter. Sea foam laps at his ankles. Pacific salt soaks into his shoes. He's calm. He's on a beach. Earth is safe. He is safe.
The Hail Mary shudders as something collides with her port-side. Grace pats the little xenonite man in his pocket and opens the airlock.
It's not quite California on the other side.
##
"Grace sleep, statement."
"I'd love to, buddy," Grace replies, staring at the underbelly of Rocky's carapace curled up on the xenonite above him.
Every so often, one of Rocky's five spidery limbs twitches to some unfathomable sound, te-tink-tink-tink across the window, and Grace's heart leaps into his throat. Rocky's twenty-nine atmospheres of ammonia would kill him before anything else, but that doesn't stop Grace's mind from wondering if Rocky has fangs hidden somewhere under all of that… that.
"Grace can. Rocky watch."
"Yeah, that's kind of the problem," Grace says.
He looks back down the tunnel to Mary's open airlock, which is a considerable distance away. He has never missed his med bed in the crew compartment more. One wrong move from either ship could send him hurtling into space. He took his EVA suit off as a sign of trust. Sleeping beyond the bounds of the ship without it is a bad idea – but letting Rocky watch him sleep has to be worse.
Rocky is a spider. A crab. A highly intelligent, sentient rock thing without a face. And he still managed to guilt-trip Grace into dragging some blankets down here.
Grace can't remember where he lost control of his life but he suspects it was the same place he apparently left his spine.
He rolls onto his side, facing the Mary. If the barrier between their two atmospheres were to fail, rapid decompression would be a quick death. Virtually painless. By the time he realised what was going on, he would be dead. It's probably not as clean-cut as going out in a massive Astrophage explosion, but he wouldn't have to push the plunger, so to speak, or pull the trigger on the gun. He doesn't think he could.
(You're a ------ and you're full of ----.)
Yáo could. Ilyukhina could. DuBois definitely would have, given another chance. Grace wishes he could remember how they found the courage to sign themselves up to die. He doesn't have that courage. He must have done, once, back on Earth. That, or he was quaking in his boots when he volunteered but did it anyway, and he likes to think he could be that person too.
There is one alternative but it doesn't bear thinking about. In fact, Grace would rather think about literally anything else except for Rocky's faceless carapace looming over him all night.
"Do you have to lie so close?"
"No," Rocky replies in his sing-song voice. "Usually closer. Rocky lie on top of Grace if could."
"Think you'd kill me, bud."
Rocky stomps his feet. The sound chitter-chatters down the xenonite like a dozen insects scurrying away. "Rocky no kill. Watch Grace sleep to stop kill. Must must must."
Grace could chuck a pillow at him. It wouldn't do much with the xenonite in the way, but it would feel good. Rocky is smart enough to pick up on the subliminal messaging of a pillow to the face. Carapace. Rock. Whatever.
As tempting as it is, Grace has to keep the peace – for Erid's sake as well as Earth's. This fragile first contact can't fall apart simply because he refuses to sleep on the floor. Yáo wouldn't refuse. DuBois wouldn't refuse. Ilyukhina would probably engineer a new bed out of lamp posts and tape. She'd know how the xenonite works already. All Grace has achieved so far is a smattering of Eridian words.
So, a giant rock spider will be watching him sleep all night, no big deal. Grace used to sleep next to Linda and there were times she definitely wanted him dead. He has that effect on people. Most of Stratt's team wanted to bash his skull in.
(It wasn't easy for -- to -- ---- to you.)
Grace pulls the quilt up over his head. His memories of Stratt are – mixed. The almost nervous lady in his classroom is a far cry from the lady marching into military boardrooms with coffee in hand. Grace was little better than roadkill in those boardrooms. Sometimes, it wasn't entirely clear who was driving the car.
He remembers – a yellow jacket. A man in black. Downward slanted blinds. It was late afternoon or early morning. The sun was either climbing or falling. Grace could still taste smoke from the research centre going up in flames. He had mud on his face at some point, before or after.
He tries to imagine Stratt here instead, in his place, lying in a xenonite tunnel beneath Rocky's freaky carapace. She wouldn't have left the Mary for anything, but definitely not to chat with a sentient rock about math. She would have swat Rocky with a clipboard the second she saw him move.
Grace smiles to himself under the quilt. Stratt would be an interstellar PR disaster. Compared to that, having Rocky watch him sleep doesn't seem so bad.
##
Fishing for Astrophage in Adrian's atmosphere almost kills them both. Grace experiences it in pieces: the fuel leak, red lights, pressure, pressure, pressure. Lokken's centrifugal system needs a failsafe. He remembers thinking that with his face crushed against the flight controls – blood in his eyes and stars in his eyes and xenonite shattering in front of his eyes.
Rocky saved him – both of them, their stars, the ship.
Grace finds him in the tunnel outside the crew compartment, laying in soot. He is misshapen. Burned. Venting with a hissing sound. He doesn't react when Grace falls against the side of the tunnel and lays there a while, still feeling the impact. He might be healing. He might be dying.
(You'll be hailed as a ----.)
