Chapter Text
Nine hundred and forty-three.
That’s how many days it’s been since Grace launched the beetles towards Earth, along with the Taumoeba 82.5 and all the logs and information the scientists of Earth would need to save their Sun.
Nine hundred and forty-three days since he turned the Hail Mary around and used the light bouncing off his fuel to locate Blip-A.
Nine hundred and forty-three days since Grace chose to save his friend, his best friend, instead of returning home.
And that’s how long the two of them have been aboard the Hail Mary, heading toward Erid.
The Taumoeba in Rocky’s ship had wiggled their way out of their containers and spread throughout the entire ship until they found the fuel bays. They had basically eaten through eighty percent of the Astrophage supply and all the fuel before Rocky realized what happened. But by then it was far too late, and the entire ship ended up shutting down.
Rocky, stubborn bastard that he was, did everything he could think of to contain the Taumoeba and salvage whatever Astrophage remained. It wasn’t much. Not nearly enough to get him home, and even if it was, with his fuel tanks and entire ship being made of a material the Taumoeba could easily escape and navigate through, there was nothing he could do.
He’d eventually curled up near his empty fuel supply, resigning in his despair that his entire species was doomed because of his failure and he was going to die out here all alone; that was when he heard him.
Grace.
He came back for him.
Rocky never understood why humans cried. No matter how much Grace tried to explain it in simple words, he never understood what the point of such a useless function was. Why do they leak so much when they experience strong emotions? He’d shrugged it off as a human thing he would never understand.
However, the moment he heard Grace’s voice outside of his ship. Recognized the familiar thumping of his friend’s heartbeat and reached out his arm to the xenonite barrier separating his hand from Grace’s. Rocky thought to himself that if he had the ability to cry. He probably would have been doing so right then.
Grace certainly shared the sentiment as Rocky took notice of the tears streaming down his face.
Together, the two of them went on to collect and scrape all the Taumoeba off of Rocky's fuel bays, around twenty-two million kilograms of it, and seal it into plastic containers in the Hail Mary.
Rocky’s remaining astrophage was utterly unsalvageable, so they had to make do with the amount Grace had.
It was Rocky’s astrophage to begin with, so it was only logical to use it to return to Erid.
Rocky had anxiously worried about Earth, but Grace assured him that he’d already sent the beetles off and Earth was going to receive their cure in a few years.
That reassured Rocky and even had him in a state of giddiness as he realized that meant Grace was coming back with him to Eridani.
Grace was going to visit his home, and Rocky was beyond excited.
Grace shared the excitement—though for different reasons. He desperately needed something to distract him from the fact that he would probably never set foot on Earth again. The possibility of visiting an alien planet and meeting an entire intelligent species did the trick.
And that’s where they have been heading.
For nine hundred and forty-three days.
Two years and seven months.
Originally, Rocky’s trip back to Erid was going to take him six years. This was due to the fuel he lent to Grace and the sheer size of Blip-A, which required much more astrophage to move.
The Hail Mary, however, was small and traveled at a high percentage of the speed of light - approximately 0.92c - which cut the six years down into three to four years.
Grace had enough food to last the trip to Erid and a few months more. The problem was that he had about a year and a half worth of “real” food left before he had to switch his diet entirely to coma slurry.
He hadn’t looked forward to that.
He decided that he would stay awake for the entirety of the trip. He wasn’t at risk of mentally deteriorating this time because he had Rocky around for company.
During the first week, as an experiment, Grace drank an entire bottle of the nutrients slurry for lunch in order to prepare himself for when the real food eventually ran out. Swallowing down that disgusting, medicinal sludge almost had him in tears. He decided that if the solitude wasn’t what was going to break him, eating this stuff for two years surely would.
Rocky had asked him why he looked so miserable, and Grace explained that the slurries weren’t exactly meant to be eaten.
Rocky made a noise that Grace was beginning to understand was an irritated scoff and told him to just not eat it then.
Well, first of all. That was unnecessarily rude; it’s not like he had a choice. He had to eat it.
And second, huh…
It made sense, he supposed.
The slurry wasn’t meant to be tasted. He and the rest of the crew were all unconscious while they were getting the nutrients pumped into them. Which meant the taste problem only existed because he was awake.
So, this meant the best solution was to remove taste from the equation.
He would pump the nutrients into his stomach.
It sounded like an uncomfortable and honestly sort of disgusting idea all together. He debated with himself about it for what felt like hours. But then he’d bitten into one of his burritos and mourned over the fact that the taste of real, Earth-made food would get erased from his taste buds forever if he ate through all of it in a year and a half.
