Chapter Text
“Same rules as last time,” I said, pressing the second ten-foot strip of tape onto the floor at the end of the lab. “First one to push the other over their line wins.”
I walked and Rocky rolled in his ball to the middle of the room. I crouched in a sturdier position, hands spread to catch his ball when he came at me. He fidgeted his claws.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked apprehensively.
“Yes. You cracked my ribs over a year ago. They’re fully healed. Just don’t roll on top of me this time.”
He planted all his feet and steeled himself, but he still sounded unsure. “Okay. Ready.”
“Three, two, one – GO!”
I slammed into him, taking advantage of his hesitation. I needed all the help I could get. He weighed over three hundred pounds and outmatched my strength by a long shot. My only chance was to use his container against him and roll him like a tire to the other side, where his boundary lay merely twenty feet behind him. I could do it.
Rocky overcame his doubts in an instant. He pushed back and immediately my bare feet slid back, losing what little ground I gained in the initial attack. I braced my legs and shoved with all my willpower against him. It was like pushing a motorcycle in neutral. For a moment, we were evenly matched in a stand still. My arms were shaking with the effort. I readjusted my grip, trying to rotate him backwards. Noticing what I was doing, Rocky threw his body into the ball, knocking me off balance. He came full face into my stomach and spun forward. My feet betrayed me and skid uselessly across the floor.
“No, no, no,” I chanted, trying to regain purchase. I slipped and slid across the room, unable to stop the approaching goal post. Rocky gave one last hearty shove and threw me over my line. I stumbled into the wall and smacked my back against it.
“Winner!” Rocky cheered, throwing two hands up.
I hopped up and draped myself over the top of him. “Best two out of three.”
He laughed, a little amused chirp. “So you can lose twice?”
I did, indeed, lose the next round as well. Reluctantly, I added a tally mark on his side of the running list on the whiteboard. I stepped back and took a moment to study it.
Rocky and I had been on this journey to Erid for almost three years. Without a pressing mission goal hanging over our heads, we had a lot of time to kill. I spent the better part of a year trying to make his food edible for human consumption (an effort that never yielded fruit), I learned a ridiculous amount of Eridian, to the point where I’d consider myself fluent now. There was, of course, the usual ship maintenance and the never-ending chore of feeding the Taumoeba breeder tanks.
But for the most part, we were bored.
We watched movies, talked about our lives and cultures, and occasionally got on each other’s nerves. Because no matter how much you like someone, there’s only so much you can do when it’s just the two of you trapped in a little spaceship for three years.
Early on our trip I suggested a daily challenge. Every day we played a game and whoever won more games each month, won the Alien of the Month trophy (a crudely melted together figure of aluminum in the shape of a trophy cup). Whoever won the most months earned title of Alien of the Year. We didn’t have a real prize worth winning aside from bragging rights.
Now, five months (five months!) away from Erid, Rocky won the first year, I won the second, and this year would be the tie breaker. We played a lot of games that we were evenly matched like 20 Questions, Two Truths and a Lie, and a boat load of card games (Rocky had to make his own deck of cards to use in his environment) - but yesterday was video games, which he can’t play very well with his limitations. I wanted to give him an easy win today with wrestling.
We were neck and neck this year. Me with four points, him with three.
“What do you want to lose at tomorrow?” Rocky teased. Sometime between my daydreaming and now he had returned to his room in the lab. The trophy sat proudly on one of his shelves. That little jerk.
I flicked the dry erase marker at him. It bounced harmlessly off the xenonite barrier.
“How about an eating contest?” I teased back.
He made a sharp trill, revolted. “You’re disgusting.”
I laughed, picturing Rocky on his back shoveling food in his stomach and me struggling to eat another spoonful of my Taumoeba-coma slurry concoction that I can barely keep down. “Yeah, not my greatest ide-“
“Did you hear that?” Rocky cut me off, perking up and spinning in circles to pinpoint a sound.
I listened. All I heard was the hum of the ship.
“No.”
“It came from near the cockpit.”
His playful attitude from a minute ago was gone, replaced with a serious tone. He scuttled away, disappearing into his tunnels. I ran after him and met him on the other side, in the corridor. I was nervous now.
“What was it?”
