Chapter Text
Comms contact detected.
Mary’s cool voice brought Grace from a deep sleep to full alertness in an instant.
He sat bolt upright, eyes finding Rocky and Adrian through the clear xenonite panel dividing the dormitory.
The two Eridians paused in the middle of their game, a sort of ultra-complicated cat’s cradle that would have completely lost Grace within moments if he had even had enough hands to participate. Quickly, Adrian released two hands and pulled with another two, making the entire tangled construction collapse into a single unknotted loop.
“Grace can wake is still weird,” observed Rocky, extricating himself from the string. “But useful!”
“Mary, repeat notification?” asked Grace, not entirely sure he’d heard correctly.
Comms contact detected.
“It’s Earth!” yelled Grace, punching the air.
“Told you would work,” Rocky trilled, tapping his feet on the spot in a rippling staccato dance of excitement.
“Never doubted you, buddy.” Grace turned a smile on Adrian, who was adding a wordless harmonic agreement to his statement. “We just needed to get close enough for them to pick up the signal. Mary, play comms contact.”
Comms contact lost.
“Okay, Mary,” Grace rephrased. “Replay record of all comms within the last five minutes.”
Comms records can be accessed in the control room.
Grace was too glad to be finally making contact with another human being to roll his eyes at her about that. Not bothering to get changed or even out of bed, he shed his quilt and pushed off directly at the hatch into the lab.
Rocky skittered off ahead of him up through his tunnel while Adrian patiently wound up and packed away the cord from their game.
Grace hadn’t had perfect aim, and had to adjust his trajectory at the hatch, but pulled himself through on the ladder without difficulty.
He was much better in zero g than he’d been years ago, and over the last week of travel had been very much enjoying the relief to the burgeoning arthritis that made moving such a pain under Erid’s gravity. Even the 1.5 g they’d maintained for the majority of the journey here had been easier than Erid. The closeness of Mary’s quarters made his cane unnecessary, walls always within reach of a steadying hand. But he’d hardly even had to use the pulley system Rocky had rigged up over the ladders towards the end of their original trip to Erid, when Grace had got too weak from the short rations to climb safely.
While Grace still couldn’t beat Rocky to any destination ever, at least he didn’t feel like such an old man in zero g, and he was going to count that as winning.
Pilot detected, said Mary as Grace strapped himself into the seat and began fumbling for the right screen. The Hail Mary had never been fitted with a radio for long-range contact, so they’d had to cannibalize and upgrade the interface for the short-range EVA comms system in an attempt to send some advance warning of their arrival to Earth.
No one, especially not the Entities, had thought it was a good idea to turn up unannounced with surprise aliens, even if one of them had helped save the planet.
But none of them had truly been sure how well Rocky’s cobbled-together radio would work—Eridian broadcast technology was very different to the way human technology worked. Stratt might have given them all the information they could ever need on human telecommunication, but it wasn’t the same as an actual working device. And there was only one way to test whether it functioned.
The announcement they’d recorded of the Hail Mary’s arrival had been set to broadcast on repeat until it was acknowledged, from the moment they’d entered the Sol system. This was the first hint they’d received of any response.
After a moment’s struggle with the interface, Grace found the most recent comm record and triggered it to replay.
[03:12] … ali- … SOS … -stron- … broadca- … to … land- … -ded by … my foo … die …
And that was it. It was a little disappointing for the long-awaited reconnection with Earth. Grace supposed what they were saying would get clearer as the ship came closer to the source.
Rocky made a dubious noise and Grace repeated the playback.
The crackling, patchy transmission made the scattered words barely comprehensible, but some of it was recognizable. Fortunately, Grace had expert listeners on board, even if English wasn’t their first language.
“Rocky, is this… is it an SOS call? What can you hear?”
“Yes, human said s, o, s,” said Rocky, bobbing his carapace up and down in his imitation of a human nod. “Also ‘my food’ and ‘die’. Think also ‘alive’, ‘broadcast’, ‘lander’ ‘stranded by’. One human in small small room, padded seats, cluttered, many machines, maybe control panels. What mean s, o, s? New word?”
It was pretty rare these days to come across a word that Rocky didn’t know.
“An SOS is a distress signal. It stands for ‘Save Our Souls’, officially, but it’s really just the internationally recognized code calling for urgent life-saving help.”
“We help, question?”
“Well,” said Grace, making a face. “We’re a long way from Earth. It’s a pretty powerful signal if we picked it up from here, so I think someone else will probably get there first. We’ll get it clearer as we get closer though, if it’s still going, so we might find out more.”
“Play again. Partial word, not certain.”
Grace did, and Rocky listened intently, pivoting his carapace absently the way he did to refine his focus on a single point, even though it wouldn’t help provide dimension to the resonance on a radio signal the way it usually would to a room.
