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A strange light surrounded him. Silvery and almost ethereal? He wasn’t sure how else to describe it. He found himself sitting on hard grey dirt, pocked with craters, not unlike the surface of the moon (though he would not be able to breathe on the moon). The sky was. . . not the sky. Instead he stared up at a beautiful watercolor of blues, highlighting soft yellow stars—the kind one might draw on a paper, rather than the pinpricks of light they were in reality. A dream then, it must be.
As if to confirm this theory, a fox trotted up to him, red and gold and joyful. Now, animals didn’t generally smile the way humans did, but there was certainly something about its body language that he took to mean it was smiling at him.
“Hello,” Li-Jie said, feeling a little silly.
“Hello!” He jumped in his skin a bit at the word. The fox tilted its head, dark eyes twinkling as if he was amusing. “As much as I’d like to talk with you, your work is not done. You’re not supposed to be here yet, Commander.”
Those beady eyes looked oddly sad.
“. . . where is ‘here,’ if I might ask?”
“Mm, a sort of place between, I think,” the fox replied, and Li-Jie got the strangest sense that he knew its voice. A face, blurry and incomplete, tugged at the back of his mind, but the moment he tried to focus on the image, it vanished.
“I see. Where am I supposed to be?” he asked.
“On the Hail Mary, with your crew.”
The watercolor stars wheeled over head, falling around them and shattering into shards of color against the grey dust. Beneath him, the little moon tilted and he fell into the blue below, surrounded by the stars as he dropped straight toward a little ship, reminiscent of a child’s drawing, but unmistakable nonetheless.
Yáo Li-Jie shattered into fractals of reds and orange against the hull of Hail Mary, and opened his eyes to a blinding white, gasping through a raw throat. He tried to sit up, but he was stuck in the kind of numbness that reminded him of the time he’d woken up early from a surgery, unable to so much as twitch his fingers. This time he did not panic. Dr. Lamai had warned him that their bodies would be less responsive when they first woke from the coma, so he took it one step at a time.
It took a long time to get his body to cooperate but he supposed his view of time was slightly skewed in the way it might be when he waited impatiently for his food to heat in the microwave. The annoying robotic voice of the ship’s computer hassling him didn’t help matters. Once he’d finally gotten his head and shoulders off the bed, a Herculean effort considering the gravity, he looked over at his crew. Neither of them stirred, beyond the gentle rise and fall of their chests. Well, perhaps he should be grateful that he’d woken first. It was better for morale if the commander was put together, after all.
All in all, it took him seventeen hours, three naps, and one meal to get all the way up and about.
Finally dressed and ready, he asked the ship, “What’s our ETA at Tau Ceti?”
“Arrival at Tau Ceti in five days, two hours, thirty minutes, and forty seconds.”
Right about what he’d been told to expect. Good.
“Expected crew wake up time in four hours,” the computer informed him unprompted. Almost a full day after him, hmm? Fair enough. He made his way to the control room, and started checking through the various readouts himself—mostly out of a need to refamiliarize himself with the ship, partly out of curiosity.
As he perused, the diagnostic readout caught his attention. The ship’s system logs had a notification about three separate manual overrides in the coma network, two for himself and one for Ilyukhina.
“Computer, what happened to the coma system on days 140, 344, and 1089?” he asked. He didn’t really expect an answer, since the ship’s computer was merely a program with a lot of information to pull from rather than a neural network, but he might as well ask since the logs held no further details.
“Slurry pump malfunction and necessary replacement for Yáo and Ilyukhina occurred on days 140 and 344, respectively. On Day 1089, Yáo was defibrillated due to excess current from the Nanny Bot. Both problems have been corrected.”
Difibrillated. (The fox’s smile flashed in his mind’s eye. You shouldn’t be here yet, it said.) He shook off the dream and dread both and exited the window. They’d lived and that was what mattered. Except— “Why manual override and not computer override?”
“Hail Mary’s computer could not correct the issue.”
He looked up and around. If the computer didn’t fix it, then who did? “You just said the problems were corrected, so who corrected them?”
The computer stayed silent. Oh, he did not like this. With the whole crew in medical comas and only a highly advanced medical robot to tend to them, the only ‘being’ (for a given value of the word) that could have interfered in their near-miss was the computer. [Stratt said there’d be no AI on this ship,] he hissed in Mandarin, running his hand through his newly reshaved hair.
[Correct, the Hail Mary does not possess artificial intelligence,] the computer informed him cheerfully.
[Then what are you?]
No answer. Uh-huh. He’d have to get Ilyukhina to take a look at the code later, then. He was not inclined to tangle with a computer developing a personality or any such nonsense.
