Chapter Text
“All right, settle down!” Dr. Ryland Grace called over the chatter of his classroom full of pre-teens, raising one hand in the air to further draw the kids’ attention to him. “We have about five minutes before the bell, so for today’s Five Minute Facts we’re going to be discussing quantum entanglement. Can anyone guess what that is?”
The classroom grew quiet as kids cast furtive glances around, puzzled expressions on most of their faces. Finally, one girl near the front of the room raised a tentative hand.
“Yes, Ela?”
“Is it… things that are attached to other… things?” Ela hazarded a guess, her voice small and doubtful.
“That is actually a pretty good summary of quantum entanglement!” Grace said, sitting back on the front edge of his desk and resting his palms on either side of his hips. “But let’s get more precise. Quantum entanglement is when two particles become interconnected so deeply that if you change one of them in any way, even if you’re just measuring it, you affect the other one no matter how far away it is from the first one.”
Grace pushed off the edge of his desk, walking around it and grabbing a dry erase marker as he moved toward the white board on the wall. “All right, let’s map it out. So, here’s particle A –“
** ~ ** ~ **
Grace careened down the hall of the Hail Mary, the zero G allowing him to bounce harmlessly off the wall in his padded EVA suit as he made his way towards the lab. He was heading for an analogue clock on the wall of the lab because he needed it to demonstrate human numbering systems to an alien – an alien! – to try and establish some kind of communication between them beyond gestures. You could say a lot with gestures; whole languages were built on them, after all, like ASL and BSL. But when you were a human trying to use gestures to communicate with… well, with what looked for all intents and purposes to be a sentient collection of rocks, some of the finer gestures were inevitably lost.
‘Okay, grab the clock, maybe a dry erase marker, and don’t forget to put your helmet back on before you exit the airlock or this is gonna be a really short first contact,’ Grace reminded himself.
Grace’s heart was absolutely thrumming in his chest, his adrenaline spiking as he reached out to grab the analogue clock as he went floating past
THUMP
The air whooshed from his lungs as he collided hard with the metal floor. What the heck had happened? Why was there suddenly gravity? And where had the dang lights gone? The Hail Mary was lit up like a…well, like a functional lab. He was in nearly complete darkness now. Had the power failed? But, no, that wouldn’t explain why gravity had suddenly returned and dumped him unceremoniously onto the floor. Gravity was not an instantaneous things in the Hail Mary, requiring several minutes of preparation to achieve.
“What the fudge?” he muttered, pressing the palms of his EVA suit gloves to the floor to raise himself up, grimacing at how warm it felt against his exposed cheek. Something was wrong with the Mary, and panic suffused him at the idea that first contact with an intelligent alien species might be ripped away from him by mechanical failure. Heck, forget first contact; if the Mary was failing in some way, the entirety of human civilization was going to fail with it because he would not be able to complete his mission to stop the astrophage from consuming the Sun and –
“Who the fuck are you?”
The question startled a tiny shriek out of Grace and he pushed himself up from the floor so quickly that he stumbled backwards to rebound off some pipes on the wall directly behind him. The speaker was cloaked in darkness ahead of Grace, lit by a couple of overhead lights in protective wire cages directly above him. And it was a ‘him’ that had spoken, the voice deep, rough, and not happy at all.
“I asked you a question. Who the fuck are you? How did you get in here? They said I was going down alone; have you been hiding back there? Why didn’t I see you while they were welding this thing shut a few minutes ago?”
“No! Hey! Whoa, I haven’t… I’m not… who are you?” Grace shot back, inching along the metal wall behind him away from the man who was shouting at him. The wall was warm against the back of his head where he’d pressed into it, but not nearly as warm as the floor had been on his cheek; hopefully whatever was causing the blackout was contained and he could possibly figure out how to fix the problem. But that wasn’t important right now because there was another person on the Hail Mary with him. And that was impossible, because out of a crew of three people, only he had survived the long induced coma necessary to get from Earth to Tau Ceti.
“No no no, I’m asking the questions here,” the man said, pushing out of his chair and rising to his feet, his broad form occluding the faint light from what looked to be a control panel behind him. The overhead bulbs did little to illuminate him, giving Grace the impression of shaggy hair, what looked to be a coat with a high collar, and very little else. “Have you been in here since launch?”
