Chapter Text
It wasn't a ship. It could be a submarine, maybe, if they weren't in the middle of goshdarned deep space.
It could hypothetically be a ship, actually. Grace supposed there was no telling. Rocky's ship hadn't looked like an Earth ship, after all. But it had still had thrusters. Fuel tanks. An engine.
It didn't show up on the Petrovascope, this whatever-it-was. Whatever it used for fuel—wherever it kept its fuel—it wasn't Astrophage.
It was "Blip-A" on the scanners. The scanners had no way of knowing that that name was taken.
"Ideas, Rocky?"
Rocky shrugged, inasmuch as he could. "No ideas. Space junk, question?"
"Looks intelligently made, though, and we're not close enough to a solar system for it to be a probe that's escaped gravity or something. Not unless it was made hundreds of years ago."
"Maybe was made hundreds of years ago. Humans have more advanced science than Eridians. Don't know what others have."
"True, I guess. It's weird, though. Looks like a submarine. Only—I don't know, it's not my area, but something about it seems wrong for that, too."
"Submarine, question?"
"Human invention for exploring the ocean."
"Oh, yes! Eridians have this. Does not look like that."
"What does it— No, nevermind, we can talk about that later. I want to get closer to that thing."
"Yes, yes, yes. Closer. Careful."
"'Course."
Grace strapped himself into the cockpit and, with minor commentary from Rocky, maneuvered them closer to the—hm. The Blip-A-B. Because that wouldn't be confusing at all. As he did this, he had the Hail Mary putting out a radio signal.
Are you in distress? Friendly ship from neighboring solar system. Please respond.
If the Blip-A-B received the transmission, it made no attempt to reciprocate. Or maybe it did, but not in any way Grace's ship was capable of picking up. Interstellar outreach was accompanied by an absurd number of variables.
"Little bit closer," Rocky said, "and can hear inside. Best for hearing is if ships touch, but probably bad idea."
"Definitely a bad idea. Way too risky. Unless…"
Grace had an even worse idea.
"You are certain," came Rocky's trilling voice through the radio twenty minutes later, "That this is less risky, question?"
"Yes. I think."
"Not comforting. Grace squishy space blob. Easy to hurt. Crazy."
"Maybe."
Maybe they were both being stupid about this. One successful first contact under their belts and here they were flinging themselves at the very next sign of intelligent life like there was no chance it could kill them. Grace had gotten lucky with Rocky, and Rocky with him. They should know better than to assume that it would work out every time.
But what were they supposed to do? Move on, leave it alone, and never find out? What if they were friendly? What if they needed help? What if they could provide the resources to get home sooner, to establish active contact between Earth and Erid, to allow Grace to survive the remainder of his natural life?
Grace had not known that he would be lucky when he'd met Rocky. It was not in his nature to leave a mystery like this unsolved.
"Just tell me again what you know so far."
"Hollow. Mostly metal, some plastic, think. Sounds from inside like machines. Engine, life support, maybe. Radio. Maybe others. Nothing else without touching."
"Life support? You're certain?"
"No, not certain. Just sound like it."
Grace flung himself out of the Hail Mary, hand outstretched for the Blip-A-B. It came to rest against the hull—he thought—and he got his first really good look at the craft.
His heart free-fell through his stomach.
"Rocky? Something is very wrong with this."
"Agree, agree, agree."
"It's scrap metal. I think. It's—rusty. It doesn't look like a spaceship. It really, really doesn't."
"Hold onto tether. Need to hear better."
Grace wrapped his left hand twice around the tether, keeping his right on the Blip-A-B. He supposed that every point of contact helped when sound reverberation was your primary means of understanding the world. Through the craft, through his body, through the tether, through the Hail Mary. Or so he assumed.
Silence, over the radio.
"Rocky?"
More silence.
"Rocky, what do you hear? Should I move away from it?"
Long, stretching silence.
"Rocky, bud, you're freaking me out. What do you hear, question?"