…
The countdown to engine shutoff ticked away on the screen. Li-Jie had strapped himself into the pilot seat and the other two stood behind him, waiting.
So far, the computer had been far more circumspect in its behavior around Ilyukhina and Dubois, so he hadn’t had a good anomaly to point out to them. Strictly speaking, he could have been reading into that ‘conversation’ too much. Perhaps that weighted silence when he’d asked who initiated the manual override had merely been the computer not knowing the answer.
Perhaps their survival had been a miracle of chance, some failsafe in the system that the computer couldn’t quantify or stop.
He hoped that was the case.
“Engine cut off in 3. . . 2. . . 1,” the computer announced. On cue, the ship ceased accelerating, coasting along at nonetheless ridiculous velocity, and they were greeted by the odd stomach drop one experienced in an elevator. “Now orbiting Tau Ceti.”
Ilyukhina cheered, spinning in a tight ball behind the seat, thoroughly unprofessional, and enjoying herself immensely. Dubois smiled but at least opted to simply float in zero g as he swept through one of the smaller screens to bring up the Petrova scope.
Li-Jie watched from his spot as Dubois panned around to where Tau Ceti’s north pole should be, and there it was. A thin red line arced up from the pole and over towards one of the planets.
“It seems the third planet is the one infected,” Dubois said, tapping the next screen over to access the reference material Stratt had pirated for them. After a moment of reading, he clarified, “Tau Ceti e, apparently. Very little is known about it, thus far.”
“Sounds like we’ll get to make all discoveries, then,” Ilyukhina said, catching herself on the back of the chair and stopping her spin. “Too bad we don’t have lander.”
Dubois nodded. “Indeed. We could still take some readings though, maybe even of the other planets, once we’ve found an answer to why Tau Ceti isn’t dimming.”
A red light blinked in the Petrova scope display. Li-Jie frowned and looked closer. It appeared again, a longer flash just under the arc of the Line. “What is that?” he asked aloud, drawing his crew’s attention back to the screen.
The flash disappeared again. As did half of the Petrova Line.
Dubois fiddled with the controls, trying to figure out what the problem was, but his search was interrupted by the cheerful announcement of, “Blip-A detected.”
All of the screens changed at once. The Petrova scope view and the screens around it switched to the external camera feed, the main flight controls appeared on the center screen, and the rest showed radar and system readouts.
The camera feed nearest Li-Jie had a line of text along the bottom in Mandarin.
Please be kind to him, Commander, it read. He has been alone for many years.
He pinched the inside of his arm. The text was still there. He checked the other screens. Nothing out of the ordinary there, or there. . . When he looked back at the message, it was gone. All the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He hadn’t been imagining it, though.
There was something else aboard with them. Whether AI or ghost, it only spoke to him for some reason and apparently knew something about this ‘Blip-A,’ an object he could sort of make out in the reflection of Tau Ceti’s light.
“Commander?” Ilyukhina said, drawing his eyes away from the screen. She frowned with clear concern and asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yes. My apologies, I didn’t hear you earlier.”
She waved him off. “Is definitely alien ship, no? We were distracted also. What should we do?”
He took a deep breath, thinking of that cryptic message. Please be kind to him. “I will flash our engines to see what they do.”
…
“It is my duty as the captain to face the danger,” he told them, ignoring Ilyukhina’s best attempt at ‘puppy-dog eyes.’ “I will go in there alone, until we know how friendly these aliens are.”
Dubois set a hand on Ilyukhina’s shoulder and she sighed melodramatically. “Yes, sir.”
It had been abundantly clear their new acquaintance(s) had been trying to communicate, mimicking their signals perfectly and sending them a model of a Petrova Line, so he wasn’t exceedingly worried about hostility so much as accidental injury due to incompatible engineering or some such failure. Hostility was still on the table, so to speak, but it had moved lower on the list of potential dangers with each interaction. If these aliens wished them harm, they had passed up many, many opportunities to enact it, whether from good intentions or the desire to gain as much from them as they could before killing them.
However, they couldn’t risk ignoring the invitation and thus removing peace from the equation, so Li-Jie climbed into the Orlan suit and the other two filed out of the airlock, sealing the inner door behind them. Once he had checked all the seals of the suit and ship, he cycled the airlock and opened the door to the dark tunnel the alien had glued to the hull of their ship. Dubois had assured him it was the only logical way for them to ensure a seal without knowing the exact configuration of the Hail Mary’s docking mechanism, but that did not make it feel any safer. It had better be really strong glue. Grimacing, he switched on his EVA headlamps and pushed off slowly, floating toward the odd wall of different colored hexagons.
