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“Eye movement detected. What’s two plus two?”
Grace groaned, grateful that Mary had at least removed the throat tube this time before asking.
“Four, Mary,” he sighed.
“And the cube root of eight?” Mary continued. “In simple terms, please, Commander Doctor Grace.”
Oh Great, he thought to himself. They’ve already pre-programmed her to be sassy.
“Two, Mary,” he sighed. Then he noticed the silence around him and his heart rate jacked up noticeably.
“Captain Yao and Engineer Ilyukhina are alive and well, Doctor Grace, you were just the first awake” Mary soothed, her robotic voice oddly gentle. Armando whirred forward carefully in a movement that almost looked bashful in case he needed to sedate him again. Luckily, everyone on Lamai’s team had agreed in no uncertain terms that the bot would never, ever hold him down unless it was a matter of life and death, so no arms were reaching for him.
The confirmation of his crew’s healthy state thankfully prevented a repeat of “Violent Catheter Self-Removal 2, Electric Bloody Boogaloo,” as he waited impatiently for the removal of all the tubes.
“Cleared to stand,” Mary confirmed, as Armando patted his arm in a soothing gesture. “Please be careful, Dr. Grace.”
“Just Grace is fine, Mary,” Grace sighed as he carefully stood on wobbly feet, one of Armando’s arms reaching out to gently curl around his waist for support.
“Acknowledged, Dr. Grace,” Mary replied.
“Well, someone certainly had fun with your code this time around,” he huffed to himself.
“Command not recognized,” Mary said, but the tone sounded distinctly cheeky to him.
“Wow, already anthropomorphosizing the ship this early in the game,” he sighed under his breath. “Great job, 🎵🎵🎶,” he huffed one of his many Eridian nicknames under his breath, one that roughly translated to ‘soft and sleep-stupid,’ and that Rocky always hit him with whenever he tried to stay up too late. Not even Adrian ever used that one; they’d tease him sometimes, but never with the sort of crass informality that Rocky did.
He wobbled his way over to the other beds, relieved to see two other wet, squishy blobs instead of desiccated husks. He checked their pulses anyway, sighing in relief. As soon as he finished, Armando was insistently shoving a tube of glop at him.
“Eat, Dr. Grace,” Mary’s voice rang through the dormitory, leaving no room for argument.
Nobody was awake to care if he made sounds that in any other circumstances and from any other person could only be called ‘erotic’ so Grace didn’t bother to hold back as he wolfed ‘Day 1, Meal 1,’ down.
“Maryyyyy,” he whined. “More, please?”
“Voice command recognized, recording activated,” Mary replied, and a recording of Dr. Lamai’s kind, Thai-accented voice suddenly filled the space.
“Let it settle, Dr. Grace. You’ll have more in a few hours. You won’t ever starve again.”
Oh, that… It was too early in the voyage to be crying, but he was tearing up anyways.
He experimentally rotated his left shoulder to distract himself, pleased at the increased range of movement over what he’d had on Earth.
He didn’t want to leave his crew, but Armando was happy to roll off and bring his packed cube of belongings to him. He selected the first t-shirt he saw- a gift from Carl that had a picture of a UFO and the words I need more space on the chest- and a black ruffled skirt he’d stolen from Stratt’s closet that was very steam-punk-esque and which he’d never actually seen her wear. Then he grabbed the socks that LeClerc had knitted for him from wool he’d spun himself back when he still lived in the French countryside, slipping them on and wiggling his toes happily before tugging on his converse. The reminder from Mary to ‘tie his shoes’ felt distinctly judgy, but he did it anyway.
The sudden sounds of Olesya’s Russian curses filled his chest with a joy that felt like Thrumming.
______
Olesya had only just finished hurling the last of the obscenities that she could fit into a single breath when Yao stirred with far more poise, answering the simple cognitive assessment that Mary gave him in Mandarin.
“We are alive,” he said in English, sitting up gingerly as his own medical robot removed all the tubes. “That is pleasant- not unexpected, but pleasant nonetheless.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty psyched about it too,” Grace agreed, an unexpected wet sob bubbling its way into his laugh.