For six days, Grace see-saws between anger and despair. When NannyBot isn't having a whale of a time patching him up (his insides are basically that can of ammunition now, oof), experimenting on the Astrophage keeps his mind from spiralling. There is always something to do in the lab: cleaning, note-taking, recording logs for the beetles to take home.
He has been lax with the video logs. None of them are worth sending. If Earth wanted a professional account of the mission then it should have sent a professional; half of Grace's videos are just ranting about Rocky, and the other half are Grace realising that Rocky can hear.
The Hail Mary's centrifuge spins. In his downtime, Grace watches the green swirls of Adrian flash past and past and past. He sits in the Crazy Node and imagines the wind in his hair. The sea at his feet. The sun on his face. He understands why the astronauts were asked how they wanted to die.
Yáo's gun is in the control room. Grace moved it there because… well, just because. It isn't loaded. He did leave a magazine within reach.
It is not the way he would choose to go.
(He is starting to question how he has chosen to go.)
##
Rocky does not die. Grace introduces the concept of a hug to his frankly unhuggable xenonite ball, and then they do science. Something in Adrian's atmosphere is keeping the Astrophage population at bay. Alone in the lab, Grace replicated that atmosphere and for almost a week he has been watching the Astrophage live, breed, and die in the sample from the atmosphere.
"Is predator!" Rocky cries, dancing like a gif with a terrible framerate. "Amaze amaze amaze!"
Grace calls it Taumoeba. He never said he was any good at naming things. Rocky speed-builds a breeder tank out of xenonite and sheer excitement, and by that evening they have a whole Taumoeba farm set up in the clean room. The prospect of saving their planets is within reach.
Rocky keeps watch of the progress from his tunnel in the lab. Grace drags his bedding out from the crew compartment and sets up camp right there on the floor. Somehow, he doesn't think the lab manager will kick up a fuss.
The Mary's lights dim blue as the day cycle comes to an end. Grace tried to explain the properties of colour while they were orbiting around Adrian, but then he went and fell off the side of the ship and ruined the mood.
He is good at doing that. He watches Rocky picking at soot-scabs on his legs and says, "You almost died, didn't you? Saving me."
"Eridians much stronger than Humans," Rocky replies, and he doesn't need a face to avoid looking Grace in the eye. "Humans soft, not hard. Grace die. Rocky save. Grace save stars."
"But –"
"Rocky made choice." It looks like that choice is burned into him forever. It's certainly burned into Grace: he has a blister the size and shape of Rocky's hand around his arm. "Grace angry?"
"No," says Grace. "Maybe. I don't know."
The anger left him as soon as Rocky woke up. Now there's just a bone-deep weariness, an almost hollowness, as though NannyBot took more than just the shards of his ribs while she was playing Jenga with his insides. He thinks Yáo's gun could fit in the space inside his chest.
(It's not ---- ----. I mean. It's a little like that.)
"Just… don't do it again, okay? I don't want you risking yourself like that. Not for me."
"♫♪♫," Rocky says, a thinking sound. His carapace rocks from side to side. "Grace risk self for Rocky, question?"
"Yes! Of course! But that's different." Grace presses his knuckles against the clear xenonite pane, and without hesitation, Rocky reciprocates. "Don't you think Adrian wants to see you again?"
Rocky bobs in an approximation of a nod. "Yes, not different! Family waiting for Grace, statement."
Grace winces. "I – I'm just sending back probes, bud. This is a one-way ticket for me."
His excited bobbing slows and stops. His voice drops an octave: "Not understand. Grace go home, question?"
"No. That's what I'm saying: don't risk yourself for me. I can't go back – but you can."
Rocky shrinks back into his tunnel. "Grace stay here? Grace stay alone?"
"Well, no, I – It's funny, really, my crewmates, they were asked how they wanted to die when the mission was over, I mean – uh, intentionally end their lives – but you know my memory's messed up and I – I don't remember what I said or planned or –"
"Planned, question!?" Rocky shrieks. He scuttles forward and knocks his carapace against the side of the tunnel, and if he had those spider-eyes, every one of them would be gawping at Grace. "Grace said Grace go home!"
"Grace lied! I lied. I didn't want to think about it. I didn't –" He corrects himself, for what little it will do. "I wanted to focus on why I was here."
Grace save stars, Rocky does not say. He doesn't say anything in fact, mute with horror or rage. Two of his arms grasp the air as though trying to wring Grace's neck.
Grace tries to smile, but his voice shakes. "Earth doesn't have much time. Once I figured out how to breed Astrophage, we only had a few months to throw it all together. There wasn't enough fuel for a return trip – and Mary already had a full payload. Lokken even designed the centrifugal system with that in mind, it's genius, really –"
"Rocky not care about ship. Care about Grace. What happens to Grace once send back probes? Grace die, question? Grace end life?"
"I – Yeah. Yeah, that's right. But if the data we send back saves billions of lives on Earth, then it will be worth it." He points to Rocky's terrible burns. "Same reason you saved me, right?"
"Not same. Rocky save Grace, only maybe die."