Quietly, "Heartbeat."
"What!?"
Louder, now, more certain, more panicked, "Heartbeat. Lungs, sloshing liquid, lots of liquid, breathing, heartbeat. Like Grace heartbeat, lungs like Grace lungs. Squishy. Sound kind of like days after Adrian mission, when Grace not wake up. And liquid. Inside craft, same part as heartbeat. Not water. Thicker. Lots of it."
"A heart? You're a certain you hear a human heart beating inside this thing?"
"Sound like it."
At a loss for what else to do, having seen no windows or obvious method of propulsion, he pounded on the side of it. The seconds stretched as he waited for someone, something, to tap back.
He tried again. Knock, knock, knock.
Wait, wait, wait.
Nothing.
"You said it sounds like the days after Adrian, when I wouldn't wake up?"
"Yes, yes, yes. Right away, after. When thought you were dying. Bad, bad, bad sound."
"Hang on, I'm going to see if they have an airlock."
Hopefully, this was either a wild goose chase or totally warranted by the level of distress this person was in, and Grace was not about to become the universe's first interstellar peeping tom.
Problem was, there was no airlock. There was one window, too small for a person to fit through and with no clear means of opening. Peering through it revealed nothing but murky blackness inside. Beyond this, there was nothing, at all, which provided any access to the outside world. That on its own would be fine, mostly. Rocky's people didn't have a concept of windows at all. They had no need of them. Grace was absolutely not the type to judge someone based on the number of windows in their architecture.
It was just that—well.
He traced the seam with his fingertips. It was very distinct, raised, slightly irregular. It ran in an approximately person-sized rectangle on one side of the craft, with rounded corners and an impression of hinges on the right. Hinges.
"It's welded," he said aloud for Rocky's sake. "If there's someone in there, they've been welded in."
"Come back to ship now. We think."
"Yeah." He stared at the hatch door. Welded. Welded. With something Rocky seemed damned certain was a very sick human being inside. "Yeah, okay, I'm coming."
The list of possibilities stood thus:
-
There was a very sick, or very injured human inside the Blip-A-B.
This opened up two sub-possibilities.
Possibility 1-A: Earth had sent the Blip-A-B to investigate Tau Ceti, and it had somehow strayed millions of kilometers off-course.
Possibility 1-B: Earth had sent the Blip-A-B to do something else, the nature of which Grace and Rocky could not begin to guess at.
-
There was another unidentified alien inside the Blip-A-B.
Possibility 2-A: It had human-like vital signs but was operating at normal levels for its species, no cause for concern.
Possibility 2-B: Its vital signs were similar enough to those of a human that they could, in fact, assume it to be dying.
-
There was nothing alive inside the Blip-A-B, and Rocky had mistaken the sound of some unidentified alien machinery for human vital sounds.
Possibility 3-A: It was dangerous, and they were risking their lives by continuing to exist near it.
Possibility 3-B: It was harmless, and they were wasting their time by investigating.
These were not the only possibilities, and a true logician would likely have had a heart attack looking at them, but they didn't have time to make a full flow chart. It at least represented the three most likely outcomes, and the most pressing questions raised by each.
There were symbols carved into the side which Grace and Rocky both agreed looked a hell of a lot like SM-13. It could be a total coincidence, maybe. Possibly. They could not assume it wasn't a coincidence that it looked like English-alphabet letters and numbers. There were only so many types of lines to draw.
Heck of a coincidence, though.
"If human," Rocky began. If pressed, Grace would call his tone "contemplative" bordering on "worried." He was getting better at that. "How much time we have, question?"
An excellent question. "I can't say for sure. We'd need a medical doctor and a lot more information, and even then, it's really difficult to be exact. If it's about as bad as I was after the Adrian mission, then an hour, maybe? Maybe more, maybe less, depending on what exactly is wrong with them."
And maybe they'd already waited too long, and there was a dead body in that crap-pile of a craft now. But he didn't say that part out loud. Rocky was smart enough to figure it out on his own.