He crawled along the tunnel above me, grabbing handholds for support. “It sounded like debris hitting the hull. But if no alarms went off then maybe it was nothing big-“
Two things happened at once:
A deafening crash came from the other room, and Rocky was sucked out of his tunnel and back into the lab. He was gone in the blink of an eye.
“Rocky!” I screamed, running to where he went. His side of the lab was chaos. His belongings were flying everywhere, a swirl of canvas bags, tools, and his little packets of food in the air – all being sucked in one certain direction. There was a fist sized hole in the wall open to the vacuum of space. Everything that wasn’t bolted down was airborne. One by one small items were sucked outside, then a few larger items stuck to the hole, and finally Rocky himself. His body was the final plug that “sealed” the hole. As suddenly as it started, everything went silent again. I had no time to react.
I yelled his name again, throwing myself at the barrier. Our separated atmospheres were the only thing that saved me. Was his air gone or is it now slowly leaking? There was nothing I could do trapped on this side. He flailed his limbs but his core was firmly held against the wall.
“Grace?!" His voice shook
“I’m right here,” I said, my voice equally shaky. “Are you okay? Can you breathe?”
He took a moment to consider this. “Yes. I think the hole is plugged.”
I didn’t have time to be relieved. This was bad. This was really bad. I paced back and forth. Did we pass through an asteroid field or something? If more rocks punctured the ship we were in deep water.
“Grace, listen to me,” Rocky said slowly. “You need to get your suit on and patch it from the outside.”
I paused. I knew it was the only way but it meant several bad things.
Number One: We were accelerating (or decelerating to be more precise) to Erid at 0.6c (60% the speed of light). This is not like stopping a car to change a tire. Spaceships take months to slow down from that speed, not minutes. Stepping onto the hull while the engines were firing would be like trying to walk on top of a moving train. The ship would keep changing its velocity while I was outside it, trying to leave me behind. I would certainly prefer to cut the engines to give myself a little more safety and reduce the strain on the damaged parts of the ship. Which leads me to -
Number Two: Turning off the engines means less control of our trajectory. We have a finite amount of space left with which to slow down our arrival to Erid. Every minute the engines are offline is another few million kilometers of braking distance I'll never get back. We could potentially do a high-speed fly-by of the planet instead of a landing.
Number 3: Space dust. Even small particles going at that speed could rip my suit if I wasn’t careful. As it was, the location of this breach wasn’t on the front of the ship so I was (relatively) safe, with the ship itself shielding most of the debris. I was still in danger from anything like say, a baseball sized rock, coming out of nowhere and instantly killing me. If we were in an asteroid field it was a distinct possibility.
All of this was important information to know - none of it mattered. I had to save my friend.
"I'm on it," I said. "I'm cutting the engines."
I ran to the cockpit and, with some hesitation, throttled down the controls, telling the ship to reduce our thrust to zero. Take a break, Mary. You've earned it. I'll be right back.
I ran the short distance from the control room to the EVA room before the effects of zero G kicked in. Without the constant thrust of the engines, we would lose gravity momentarily. I was suited up and clipping on my EVA tool belt when my stomach dipped, like I was falling. Slowly my feet lifted off the floor, my body gently turning sideways.
Yep. It's been a long time since I felt this and my body wasn't used to the feeling anymore. That combined with my anxiety made me sick, but now was not the time to vomit. I secured my helmet on my head and established the radio channel between my suit and the Hail Mary.
My microphone was actually just connected to the speakers in the cockpit but Rocky could hear that from anywhere on the ship. I needed the pilot's microphone to hear him back. I hopped out of the EVA room to tape the receiver to the xenonite barrier near Rocky in the lab and rushed back to finish gearing up.
I tapped the feed. "Can you hear me?"
"Of course," came his voice through my helmet.
"Hang tight. I'm almost ready."
"I literally cannot move."
I snatched a loose tool that drifted away and re-secured it to my belt. I checked and double checked all my gadgets weren't going to fly away. Then I dug through the shelves in the EVA room until I found what I was looking for - a little yellow brief case labeled: KERMit - an emergency repair kit for just this occasion. They missed their opportunity to make it green. Or maybe they remembered 'it's not easy being green' and changed the color out of respect.
