Chapter Text
"Eye movement detected."
Captain Yáo Li-Jie gagged, coughing on the intubation tube as it was slid out of his throat and past his lips with the taste of something anesthetic and chemical.
"Cognition assessment. What is two plus two?"
Yáo didn't answer right away, he couldn't. His mouth felt like it belonged to someone else, dry like it had been stuffed full of cotton and hadn't been used in far too long. He supposed that last part was half right. His head felt just as stuffy and full, and his thoughts were slow to process. When the words finally came back to him, they came in Mandarin first, then English, each thought staggered and thick like molasses.
Somewhere underneath the fog in his brain, his mind cycled through random flashes of memories—the repetitive days of astronaut training, the comradery of people all working towards the same mission, a karaoke screen and Ilyukhina's arm over his shoulders, the sound of his mother's voice distant and warm like a well worn blanket that had started to fray at the edges.
The computerized voice was soft, feminine but lacking emotion. Yáo knew he was hearing the chosen voice for the Hail Mary. He knew where he was and the importance of the mission he was on.
"What is two plus two?"
"Four," he managed in a rough croak.
A light swept across his eyes, quick and clinical, and it was gone before he could blink against it.
Beside him, a groan turned into a low string of familiar sounding Russian that Yáo was fairly certain wasn't aimed at the medical bot at all. Good. Ilyukhina was awake as well and alert enough to begin her own cognitive assessment.
The medical bot did not care much about giving Yáo a moment to gather his thoughts and get his bearings. Mechanical arms unfolded from the ceiling and got to work, easing tubes and catheters out of his body and removing the sticky electrodes from various points of his body with gentle efficiency. Yáo let it be and chose to focus his energy on grounding himself mentally after the long, induced coma.
He counted backwards from ten and thought about three things he could feel against his skin. It was the same trick his instructors had drummed into him for high-stress simulations, and it worked just as well now as it had in a mockup capsule with sirens blaring and a training officer timing his ability to remain calm under pressure with a stopwatch.
He was awake. His fingers and toes could move and his body wasn't any more sore than it would be after a particularly long, deep night's rest. That meant the medical bots did their job well. Dr. Lamai would be pleased. He just needed to wait for the medical equipment to be cleared from his body, then he could unbuckle the restraints holding him down and keeping him from floating away from his bed so he could check on the other two members of his crew—
Floating away?
Yáo was floating, and not in the loose, drifting feeling of someone who didn't remember their own weight after a particularly long sleep—no, his body was genuinely floating centimeters away from the medical bed and was strapped in haphazardly by someone who had used anything available to keep him from drifting into danger without restricting the medical bot's access to his body.
Zero g, his brain supplied helpfully.
That couldn't be right, though. They shouldn't be in zero g yet. The mission plan had been clear: they would wake up days out from Tau Ceti, with time to stretch and get familiar with Mary, they would help Grace get up to speed on the things he hadn't been trained for regarding the ship, and then they would decelerate and reach orbit.
Yáo turned his head and found Ilyukhina already looking back at him from across the bay, her medical bot still working over her to remove the last of the medical devices that had kept her alive during the coma.
She had come to the same conclusion as him.
Yáo didn't have a plan for this, for waking up in zero g when he should have had the 1.5 g of gravity from their acceleration. He had even less of a plan for finding his scientist missing from his own medical bed and in his absence, large tunnels running through their ship, leaving holes that should not exist in the bulkheads and curving off into other parts of the ship.
The tunnels didn't seem to be made of glass, nor were they made of any other alloy Yáo recognized from the ship's schematics. They caught the cabin light strangely, translucent but almost iridescent at the sharp edges.
"Someone has been renovating," Ilyukhina said, her voice low as she unbuckled the makeshift restraints so she could leave the medical bed.
"That is one way to put it," Yáo said, reaching for the nearest handhold as he floated off the medical bed. There would be time to react properly later. Right now, he had a check list to follow.
Getting dressed took longer than either of them expected, and the zero g was not helping much. The coma had required them to be stripped down to nothing. It was practical, easier for the medical bots to monitor their vitals and manage the mess of long-term unconsciousness without fabric in the way. Neither of them had the proper coordination yet to make quick work of pulling on the flight suits that had been folded neatly beneath their bunks.