Therefore, he would survive the beginning of the trip by pumping the coma slurries straight into his stomach to avoid tasting its bitter flavor. That way all the real food would be saved for the end of the trip.
Save the best for last, as they say.
This plan didn’t come without its risks, of course. In order to get the liquid nutrients directly into his stomach, he’d have to either shove a tube up his nose or directly into his stomach hole.
Threading a tube down your throat while fully conscious sounded like a great way to choke, gag, or aspirate slurry into your lungs. Aspiration pneumonia in deep space seemed like a pretty terrible way to die.
The ship also didn’t carry the medication you’d normally use to numb the throat for that kind of procedure. Instead, when he asked the nanny bot about how it administered the nutrients into them, the bot provided him with a PEG tube.
Right. Of course. The surgical port was already installed in his abdomen. The one designed specifically so the bot could feed him while he was unconscious.
So that’s how he’d been eating for the last year and a half. Every morning he hooked up the feeding line, let the slurry pump into his stomach, disconnected everything, and went about his day.
There was no horrible taste and no misery. And honestly it wasn’t that bad. Still gross, definitely still gross. But it was manageable, and most importantly, it meant the burritos and noodles survived for a while longer.
The liquid diet had also come with one unexpected benefit that Grace had not considered when he first came up with the plan.
He took far fewer dumps. It turned out that when most of your calories were being pumped directly into your stomach in a perfectly measured nutrient slurry designed to be absorbed almost completely by the body, there wasn’t a whole lot left over to turn into solid waste. His digestive system was running at peak efficiency whether he liked it or not, and the result was that the Hail Mary’s bathroom saw far less use than it probably had during the mission planners’ original projections.
Grace certainly wasn’t complaining. The ship technically had a perfectly functional waste management system, but that didn’t make the experience of floating in a small metal box while doing your business any less awkward or humiliating. If anything, the reduced bathroom visits were one of the few perks of the whole situation.
That didn’t mean he completely gave up on real food, though. Every now and then he would still grab a small snack, usually something simple like a protein bar or a handful of crackers, mostly just for the sake of chewing on something.
Humans, it turned out, were weirdly dependent on the act of chewing. It wasn’t even about hunger half the time, it was about the simple comfort of doing something with your mouth that wasn’t talking or drinking water.
Sometimes he would even sacrifice half of one of his precious burritos just to remind himself what actual food tasted like, though he tried to keep those moments rare. Most days it was just the feeding tube and the measured slurry.
This particular day was like any other. They still had around a year and nine months left of traveling before they would finally reach Erid, and Grace was beginning to lose it a little. Not in a screaming-into-the-void and hearing voices sort of way, but in the slow, tortuous manner that came from doing the same things over and over again inside the same metal walls with no real change to break up the routine.
Stratt had at least done him the enormous favor of downloading essentially the entire internet into the ship’s computer banks before launch, which meant Grace had access to more movies, television shows, documentaries, and random online content than any single human being could realistically consume in several lifetimes.
For the first year it had been fantastic. He watched classic films he had somehow missed growing up, entire television series people had recommended to him years ago, and a frankly embarrassing number of cooking videos. But even with the infinite variety the internet provided, the lack of real-world interaction eventually started wearing him down.
The real problem, as Grace was slowly realizing, wasn’t even the social isolation anymore. Rocky had more or less solved that problem.
They talked constantly, argued about science, shared observations about their respective species, and filled hours upon hours with long discussions about everything from astrophage behavior to the absurdities of human and Eridian culture.
Grace had spent so much time worrying about the psychological dangers of social isolation that he had overlooked something else humans needed almost as much.
Physical touch.
Stupid, needy humans and their stupid, needy biology.
It wasn’t even that humans needed constant contact or anything like that. Most people went through their daily lives with only the briefest moments of physical contact, like a handshake, a quick hug from a friend, a pat on the shoulder, or someone brushing past you in a crowded hallway.
And those tiny interactions were enough to satisfy whatever strange psychological requirement the human brain apparently had for physical reassurance. Grace had never once thought about those moments when he lived on Earth. He didn’t realize how much he relied on them until they were ripped out of his hands.
Rocky filled the void of companionship almost perfectly, but there was absolutely nothing either of them could do about touch.
Their atmospheres alone made that impossible, and even if they somehow solved that problem, the two of them were built so differently that physical contact would probably be awkward at best and dangerous at worst.
The result was that Grace had gone over two years (not counting the four years he was in a coma) without another living creature physically touching him, and his brain was apparently not handling that fact as gracefully as he would have liked.