"But cannot be human."
"If it is, we have way more questions than answers."
"Unlikely enough to bet on, question?"
Grace stared out the window at the Blip-A-B. Or maybe at the SM-13. Cursed his stupid fudging pack-animal lizard brain which would not stop screaming about the human heartbeat, the slow, unhealthy human heartbeat in the five-by-fifteen scrap metal box with the welded door.
"No, it isn't."
"No," Rocky confirmed. "If human, we fix."
"If human, we fix."
So they did what they always did: something very, very stupid, which would probably get them killed, on the off chance that it turned out to save someone.
Rocky built the tunnel. They didn't have a ton of spare xenonite lying around, but they had enough, Rocky said, to safely connect the two ships over a distance of about three feet. Grace made it two and a half, for the sake of time. It was a rush job, but his faith in Rocky's craftsmanship had never yet failed a test. It was ready to attach in just over forty minutes flat, but Rocky insisted that he could still hear the heart. Grace suited up.
Rocky stayed behind the inner airlock door. He'd wanted to stick closer out of concern, but if that craft turned out to have some crazy atmosphere conditions that the EVA suit couldn't handle (like, say, highly pressurized, blisteringly hot ammonia, for example), one of them should live to tell the tale. There was no point in taking all of Erid with them.
"No die."
Grace smiled to himself as he fired up the AstroTorch and grabbed onto a handlebar, pulling himself towards the tunnel's "floor" to begin prying the junk heap open. "I'll take it under advisement, bud."
"No. An order."
He pursed his lips, schooled his expression into something very serious, though Rocky could not see his face. "Alright, then. You're the boss."
While Rocky worked, Grace had maneuvered Mary around the craft so that they faced the sealed hatch. He hoped that, if he only cut where the door was theoretically intended to be, he would be less likely to accidentally hit something important and make everything worse.
He was deeply, deeply unencouraged by the liquid which seeped out from the gaps he made in the metal. It was thin, and Rocky had assured him that there wasn't enough of it to really pose a problem, but it looked like—
He swallowed. It wasn't blood. That would be insane. And not like first-contact-with-Rocky insane, like actually-loosing-his-entire-bag-of-marbles crazy. It couldn't be blood. It couldn't be. But the color and consistency were similar enough to make him deeply uneasy.
"You still hear the heartbeat, Rock?"
"Yes, yes, yes. Weaker, but still there."
Weaker. Potentially a good indication that they were making the right choice.
He worked hastily to make a gap wide enough to fit through. All the while, that stuff (not blood, not blood, not blood) coated his hands, his knees, the AstroTorch. Everything it touched came away sticky, arterial red.
At last, he'd carved out most of the hatch and the red-liquid-stuff flowed freely, trailing like morbid streamers through the air down the tunnel, pooling against the airlock door. Sorry, Mary. Blessed art thou among women, I think. I'm not a Catholic.
He didn't like going inside. It was cramped and dark, seemingly made for neither comfort nor safety, and he struggled to get his bearings in the zero-g cloud of definitely-not-blood. Something in his animal hindbrain was convinced that the (entirely removed) hatch door would slam behind him, and he'd be trapped here, alone, in the dark, between walls so close together, he could touch both by leaning side-to-side with his feet planted on the floor.
There were no living quarters. No obvious food storage. Not so much as a cot shoved into a corner.
He almost didn't see the man, at first. A feat, in such a small space.
He was floating near one wall, completely limp and drenched head-to-toe in red, so that at first glance he appeared almost skinned alive. Grace couldn't even tell what color his hair was. He wasn't moving—there was no mistaking the absolute lack of intentionality about the position of his limbs and—oh. Huh. He was missing an arm. Above the elbow, and probably pretty recently. For a moment, Grace thought that might be where all the blood had come from, but no. On closer inspection, the wound was roughly tourniqueted, and no one could possibly have lost that much blood and lived. He was alive. The only movement was the almost-imperceptible rise and fall of his chest.