"It's the same, bud. We just dress it up in a different word."
Rocky chitters to himself, visibly distressed. Grace doesn't have the heart to introduce 'suicide' into the English-Eridian vocabulary, so he keeps his mouth shut. He spreads his fingers across the tunnel, wishing he could offer more than empty words.
"It's okay, Rock. It's what I'm here for. And hey, I got to meet you! That's great!"
"Great, great, yes. How much fuel Grace need? Rocky give."
Grace's heart hits the back of his throat. "What? No, no, don't say that. It's a crazy amount. Two million kilograms."
"Can give," Rocky says, hands clacking together, seamless math in his head. "Can give more. Grace Rocky go home."
"But don't you need –?"
"Need Grace to not end life. Plan bad. Bad bad bad. Grace not allowed to make plans tomorrow or other day."
Grace startles them both by laughing. He can taste his heart in his mouth: blood, hope. Above him, the xenonite tunnel dazzles in the ship's sunset with opalescent light. It doesn't look so bad anymore, Mary's cold and lifeless white. She'll never have to go dark. He'll never have to give that command.
"Grace okay, question? Grace leaking."
So he is. Tears run down the sides of his face and drip onto his quilt. He wipes them away with the heel of his palm, sniffing and smiling, and blubbering reassurances he's sure Rocky only half understands.
##
They breed enough Taumoeba to engineer a nitrogen-resistent strain. DuBois' personal-item allowance came in useful after all, go figure. Grace doesn't mention to Rocky what it was actually intended for, and still singing with his brilliance of sending Grace Rocky home, Rocky does not ask.
They celebrate. Grace seriously considers unearthing Ilyukhina's allowance of heroin just to try it, just once, but now with his days numbered in the thousands rather than the single digits, he makes the executive decision not to run the risk of a heroin addiction on the four-year journey home.
He disposes of the drug by venting it from the airlock, feeling only slightly bad. Maybe in a hundred years, it will find its way back to Ilyukhina's body, adrift out there in space, so that she can finally break her own rules.
He vents Yáo's gun and ammunition, too, which makes him break out into a sweat for an entirely different reason. It was never a matter of being brave enough to use it. Even a coward can be driven to that point.
And he is that: a coward. Disgraced from the scientific community he loved so much, he hid himself away in a high school. He turned Stratt away in his classroom because he was just as scared of being right as he was of being wrong. Grace remembers the tinted windows in the car, the leather seats. The school slid past in shades of murky grey.
She always got what she wanted, that Stratt.
Grace – doesn't know how to feel about that. The more he thinks about her, the harder it is to call to mind anything except a yellow jacket and downward slanted blinds. There was mud on his face. It was under his nails. It was over his glasses. It was pressing into his mouth. Something was pressing into –
(It would have been ------ if you'd just said ---.)
Nobody asked him how he wanted to die.
Grace supposes it doesn't matter now, with him returning to Earth and all. He and Rocky do the swap: half of the Taumoeba farm for two million kilograms of fuel. He tries not to think about the fact he only has enough food for the trip back because his crewmates weren't alive to need it.
His return will be a media storm. Mission Control are expecting the beetle probes, not the Hail Mary to come rocketing back into orbit. Grace should be excited about that – and he is, he is – but as he performs and re-performs system checks up in the control room, he wonders why that gun-shaped cavity in his chest feels like it's getting bigger.
"I guess this is it," Grace says, because he can't bear to say goodbye. He never said goodbye to Earth. He has spent every waking moment on the Hail Mary saying goodbye to Earth.
Saying goodbye to Rocky is infinitely harder. The bridge between their ships is all that connects and divides them now. Grace presses the glove of his EVA suit against the xenonite airlock. He makes a fist.
"Fist bump."
"Fist my bump."
"You know that's not right."
Rocky's musical laughter follows him all the way back to the Mary and for the days and weeks beyond, in the darkness of deep space, still looking back, until even the light from his ship is too far to see.
Grace keeps watching for it anyway, one scope pointing towards Earth and the other pointing back. As a teacher, he was never supposed to pick a favourite student, but as a scientist he thinks Tau Ceti is his favourite star in the sky.
##
"How do you want to die?" Grace asks: red couch, yellow suits, beacons never coming home.
How do you want to live, Tau Ceti asks: red lights, yellow star, four years away from home.
##
"Mary, new protocol," Grace says, jumping into the pilot's seat. "Mission Two: Eridian Boogaloo. Bring up the Blip-A's last known coordinates."
"New protocol defined," Mary replies, the nav screen zooming away from the blinking dot of the ship and past Tau Ceti, displaying the Blip-A's intended course. "Please state procedures."
"Step one: save Rocky. Step two: save Erid. Step three: die."
The spin drives swing the ship back around. He can only hope the beetle probes make it safely on their own. That's what they were designed for, after all. A heroic suicide mission is what Grace was designed for, after all, and what's the first step of dying if not living his life?
"Step four," Grace says, grinning to himself. "Find Eva Stratt in the afterlife and tell her she was only half right, and then immortalise the look on her face."