The side effects of that physical depravity showed up in small ways at first. He noticed himself getting irritated more easily than usual, snapping at minor inconveniences and losing patience during conversations that normally would have amused him.
Rocky noticed too, and since Rocky was not exactly the most emotionally subtle being in the universe, he responded by snapping back just as often.
They had started bickering more.
The arguments were never particularly serious, usually revolving around minor disagreements about scientific approaches or the occasional cultural misunderstanding that spiraled into a debate neither of them really intended to start.
Still, the tension built quickly when two intelligent beings were stuck together for years in deep space with no one else to talk to. They could never physically hurt each other, of course, because Rocky’s ammonia atmosphere would kill Grace in seconds while Grace’s oxygen environment would do the exact same thing to Rocky, but that didn’t stop the arguments from escalating until one of them eventually stormed off in frustration.
Grace would retreat deeper into the Hail Mary, muttering to himself while pretending to busy himself with maintenance checks or pointless recalculations of their travel trajectory, while Rocky would clatter in the other direction with irritated clicks and musical grumbles that were probably Eridian profanities that he refused to tell Grace the meanings of.
They never stayed apart for long, though. The silence always crept in eventually, and both of them hated it far more than they hated whatever stupid thing they had been arguing about in the first place.
One of them would eventually return, usually pretending that they had come back to discuss something useless and unrelated like astrophage efficiency or structural stress in the xenonite barriers, and after a few awkward minutes one of them would quietly apologize.
The other would apologize too, sometimes immediately and sometimes after a short pause that clearly meant they had been planning to do it anyway. Then the conversation would drift back into normal territory as if nothing had happened.
Still, the pattern was becoming more frequent, and Grace knew it wasn’t just him feeling the strain. Rocky was dealing with the same isolation, the same endless travel through empty space, and the same understanding that the only other intelligent being within light-years was currently the one you were stuck arguing with.
They both knew the stakes were far bigger than their frustrations, and neither of them would ever abandon the mission or the other because of something as trivial as cabin fever. But that didn’t mean the strain wasn’t there, slowly wearing them down day by day as the stars crawled past the ship’s sensors.
They just had to endure it a little longer.
One year and nine months.
They needed to survive the boredom because eventually they would reach Erid and save an entire species. They would be in a new environment and meet others without the confines of this seemingly endless routine chipping away at their psyche.
Grace was in the control room running through one of the many routine checks that had slowly come to define his days, absentmindedly verifying their current trajectory and making small adjustments to their course when the computer suddenly chimed with an alert.
It wasn’t a loud alarm, just a sharp, clean notification tone accompanied by a small blinking icon on the display labeled BLIP-D. Grace immediately frowned and leaned closer to the console. The Hail Mary’s systems were deliberately designed not to bother him with ordinary space junk.
Asteroids, micrometeorites, and random debris were automatically tracked and filtered out unless they posed a direct collision risk. If the computer had decided this thing was worth notifying him about, then it meant the object was unusual in some way.
He pulled up the external observation systems and activated the ship’s long-range optical cameras, the highly sensitive imaging equipment designed to pick up faint reflected light from objects drifting through deep space.
The camera array rotated slowly, aligning itself with the coordinates the computer had provided, but for a moment Grace saw absolutely nothing useful on the screen.
The display remained almost completely black, the digital field of view empty except for the faint instrumentation lines and targeting brackets. It was clearly turned on, but it wasn’t showing anything, not even stars. Was something blocking the view? He adjusted the zoom, nudged the aim slightly, and waited while the sensors tried to resolve the object the computer insisted was there.
It took him a moment to register what was wrong.
There were no stars.
Grace leaned forward slowly, squinting at the screen. The camera wasn’t malfunctioning; the readouts said it was working perfectly. But the region of space it was looking at was just… dark.
Not normal space dark. The entire section of the image was empty, a massive stretch of darkness where the stars should have been.
It reminded him of when he went back to save Rocky and had drifted toward Blip-A in his EVA suit, when he’d been too far away for his eyes to catch any light reflecting off the ship and the whole thing had looked like a giant silhouette cut out of the stars.
Except that had been his naked eyes trying to look at something far away in space. This was a camera specifically built to see things in space, a sensor system designed to amplify the tiniest glimmers of reflected light across astronomical distances.
Which meant that darkness wasn’t Blip-D.
It was a region of space where the stars themselves were missing.
“Okay, that’s impossible,” Grace murmured under his breath. There was no way any section of space could be devoid of stars. Stars were everywhere in space, and unless there was a black hole nearby he doesn’t know about, this emptiness shouldn’t be possible.
He adjusted the focus again, slowly sweeping the camera across the strange starless patch while the computer tried to enhance whatever signal it had originally detected.