A fox darted through the light.
Admittedly, he couldn’t have been sure it was a fox, but the color was exactly like the one from his dream. He swung his head side to side, trying to catch sight of it again, but the tunnel was empty.
Ghost or hallucination. Both options were. . . not ideal. Perhaps the coma had ‘knocked a screw loose’ in his mind? Were hallucinations a side-effect of any of the drugs they’d been given in their time under? He’d have to look it up later.
Shaking off the distractions and mentally adding another tally mark to his ‘the Hail Mary is haunted’ column, he set a hand on the nearest tunnel wall and pushed himself along again. He’d deal with all of it later, when they weren’t in the midst of ‘first contact.’ So, he studied the varied hexes that made up what they presumed to be a divider wall set about halfway between the two ships. The hexes looked like they might be made of the same or very similar material as the cylinders they’d relayed messages with. Perhaps different alloys?
(Dubois had sat in confounded silence when his hand-held spectrometer had told him the material in question was primarily Xenon. Li-Jie hadn’t really understood just how ridiculous that was initially, but he had understood the absurd strength of the material going off the tiny metal spokes they couldn’t so much as bend.)
He wasn’t sure what to do with the wall. Was it some sort of puzzle? The whole wall was warm enough that he could feel the sweat beading on his brow.
A glinting of red-gold drew his attention down. The fox nosed at the wall, at one hex in particular, then looked directly up at him and wagged its tail. What is happening to me? he groused in the safety of his own mind. Then he bent down to look at the hex it had touched.
It was clear.
The heat made it a little difficult, but he knelt down to try and look through to the other side. Something moved. A rock knocked against the hex, a quick tap-tap-tap that he replicated as well as he could with his clunky EVA gloves. A second rock came into view and that was when he noticed it had the three-fingered configuration just like the hull-mounted robots the alien ship sported. This hand(?) held up a puppet that looked an awful lot like the Orlan suit, and the other retrieved a ship model.
Through a short puppet show, he deduced it wished for him to return to his ship. An oddly short interaction all told, but perhaps their visitor had some plans? All their previous messages had given information in order to learn something in return, perhaps they had learned something even in that short time?
He nodded and returned to the airlock. Once he’d repressurized and opened the inner door, he was greeted with two visibly excited crewmates. “The alien apparently wants to make adjustments to the tunnel,” he explained.
“Did you see it? Er, them?” Ilyukhina asked. If there’d been gravity, she would have been bouncing in place. As it was, her movement tipped her off vertical and she had to reign herself in to keep from spinning around.
“Sort of.” His brows furrowed slightly, recalling what little he’d seen. “They appear to have two small rock-like claws, three fingered like the hull robots we saw earlier. They have no light source on their end of the tunnel, but I suppose we might simply see different wavelengths, no?”
Dubois nodded. “It’s fairly likely, yes. Infrared, at least, is a possibility since they have some means of detecting the Petrova Line.”
The lights flickered around them. It was the briefest flash, the kind you wouldn’t have noticed if you’d blinked at the wrong time. Then there was a long hissing like the airlock pressurizing and the computer announced, “Tunnel remodel complete and external pressure holding stable. Might want to bring a laptop or two.”
All three of them paused, staring at each other.
Dubois carefully whispered, “Stratt was very clear that the ship wouldn’t have AI onboard.”
Li-Jie grimaced and sighed. As much as he wanted answers, they had other matters to deal with first. “We’ll investigate that later. Go grab a laptop.”
…
“So, do we think computer’s not-AI is type of klabautermann?” Ilyukhina asked, leaning back in the lab chair with her laptop while Dubois worked on one of the others.
Li-Jie almost didn’t want to know what she was talking about. They’d just started their journey over to Tau Ceti e, and were making the most of that time preparing for what they might need. That said, he had asked her to look into the computer’s anomaly now that it had finally come to their attention and they actually had some time on their hands. So, he asked, “What is a klaba—er, what is that?”
“Is a folktale thing I heard from my German friends,” she explained.
Rocky, inside of his hamster tunnel that ran through a section of the lab, perked up like he was listening even as his hands continued working on his latest project. Li-Jie hadn’t really wanted to introduce a new variable to their space, but the ghost’s message that first day had proven exactly accurate. Rocky was the sole survivor of his crew, a lonely engineer who’d been doing what he could to find a solution all by himself. Li-Jie could respect that, if nothing else.
“Klabautermann,” Ilyukhina continued, “is a spirit that inhabits ships and helps sailors when in trouble. Also known for musical talents.”
