Chapter Text
Grace hooked the final strap down over the large duffel pack he’d been lugging across the dormitory and huffed out a heavy exhale, floating back to survey his work. He drifted toward the wall and caught himself on the makeshift slackline rigged to the outer frame of his bed, steadying himself and taking a breath.
There was a pause, and then distant trilling and tapping filtered through from the xenonite tunnel somewhere up in the lab. Tied to a ladder rung across the room, the computer’s translation program kicked to life. “Why Grace stop, question? Two more bags to move in sleep room before space for Rocky things.”
Grace huffed again. “Give a man a break, Rock,” he complained, mostly good-naturedly. “We’ve been at this for hours. Moving things is hard work.”
“Hard work in zero gravity, question?”
Grace scoffed out a chuckle at that. He shook his head and smiled. “It’s good to have you back, buddy.”
A pleased trill emanated down from the tunnel. The computer picked up the sound of relief and sincerity in his tone. “Happy back with Grace also. Happy not alone. Grace not leave anymore.”
“Good plan.” Grace rolled out his shoulders and braced against the wall, aiming to coordinate his launch across the room to reach the doorway. “Two more bags, and then you can bring in your stuff.”
• ☆⊹ ˖ ⊹ ࣪ ★ ⋆.˚ ⊹ •
With only a little more griping and elbow grease, Grace managed to secure away the last pieces of lab equipment he’d stored in a section of Rocky’s tunnels that had been reintroduced to his oxygen atmosphere. Rocky procured a set of new xenonite panels to pass through their makeshift airlock, which Grace secured to the breached section of the tunnel with epoxy. He’d tensed up despite himself as Rocky flooded the passageway with his air again—try as he might, he still couldn’t quite get used to the idea of 29 gs-worth of ammonia being contained by a transparent, glass-thin wall—but to his relief it had held strong. They’d both done their work well.
Rocky chittered in excitement, floating down through the tunnel to level with Grace. He splayed his claws against the xenonite in his happy jazz hands-dance. “Good good good! Rocky tunnels stable! I go get last things to bring down into sleep room.”
“And then we’ll be outta here.” Grace smiled. “Make sure to be quick—your whole ship’s exposed to radiation now that the astrophage is gone.”
“Yes yes. Then time-go!” Rocky seized the handles along the xenonite wall and disappeared up the tunnel in a flurry of motion.
Grace watched him go, then drifted his way over to one of the cabinets along the wall. “And as for me, I’m getting a snack. I’ve earned it.”
If he heard Rocky retreating a little faster after that, he didn’t pay it mind. He swiped a pack of freeze-dried mango out of the assortment of stashed edible goods floating lazily around the compartment and used his teeth to tear it open.
He maneuvered down the nearest slackline to the doorway below, munching on a mango strip, and drifted through the hallway to arrive at the vast circular viewport. He’d gravitated toward it, he found, during his days alone when he’d started his return journey to Earth…before the Great Taumoeba Escape had significantly changed up his plans, that is. The view out there was dark and lonely, sure, but also a reminder of what they’d somehow managed to find a way to save. A reminder that he’d look out that window and watch a star getting closer and closer—brighter and brighter—eventually until it overwhelmed his vision, and its orbiting planets would draw into view, and…
He’d never see that view, now, even if they did manage to save it. He settled on (or bumped up against) the sill of the viewport and sighed through his nose. It was hard to push away the wave of melancholy that rose up at the thought.
Eugh—this new mango strip was bitter. He hoped the next one was less so.
He was peeling another sugary morsel out of the pack when a brilliant light exploded through the glass from the void beyond, drowning his vision in white. Grace startled with a gasp and choked on half-chewed mango. The light vanished all at once, leaving him half-blinded, doubled over and coughing desperately as he tried to clear his windpipe. “Ack—f-fudge—”
Tears gathered in his eyes as he struggled for air, panic of numerous origins flooding his veins. What was that—what was that—what was that—
His ears were ringing at the shock of it all, but after a little while he managed to make out the sound of rapid thudding down the xenonite tunnels. Four coughs later and Rocky burst into view, scrambling over to ram up against the xenonite closest to him, about six feet out down the passageway. The cap segments on his dorsal carapace pounded up and down frantically, the air leaving his vents in distressed whistles.