After an agonizingly long wait for the door to depressurize and open, I hopped into open space.
Outside, the sky was eerily still. You wouldn't know how fast we were moving by looking at it. The stars didn't twinkle, they didn't move, they just hung there while the ship and I screamed toward Erid at a speed my brain wasn't equipped to comprehend. It didn't look like we were in an asteroid field, which was a relief. Maybe this event was a one time thing.
The airlock cycled behind me. I checked my three (yes, three. I wasn't taking any chances.) tethers before I pulled myself along the handholds to the damaged section of the hull. I clipped my secondary tether to the next attachment point and looked at the damage.
"Oh, that's not good."
A small piece of rock had punched straight through the outer hull. The hole itself wasn't huge but the surrounding material was ugly. The impact had left a shallow crater around the puncture, with several hairline fractures radiating away from it. Exactly what I didn't want to see.
"How bad?" Rocky's voice came through my helmet.
"Small hole. Cracked around the edges."
"Can you repair?"
"That's what I'm here for."
I opened the repair case attached to my waist. The kit looked simple enough. A circular patch, several fasteners, a surface-preparation tool, and an injector cartridge.
The patch was transparent, which I thought was an odd choice. It wasn't just a piece of plastic, though. The disk was thick and rigid, with a flexible sealing ring molded around its underside. The center contained an injection port.
The design reminded me of something I'd seen in an old NASA repair proposal. The principle was simple: cover the hole mechanically, then fill the space beneath the patch with adhesive. No magic space welding, just engineering.
I pulled a small scraper from the kit. "Starting surface prep."
I worked carefully around the hole, removing loose fragments and anything that might keep the patch from sitting flat. I kept one hand on the hull while the other worked. I cleaned the last bit of fractured material away and pulled out the patch. The sealing ring on the underside was soft enough to conform to the hull but stiff enough to hold its shape. I positioned it over the hole and pressed.
The patch seated.
I took the first fastener from the kit. It was a short, broad-headed bolt with a captive washer. The head was large enough that I could manipulate it with my EVA gloves. I pushed it through the first mounting hole. The fastener caught the threaded hard point beneath the hull. I turned it with the powered driver and tightened it. Then I added three more.
I opened the injector cartridge. It was a two chambered gun with two different glues inside. When I squeezed the trigger, they mixed in the nozzle. I ran a bead around the perimeter of the patch, filling the gaps between the sealing ring and the hull with the white liquid. It didn't spread naturally in vacuum. I had to work it into the seam with a small spatula. The adhesive disappeared beneath the transparent disk and I watched it spread outward, filling the cavity beneath the patch. When I finished, I leaned closely to inspect my handiwork before informing Rocky it was sealed.
"I'm free!"Rocky cheered. I imagined him popping off the wall like a rocket and springing around the room. "Now get back in here."
"I have to wait for the adhesive to set."
"Okay, but hurry."
"Okay, I'll wait faster."
Twenty minutes until the material reached handling strength. I could do that. Twenty minutes.
At our current velocity, that was an absurd distance. I had already been out here for about as long. By the time I got back inside it would be near an hour since I turned off the engines. I tried not to think about it. There was nothing to be done. Rocky and I solved a lot of problems together, what's one more?
I was a sweating from the anxiety - and maybe because I decided to forego the LCVG that's supposed to go under my EVA to regulate my body temperature. Time was of the essence and my t-shirt and sweatpants were just fine as underlayers so long as I didn't stay out too long. As it was, I was uncomfortably warm.
I busied my eyes with inspecting the rest of the hull I could see from my limited view, in case there were any other weak spots that need be addressed. It all looked like standard damage sustained from a ship with nearly eight years of travel under its belt. Lots of scrapes and bruises, but no broken bones. For a ship that was designed for a one way trip, she was doing remarkably well.
But there was one thing that caught my attention.
There was a small oblong meteor wedged in a crook of the ship. I didn't notice it on my way out because I glided right over it. It must have hit at the same time as the other rock. Luckily this one didn't punch a hole, although it was dented inwards so it didn't do nothing. I would check the damage once I could move again.
I held the patch with one hand, the other I drummed my fingers against the ship. The wait was torture.