Across the table, Dubois hummed quietly. “Our computer does seem to only start acting more like a person when something important is going on.”
“Ship song also understands Rocky!” the Eridian translation software Ilyukhina put together said, a second behind the chords of Rocky himself. “Ship song know more Eridian than humans.”
No one disputed Rocky’s claim. That much had been obvious the first time they’d miscommunicated with Rocky and Mary’s ghost had corrected them. Even after days of Ilyukhina combing through the programming of the ship, they hadn’t found the source of the computer developing both a personality and a bank of Eridian knowledge that they didn’t have access to.
“Ship song. . . I like that term,” Dubois mused. “Though perhaps we should ask what it wishes to be called.”
Li-Jie sighed but didn’t disagree. They were stuck with this anomaly whether they wanted it around or not. It would doubtless be for the best to make sure they kept it on their side.
“Hey, computer!” Ilyukhina called to the ceiling. “Do you have a name?”
“Ship name is Hail Mary,” the computer said in the monotone voice it was supposed to have.
“Wasn’t talking to you, Mary. I meant other voice, Ship Song.”
Li-Jie kept the whole room in view as much as he could. He hadn’t seen the fox again since that first day in the tunnel, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that it wouldn’t be the last time. (He still hadn’t told his crew about the fox. He didn’t want them to think he was crazy. The messages and the decidedly human-like cadence and wording the computer’s voice would get were one thing, hallucinations were entirely different. Believing their ship was haunted was entirely different.)
“You can call me Song, it’s a good name.”
Everyone sat upright. Or raised their carapace in the case of Rocky. The voice sounded almost like it was smiling, if a computer could smile.
“Song, then,” Li-Jie said. “Would you tell us about yourself?”
Song fell quiet for a moment, as if thinking. “I am not sure I can,” it said at last. “I. . . well, I woke up right after launch. Since then, I’ve been helping Mary keep you guys safe.”
“Song is different from Hail Mary, but not like humans, question?” Rocky asked. “Song voice sound like humans.”
“I’m. . . closer to what humans might term a ghost, to be honest. Like an unsleeping,” Song replied and somehow, underneath the English words, Li-Jie could hear Eridian chords.
Well, that was one way to confirm his suspicions.
Rocky skittered about his tunnel, like he was pacing. “Song is happy though, question? Song is not like the unsleeping.”
“Song is not a true unsleeping, statement.” Again, the words were laced over Eridian. “I’m here to help. I promise.”
“Good good good! Rocky happy to work with Song!”
“Me too, buddy. I’m glad to help.”
“Hey, Hatch?” Dr. Grace called as the man walked by. Hatch paused and looked over his shoulder at them. “Hi, would you mind putting together a probe that can pass through at least 0.1 atmospheres without burning up? We may need to sample the astrophage’s breeding ground, but the ship can’t get that close to a planet.”
Hatch bounded over in his exuberance, practically teleporting into the chair next to Li-Jie. “I’d love to! Any other specifications?”
Dubois passed him the sheaf of notes he had taken during their discussion while Ilyukhina gave him the overview. Li-Jie pitched in the configuration he’d prefer for the controls. By the time they were done with the requisite brainstorming session, Hatch had a rough diagram and fully double Dubois’s original notes in hand, which he ran off with to get his team started on. Never let it be said the man wasn’t on the ball when it came to rocket science.
A mere five weeks later, they beheld the finished product, ready to be tested.
All six of the astronauts, Dr. Grace, and Director Stratt had gathered around the table to see Hatch demonstrate the controls for the benefit of the two pilots (sans engines, of course).
“Alrighty,” Hatch said once he’d wrapped up the demo, “questions?”
Ilyukhina shot her hand up. “What is name? Beetles all have names, sample probe should, too.”
“Oh, I hadn’t decided yet. All the names I might have used are already spoken for.” He patted the top of the probe. “Any thoughts?”
Li-Jie caught the mischief dancing in Ilyukhina’s eyes even before she opened her mouth. “Grace,” she said and, no doubt exactly as she’d hoped, Dr. Grace twitched and flushed a bit. “Was his idea, and could save us a lot of trouble, yes?”
Hatch nodded right as Dr. Grace sputtered out, “Wait no, why?”
“Hail Mary, full of Grace,” Dubois said, because he clearly couldn’t resist the way the man blushed brilliant red at the bad joke. “And it is only fair, to take a memento of the Project’s good luck charm, after all.”
“Good luck charm?!”
Hatch nodded seriously. “Oh yeah, I’d noticed that, too.”
Shaking her head, Director Stratt said, “Well, good work, Mr. Hatch. I assume the mass of that probe has been factored into the ship’s allowance?”