“Of course, I’ve been in here since launch,” Grace said, trying to keep from shouting. His heart was absolutely hammering in his chest and he felt like he might pass out if his cortisol shot any higher. “But… who are you? There were only supposed to be three of us and you aren’t Yao and you definitely aren’t Ilyukhina so how did you get on the Mary?”
“Mary?” the man repeated. “Who the fuck is Mary? What do you mean, ‘three of us?’ This is a solo mission. The one of me. So unless the COI was lying to me – which, yeah, I absolutely believe is true – then you shouldn’t be here.”
“No, you shouldn’t be here,” Grace returned, still inching. He should’ve run into a lab bench by now. How far had he been thrown into the lab when he fell?
“Look, you are in the SM-13 and there’s only supposed to be one person in here. Me! The oxygen won’t last if there’s two of us so unless you know something I don’t then we need to surface right the fuck now and get this figured out because I am not suffocating in a tin can because you thought you’d take a joy ride in the blood ocean.”
Wow. That… was a lot of words.
Grace blinked once, hard. And then a couple more times as he tried to process everything that had just been thrown at him. He needed to focus and understand what –
“A blood ocean?” Grace asked, his voice squeaking out higher than he’d intended.
“Yeah.” The man took a step closer, moving out from under the lights and making it impossible to see more than a haloed outline of his form. “Are you COI?”
“Am I…? No? I’m… I’m Doctor Ryland Grace. I’m… we’re… this is the Hail Mary.” He glanced around the dark interior, picking up faint points of light from indicators and buttons along the walls. The very, very tight walls.
‘…suffocating in this tin can…’
“Ohhh, crap,” Grace breathed on a sigh, slumping slightly. As impossible as it was, he was not on the Hail Mary. This dark, enclosed room looked nothing like his bright, open lab. Plus, there was another person here, wherever ‘here’ was.
“I don’t know what the Hail Mary is,” the shadowed man returned, raising one hand to gesture around the small, dark room. “This is the SM-13. The Iron Lung, if you prefer that. And this,” he turned and took two quick steps to the front of the Iron Lung, tapping a series of four glowing green rectangles with one forefinger, “is my oxygen, which you are using up by being here. Now stop fucking with me and tell me: are you supposed to be here?”
“No,” Grace said, his voice small and dismayed. “I have no idea where I am.”
The man stepped towards him quickly, reaching out both hands to grip Grace by the front of his EVA suit, jerking Grace forward roughly. The man was a few inches shorter than Grace, but that didn’t make him any less intimidating in the warm dark of this place. Grace’s eyes were adjusting to the dimness somewhat and he could make out the man’s features. He was good-looking, despite the scowl.
“Did you sneak on? The COI doesn’t know you’re here?” the man demanded, his voice dark with fury.
“I didn’t sneak on! I don’t know how I got here,” Grace protested, raising his gloved hands to paw uselessly at the other man’s grip. “I was onboard my ship, the Hail Mary, and then suddenly I was here!”
The man shook him by the EVA suit gently, seemingly not trying to hurt him but rather make a point. Still, even a gentle shake was a shake, and Grace’s glasses slid down the bridge of his nose to balance precariously at the tip.
“The Iron Lung wasn’t launched from the Hail Mary so how did you end up onboard? Stop fucking with me!”
“I’m – I’m not!” Grace stuttered, giving up on pawing at the man and raising his hands in surrender. “I was on my ship and then I was here! I have no idea how it happened. I have no idea where I am! I don’t know who you are and I don’t know how I ended up on your… your Iron Lung. I swear.”
The man released Grace’s suit and took a couple of steps backwards, putting some welcome space between them. “Then… then we have to surface. You can’t be here. The COI… I don’t have enough oxygen for you to be here.”
The man returned to the chair at the front of the… the ship? It didn’t look like a ship. If anything, it looked almost like an old submarine with its curved walls and ceiling. Grace took a hesitant step forward, trying to peer over the man at whatever passed for a control panel in this vessel, but the faint spots of light on the panel did very little to light up the whole and Grace only got vague impressions. The man seemed to jerk a lever or something and a faint grinding, rattling sound echoed around the Iron Lung as the floor began to vibrate beneath his feet.