Human, definitely. Human-shaped, human heartbeat, human face. (Human blood.)
"I found him, Rocky. He's injured, I mean bad, bad injury but he's breathing. It's—goshdarn it—it's definitely a human. A man, I think. Like me."
"Good, good, good. No issues with atmosphere?"
"No, I don't think so. There's some—liquid, though. I don't know what it is. Get the airlock open so I can drag him inside, and prepare for a mess."
"Mess not Rocky problem. Cozy inside tunnels, no liquid get to me. Grace clean it."
"Thanks for rubbing it in. Just be quick, he doesn't look small."
He felt the change in pressure as the Hail Mary's airlock opened behind him. The man was easy enough to move without gravity, though he looked like he'd be darned heavy otherwise. He stirred as Grace braced him under the armpits, like rescuing a drowning victim, and began to guide the two of them out. His head shook, a distinctive no gesture, and he muttered something which came from deep down low in his throat. Grace couldn't make out the words, but it didn't sound friendly.
And fair enough. If he'd been sealed into a pile of rusty scrap metal full of (not!) blood and flung into the cold void, he'd probably be feeling a little prickly, too.
Whatever compelled him to resist, though, it didn't compel him to wake. It probably couldn't, at this point.
"He okay, question? Lot of blood."
"It's not blood. Humans don't have that much blood in their bodies, it's—I don't know, it's something else. Fire up the centrifuge, I need to get him to Armando."
Rocky rushed towards the cockpit as Grace guided the sleeping man carefully down the ladder towards the dormitory.
"Unknown individual."
Armando always did keep it succinct.
"Severely injured; in need of medical attention."
The room tilted, a sure sign that gravity would momentarily return.
"Please move patient to the nearest unoccupied bed."
Grace did as he was told, trying to position the man so that, when gravity returned, he would land on the mattress and not the floor.
He succeeded, mostly. The guy's remaining arm flopped over the side, but it caused him no additional damage.
He left the room to allow Armando to do its work. Presumably, the first step would be getting all the weird, tacky red crap off of him, which Grace would rather not intrude on.
"Messy, messy, messy," was the first thing Rocky said.
"I warned you."
"Worse than thought it would be. Look like human blood. Is blood, question? Certain, question?"
"Nah, it can't be. Even if he'd been free-bleeding from that missing limb, which I don't think he was, it's way too much. He'd have died before he lost a quarter of that amount."
"Maybe other humans who died, like Grace and Rocky missions."
"I don't think so, either. That craft was small. I mean, tiny. You could have fit a second human, technically, but frankly if they tried, then the most unlikely part of this whole situation is that they made it more than a week or two before they tried to kill each other. We're years out from Earth. And even then, there were no doors or windows to jettison the body from, and he definitely couldn't have hidden it in there."
"Alright. Not blood. What do now, question?"
"First, I'm gonna use the XRF Spectrometer to figure out what that stuff is, and then I'm going to clean everything it came into contact with within an inch of its life. And then, I guess we wait."
If he was honest with himself, he knew what he would find the moment he took off the EVA helmet. The smell was unmistakable. Metallic, animal, slightly musty. Something primal inside him stirred and struggled the second it hit his nostrils, a mostly-dormant instinct to run from the dens where predators wallowed.
Still, he was a scientist. He scanned it with the Spectrometer. And then he scanned it with the Spectrometer again. And again, just for good measure.
Even his first brush with xenonite had been easier to accept.
"What see, question?"
"It's— It's oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and iron. Mostly. Trace amounts of some other things. Sodium. Magnesium. Calcium."
"What mean, question?"
"It's. Blood. That's the same atomic composition as human blood. It looks like human blood, smells like human blood, quacks like human blood. It's blood."
"Quacks, question?"