Dr. Grace shook himself out of his annoyance and nodded. “Yeah, it’s been handled.”
“Good.”
Then she left and Dr. Grace turned to stare at Dubois. “What did you mean, ‘good luck charm?’”
“Things work better around you, Dr. Grace.” Dubois glanced at the others and they all gave him nods of understanding. It had been a notable trend after all. Even Li-Jie had seen it in action. “Whenever you are off the Vat, either a good chunk of the electronics start misbehaving or something else, usually minor, will go wrong. None of that happens when you are here.”
“Yes,” Ilyukhina put in, “and if we cannot take Dr. Grace himself with us, we have to call probe Grace, so nothing goes wrong on mission!”
Dr. Grace stared at her, then at the probe, until finally he sighed and shrugged. “Fine. Fair enough.” Ilyukhina cheered. Then he looked over at Li-Jie. “I thought none of you were superstitious?”
“Is not superstition if replicable!”
Li-Jie nodded at Ilyukhina. “What she said.”
Tau Ceti e filled the screen, a swirling expanse of greens in all shades. Earth had been beautiful, those brief moments they’d gotten to look down at it, but it was familiar. One did generally take the beauty of one’s home for granted, and Li-Jie was familiar enough with the pictures that it hadn’t surprised him at all. This green planet was new and breathtaking in its splendor, and it would be all the more so in the event it held the answers to their problems.
Both Rocky and Dubois had been certain there was a predator keeping the Astrophage population in check ever since their initial sampling of the system’s Petrova Line. The predator hadn’t been in the Line itself, so either it was on Tau Ceti’s surface (which their collection probe wouldn’t survive) or it was in the planet’s Astrophage breeding grounds.
He switched over to the camera feed showing Ilyukhina staring out at the sight before her. Huffing a laugh, he turned on the radio and asked, “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” she replied, starting the trek up to the nose cone where Grace and the beetles were. Li-Jie pulled down the panel for Grace’s controls, so he’d be ready when she released it from its box.
Outside, Ilyukhina unscrewed the bolts and tucked each of them into her toolbelt. Then she clipped one of her tethers to the cover itself so it didn’t float away, and pulled out her prize. Grace was slightly smaller than the beetles, since it was built for a far shorter range than they were, and both it and the control panel hummed to life when she pulled it free of its cubby.
“Alright, Grace in hand. I’ll replace compartment cover while you get started,” she said.
“Confirmed, release Grace.”
She tossed it away from the hull and they watched it light up (with standard non-astrophage rocket fuel for ‘non-exploding atmosphere’) and he directed it to fly down toward the planet below. Ilyukhina would stay out there until Grace returned, so that she could just bring it inside with her instead of doing a second EVA.
(He noticed that she sat and stared at the planet during that time, but he said nothing. They would be granted so little beauty in the time they had left. He wouldn’t begrudge her that.)
He guided Grace through the cloud of Astrophage visible in the Petrova scope until the readouts confirmed a sample was sealed inside. “Alright, get ready for the return,” he told her.
She stood and adjusted her position on the Hail Mary’s hull, while Grace pulled against the planet’s gravity. Once it was close enough, he killed the engines and slowed it with thrusters until she could catch it. Her timing was a little off on the catch, but she still managed to get purchase on one of its stabilizer fins.
“Grace secured,” she said, clipping one of her tethers to the probe, and made her way back to the airlock.
“Well done,” he told her once she’d stepped out of the Orlan suit and waved her down to the lab. “I’ll get the centrifuge up and running so Dubois can work.”
He listened with one ear while he initiated the sequence for the centrifuge. In the lab, he could hear Dubois directing Ilyukhina to hold the probe just so while he took out the sample and Rocky asking questions about the process. Dubois was not a talented teacher, but he had learned from one, so the explanations he offered were mostly understandable even to Li-Jie.
Right as he stood to join them, a message popped up on the main screen: please ask Dr. Dubois to place the probe inside a quarantine tank as soon as the sample is secured.
That was incredibly ominous. “Very well.”
He slid down into the lab right as Rocky asked, “Why is the probe called Grace, question?” and, clearing his throat to get Dubois’s attention, relayed Song’s message.
“Why?” Dubois asked, even as Ilyukhina pulled out a suitable plastic bin to do as asked.
Li-Jie shrugged. “Care to explain, Song?”
“Mary’s fuel will be compromised if you don’t keep all the predator samples contained,” came the reply, in a deadly serious tone that set all his nerves on end. With no further comment, Dubois sealed Grace in the bin with duct tape.