When time was up I lifted my hand off the patch, waited to see if it would come flying off, and told Rocky, "All done. Patch it from your side too just in case. I trust your xenonite more than this thing."
"Thank. Come inside fast but be careful." I could hear the relief in his voice mixed with his fear. He also understood the implications of what this delay might cost us.
"Copy."
I pulled along my tethers until I reached the meteor. It was… weird looking. It was in shadow so the only reliable light I had to go by was my helmet light. The little florescent bulb didn't illuminate much. I brushed a hand along the rock. Smooth and almost slimy? I grabbed it with both hands and yanked it out of it's nook. I grunted with the effort and my groan echoed through the radio like interference. The hull beneath was dented but nothing that I was concerned about.
What I was concerned about was this space rock that was definitely not a space rock.
It was man made.
Was this a piece of the Hail Mary that broke off? No, it didn't look like it. But it was undoubtedly crafted by human (or maybe Eridian?) hands. The whole thing was solid metal and about the size of an American football. The front, the part that hit our ship, was smashed in. It looked like something was mounted on there at some point. On the long side of one side was a thin tube of metal. It clearly had a matching part that was missing on the other side. It almost looked like a ballast tank. In the back was… a propeller? Why would it need a propeller?
If I didn't know any better I would say this wasn't meant for space travel. It looked more like a submarine than spacecraft. But the Blip-A also looked highly unusual to me so maybe this design made sense to an Eridian.
My heart was racing. We were close enough to Erid now that we may be within communication distance! If this thing could get a signal maybe we could set up a radio connection.
"Rocky, did your species ever send probes into space?"
"Not that I know of," he said, sounding confused. "Why?"
"I think they did after you left. Because I just found one."
"What?!"
"It's wedged on the ship. I'm bringing it inside."
He trilled, equal parts excited and confused. Same, buddy. Rocky had been missing from his star system for fifty years. A lot could have happened in Erid's space program in that time.
I rushed (carefully!) back to the airlock, cradling the probe in one arm. This could be the answer to our problem. If we used this as a repeater and established radio communication with Erid now, we might be able to work together to get the Taumoeba off this ship sooner. Not to mention give the Erdians a head start in synthesizing edible food for a human who was very sick of his diet.
I rapidly pulled my tethers in the tunnel and sealed the door. I waited impatiently for the airlock to cycle. I was giddy with excitement, ready to tear this alien thingy apart. Actually, Rocky would be doing the work but I was excited to watch. I untucked the metal ship from under my arm and -
Quickly I shoved the thing away from me. It bounced off the wall and back at me. I tapped it gingerly with one finger and paused it in midair. In the bright lighting of the room I could see it much clearer now.
The probe was caked in blood.
Not dry, old blood either. Wet, viscous, bright red blood. Or at least that's what it looked like. It was probably a different liquid from Erid but what it could be I don't know. All I knew is it looked like mammal blood. Eridians have Mercury for blood so it wasn't that. Why was it coated in liquid anyway? How was it not dried out?
I glanced at my suit. The fabric was red so I couldn't easily see the not-blood on it but I know I had it all over my hands and arms. Mary would throw a fit if I brought this foreign contaminate on board.
The door opened. I didn't enter. Instead I stripped my EVA off in the airlock and left it there with the probe floating inconspicuously in the middle of the room.
I floated into the EVA room and closed the door behind me. Through the window I pointed at the hunk of metal. "You've been a bad alien probe. Stay."
I had to get the engines thrusting again as soon as possible. I called out to Rocky, telling him I was on my way back to the cockpit. I couldn't hear his response from the lab but I knew he could hear me. I strapped into the pilot's seat because operating the controls while bouncing around the room was a pain. I pushed the throttle up again, flipped a few switches, and checked our trajectory. Autopilot was operational and we were still on course for Erid. As far as I could tell, everything looked good; we weren't wildly off course.
The hum of the engines running resumed their background noise. Gravity steadily trickled back up from 0 to 1.5Gs. I felt my weight press into the chair. My hair floated down. The constant feeling of falling in the pit of my stomach eased as all my organs settled into their proper places.
"Fuck!"
Then a wet sloshing sound followed by a clatter.
I froze.
