Chapter Text
Ryland Grace was not one to complain. Scratch that, he was, and he’s complaining right now.
He was currently laying on the floor of the Hail Mary, he legs up on his bed. His body twisted to the right, trying desperately to stretch his back. The confined space had been doing wonders for his back. He hadn’t had a chance to fully stretch his wings since Rocky made that tunnel, and before that it had been four whole years. Granted, he was asleep during a vast majority of that time, but still.
His back muscles were complaining about the lack of space as much as he was. Why couldn’t they have given him more space?? He knew why, but the only place he could possibly stretch his wings was in the Don’t Go Crazy Room and it still wasn’t big enough. The lab was bigger, but the table and lab equipment made it less than ideal. The last time he had tried to stretch his wings there several vials had fallen onto the ground. Thankfully they weren’t glass, but if they had been it would have been devastating. Since then, he had taken to trying back stretches on the floor of the dormitory instead.
Curse him and his massive wingspan. How do birds cope?? For one, they usually aren’t stuck in tiny spaceships. He groaned in exasperation. This was not helping at all, it was just making his side hurt. He gave up and rolled over onto his back, his wings half unfurled at his sides. His glasses fell off during his stretch, he didn’t feel like grabbing them. He just dealt with the blurry vision.
“I think not being able to stretch is going to kill me.” He sighed, closing his eyes.
“Grace being dramatic, statement.” Replied the musical voice just outside of his vision.
Grace had long abandoned the translator. He had a pretty good grasp on Rocky’s language by now. Plus, if he was going to live on Erid he was going to have to learn it one way or another. Better now than later. It was sort of fun trying to learn the few words he didn’t know yet, anyway. Sitting in that tunnel two years ago pointing at the numbers on a clock had been one of the few highlights of this mission.
Even after remembering that he hadn’t come willingly he tried to think of the positives. If he’d never been sent, he wouldn’t have met Rocky. He squinted at the ceiling.
“I am not being dramatic, it’s been a whole two years since I stretched last!”
“Stretching now, statement.” Rocky replied.
Ryland groaned. “It’s not enough! These darn wings make stretching impossible.”
Rocky laughed at his dramatics and Grace huffed in response. Eventually he rolled over and pushed himself up, putting his glasses back on. Laying on the floor without his glasses was just going to make his back hurt more and give him a headache on top of it. He placed his hand on his hips and arched his back on one last attempt to stretch before leaving to the hallway. He heard Rocky tumbling after him in his xenonite hamster ball. When he started calling it that he had no idea. The thought made him laugh softly to himself as he walked.
“What funny, question?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
“Rocky want know what funny!”
Rocky rolled after him, nudging his leg in a way that almost made him fall over. “Nothing’s funny!” Of course that just made him laugh more as he looked back.
He knew that Rocky had no face, but Grace had a very strong feeling that if he did, it’d be scrunched up in frustration. He laughed again and turned his head back just as he passed the big half-dome window. What he saw made him stop and gasp. Rocky bumped into his leg before quickly rolling back a bit. His carapace tilted up at Grace.
“What wrong, question?”
“There’s… something out there.” He stepped closer to the window, pressing his hand on the glass. “It’s too far to make out what it is, but… it looks man-made.”
His wings twitched, a couple feathers falling to the ground. There shouldn’t be anything man-made this far out in space. Whatever it was, though, he could tell it wasn’t natural. It was tube-shaped, smooth, and vaguely shiny. He couldn’t make out much more just due to how far it was. But, as the current speed the Hail Mary was going at they’ll come close enough in a few minutes. It was too perfect and symmetrical to be a space rock.
“Other human, question? Earth send other ship, question?” Rocky’s carapace tilted to the side slightly. It reminded him of- oh. Rocky was mimicking him. Grace sighed.
“I don’t think so, this seems way too small to be an interstellar spaceship.” Grace replied.
“Oh oh, maybe beetle! Like what Grace send to earth!” Rocky perked up, turning to ‘look’ at Grace, another habit the eridian picked up from him.
Grace thought for a moment. It could be, but why would earth send a probe back? It had to be something important, then.
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It had been a whole ten minutes since Grace and Rocky decided to try and line up the air lock to the mystery object. It was going…interestingly for lack of a better word.
“Left left! No other left!” Rocky demanded.
“You are not being very helpful right now!” Grace squinted at the screens in front of him. He’d long since given up trying to look at the visible light camera while also trying to steer, so he’d told Rocky to give him directions. “This is harder than it looks.”
“Be better pilot, Grace.”
Grace ignored that last comment and focused on trying to get the ship into position. His wings were being squished against the back of the seat due to the harness meant to keep him in place during zero-g, and the discomfort was making it difficult to focus. Eventually he groaned in frustration and called it close enough, deciding to do an EVA to pull the object closer.