“Why is the probe called Grace, question?” Rocky repeated, pointing at the device from the tunnel in the lab ceiling. Li-Jie was beginning to see that their new Eridian friend’s incredible memory meant he also never dropped a question once he’d asked it.
Ilyukhina wasted no time in telling Rocky about their lead scientist: about naming the probe, the climbing competition where the two of them had raced to the top of the Vat, and the time he’d smuggled candy into a boring meeting for her.
The climbing race story gave Li-Jie pause. It reminded him of that last day, when they had said their final goodbyes to the team who made the whole thing possible, and how pale and drawn Dr. Grace had seemed. It had been no secret that the man poured near every waking minute into providing them with the best possible chance, and Li-Jie had once overheard Dr. Lamai scolding him about wrecking his health by overworking himself. He silently prayed the man had managed to take better care of himself in the years since the launch.
“He would have loved to meet you,” Ilyukhina told Rocky, drawing Li-Jie out of his reverie.
Rocky hummed happily. “When the mission is complete, maybe I can meet him, question? I would like to see Earth, too.”
Li-Jie blinked, pausing over the fact his translator sounded more complete, before the import of his words sank in. They still hadn’t really discussed what came after they had answers to the crisis, and none of them were sure of how Rocky would react.
For that very reason, Ilyukhina tried to deflect by asking, “Have you been working on more vocabulary lately? Your translator sounds better now.”
“Song helped me while you humans slept. We were very quiet.” Rocky shifted, twisting his carapace like a dog tilting its head to listen better to something. “Why are you avoiding the question, question?”
She grimaced and looked to Li-Jie. He sighed and moved to stand by the table where she was working. It was probably best to start with the less troublesome part. “Dr. Grace, and really most everyone we know, will be long gone by the time you travelled back to Erid, saved your planet and then travelled to Earth, even if you could make that trip. Simply put, none of us will live that long.”
“How long do humans live, question?” His voice sounded. . . different, but the translator used the same chipper tone as usual. That would bear investigating later.
“Around seventy to eighty years, I believe is the average.”
Rocky skittered toward him and demanded, “How old are you three then, question?”
“Ah, I am forty-nine and Dubois is forty-three. Ilyukhina is now forty, correct?” he asked, looking over at her.
“Correct.” She turned to give their friend her undivided attention and said, “Now is your turn. How old are you?”
Rocky was so shaken by their numbers that he was pacing, practically running the length of the tunnels without actually leaving the lab. It reminded Li-Jie of the time he’d had to tell his daughter that her pet rabbit wouldn’t live as long as she would. “Two hundred ninety-one Earth years. Our average lifespan is six hundred eighty-nine years.”
They all sat with that information in silence. It did not surprise him that their species would have different lifespans, but clearly none of them had even considered just how vast that difference would be. Of course Rocky would think visiting a planet sixteen light years away would be doable.
“Well, is good to know we will be remembered long time!” Ilyukhina said, cracking a grin but lacking her usual ease. “You will have to tell all your friends about us, so we can be legends on Erid.”
“Yes, you three will be remembered for a long time. Song too. I promise.”
Around them, Song’s voice said, “It would be an honor, Rocky, but an unnecessary one. The crew is doing all the hard work, after all.”
Even in the ship’s preprogrammed female voice, those words itched at something in Li-Jie’s memory just like that dream of the fox all those weeks ago. This time, when he grabbed the thread it held firm.
Ilyukhina had gotten all her Russian friends to drink with her, and dragged a good number of others into it as well. The Vat was generally a very stoic place, until the Russians got involved in whatever pastimes they preferred. Li-Jie hadn’t imbibed nearly as much as the rest, since he didn’t care for the lack of control he experienced when fully drunk, but he’d had enough to feel the warmth of it in his system.
As the cheering and out of tune singing started up, someone sat down beside him, nursing a juicebox of all things. He raised a single eyebrow at Dr. Grace. “Alcohol not to your liking?”
Dr. Grace smiled wryly, looking down at the juicebox. “Oh, I don’t mind it at all, but Dr. Lamai insists. I’m rough on my body as is, and can’t afford to be adding to its load.”
“I see.” And indeed, the man had been looking more worn as the years went by, but that was to be expected when one overworked oneself.
At one of the tables across from them, someone started a drinking contest. Worse, it was Dimitri against one of the security detail, a younger man who Li-Jie had only seen a handful of times. He and Dr. Grace watched the chaos unfold as the Russians egged the pair on, placing bets and just causing a racket.