That was a voice. A human voice. And it was coming from the radio. I un-clipped myself from the pilot's chair and hurried into the lab where Rocky, who was still working on the wall patch in his room, was also frozen.
"Was that you?" he asked.
Okay, so I wasn't hallucinating. Rocky heard it, too.
I shook my head. I crept to the microphone still mounted on the wall, lightly cleared my throat, and said hesitantly into it, "Hello?"
Seconds passed. And just as I was sure we were both hearing things, Rocky said, "Go back to the pilot seat. You got a reply."
Oh my God. This was actually happening. Taking the microphone with me, I zoomed back where I came from so I could communicate. I sat down in the chair again.
"Hello? Can you hear me?" I repeated.
"Wha… whahapp..ened?" A groggy, slurred voice replied.
We were getting a radio signal from another ship - with humans on board! They had to be, if they spoke English. Unless this person, a man by the sound of it, was some super advanced alien with Star Trek level technology and using a universal translator. Unlikely.
How was this possible? We were a dozen light years from Earth and space was massive. This was an oddly specific place for an Earth spaceship to be and a huge coincidence that we were here at the same time. I did a little math in my head. No, even if the Beatles with my information about Erid made it to Earth in record time, not enough time had elapsed for us to launch a ship to Erid to greet our new neighbors, even accounting for time dilation.
"H-hello!" I said more enthusiastically, putting my ear closer to the speaker. "Can you hear me? My name is Doctor Captain Ryland Grace of the Hail Mary. We picked up your radio signal."
Silence. Then, "What?"
"What are your coordinates?"
"I don't… understand," the voice said hoarsely. "What happened?"
I frowned. "What do you mean?"
The man on the other line groaned. "I think I hit my head pretty hard… And I can't see anything. The lights went out… I… I'm hurt pretty bad."
Great. My savior might be in need of saving himself. I'm not even sure how we would meet up if we were nearby, given the whole light speed thing, but I would find a way.
Sloshing liquid crackled through the radio.
"The ship… has a leak," the man continued, his voice becoming stronger but more tense with this realization.
A leak with water coming in? In space? That didn't make sense. But I didn't think too much about it. I was too anxious to find them and meet.
"What are your coordinates?" I repeated. "We can find you."
More watery sounds, like someone stomping through a knee deep marsh, followed by some banging.
"Um, the panel is busted but I think it says 460 by 690."
I pulled me ear back, unsure if I heard that correctly. I gave the radio an incredulous look. "Those numbers don't make any sense. What system are you using? Cartesian?"
"Fuck you, this is the only thing you gave me. You figure it out and get me the hell out of here."
I wrinkled my brow. "I didn't give you anything! We just met."
"Then get whoever is in charge of your fucking stupid COI mission," he snapped.
"What's the COI?" This conversation was getting weirder by the second.
"Don't fuck with me like that. You know which space station that is."
"You're from a space station?!" I blurted out.
Holy cow. Space stations?! There were honest-to-God sci fi space stations established here? Here? There's no way. The government couldn't keep that a secret. The amount of material that would take, the people. This would have to be a multigenerational ship. And why all the way out here? We didn't know about life on Erid until Rocky and I met.
"Wha - who the hell are you?" the man growled, clearly annoyed with my questioning.
"I told you. I'm Doctor Ryland Grace," I said, more chipper than him. "What's your name?"
"Uh, Simon," he said curtly.
Simon. I was such a normal name. He was definitely from Earth. My head was swimming with questions but he was clearly angry and in trouble, so I held off. Now I had to figure out how to find him. Time to put my science brain to use, I guess.
"Grace, the probe," Rocky shouted from the lab. He was just as confused and fascinated as I was, but at least he remembered I brought a machine aboard about ten minutes ago that, now thinking about it, probably most definitely, was connected to Simon's sudden appearance. I guess it wasn't an Eridian probe after all.
I clapped my hands. "Right! Simon, I'll be back in a minute. I have an idea."
I brought the mic with me and flipped the radio speakers to play ship wide before leaving. I dug around the lab for my PPE, opening and closing drawers as I went. I wasn't about to touch that probe without proper protection. I pulled a pair of nitrile gloves from my dwindling supply and snapped them over my hands before scurrying to the front of the ship.