“Come here,” Yao told him kindly, standing up and opening his arms. Grace didn’t even care that the man was still in his coma suit, half-falling forward and clinging desperately.
“Hey, I want hug too! No fair that Yao gets first,” Ilyukhina complained, still in her coma pod.
“Incorrect,” Mary replied, switching from Russian to English when Olesya did. “What is two plus two?”
“Mary, override cognitive assessment,” Grace ordered. “Input Status for Engineer Ilyukhina: fit to work.”
“Спасибо,” Lesy replied, stretching her arms.
Grace gave her a thumbs down and a smile and turned his face up towards the ceiling where Mary’s speakers were kept. It was a charming little quirk, Yao thought, for the man to look at the ‘person’ he was speaking to, even if they didn’t really have a body to speak of. Or perhaps Grace considered the whole ship to be Mary’s body… it would certainly give a more literal meaning to the Christian prayer metaphor.
“Mary, how long until engine cutoff?” He asked the ship.
“Time to Tau Ceti is 11 days, 2 hours, and 33 seconds,” Mary replied, and Grace thanked her.
Grace looked jealously at the two of them as they sucked down their tubes of goo, but he brightened when Armando extended a pouch of coffee as a peace offering.
“I’ll leave you guys to get dressed while I go check the ship’s cargo manifest again just to make sure everything made it on. I mean, I’m sure it did, because this is Eavie we’re talking about, but she’d tell me herself to always triple check,” he told them. Really, it was clear he just needed something to do to occupy his nervous, anticipatory energy, but Olesya couldn’t fault him for that. Hell, she was nervous, and she didn’t have nearly as much reason to be looking forward to their arrival as he did.
Olesya pulled on an old band t-shirt from a techno-fest that she barely remembered back in Moscow (the vodka had been strong even for Russians, but she still treasured the blurry glimpses of strobing lights and dancing and flirting openly in a way she rarely ever got to back in her homeland. The appeal of those festivals was more about that than the music, really) and followed it with one of her yellow flight suits. Then she grabbed her little yellow polaroid camera and took a selfie before leaving Yao to get dressed. He was like a father figure to her, and she had no shame around human nakedness, but she knew that he was a little more reserved and would prefer to dress in solitude.
She found Gracie in the cockpit, staring at one of the screens with a wistful look on his face.
“They put some pictures of the launch in here for us,” he told her, scooting over in the pilot’s chair. She sat, half on his lap and half in the small space he’d made for her.
Carl was crying as he held Grace’s sleeping form, and Annie was making bunny ears behind Ilyukhina’s lolling head. Someone had stuck a fake mustache onto Yao’s upper lip, and the whole team had one fist over the other forearm, mid Eridian-goodbye. Stratt had eyes only for Grace, staring at him like he was the sun and she wanted his imprint to be burned into her eyes forever as the last and only thing she’d see for the rest of her life.
She’d seen a photo, once, of her great-grandfather looking at her great-grandmother the day before he’d left for the Eastern front and never come back. Eva’s face looked like his, every bit as wretched, body tense, held back by sheer force of will to complete one’s duty, but with eyes that expressed the complete opposite.
Olesya wasn’t sure she’d have been able to leave, if she’d had anyone to look at her that way. She raged against the unfairness of it all, that loss would follow both Grace and his loved ones no matter where in the universe they found themselves.
“Hey,” he told her, eyes almost unbearably kind, voice school-teacher soft. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“You’re right,” she told him, becoming aware of the wetness pooling below her eyes. She wiped them with her sleeve. “Of course it is. But… well… What about you? You’re going back to people who don’t remember. How are you handling that?” She’d been afraid to broach the topic back on Earth, but now they were getting closer, and she felt she owed him the conversation, the chance to share his feelings.