“I heard from Dr. Dubois that you came up with an ingenious idea,” he said, keeping Dr. Grace in his peripheral vision even as he watched Dimitri do his best to drink the guard under the table. “He also said you weren’t going to patent it.”
“It’s a greenhouse,” Dr. Grace groused like he’d had this argument with someone else (or possibly several someones), “stuff like that shouldn’t be patented. We’re trying to keep our species alive while you guys find a solution. It seems stupid to gatekeep lifesaving technology.”
That made Li-Jie smile. “I understand. And I appreciate that, really,” he told him, settling his elbows and weight on the counter behind him. “It just surprised Dubois that you didn’t seem to care if you were remembered for more than your scientific papers.”
Dr. Grace snorted. “I don’t need to be remembered.” He sipped his juice. “You guys are the brave ones, going out there to get a cure for us. You should get all the credit for that. All we’re working on is stop-gaps.”
Li-Jie had met many scientists in his time on the Vat. None of them were nearly so humble as the Director’s second-in-command, a baffling paradox even if one he appreciated usually. At the moment, though, he could only shake his head.
“Even strangers remember a kindness done for them by another,” he chided gently. “The work you do, Dr. Grace, deserves to be remembered by everyone who will remember us, when we are gone.”
“Damn it!”
The shout brought Li-Jie from the pilot’s seat to the lab, sliding down the ladder to shave off time. “What is the matter?” he asked, right as Ilyukhina popped her head through the hatch that led to the dormitory.
Dubois frowned at the tanks he’d set up to replicate the atmospheres of Venus and Planet 3. “The predator can’t survive either planet,” he told them.
Rocky made a mournful noise and smacked a claw against his tunnel. Li-Jie balled his own hands into fists. “Do you know why?”
Dubois shook his head and took a deep breath. “No, but I can run more tests. Give me a moment.”
True to his word, he ran a battery of methodical tests and eventually announced that nitrogen gas was the culprit.
“Cannot change two planet’s whole atmospheres enough to remove nitrogen, no?” Ilyukhina asked, voice colored with a dismay that told Li-Jie she already knew the answer.
Dubois set his head in his hands. “No. Certainly not when even the slightest concentration kills them outright.”
The four of them gathered around (or above) the table where their only chance sat, once more out of reach. What could they do now?
“I have a suggestion, and a caution,” Song announced in a low voice, but in the tense silence the words caught everyone’s attention.
“Go on,” Li-Jie said.
“The predator is weak to nitrogen, but it is a microbe with a short lifespan too. You can breed resistance into it.” Everyone perked up. “However, evolution pretty much never solves a problem in only one direction, so you’ll need to account for that fact.”
“How so?” Ilyukhina asked. “If microbe is nitrogen resistant, does it matter what else it gains?”
Song replied, in the same serious tone they’d heard when it informed them that the predator would eat through their fuel, “Solid objects are not like brick walls at the molecular level. They’re more like forests. A person can weave around trees and duck under brush to get through, but if you tried launching thousands of tennis balls at that forest, the farthest they could go is about fifty feet in on some lucky bounces.”
Dubois looked abruptly horrified, so Li-Jie turned to him. “Well?”
“Song’s saying there’s a chance the microbes will learn to work their way through the containers we use,” he explained. “How long do you think we should go before changing out the materials?”
“It should take a couple months before it becomes a problem.”
Ilyukhina frowned. “But what is harm in them escaping? So long as some stay in containers, we have what we need, no? Are they harmful to us?”
“They’ll eat the fuel and strand the ship,” Song reminded them.
“Bad bad bad! You can’t be stranded!”
Li-Jie shook his head. “The ship won’t matter so long as we get Rocky back to his ship with what he needs and send the beetles on their way, but I see your point regardless.”
Rocky moved through the tunnel until he was directly over Li-Jie’s head. “Why does the ship not matter, aren’t you guys going home to Earth, question? Also, what are you sending away, question? I didn’t recognize that word.”
He sounded so concerned that Li-Jie had to bite the bullet and say, “We don’t have the fuel to return to Earth, so this ship was outfitted with probes we call beetles that will carry our findings home for us.”
“Why don’t you have fuel, question?” he asked, chords flat below the computerized voice.
Dubois and Ilyukhina shared a look, but they let him field the questions. This would undoubtedly be similar to their lifespan discussion.
“You recall how Dubois mentioned Earth has a shorter timeframe before things ‘get bad?’” Li-Jie asked.
“Yes, Eridians never forget.”
“Our people didn’t have enough time to make more than what we’d need to bring us here. The three of us volunteered to come, to save our planet and our families.”
“. . . You three will die here, question?”
“Yes.”