In the airlock, the probe was right where I left it, except now it rest on the ground in full gravity. I firmly grasped it and held it at arms length on the walk back to the lab, handing it like a bomb that could go off if I jostled it too much. As expected, Mary was not fond of it entering her clean environment.
"Foreign contaminate detected," she said the moment I stepped into the corridor. Her voice echoed weirdly over the speakers. First time that's happened. It sounded like a faint recording of her was being played over her crystal clear voice at the same time.
Mary repeated her line once more before I made it to the fume hood, which I opened with my foot to place the probe in. With the clear glass lid placed atop, she ceased the alarm, satisfied that the contamination was contained. I stripped off my gloves, deposited them in the biohazard bin, and slipped my arms into the black gloves connected to the fume hood to inspect the probe.
"What was that voice?" Simon asked.
"Just my ship yelling at me for bringing a probe aboard," I said absently, turning the device over in my hands to look for a hatch to access the computer parts inside. The only door I saw was welded shut. "Do you have any floating around in space? We just picked one up and my guess is it's related to your ship. I'm hoping I can use it to find you."
Simon yelped and in the background I heard a faint clatter of items being tossed around in water. Then a grunt of pain. "You don't have to look very hard. I think you found me."
"Uuhh, Grace," Rocky called from his room. He was now pressed against the xenonite wall as much as he could be, clicking and listening intently.
I furrowed my brow. "What?" I asked, to both him and Simon.
"I can hear your voice outside and on the radio-" Simon growled.
At the same time Rocky said, "H-how small can humans get?"
I blinked. I glanced back and forth between Rocky and the chunk of metal in my hands. That didn't make sense. Nothing either of them said made sense.
"Not this small. That's not possible," I said, dumbfounded.
He stomped a foot at me. "I can hear through walls, remember? There's a living human inside there."
"What do you mean?" Simon asked. "Who are you talking to?"
Oh right. Simon couldn't understand Rocky. It was so used to hearing Eridian it almost sounded like English to me. Oh boy, explaining my alien friend was going to be interesting, to say the least. But that was a conversation to put on the back burner. We had a more pressing issue.
"Ask him to knock on the wall," Rocky demanded.
I refrained from rolling my eyes. There was no way Simon was in this little thing. It was not physically possible. The laws of physics literally prevented that. A shrunken human would be dead six ways to Sunday.
"Simon, can you knock on the wall, please?" I asked just to humor Rocky.
"Uh, sure?"
Knock, knock, knock.
I jumped back, ripping my hands out of the gloves. I gawked at the probe - no, the ship. This was a ship after all, and inside, something was alive.
"I told you so," said Rocky with a smug tone.
"Can you get me out of here now?" Simon said, sounding impatient.
I scrubbed my hands over my face, as if I could wipe away what I was seeing, what I was hearing. Right now Simon's voice was coming through the speakers but I wondering if I put my ear closer I could hear him through the wall.
"Uh, yeah," I said stupidly. "One more quick question: How tall are you?"
He didn't answer for a moment. "What?"
"Humor me."
"Uh, close to 180 centimeters."
Oh. He didn't know. This made it worse. I didn't have the heart to say anything because I still didn't believe it myself. My heart was racing and my hands and voice shook as I approached the fume hood once again.
"Right… okay, I'm going to find something to get that door open. Hang tight."
I tip toed away for a few steps then ran the rest of the way to Rocky. I slammed my palms onto the barrier, pushed my face next to his, and whispered, " What the heck are we going to do?!"
"How the fuck am I supposed to know?! You're the human expert!" he hissed back.
"This is insane. There's no way a tiny person is in that ship."
"Okay, okay let's just calm down and take this one step at a time. Get the door open first and we'll go from there."
I groaned. Okay, he was right, but that didn't mean I had to like it. I told him as much.
I spent a few minutes searching for the handheld circular saw. It's been years since I've used it since I've had limited need for it until now. I tore apart the lab until it looked nearly as messy as Rocky's side, which was still in shambles from the meteor incident. It wasn't in the lab, or the dormitory, or the data corridor. I even checked the Don't Go Crazy room. There were only so many places it could be.