“More okay with it than I thought I’d be,” he told her. “I mean, we have a lot of shared memories, Rocky and I. Adrian and the other Eridians too, but especially Rocky. They brought us closer, and I’ll miss those, but… there were a lot of dark times, too. I know I’ve made peace with what I put my body through the first time, and I’d do it all a million times if it meant meeting Rocky and keeping him safe. But Rocky never made that same peace. He had to watch me waste away, not knowing if I would even make it to Erid. Honestly, I think he’s the only reason I did. I was so sick, and so tired, Olesya. Starving to death is… pretty much the worst way to go. It might not be as painful as some of the quicker ones, but all of that is overridden by just how long it is. And do you know the worst part?… it’s actually really pleasant, towards the end. That’s how you know you’re about to die, when you start feeling peaceful and floaty. And for the last month or so of our trip, I had that feeling sneak up on me so many times, and it was terrifying because I knew, I knew what would happen if I just relaxed into it, and I had to fight it. It was like fighting off the haze of a drug, peaceful and gentle and so deceptively kind. I had to hold onto the pain with every fiber of my being because I knew that if I relaxed into the pleasant haze that the human body tries to offer in the very last stages of starvation, well… that’s all I could focus on. It kept me busy enough. But Rocky had to watch. Nothing could ever have hurt me as badly as the fact that Rocky had to watch.” He was sobbing now.
Olesya pulled him into a hug as his body was wracked with tremors, but he kept talking. “I know Rocky. I know who he is as a person. I know that no matter how different I am, or what circumstances we meet in, he’ll always come to love me. I have faith in that more than I’ve ever had faith in anything. He’s my person, in any universe. He’s always at the end of my red string of fate. It would be selfish to want him to remember the good times at the cost of having witnessed all the horrors. So I’m grateful as much as I’m sad. But mostly, I’m just sure- I’m sure that Rocky will always be Rocky and that Rocky and Grace will always belong together, in any universe.”
What did you even say in the face of that kind of admission, that kind of care? Olesya didn’t know, so she just held him until Yao came into the cockpit, fully dressed, and wrapped his arms around both of them.
________
There wasn’t actually a lot to do in the countdown towards Tau Ceti. They checked all the equipment on the ship in their respective domains- Grace made sure everything in the lab was working properly, Yao took them off autopilot for a bit to check all the ship’s controls, and Olesya went through everything else. But the xenaluminium coatings on all the crucial components were doing their jobs; everything was in perfect shape. So that still left them with ten days to kill.
They played a lot of cards, and Grace argued with Mary, and she argued back in a way that made her feel almost human to them. They spent a lot of time in the Don’t Go Crazy room, watching movies and looking at pictures of their time with the Petrova Taskforce.
They argued about which movies to show the Eridians first, and Grace had something to say about every suggestion, on how Adrian didn’t like the plot holes in this one, or how Rocky thought that one wasn’t violent enough. The only thing they all agreed on was Star Trek and the Rocky movies.
On the last day of deceleration, Grace had ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘The Two of Us’ pretty much on an endless repeat. Rocky’s favorites, he’d said. He didn’t say the other thing- that because they were Rocky’s favorites, they were his favorites too- but it was easy enough to figure out.
Grace had made so many sacrifices for this mission in both his lives. They could put up with the music.
______
Grace was already pre-curled into the fetal position as Mary counted the last ten seconds to zero-gravity.
“I’m good at moving around in it, but I never got over the initial panic at the transition,” he’d explained as they started floating, face curled against his stomach. “There were a few stretches on Erid where I had to spend a month or two at a time in orbit to ease the arthritis, so they built me a little tree-house thing up there because they thought Mary was too small. Rocky and Adrian always came with me, and Adrian’s bigger, so they always held me as the gravity cut off. I don’t like doing it alone.” His cheeks were red as he peeked through the curve of his elbow.
“It’s understandable,” Yao told him kindly. “I actually threw up my first time.”
“So did I,” Grace admitted. “Into the flight suit.”
Ilyukhina made a face. “Well, thank you for not doing that this time,” she replied, nose wrinkled.
Grace carefully uncurled, taking a deep breath as he pushed himself towards the Petrova scope.
“Moment of truth,” he said to himself, tone encouraging.
“Well?” Ilyukhina asked impatiently a moment later, and they all knew she wasn’t asking about the Petrova line they’d known would be there.