Grace had left the computer in the lab, but he could make out some of Rocky’s words without the translator. “—GRACE!—question?—wrong, question?—Bad, bad, bad—gross—food—breathing—”
Grace waved his hands frantically, still coughing, trying to calm him down. “’mfine,” he wheezed, unconvincingly. “’t’sfine—there was—there was—” he gestured helplessly toward the viewport.
“Grace breathe,” Rocky demanded firmly, stamping a pair of claws against the xenonite. “—oxygen. No talk.”
Grace obeyed, fighting to fill his lungs. He coughed out a few more strangled curse-alternatives before it finally felt like he was able to draw in air. Rocky hovered beside him nervously as he caught his breath, the adrenaline still thrumming in his chest, his heart pounding. He swallowed hard to clear his throat and swiveled to stare at the now-dark, innocuous viewport.
“Did you—” he started to croak, but checked himself quickly. No, of course Rocky hadn’t seen that. Visible light and anything outside the linked ships were undetectable to him.
“A light,” he managed instead, still panting. “There was—there was this huge flash of light outside, just now—”
Rocky tilted his carapace, shifting his stance against the wall. “Light, question?—thing beyond ship, question?”
“Yes—yes. It’s gone now—I don’t know what it was, or where it came from—”
“Not feel anything. We—check.” Rocky started to scramble back up the tunnel, and Grace pulled himself together enough to follow close behind.
• ☆⊹ ˖ ⊹ ࣪ ★ ⋆.˚ ⊹ •
“I…I don’t get it,” Grace muttered, pivoting the pilot’s seat around to get a better view of the console displaying the hull’s second camera. “What was that thing?”
Rocky shifted his grip on the xenonite handles against the thin tunnel that made up his little portion of the control room, not having much to offer. The Mary hadn’t picked up anything on her proximity radar—it hadn’t been within the 100 kilometer range for her to detect, unless no solid or liquid matter had been involved in the phenomenon. No visible light remained on the cameras; whatever it had been had come and gone in the blink of an eye.
Grace fumbled over to the Petrovascope and turned it on. Flickers of red over a vast abyss of darkness immediately populated the feed, and he gasped. “There—these are reflections of a huge IR signature. There.”
Rocky chittered, raising his crystal texture camera to the screen. “The flash of light—it must’ve let off an enormous amount of heat, hence the IR flare,” Grace processed aloud, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “The Petrovascope’s catching the…the orphaned IR signal radiating out through space, getting bounced back to us against debris like space dust.”
Rocky hummed. “Understand. What source then, question?”
“That’s…what I’m not sure about.” Grace adjusted the dial on the camera, leaning in. “It isn’t the Petrova frequency wavelength. But the fact that its IR signal is this strong—its energy output must’ve been unbelievable. Like, astrophage-level unbelievable. I’m guessing quadrillions of Joules…and it only lasted a second—”
Grace shook his head, pulling away from the Petrovascope. “I…I have no idea.”
It was…a mystery blip in the cosmos. There was no explanation that either of them could think of. Conspiracy theorists and alien enthusiasts (other than Grace) would’ve had a field day with it back on Earth, astrophage crisis notwithstanding. There’s a chance that they actually would—the event would probably be detectable from the solar system. It’d get there in twelve years and change.
Grace looked back at the Petrovascope feed. The red flickers were shifting—catching on other particles as the IR signal traveled out further into space. When he swiveled the camera 30 degrees portside, another spattering of the red glow was there, but visibly dimmer.
“It’s moving out in all directions, like a supernova, or the birth of a star…” Grace straightened up in his seat, hurrying to grab a tablet with his calculator app. “If we can chart the way it’s traveling from different angles, we should be able to identify its point of origin—”
“Yes yes!” Rocky chirped, wiggling his carapace enthusiastically. “Grace big science! Grace find source of unknown light!”
The next few minutes were a scramble to triangulate the anomaly’s “ground zero” (“space zero?”) from the locations and pace of the orphaned IR signal. Grace was able to calculate the distance between the ship and the space debris reflecting the IR light thanks to the offset between the Mary’s visible light camera feeds. “It’s like how having two eyes helps us see three dimensions,” he explained briefly to Rocky.