Eventually I found it behind a storage panel along with some cannibalized parts of a Beetle we tore apart to siphon astrophage from. That's how long it has been since I needed this. I'm glad Rocky has a perfect memory or else I may have forgotten I had it, and tearing into a solid metal hull would be painful without it.
"Found it," I announced as I reentered the lab, pressing the trigger on the electrical saw a couple times to test it was working. I reapplied fresh gloves to my hands, a disposable gown over my shirt, a face mask, and safety goggles over my prescription glasses. Can't be too careful!
I opened the fume hood and told Mary to be quiet as she warned me, yet again, about the foreign contaminant. She silenced her alarm but I could feel her contempt. She was trying to tell me this was a bad idea and I wouldn't listen. I didn't want to listen to me either.
"Cut it near the rear," Rocky suggested. "It's thinnest there."
"Simon, I'm going open it now. Stand as far to this side" -I tapped the front of the ship- "as you can and cover your ears. It's going to be loud. And um… don't freak out when it's open."
"Why would I freak out?" he asked, worry creeping into his voice.
I took a shaky breath. I still didn't believe this was happening so I didn't want to say what was on my mind, lest I was wrong. "Because you might not like what you see. Are you in position?"
"Uh, yeah… Ready, I guess."
I'm glad someone was.
I whirred the saw to life and began slicing into the hull. It gave away surprisingly easy. The blade was sharp and the metal beneath gave me no more resistance than slicing into an apple with a knife. I carefully cut away at each side, making an opening large enough for him to walk through. I had the full intention of chopping off the entire end but with about a quarter left to go on the bottom, I was splattered with red.
I stopped the saw and reeled back.
I dropped the safety glasses, now speckled red all over the lenses, on the floor, and inspected the damage. Oozing out of the nearly sawed in two ship was an enormous amount of blood. It flowed across the surface of the fume hood and caught in the crevasses so it never spilled over the top.
My stomach lurched. I may have just killed our guest. Realistically I knew this was too much blood to come out of one person so small but I wasn't thinking rationally.
"Simon?" I said hesitantly.
No reply.
I leaned my face in closer but not too close. I wasn't sure I wanted to see what was inside. Knowing there was a tiny person in there and actually seeing it were two different things entirely and I'm not sure my brain was ready to process that.
It was dark. Too dark to see with my eyes adjusted to the florescent lights.
I took off the rest of my soiled PPE and tossed it on the floor. I could deal with that later. I grabbed a pen light from a drawer and, steeling my nerves, shined it into the darkness.
Inside, every surface was coated in wet blood. It dripped from the ceiling, into a puddle on the floor, and drained out the newly created door. There wasn't much else in there. I saw what might have been a computer at one point on the left side (I had sawed through half of it), a display directly across from that, and in the front a console with very few buttons and a chair to sit at the controls. On the floor was a life jacket haphazardly wrapped around a box of some sort and a fire extinguisher. That's it.
Oh, plus the person.
Pressed against the console, as far away from me as possible, sat a man only a few inches tall. He was also covered head to toe in blood. I couldn't make out any other details about him other than clocking a missing left arm that was cut off just below the shoulder.
This had to be Simon.
He flinched at the light in his face. I lowered the pen light so it wasn't directly in his eyes. Without the glaring beam blinding him, his eyes widened like saucers and his breathing became heavy. I watched the rise and fall of his chest increase rate as he began to hyperventilate. He was trembling violently.
We stared unblinking at each other, both too stunned to speak.
The silence stretched. My own breathing matched his. My hands shook. I set down the pen, shrouding him in shadow once again, and fell hard into the stool behind me. I ran my fingers through my hair, trying to form a thought, a sentence, but got nothing. This was crazy.
No, not just crazy - impossible. I was dreaming. Although it's never worked before, I pinched myself to wake up. Why do people do that? I have no idea. I didn't feel any different.
"How?" was the only word I could form. But emboldened by breaking the silence, I carried on my stream of consciousness. "Literally, how? You should be dead."
I clenched and unclenched my hands, then turned to Rocky. "You can't just smash the distance between atoms like that," I explained like he didn't already know all this. This was more for me than him. I stood up and paced in front of the submarine. "Not to mention the square cube law. Or microfluidics. Or- or the energy requirement for that!"