“This won’t take us all the way up, but we can get high enough for the COI to be able to contact us. We’re gonna get this figured out and I’m gonna get my mission done and then I am out of here,” the man muttered, not looking back at Grace.
“What uh… what mission?” Grace asked, shifting from foot to foot. “Are you… is the COI also trying to figure out the problem with the stars?”
It was a possibility that a second organization had sent out their own vessel, not trusting in Stratt and the collected might of the world powers to get it done. If that were the case, maybe they could join forces and –
“The stars?” the man repeated, spinning abruptly to look back at Grace. “What do you mean? Do you know something about the stars?”
“Of course,” Grace said, raising his arms in an exaggerated shrug. “I’m Dr. Ryland Grace. I was the one who discovered the astrophage in the Petrova Line. I’m the one who was sent to fix the problem.”
“The… astro… no.” The man shook his head, dismissing the word as unimportant. “You know how to fix the stars?”
“I mean, I don’t yet,” Grace admitted. “But I was working on it before I ended up… here.”
“The planets,” the man pushed, half-rising from his chair. “Can you fix the stars and the planets?”
“Well, yeah. If I’m able to deal with the astrophage issue, the planets should be fine, too.”
“Oh my God,” the man whispered, slumping back into his chair in seeming relief. “You…” He trailed off before his head snapped up again and his voice took on a harsh, suspicious edge. “You better not be fucking with me.”
“I’m not!” Grace said, raising his hands in the universal ‘stop’ symbol, backing up until he ran into the wall behind him. He heard a dull ‘thunk-kunk’ sound followed quickly by the sound of a camera flash and a bright explosion of light to his right. Both he and the man at the front of the vessel turned to stare as a section of the wall lit up with an image of… well, of something. A landscape of some kind, bright at the foreground fading into darkness. After a few seconds, the image faded away, leaving them once more in dimness.
“Huh,” the man said in soft bemusement. “A camera? Makes sense…”
Grace took a step away from the wall and whatever had activated the camera; he had a lifelong habit of clumsiness when he wasn’t focusing, and he had no intention of inflicting it on this stranger in his tiny vessel.
“Right,” the man said, shaking his head a little as he rose to his feet. “Okay. Then we need to get you back to the, uh… the Hail Mary. If you can fix this, I’m not holding you back. We need to get you out of the SM-13; does the COI know about you?”
“I have no idea who the COI are,” Grace confessed, taking another step away from the wall behind him, moving closer to the strange man, trying to get a better look at his features in the dim light. It was difficult, Grace only picking up vague impressions of a long nose, wide jaw, and a beard. The features didn’t ping any familiarity in Grace’s admittedly faulty memory, though. “Are you also trying to solve the Petrova Line problem?”
“Petrova Line? No, I’m just here to find resources,” the man said, sighing and settling onto the edge of the solitary chair in front of the control panel, sitting at an angle to face towards Grace. His posture no longer suggested he was considering shaking answers out of Grace, which seemed like a step in the right direction. “I’m being a ‘useful part of society.’”
He spoke the last with a twist of sarcasm and Grace couldn’t help the faint smile that ticked up the corners of his mouth.
“Well, it sounds like we have that in common, at least.” Grace patted a hand against his mission badge on his EVA suit. “Gotta save humanity.”
“Yeah, we do,” the man said, his voice lightening slightly with a hint of amusement.
His heartrate was finally slowing down as the other man calmed, letting Grace himself calm down.
“So, what is the COI?” Grace asked, stepping a little closer again, eyes straining in the dimness to try and get a clearer picture of the stranger.
“The Consolidation of Iron?” the man prompted, and Grace shook his head slightly, raising his shoulders in a slight shrug. Nope, sorry.
“Right. Okay.” The man stood from the edge of his chair. “Well, I guess that means you’re – ”
Grace’s eyes squeezed shut against sudden brightness. Cool, recycled air blew across his exposed face as he spun slowly in the air at the center of the lab.
“What… what …what?”