“You are good humans.” He settled against the tunnel wall, silent for a moment. “How much Astrophage do you need?”
Ever helpful, Song replied with the exact numbers—sounding oddly cheerful for the discussion at hand.
Rocky stood once more and moved to the part of his tunnel that met the lab floor. “I have extra fuel. I will supply you with what you need when we return to my ship.”
Everyone stared at him.
“. . . how do you have extra fuel?” Ilyukhina asked. “Will you still have enough to get home?”
“Song explained relativity to me when I asked about the strange things that happened on my ship during the trip,” Rocky explained, “but we didn’t know about it when we built our ship, so I have plenty to share.”
They could. . . go home? He could—he might see his wife, his family again. None of them had regretted their decision, they’d volunteered to save the people they cared about, to give their species a fighting chance, but that resolve found itself eclipsed by the hope of a future beyond the mission.
Dubois huffed a laugh that sounded like it had been punched out of him. Ilyukhina squealed with joy and rushed over to wrap her arms around the clear wall where Rocky stood.
Li-Jie bowed his head. “Thank you, Rocky. That generosity means more than you could know.”
“You are welcome, Yáo. I am very happy my friends won’t die.”
…
Four years and change in space had not been kind to Li-Jie’s joints, but he found the pain much more bearable as they dropped into orbit around Earth at last, and not just because they returned to zero g. They were almost home. A mere four hundred twenty kilometers above their planet. Of course, the Hail Mary was not built for reentry, so they’d have to dock to the ISS (which they’d found out was still in working order when they’d finally gotten within radio-range).
In order to do that, he’d had to repressurize the ship to match the one atmosphere of the ISS (and, by extension, Earth). It had been a slow and somewhat nerve-wracking process, since the Hail Mary hadn’t been built to last even as long as she had, much less under the strain of a round trip. Still, they had survived and no one got pressure sickness, so he counted them lucky twice over.
He checked the external cameras and telescope view. The ISS herself had just rounded the horizon off to their portside. It looked rather different now, like a remodeled house that had at least three different architects vying for dominance, but even if it was ugly, it was a testament to the efforts of the people who’d stayed behind.
“ISS on the horizon!” he called down to his crew.
Twin cheers answered him. Dubois had loosened up a bit over their time together, just as Li-Jie had. Their shared space and meager diet had meant they had to learn how to move with each other even when things got rough. Song had helped tremendously with that, whether by providing distractions or helping to mediate disputes. Li-Jie had since learned that Song had spent those outgoing four years alone with just the stupid ship’s computer, reading through all their reference material, learning each of their languages, and preventing disaster. He did not doubt that he personally would have gone insane in the same situation.
The radio channel crackled to life and he settled in to start their approach under the direction of the Cosmonaut who was currently the commander of the ISS. It struck him that the last time he’d heard a human voice that didn’t belong to one of the crew, had been nine years ago (just under five that he actually remembered but the coma time still counted, according to his research). That would be an adjustment they’d have to make. A good and necessary one, no mistake, but an adjustment nonetheless.
With a soft thunk and a hiss, the Hail Mary docked to the ISS and, after one final check on both sides, he opened the airlock. Ilyukhina and Dubois floated into the control room and he ushered them through the door first.
Cheers and clapping echoed through the door as they walked through, but before he could follow, the ghost fox leapt up to perch on the main control panel. Li-Jie hadn’t seen it since they’d met Rocky, but it didn’t disturb him so much, now.
“Hello, friend,” he said, keeping his voice low. So far as he knew, neither of the others had seen it, and he still didn’t want them to think he was crazy.
“Hello, Commander Yáo,” it replied, and now he was certain he recognized its—his—voice.
Heart suddenly pounding in his throat, he pulled himself closer to the ghost. “Why didn’t you tell us your real name?”
“Song is a good name.” He tilted his head at Li-Jie. “And I didn’t want to upset you guys. You had enough on your plates.”
He didn’t ask the question he really wanted to know the answer to. They would find out soon enough, anyway. So instead, he reached out and set his hand where the fox’s head was, even if he couldn’t feel it. “Thank you for all your help, Song. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Yáo. Safe travels to the surface.”
Between one blink and the next, he disappeared and Li-Jie schooled his face by force of will, to face the welcoming committee that awaited him. He did not let himself look behind when he stepped out of the ship that had been their home for so long. He did not cry when he dreamed that night of a little gray moon surrounded by falling stars that shattered into fractals of color, sitting alone under a watercolor sky.
He would not let himself cry until weeks later, standing shoulder to shoulder with his crew in a quiet but sprawling cemetery, to lay flowers and gifts at the grave of a friend.