“Blip-A detected,” Mary responded, as if the moment was rehearsed. But Grace was sheet-white, pulling back as his glasses slipped off his face and started floating away. Yao grabbed them, but Grace didn’t seem to notice.
“What? What’s wrong?” Olesya demanded.
“That’s… that’s not the Blip-A.”
“Holy fucking shit,” Yao said.
______
“Wait- what do you mean it’s not the Blip-A? Mary literally just called it the Blip-A?!” Ilyukhina half-yelled, grabbing a shell-shocked Grace by the shoulders.
“I mean, it’s not the same Blip-A,” Grace explained, voice a croak. “It’s definitely Eridian, but it’s way bigger than last time. And the design is… different.”
Nobody knew what to say to that, except for Mary, who cheerfully chimed “Blip-B detected!”
“I’ll go get it,” Ilyukhina said, leaving no room for argument. “You are in no mind-set to go for a spacewalk right now.”
It was the work of 20 minutes for her to be in and out, and she barely even noticed the grandeur of Tau Ceti, too busy staring at the alien ship. A robotic claw waved at her. She waved back without thinking about it, her overstimulated brain unable to consider the potential implications of the movement.
“Huh…” Grace mumbled, after starting the centrifuge and opening the container (lefty-tighty, righty-loosy, waft don’t sniff!). “That’s weird…”
“What’s weird?” Yao voiced his and Ilyukhina’s shared thought.
“They didn’t send a solar system model this time,” their commander replied. “They just went right to ‘build tunnel.” He showed them the connected xenonite model of their ships.
“Well, I suppose we’d better listen, then.”
______
Grace checked the readings on their EVA suits. “Already pressurized and full of oxygen,” he muttered, scrunching his brows together.
Ilyukhina would have been surprised by that, if she’d had the brain space. However, she was too busy being freaked the fuck out at the two rocks barrelling towards them. One was brown, about the size of a perfect sitting-rock at the beach, and the other was ginormous, nearly as tall as her and as blue-green as a topaz. They were surrounded by a chorus of musical notes, not just from the two rocks currently rushing them, but also dozens of other rocks standing at the end of the tunnel. They were all reverbating with the notes that Olesya dimly recognized as the full Eridian title that Grace was so embarrassed about, and the two grabbing the various handholds and propelling towards them at the zero-gravity version of a full sprint were jubilantly trilling something shorter but with a few of the same notes.
Grace’s eyes were comically large as the two rocks reached him and pulled him into their bodies with a surprising gentleness, screeching and singing a cacophony of so many harmonies layered together that the laptop in Olesya’s hands with translation software could only pick out a few words, few and far between.
“Grace… Beloved…. Soul… Idiot… stupid… brave… dumbass… agony… missed… never again…” the two rocks were screeching over top of each other, the fans of the laptop working overtime as her program tried to keep up with even that much. Grace clearly understood every word of it despite what seemed like multiple sets of conversations layered over each other, and he was fully sobbing as the smaller rock reached out with one of many limbs to pull his helmet off and toss it aside carelessly, nearly hitting Yao in the face. The alien paid the other two no notice, too busy shoving its body against Grace’s face as if trying to merge and Become One. The larger, turquoise rock was holding both of them, front limbs around Grace’s torso as it hummed at a frequency that filled the space and made Olesya’s soul want to soar out into the great beyond, elated as it filled with a joy that wasn’t her own but was yelled freely into the universe like an Invitation.
It could have been five minutes. It could have been an hour. It could have been a year for all Olesya knew, too busy trying to absorb the Reality of what had been, until now, something that she’d only known to be fact, which was apparently a far cry from Knowing something to be Truth.
Finally, finally, Grace angled his head slightly towards them, still ensconced snuggly within the embrace of two aliens who did not seem like they would be letting him go anytime soon.
“Guys,” he said to them, choking on a laugh so bright that the emotions it evoked made Olesya panic for a second, thinking there was a breach in the atmosphere from the way her chest tightened with the force of it, “Meet Rocky and Adrian. They’ve been waiting for us.”