"Nevermind. Earth saying. Point is— I don't know what the point is. We need to decontaminate the entire ship, I guess that's the point, and maybe—"
He stopped short of saying, Maybe restrain our new friend. Sue him, but the guy was badly injured and unconscious. Whatever he'd been through, it had been very, very bad, and Grace had too clear an idea of what it would feel like to wake up on an unfamiliar space ship on the heels of something horribly traumatic, unable to move.
It was a lot of blood, though. And he stood by the fact that it couldn't have all come from one person, especially a living one.
"Restrain new human," Rocky said, saving him the trouble. "Before wake up."
And he was right, of course.
Grace entered the dormitory cautiously, though Rocky assured him that the man hadn't moved.
Upon confirming that he was still out cold, Grace averted his eyes and said, "Clothing for patient?"
"Clothing is not advised for patient in critical condition."
"Do it anyway."
"Query not recognized."
He groaned.
The man was intubated, so Grace dressed him in a cardigan which buttoned up the front, rather than attempt to pull something over his head. Getting the sweatpants on him was a little awkward, but Grace tried to tap into his more scientific thought patterns. Just a body, just a sleeping person, just a series of mechanical motions which would spare him the distress of waking up naked among strangers.
The blood was gone, at least. His skin was freshly scrubbed, and his hair —Grace could now see—was a natural, glossy black. His arm-stub had been cleaned and covered with white bandages. For all this, though, he still looked pretty beat up. There were stitched-up wounds across much of his body, bandages with angry, red patches around their edges which spoke of much worse underneath, visible scarring over one side of his face. And if that weren't enough, it was plainly written in the sallowness of his skin, the drawn tiredness of his face, the deep shadows below his eyes.
"Patient update?"
"Unconscious. Normal brain activity levels. Heart rate stabilized at seventy beats per minute. Symptoms of radiation poisoning. Severely dehydrated. Possible malnutrition. Mild concussion. Severed left arm. Severe infection. Multiple moderate-to-severe abrasions of the skin. Internal temperature forty degrees Celsius. Administering Potassium iodide, Diethylenetriamine pentaacetic acid, amikacin, intravenous fluids, codeine, ondansetron. Mild anesthetic administered for patient safety during recovery process. Partial recovery expected."
Some of that went over Grace's head, but he recognized the names of an opiate painkiller and a couple of treatments for radiation sickness. The others, he wasn't sure about. Probably, there was an antibiotic in there somewhere.
"Thanks, Armando. You might not like what I'm about to do next."
"Query not recognized."
The restraints they had come up with were nothing fancy. A simple plastic cord intended to bind some kind of machine components together when they weren't in use—Rocky was the engineer, not Grace—which closed with a simple rotating lock mechanism, like a bicycle lock.
Armando had, helpfully, attached a railing to the side of the cot. Probably because this guy wasn't in a coma, and might wake up at any moment and panic. Grace made sure to bind his remaining wrist such that he couldn't wriggle out, but without cutting off circulation.
In all honesty, it might not hold him off for long if he was determined, especially once he got his strength back, but it was better than nothing. Hopefully the sheer disorientation he would almost certainly feel upon waking would be enough to stay his hand.
Assume the worst, pray for the best. Hadn't he heard Stratt say that, once? It sounded like her. Stratt would probably have a conniption if she saw what he was doing, but then, who cared what she thought?
Rocky came into the room behind him. "Watch him sleep, question?"
And maybe Grace had been too immersed in Eridian culture these past months, but it felt wrong not to. He was sick. He'd probably be terrified when he woke up. Someone should be here. Humans, like Eridians, were not made to be alone.
"Yeah, we can take turns. But if you're here when Armando alerts for eye movement, come and get me. I want to be the first one he sees."
"Think he might be…human term…freaked out, question?"
"Yeah, we have no idea what he's been through, and no offense, Rock, but a Labrador-sized space spider might not be the most soothing sight to a disoriented human. Other than me, of course. Very soothing to me. But most people just don't expect that sort of thing."
"Understand. No offense. Most Eridians same, giant biped space blob very scary if not expecting it."
So they watched, and they waited.