I waved my hands at ship. "Where did all his mass go? You can't just delete matter!" I drew closer to the table, suddenly intrigued. "Wait, how much do you weigh?"
He didn't feel heavy in the ship, certainly not the weight of a full grown human, but I had to find some logic in this. Aliens made sense, astrophage made sense (mostly), even xenonite made sense when Rocky explained it to me. But this? Maybe he wasn't human? Maybe he was an alien race that looked remarkably similar to humans… and spoke English… and breathed oxygen.
Yeah, no. The coincidences were too many. He even said he believed himself to be nearly six feet tall, so he wasn't born like this.
Simon pressed his back further into the console as I came closer. He was trapped and the only way out was through me. "G-get the hell away from me," he stuttered, trying and failing to sound tough.
I blinked. Hearing his voice in person and not a speaker short circuited my brain for some reason. It made this all too real. And his voice was deep, not the high pitched squeak you hear in cartoons.
"Oh, sorry-"
The sound of shuffling feet from Rocky drew my attention. He was about to get in his ball for a better look at Simon. I rushed to his makeshift EVA and pushed it flush against his wall so he couldn't disconnect.
"No, no, Rocky. You're going to scare him," I said, quietly enough so Simon couldn't hear.
"Oh, because you're doing a fantastic job keeping him calm," he retorted, crossing two of his arms.
I bit my lip. "I don't know what to say to him!"
"How about not starting with a tangent about mass conversion and weighing him."
I took an outsiders perspective on this situation for a moment. He was trapped inside a bloody, metal death trap and was just freed by a giant in a lab with little to no warning. And my first reaction was to go into analytic scientist mode. He was like a lab rat waiting to be studied.
"His heart rate has increased from 100 bpm to 130 bpm since you started talking."
Craaaap. I was going to give the little guy a heart attack. All right, time for a new approach.
I took a deep breath, relaxed my shoulders, and walked back to the fume hood. He was more afraid of me than I was of him, I reminded myself. The tiny human had poked his head out but hurriedly stepped back into his hiding spot as I approached. Well so much for keeping Rocky a secret. He must have seen us talking. I eased myself onto the stool.
"Simon," I said gently. "It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."
I think I've read before that it's a good idea to say a victim's name a lot in a hostage situation, to humanize them and establish a relationship. Or, was it the other way around? I don't know. I'm not into true crime and no one's ever been afraid of me before. Even Rocky, I don't think, feared me when we first met.
I decided to take the patient teacher approach, consoling a student. Middle school is some of the toughest years in a kid's life and I've had my fair share of breakdowns from pre teens with failing grades, bad home lives, and general hormonal issues. You don't tell them to "calm down." You sit down, lower your voice, remind them again and again that they're safe because it never sticks the first time, and simply give them time. Talk to them.
If I can reassure a crying child that they were safe with me, surely I could handle a rational adult.
"I know this is scary," I continued. "I'm a little freaked out myself. But I think it's a good idea if we both take a few deep breaths and talk. Does that sound good?"
He didn't answer. Or maybe it was so quiet I couldn't hear. I think I damaged the radio communicator tearing the sub apart because I didn't hear anymore feedback on the speakers.
I took ten deep breaths, exaggerating the movement so Simon could follow along. Doing this for myself was hard to continue that long, but doing it with an audience was easier and encouraged me to keep going. I only hoped this was helping. I was surprised how much better I felt afterwards. Huh. I guess that exercise really does work when you do it properly.
"Why don't you tell me about yourself?" I asked in hopes of getting him to speak. "Where are you from? I'm from the Bay Area. Your accent sounds American so I assume you're from the United States?" I raised the pitch in my voice at the end of my sentence into a question.
"Fuck off," was his reply.
Ooookay. He wasn't pleasant before I broke his ship I guess it's dumb of me to assume he's going to be nice afterwards. I hoped it was just his fear and not his everyday attitude, or we were in for a long flight. But to my surprise he wasn't finished speaking.
"Don't talk to me like we're on Earth. I've never even been to Earth."
Aha! My hypothesis that there was a multigenerational space station around here was sounding better and better. I listened intently.
"So, where are you from?"
"Eden. And Mars before that."
My mouth fell open. "I'm sorry, what?"