Once he was in the suit, he remembered why he’d been reluctant to do an EVA in the first place. The suits were tiny, with barely any accommodation for his wings besides a little bagginess in the back. Making an EVA suit fit around his wings would have been difficult and would have needed to be custom made, so the Project Hail Mary team had opted for good enough. It made sense, custom made suits took a long time and they would need ones for the backup crew, too. Plus, Grace hadn’t even been initially intended to go. Lucky him.
Grace shook his head and gently pushed out of the airlock, hooking a second tether to the ship. Now that he could get a closer look at the object, it looked more like a submarine strangely enough. It was indeed tube shaped, with a sleek hull and a rudder at the back. He could see a door, but it looked sealed. Odd, what was a submarine doing all the way out here, ten-odd something light years from Earth? He could also see the color of the submarine. It was an iron gray, and what he had previously thought was rust obviously wasn’t now. It was blood. Grace almost gagged. It trailed behind the weird submarine in crimson blobs.
He took a deep breath and allowed himself to float towards it before attaching a tether to it. With one hand on the ship and another on his tether, he slowly pulled himself and the object slash submarine toward the Hail Mary’s airlock. Once he tethered the submarine directly to the ship he quickly darted into the airlock and back into the ship. He hated that EVA suit. Grace nodded to Rocky as the little alien went to work on securing the object to the airlock in a way that he could get at it without the EVA suit.
In his time on the Hail Mary, Grace had pretty thoroughly investigated all the little panels and menus in the control room. A lot of them he didn’t fully understand, but they seemed insignificant so he hadn’t bothered. One of those panels, though, was a menu that showed radiation levels. Grace brushed it off since it was likely only meant to show if there were any leaks in the ship’s radiation protection. Now, though, the menu popped up on one of the smaller screens and was beeping like crazy. Grace tilted his head slightly and checked what the problem was.
The screen showed a blueprint of the ship, with red dots indicating areas of high radiation. Surprise, there was no significant radiation Hail Mary the ship. However, there was a big red dot right outside where the airlock was. Whatever the submarine-like object was, it was radioactive. Not enough to kill, but enough to be concerning. Whatever Grace recovered from inside would probably also be radioactive.
Wait. That thing’s radioactive. Rocky isn’t protected against radiation. His feathers puffed up and he ran back to airlock. He needed to warn Rocky!
He stopped right as he reached the airlock.
“Rock!”
“Grace okay, question?” Rocky was just rolling out of the airlock as Grace arrived, tilting his carapace at him.
“Whatever that is, it’s radioactive. I think you should go to the lab, just in case.” Grace took a deep breath, flattening his feathers.
Rocky paused. “Good idea, Grace.” Rocky skittered off toward the lab. After what happened to Rocky’s crew, he definitely did not want to risk radiation.
Grace took a moment to catch his breath watching Rocky leave. The eridian was definitely getting better at navigating in his hamster ball in zero-g. He sighed and turned to the airlock. Rocky had somehow set up a short, xenonite tube that connected from the airlock to the side of the submarine-thing. He really needed to find a better name for it. After a quick trip back to the control room to turn on the centrifuge, he was back at the airlock.
What should he do about the radiation? He was probably going to have to wear the EVA suit again, he realized. Grace could practically feel his wings aching already. He sighed, time to get over it. Plus, his curiosity was starting to win over and he was dying to know what was inside. After grabbing the blowtorch Rocky had made when they were cleaning out the astrophage tanks, he suited up into the EVA suit again.
When he entered the tunnel for the first time, he realized that this sub was old and covered in rust. Thankfully the section in front of him had little to no blood and he could make out the outline of the welded door he’d seen before. He brushed it off and decided that was a good spot to start cutting.
Cutting through didn’t take very long, whatever this was it was oddly thin. He set the torch down on the xenonite before entering. Directly in front of him, Grace could see what looked like a screen the size of a full-length mirror. To the right of it was a button that flickered irregularly green like a dying lightbulb. He took a mental note of everything as he went further.
His eyes scanned the pipes running along the ceiling. Everything seemed to be covered in what looked like blobs of coagulated blood. He took a deep breath and tried his hardest not to gag. He probably wasn’t going to add that to the mental checklist. Finally, he looked down. What he saw first was what looked like a fallen over, mangled chair. Judging by the circular post next to it, it had likely been previously bolted to the floor. What could have mangled it like that? In front of the chair was what looked like controls. A simple compass-looking dial and a throttle handle. How had this been piloted with those simple controls? Finally, he looked at the floor.
He had to quickly turn away to prevent himself from gagging, eyes squeezed shut and taking several deep breaths. It was a man, laying slumped half against the wall. His left arm was missing with an ugly wound at the shoulder. He was nearly covered in blood, like everything else in this thing. Grace steeled himself and knelt in front of the man. It was near impossible to make out any features. He probably died of radiation poisoning if he was trapped in here.
“Uurgh…”
Grace jumped back, nearly slamming his head against the wall. The man had just groaned! He was alive? A million questions floated through his head, including several variations of “how??”
Well, he probably wouldn’t live much longer without medical help. So, after steeling himself, he picked the man up and headed towards medical.