There was no modesty to be had, not after years of training together and getting used to living in close, cramped quarters before the mission. Ilyukhina helped Yáo get his legs into his flight suit, and in turn, Yáo zipped hers up for her when her hands couldn't grasp the zipper fully. It was practical, logical even, to take care of each other. Get dressed, get moving, figure out what the hell happened to their ship while they'd been asleep.
Once dressed, Yáo and Ilyukhina followed the tunnels, exploring just how far they reached through Mary's interior—most of the space of the dormitory had been taken up by the tunnels, the lab had been left largely untouched, and climbing into the cockpit had been difficult. It was a tight fit, with some strange bulb in the floor right next to the hatchway.
Even stranger was the thing the tunnels were apparently for. It was just simply there, this five-limbed, rock armored thing. it was balanced on three of its legs, while one a fourth held this strange crystal device pointed at the display screen closest to the bulb it was in.
The bulk of the rock was a mottled brown, with spots of teal inlaid in some of the legs. It was, Yáo thought distantly, about the size of a large dog, if dogs were built out of stone that is. He didn't have any other words for what he was seeing, not in Mandarin, and certain not in English. Ilyukhina, at least, had found something to say in Russian. Short, precise, and Yáo wasn't sure he wanted a translation.
"♪♫ ♩ ♪♫."
The strange song seemed to come from the general vicinity of the rock alien, even though Yáo couldn't see any sort of mouth for it to speak from. The song rose and dipped in pitch, quick, as it dropped the crystal device it was holding and pressed two of its legs together and leaned its weight forward into them.
"I think that it is happy," Ilyukhina said.
Yáo disagreed, "It is a rock, it does not have a face. How could you possibly come to that conclusion?"
"Eh," she waved her hand in a dismissive motion, "Faces are overrated."
Neither of them moved as the alien picked up the crystal device once more, singing those multi-chorded notes again. Even without a face for reference to know which way the alien was turning its attention to, Yáo got the impression that this whale song wasn't meant for them.
A burst of static cut across from what looked like a radio taped haphazardly to the side of the alien's bulb.
"I'm having a moment." There was a pause, and the radio crackled again. "You know, back on Earth, if you discover something, you get to name it."
The alien chittered, waving the crystal at the screen display of a swirling green planet.
"'Kaayyy… well, let's just say that Medium-Rough Texture Circle Planet was taken. It's good to have a backup. Something personal, maybe?"
"♫♩♪♫.”
"Adrian."
Grace. Yáo would have recognized that voice anywhere, even with the grainy quality of the radio through the strange, clear tunneled structure. It was unmistakably their science specialist, talking to the alien rock in their cockpit, and the alien was talking back.
It was a relief to hear Grace's voice, to know he was alive and somewhere on the ship as well.
Ilyukhina had drifted away momentarily, leaving Yáo to keep an eye on the alien communicating with Grace. When she came back, she nearly rammed her shoulder into Yáo's, her eyes wide and her voice a fast, furious whisper as she clung to the sleeve of his flight suit. "He's outside. Grace is on the hull."
"♪♪♫♩ ♩♪ ♫?" The alien's tone sharped. It clicked the three claws of its free hand together and tapped one of its legs twice against the bottom of the bulb to punctuate what it had said.
"Whoa. Buddy, slow down. I missed half of that." Grace's voice came through the radio a little bit strained, followed by the clanging sound on the outside of the hull of a tether point being connected and another being disconnected slowly. Grace was making his way back inside. "Give me a second to get through the airlock."
The alien didn't wait quietly. It rotated on its legs, letting different sides of his carapace face them as it clicked its claws together nervously until the airlock cycled with a hiss. Yáo watched curiously, wondering if there was a front to this strange alien being.
Grace completed his EVA with surprising ease, and moved through the airlock like he was used to it. The sound of his voice no longer crackled through the radio but bounced off the walls around them instead. "I'm going to need you to bring it up an octave, Rock, 'cause it sounded like you said—"
Grace froze.