“Yes,” he said eventually, after Grace had repeated the message twice. “Definite. He saying ‘astronaut’. Is stranded astronaut, running out of food, dying. Astronaut would not be stranded on Earth. Signal might not get stronger. What nearby?”
Grace didn’t need to check the navigation chart and Rocky knew that too. He’d spent a good amount of time the previous night ogling the approaching red bulk of Mars out the airlock window.
It was the closest they’d come to any planet on the way into Grace’s home system. All but Jupiter had been poorly aligned, far off past the sun on their orbital path and no more visible than they would have been from Earth.
Jupiter hadn’t been what could be called nearby, not to the naked eye, but was close enough to the line of travel that for a full week, Mary’s telescope could catch a detailed enough view to see the red spot when it spun past through the widening crescent lit up by the sun.
Grace had excitedly watched and captured images on the telescope as Callisto crossed Jupiter’s face, then Europa. His pictures were tourist snaps compared to the stored images taken by Pioneer in Stratt’s onboard archive, but Jupiter had enough color variation that even Rocky could appreciate that the surface looked ‘amaze’ on his texture reader.
But Mars was a different story, even if its solid color was significantly more boring to Rocky than Jupiter’s variegation. Still weeks from Earth at the gentle cruising velocity they’d settled on after finishing their two and a half years of deceleration, the tangent they were coming in on took them along the line of Mars’s orbit for a few days, nearly parallel with the planet itself.
Grace wasn’t ashamed to have added a couple of minor burns to the flight path to put them just inside the planet’s orbit to ensure they could see it properly lit up.
He’d intended to do an EVA that morning, near their closest approach, because he was an astronaut now. What was the actual point of being an astronaut at all, if you weren’t going to get out and look at other planets with your own eyes when the opportunity arose?
“You think there’s someone on Mars? You think humans have escalated manned space flight that much in the last sixty years?”
Rocky gave a huff from his vents, fiddling with some sort of new project Grace hadn’t seen before with three hands, waving another one in the air for emphasis while still keeping himself anchored with the fifth. “They send you to different star. Different planet easy.”
Which was, Grace supposed, fair. Although the trip to Tau Ceti had been a massive undertaking to deal with an existential threat to the human race. A threat that the loss of resources poured into the Hail Mary had made exponentially worse.
One sleepless night on Stratt’s Vat, Grace had done the calculations about the direct thermodynamic effect of removing the heat of two million kilograms of Astrophage from Earth’s struggling biosphere. Ten to the twenty-third Joules was the equivalent of the total energy output of the sun, at least as much of it as hit Earth, for over nine months.
Generating Hail Mary’s fuel had literally sucked as much heat energy out of Earth’s atmosphere as if they had switched off the sun for enough time to make a whole human being.
As much heat as if the Petrova line had dimmed Sol by that full final ten percent for an extra seven and a half years.
After Stratt’s final lecture about hell had come back to him, Grace had been wracked with visions of humanity suffering through the loss of far, far more than the half of its population Leclerc had promised. Starving, freezing, warring, reduced to base needs, the survivors struggling through the loss of infrastructure and knowledge into another dark age. Grace had worried that by the time the beetles arrived, humans wouldn’t have the ability to capture them or send the Taumoeba to Venus at all. He knew that even if they could save the sun, the world he’d known would be entirely gone.
There was more than one reason he’d stayed on Erid after all. It was better to remember Earth how it was, to imagine that it might still be that way. Better to secretly dread that he was the last remaining human being in the universe, than to find out for certain what the apocalypse he’d helped hasten in the attempt to stop it all had done.
Even knowing they’d managed the trip to Venus, he hadn’t imagined Earth might have the spare resources to be going on trips out to Mars, just to see what was up.
Grace flicked over to Mary’s fuel screen, even though he knew the answer. They’d loaded her with more than enough Astrophage for a return trip to Erid. Thanks to the staggering heat of Eridian oceans and the staggering kindness of the Eridian people, Hail Mary definitely had enough fuel for a side trip to Mars, just to see what was up.
Or to look for a stranded astronaut.
“Okay,” said Grace, switching back through screens to find the numbers he needed. “Let’s calculate a burn to zero out the velocity with respect to Mars and then retrace our path, see if we can pick up the signal again. You said a small room with seats and control panels. And did he say ‘lander’? Do you think maybe he’s in orbit? Missed a transfer window or mechanical failure in his lander? We might have lost the signal because he went behind the planet, not because we’re too far.”
“Yes yes yes,” said Rocky, hands still busy with his task, whatever it was. His tone was flat and devoid of harmonic overtones in his focus. “We find astronaut. We help. And then when we get to Earth, we ask them why they still sending astronauts to starve in space.”