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“But what if we’re too late?” Grace asks, curled up on the floor of the Hail Mary and wrapped up in his good luck blanket. “What if there’s no one left to save?”
It was a question Grace had a tendency to ask more and more the closer he and Rocky got to Erid, the human growing ever lither the more he had to rely on “coma slurry” and the taumeoba for sustenance.
Rocky, donned in his recently-made specialized xenonite suit, sits next to his friend, four limbs tucked underneath his carapace while the fifth strokes at Grace’s side. [Not too late. Erid is waiting, Earth will wait for beetles, plenty of people to save,] Rocky assures, squeezing at his friend.
“You can’t know that,” Grace snaps, curling further in on himself, hands clutching at his scalp. “What if the beetles miss Earth, or everybody dies before the beetles get there? What if something happened on Erid and nobody was able to make it?”
While Rocky couldn’t speak on Earth’s timeline, he was certain of Erid’s safety. The team that had plotted and launched this mission had run countless calculations over and over until they were triple certain of the results, and according to those answers, Rocky and Grace could have stayed in Tau Ceti’s system for years before being pressed for time, even accounting for the worst-case scenarios and the magic of relativity.
Rocky had gone over this with Grave on several occasions, reciting the equations just as they had been explained to him all those years ago. Yet Grace still worries more and more, leaking over a feared extinction that he and Rocky worked so hard to craft a solution for.
Part of Rocky wants to stomp some sense into his friend, to state how dumb it was to dread a future so unlikely to come to pass. But the more time Rocky spends with Grace, the more he understood that the concerns a human mind focused on could not always be dismissed with traditional logic. Sometimes it needed assurance through other means.
[If Rocky and Grace too late,] Rocky says, continuing to pet Grace’s side, [then Rocky and Grace will still save stars. Will make sure universe is safe, and universe will have chance to grow new life.]
Grace grows still, panicked shakes ceasing as he peeks out from between his arms to look at Rocky.
[Will be sad,] Rocky concedes, moving his arm to gently pat Grace’s head. [But Grace will still have Rocky.]
Grace pauses for a moment, saying nothing as he considers Rocky’s words. Then, he gives a long sigh, releasing his own head as he tucks one arm under the blanket and moves the other to hold Rocky’s hand. “You’ll have me too, pal. ‘Til the end.”