Chapter Text
"I want to do an EVA!" Christina whines, halfway down the hallway already. "Well, we had to be fast…we completely missed the first one they sent us." Victor explains as she comes to a stop in front of the EVA room.
Reid's already halfway through the process of putting on the Orlan-MKS2 suit.
"Do you need any help?" She asks, hovering at the doorway. "Maybe a little," she nods and moves behind him to clasp some of the pieces he can't easily reach.
"What exactly did they throw at us? And how sure are we that it's not a bomb?" Christina whips her head around to see Jeremy floating outside in the hallway.
"What are you doing up?" She asks, clicking Reid's second glove into place. "I told you, I don't like being alone on this ship!" He hisses, pulling his knees up to his chest.
"You should be resting. You broke your arm." She reminds him (as if the pain isn't a constant reminder). "He broke his arm?" Reid asks, looking over at the splint.
"Yeah, because of your crazy driving!" She says it as a joke, but it's mostly true. "Well, I'm sorry I was trying to keep us from being obliterated by an alien spaceship!" Reid defends with a pout as Christina shoves the helmet over his head and locks it into the body of the suit with a snap.
"Yeah, yeah…you're always so dramatic." She catches a glimpse of the copula behind Jeremy and her jaw drops. "Oh my God, is that their ship??? It's so cool looking!" She exclaims, floating over to the large window.
"Ahhhh, no…that's not cool, that is terrifying! It's like ten times our ships size!" Jeremy scrambles away from the window as if that will keep him safe. "Try twenty…" Victor muses. "That's not helping!" Jeremy says anxiously.
"Alright, alright…" Christina says as Victor secures Reid's tether.
"Try not to fall…or get hurt…or be blown up…or seem threatening…" Victor lists matter-of-factly.
"Anything else?" Reid asks through the comms of his suit. "Just don't die." Christina says, giving him a pat on the shoulder before she opens the airlock door.
—
"Can you see it okay?" Victor asks Reid through the comms as he connects himself to the top of the ship's hull. "Blip-B?" Reid clarifies.
"Yeah…and Blip-A." Christina looks towards one of the display screens in the cockpit and sees that each of the foreign objects have automatically been named Blip-A and Blip-B on their radar.
"Is it as big as it looks from in here?" Jeremy asks, leaning forward to speak into the mic. "No…it's bigger." Jeremy shudders.
"It's kind of high…" Reid says with a wince as the Blip-B approaches. "Agh, we should've sent someone taller…" Christina shakes her head.
"No, like…two feet above me-also I am not that short!" Reid says, sounding slightly offended even through the patchy comms. "Well, I hope you're prepared to jump…" Christina says with a slight wince. "Yeah…"
"Maybe move a little to the right?" Victor suggests, squinting at each of the different display screens.
Reid shifts slightly to the right and almost loses his footing.
"Well, don't do that!" Christina exclaims, feeling the anxiety start to kick in. This could be a really really bad idea…
She resists the urge to cover her eyes when it finally comes time for Reid to jump. Peaking through her fingers, she watches Reid jump slightly to the side and catch it— whatever it is— perfectly. She sighs in relief— but then he drops it.
"Shit," Victor swears. Christina can't breathe for a second and watches with horror as Reid dives to get it. "Oh my God…" she feels like throwing up.
"I'm okay!" She hears Reid say through the comms. She exhales deeply, letting herself float away from the pilot chair as she tries to slow her heart rate. "Did you get it?" Victor asks after a few seconds.
"…Yes." Christina feels some of the anxiety subside, replaced by excitement.
—
"Okay so like…how bad would it be if we forced it open?" Reid says, leaning against the wall. They turned the centrifuge back on after finding themselves unable to open the canister in zero gravity, but so far it hasn't helped. (Jeremy's pretty content though; he keeps running up and down the halls.)
It's been nearly an hour since Blip-A sent them Blip-B and it still hasn't budged. There's a clear seam at the top where it should open… but what should and does happen, as they are now realising, are very different things.
"If my arm wasn't broken, I could totally do it." Jeremy declares unhelpfully.
"Sure, you could, bud…" Christina says with a yawn. She's so tired, but they can't sleep when there's so much excitement to be had.
They sit in silence for a few minutes, passing the canister around to keep trying different ways. "Hey, guys…has anyone tried turning it to the right?" Jeremy asks suddenly.
Christina laughs, since the canister is in her hand she turns the top to the right in order to prove Jeremy wrong. "Of course we've tried turning it to the-" it twists open easily. "Oh my God!"
"Did we seriously not think of that?" Reid asks, moving closer to her. "Blame it on running on a two hour nap-" she cuts herself off with a cough.
"Oh God…" she holds the canister away from herself. "Shit…we didn't consider that…"
They really are sleep deprived. Any toxic gas could've been in there and they're just opening it up with zero protection?
"Put it in the glove box…" Reid tells her, ducking his nose into the neckline of his uniform. "Yeah," She stands, quickly making her way over to their containment station, placing it inside and sealing it off. She takes a deep breath and tries not to panic…she'd know that scent anywhere.
"Okay so…that was ammonia." Christina says with a sigh, sinking to the floor and leaning against the wall next to the glove box. "My lungs aren't burning and we're not dead so it's probably fine…" She reasons, staring at the ceiling.
"Let's not do that again…" Reid says, taking notes on his computer. "Yeah, alien foreign objects go straight to the glove box after cooling off in the airlock." Victor adds with a nod.
They'd also learned in the past hour that the canister was extremely hot by the time they were able to reach it, even after spending enough time in space for it to have theoretically cooled off .
After its external temperature had been deemed safe, they took it to the lab and ran every test they could think of. It's not radioactive (that was a priority for Jeremy.) It's not conductive. It's extremely hard to break— they'd tried all of their tools and none of them even made a dent.