He focused on four different points of the rebounded wavelength, just to be safe. Some rapid calculations placed its source at just over 142,400 kilometers portside of the Hail Mary.
142,400 kilometers.
Grace leaned away from the tablet in abject shock, taking a slow breath to steady himself. “What happened, question? What wrong, question?” Rocky demanded, tapping the xenonite, his voice spiking a few frantic notes in pitch.
“It…it was incredibly close to us,” Grace managed, his eyes flicking over the numbers again, then back to the IR camera. “Like…unbelievably close. The odds of something like this happening, in all the vastness of the universe…it’s crazy. Almost less than zero.”
It had been closer to them than the nearest celestial body by…well, by more than leaps and bounds. The distance between the anomaly and the Hail Mary, if his math was right, was a little more than a third of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. The hull’s astrophage lining had protected them from any harmful radiation caused by the surge, but too much closer and they very well could’ve been vaporized.
Rocky hummed, a low, dual-toned resonance. “Another spaceship, question?” he asked. “Close to Tau Ceti…maybe wants to find astrophage solution, find taumoeba like us, question?”
Grace ran a hand through his hair, pushing his glasses up with the same motion. “It—maybe. But it isn’t the astrophage IR wavelength. It could be another energy source, something created by another alien race…”
They sat there in pensive silence for a moment. “…Or it could be some kind of astrophage variant,” Grace realized, a cold feeling flooding his chest. “What else could emit a signal that short and that strong? Maybe it responds to another IR wavelength—maybe it needs a chemical other than carbon dioxide to breed.”
Both of them shuddered at the thought. If there were a new kind of astrophage that could survive on planets other than Venus and Threeworld…if there were a new kind of astrophage resistant to taumoeba—it could mean that all of their work was for nothing. It meant that both of their stars—both of their worlds, their people—could still die.
But if they went to go investigate, and that surge happened again—they would get obliterated in less than an instant. The information from the beetles would get back to Earth, sure, but all of Erid wouldn’t make it.
Rocky shifted on his xenonite handles. “We go check, statement,” he trilled, a decisive timbre to his notes. “I get last things, then Grace Rocky go check. If astrophage, we sample and learn how kill. If spaceship, we give taumoeba for save star.”
“Okay,” Grace managed. “Okay.” Rocky hurried down the Blip-A/Mary connector tunnel as Grace started fiddling with the controls to plug in new coordinates.
A short time later, Rocky had hauled his last few belongings down into the dormitory and secured them in his odd Eridian packing-bags. After assuring Grace several times that he hadn’t forgotten anything, Rocky sealed off his side of the intercraft bridge with new xenonite and Grace wrestled himself into an EVA suit. Once Rocky was finished, Grace severed the tunnel from the Mary’s cockpit a second time, a task that filled him with an odd, no-longer-founded pang of heartache.
“All set?” Grace panted after the airlock hissed shut, shrugging off the suit as fast as he could manage.
“Yes yes. Grace Rocky go now.” For all the time he’d spent on it, Rocky didn’t seem all too sad to leave his spaceship behind. But then again, his memories associated with it were bleak and painful, so Grace couldn’t really blame him. And maybe sentimentality wasn’t so much of an Eridian thing.
“Okay.” Grace strapped himself into the pilot’s seat, which Mary dutifully identified, and took a deep breath. At least their chain—pun not intended, but welcomed—of misadventures with the taumoeba had given him a good amount of experience behind the metaphorical wheel.
Grace reoriented the ship and punched in the command for spin drive activation. He braced for the rush of pressure and queasiness as the engines flared to life, kicking off their constant acceleration at 1.5 gs until they’d flip and decelerate the second half of the way. It still hit him like a truck, and he groaned through the wave of nausea.
“Words of encouragement,” Rocky chirped at his side, unswayed by the change in gravity.
“Thanks, buddy,” Grace gritted out. He’d learned from his first 0 to 1.5 experience—or the other way around, actually—and had requested emesis bags from Armando to store in the cockpit. After about a minute, though, he felt confident that he didn’t need one this time.
Grace’s tablet clattered to the floor behind him, and the clinking of a few other small objects followed. “Arrival at «undocumented location» in one hour, forty-two minutes, and 44.51 seconds,” Mary’s pleasant voice announced after a brief stretch. She was, unsurprisingly, the calmest one in the control room.