His eyes slid from Yáo, then to Ilyukhina, then back to Yáo as if he didn't believe what he had seen the first time.
For a second nobody moved, the three humans and the one very much not-human were all suspended in the same small stretch of ship, and Yáo had the absurd thought that this clearly was some sort of elaborate joke. Except, he knew as well as anyone else that Eva Stratt was not the joking type.
The alien sang again, short and insistent, and stomped its leg twice against the clear bulb it was in, "♫♪♩, ♪♫?"
It seemed to shake Grace out of his daze. "Right," he said on an exhale. "The sample. I've got it. Just—let me—uh, gravity…"
The alien chittered, throwing up what seemed to be very excited jazz hands.
"Yes, gravity, then Grace Rocky big science."
Grace squeezed past Yáo and Ilyukhina, careful not to touch either of them as he did. He pulled himself down into the pilot's seat—the seat that should technically be Yáo's—and started flipping switches with the fluency of someone who as familiar with the controls.
The centrifuge spun up, and Yáo felt his legs taking on his weight again, familiar and welcomed.
Grace was already halfway out of the pilot's chair, going for the sample case he had set down when Ilyukhina planted herself firmly in his way.
"What the fuck is that."
Grace didn't look back as Ilyukhina pointed. There wasn't a need to, there was no hiding the metaphorical elephant in the room. He clutched the sampler case closer to his chest like a shield as the rock alien behind him chittered in delight. "That's—uh, Rocky. He's from Erid, well, 40 Eridani A b, but that's a mouth full," Grace muttered, almost nervously. It reminded Ilyukhina of how Grace had been any time Stratt had shoved him to the front to speak in front of the delegates on his Astrophage findings. "His people sent him here on the Blip-A. We are here for the same reason."
Rocky sang something short, and Grace nodded.
Yáo and Ilyukhina shared a look, one that Grace recognized well enough. It was similar enough to a look that he'd once received right before he'd popped off and called the leading scholar in his field a staggering waste of carbon. He exhaled through is nose and tugged his glasses down to let them dangle from his ear under his chin as he pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Don't look at each other like that. I'm not crazy. Look, it will be easier if you can just understand him for yourselves."
Grace passed the sampler box to Yáo with a muttered "careful with that" before turning back to the cockpit to grab a laptop out of the co-pilot's chair where it had been carefully strapped down for zero g. Ilyukhina cringed at the mess Grace had made of the laptop, a second screen taped sideways against it, and a recording device plastered to the back. He balanced it on one arm and clicked through menus with the other hand. "Try that."
"Try what, question." A voice came through the laptop as Rocky sang, low and gravel-deep.
Rocky's legs skittered backwards, claws scraping the inside of his clear bulb. "No. Do not like."
"Yeah, can't unhear it, really." Grace muttered as Rocky tacked on a little 'scary'. "Try this one."
"Ooo~" A sultry female voice exited the speaker next, "Grace picking Rocky voice, question~"
Grace went red all the way up to his ears as he flustered, nearly dropping the laptop in a haste to change the voice. "Nope. Absolutely not."
"Wait," Ilyukhina grinned, "Keep that one. I like it."
Grace did not humor her.
They tried three more voices—a generic British tone that Rocky rejected, a French accented voice that both Grace and Rocky shook their heads at (or rather, one shook a head and the other shook a carapace), and then a voice that oddly sounded like Meryl Streep. They ended up settling on a generic sounding voice, friendly, a bit robotic, but otherwise pleasant.
"Why didn't you already have this set up?" Yáo asked.
Grace shrugged, "I got good at understanding him without it."
Ilyukhina's attention drifted back to the tunnels running throughout the ship and the sheer amount of space the tunnels swallowed up. They must have taken some time to set up. "You just… got good at understanding alien language?" She looked back at Grace. "How long have you been awake?"
"Grace awake alone many days while human crew sleep. Grace Rocky meet forty-three days ago. Earth days. Always Earth unit. Grace bad at math." Rocky supplied, the robotic voice from the laptop sounding somehow chipper.
Forty-three days. Yáo and Ilyukhina shared another look.
That definitely hadn't been part of the mission plan.