Since they couldn't get a piece to break off, they couldn't run it through a gas chromatograph. But they did scan it with a handheld x-ray spectrometer. It's made of xenon. Which makes absolutely zero sense. Xenon is a non-reactive noble gas, not a solid. And now that they know that the canister contains ammonia, they are can conclude that ammonia is probably a significant component of the alien's atmosphere.
Reid has a document open that notes all of this.
"Okay," Christina says, getting back up. "Let's see if there's anything other than ammonia in here." She sticks her hands into a pair of gloves and carefully turns the canister over. Two small items fall out.
She pulls them away from the canister and sets them both down, leaning down to get a better look. "What is it?" Jeremy asks, standing behind her.
She's quiet for a minute, observing all the different shapes. There are a few spheres, connected with a whisker thin line. That shape…it's so familiar…"Petrova Line!" Christina blurts out excitedly.
Jeremy and Victor both get up and move closer. Reid takes a seat at a desk nearby, ready to take notes. "That's a star…that's a planet and the line connecting it is a Petrova Line." She explains, pointing to each part of the model with a gloved hand.
Reid types away on his computer, it's the only sound in the room.
"They're here for the same reason!" She says with a smile.
"Okay…are we sure it's not anything else? There's a Petrova Line here, maybe they're just replicating that?" Victor asks, poking holes in her theory to try and prevent any false hope.
"Hmmm, then what is the main point of the message?" She asks, looking at the other model for a moment. She pokes at a few of the pieces. Despite how thin the wires leading up from the bottom are, the material doesn't budge. Just like the material the canister is made out of, it seems much sturdier than anything they have on Earth.
The other model has a lot more planets (or maybe stars) and they're all a lot smaller than the other one, the Petrova Line is still there, but it's not the focus. She thinks for a minute.
"Reid, pull up an Excel spreadsheet. I wanna see something." She instructs. He does as he's told. "What am I entering?" He asks when he's got it.
She grabs a calculator from one of the drawers and starts typing away, periodically reading off various numbers and instructing Reid on how to enter them. It takes almost fifteen minutes, but when they're done, the schematic they've created on the computer is a perfect match to both the model they were sent and a map of the stars near Tau Ceti they found on the ship computer.
"Okay, so they sent us a map of the stars and a Petrova Line." She looks back at the model, trying to see if any of the stars stick out. There's a little wire connecting Tau Ceti to another star.
"Which one is that?" She asks Reid, looking over at their map. "Uh… 40 Eridani."
"I bet that's their home." She says with a smile. She's suddenly extremely excited about meeting this new, clearly intelligent species. "The message means: we're from the Eridani system. We have a Petrova Line and so does Tau Ceti, we're here to save our sun."
No one has any arguments, because what else could it mean? She's spot on. "Okay, so we should tell them where we're from and maybe try and make a mini Petrova Line in our system?" Reid says, finding Sol on the map.
"It's really tiny…how are we gonna do that?" Christina asks, furrowing her brow. "I think we have some paraffin…and a torch…" Reid says, looking through some of the drawers and cabinets.
"Ah, yes, fire on the space ship. Great idea, Reid…" She says sarcastically. "It'll be fine…I took a welding class in high school." He assures them.
"Oh yes and that was, what? 50 years ago?" He glares at her, but she's not too far off.
—
After a little bit (a lot) of struggle, they managed to connect Sol to Tau Ceti, form a little aluminum structure resembling Earth— labelled with a little piece of paper reading Earth because by that point, they had grown increasingly tired of their inter-terrestrial arts and crafts— and create a Petrova Line arching from Sol to Venus.
"Okay…so who's going to throw it back?" Christina asks after placing the updated model back in the canister. All three of them look at her.
"Oh, okay…" she says with a laugh, making her way to the EVA room with the canister in hand. Reid and Victor both help her get into the suit quickly so to prevent keeping their newfound alien… friends?… waiting for too much longer.
Their ship is actually positioned perfectly between the two, main regions of the alien ship. All Christina has to do when the exterior door opens is throw the canister across the distance between them. It moves faster than it did during the initial transfer so she remains outside until she is certain they are able to get it.
A robot on top of the hull moves over to exactly where Christina had thrown it from the doorway and catches it precisely, pulling it inside of a hatch. She pulls the door shut.
—
The EVA had flooded Christina's body with adrenaline, but once she gets back inside she can barely keep her eyes open.
"Why don't you get some sleep, Tina? We'll wake you up if anything changes." Reid says when he notices how tired she is.
"Can I sleep too?" Jeremy asks before Christina can respond. "Yeah, that's probably for the best. You guys did just wake up from a coma. We were pretty tired yesterday too." Reid tells them both.
Christina wants to argue; she wants to stay awake and see what the aliens have to say about their message, but she's falling asleep on the spot and with the gravity on that's not really safe. She agrees and walks with Jeremy back to the dormitory.
She knows that Reid and Victor are probably exhausted too, but she'll deal with that later…she's asleep ten seconds after her head hits the pillow.
—
"Christina…" she forces her eyes open. "We got another message." Reid tells her, his hand on her shoulder. She sighs, contemplating the merits of going back to sleep versus making history.
"I'm up," she says, throwing the blankets back. "Jeremy!" She calls, looking to her left. "Well, you could let him sleep…" Reid says, but Jeremy's already awake.
"He doesn't like to be alone," she reminds Reid. "Come on, Jere…we gotta get to work."
When Christina sees the second model, it's immediately clear to her what they want. "Oh…" she bites her lip. The new model is completely different.
One looks like a tiny Hail Mary…the other looks like a tiny Blip-A. The only difference between the ships in the real world and the ones in the model is that the two ships in the model are connected with a tunnel.
"They want to meet us…"