For a second he thought he’d lost the blip entirely because the sensor indicator drifted off the edge of the screen as he repositioned the camera, but then something faint slid into view and the targeting bracket snapped onto it again.
What he saw made him freeze.
The shape slowly resolved itself as the system enhanced the image. At first it looked like nothing more than a long, uneven silhouette floating in the darkness, but as the camera sharpened the details, he began to make out the strange contours of the object.
It was long and cylindrical, thicker in the middle and tapering slightly toward the ends, with a dull, uneven surface that looked badly corroded.
The metal, if it even was metal, was patchy and scarred. It looked dirty and rusted. The metal was clearly smeared all over and covered in blotches of reddish-brown. Portions of it looked crudely welded or bolted together, as if the whole thing had been assembled without much concern for aesthetics or precision.
The shape itself was awkward and oddly primitive, lacking the sleek symmetry Grace expected from spacecraft. It was just a bulky, elongated shell with strange protrusions and ridges along its body that looked less like engineered components and more like structural reinforcement slapped on wherever it had seemed necessary.
Grace stared at the thing in complete confusion, his eyes flicking between the camera feed and the sensor data as if one of them might tell him what in the world he was looking at.
No one in their right mind would send something like that into space. The object’s size and shape were strange enough on their own, but the condition of it made the whole sight even more absurd. The vessel looked as if it had been assembled from rusty metal slabs, oversized bolts, and a dream. The angle of the camera wasn’t helping much either. From where Grace was viewing it, the object’s rear end was mostly obscured, leaving him with an incomplete silhouette.
As he adjusted the zoom and tracking systems, he noticed the vessel itself was slowly drifting closer, rotating with an almost lazy momentum.
It wasn’t tumbling wildly like most derelict objects in space. Instead, it hovered forward at an incredibly slow crawl, rotating along its axis so gradually that it took several seconds before Grace even realized it was even moving.
As the vessel continued its slow rotation, more of its rear section drifted into view. At first it just looked like another collection of cylindrical tanks and structural ribs, but then he noticed something that just made things worse. The back end of the craft revealed a large circular assembly, thick metal blades arranged around a central hub, partially enclosed in a protective frame.
Grace blinked at it for a moment, his brain scrambling to place the shape before the realization finally slammed into him.
“No way…,” he whispered.
A propeller.
The entire design suddenly began making sense in his mind. The long cylindrical body. The reinforced plating. The clustered tanks mounted along the underside. Even the strange forward structure that had looked so awkward before suddenly made sense.
It was a submarine.
Grace leaned back slowly in his chair, staring at the screen like it might disappear if he blinked.
A submarine.
In space.
He spent a good few minutes just staring at the screen and balking at him in silent disbelief as the object that was currently the cause of his growing migraine continued to slowly spin. The more he looked, the more it proved that it truly was a submarine.
What a freaking submarine was doing floating around in space was beyond him.
But now that he recognized what it was, the rest of the vessel’s structure became painfully obvious. The hull was clearly designed for deep water pressure, thick and heavy rather than sleek and aerodynamic like a spacecraft. The tanks along the bottom were ballast cylinders. The front end had the reinforced framework that would normally protect sonar equipment and forward sensors. It was still in horrible condition, rusted and battered, but the design was unmistakable.
Now he was even more confused, though. Because submarines did not belong anywhere near space. In fact, they should be furthest away from it and at the bottom of an ocean.
Which raised the much bigger question of where in the world it came from.
Grace slowly shifted his gaze back to the empty stretch of darkness behind the drifting vessel. The massive starless void the sensors had first detected.
“Did it come from there?” he murmured.
But that didn’t make sense either. There was nothing there. Genuinely not even a single star. Grace wouldn’t have even noticed this absolute space anomaly if the ship hadn’t detected the blip.
The submarine continued its slow, silent spin, offering no answers to Grace’s troubles as it drifted forward out of the darkness.
Then the heavy footfalls of Rocky’s steps registered in his ears as his friend came into the control room through his xenonite enclosure.
“Grace talking to himself, question?” He sang. Grace had begun understanding Rocky fully without needing the automatic translation about a year into their trip. The notes translated perfectly in his head nowadays.
He looked back at Rocky with a look of barely contained panic. “There’s a submarine floating out there!”
Rocky paused. “What is meaning of third word?” He asked after a moment.
Grace ran a hand through his hair and pointed helplessly at the screen. “It’s… okay, it’s basically like a spaceship,” he began quickly, the words spilling out in anxious bursts. “Except instead of traveling through space it travels underwater. Like in an ocean. Humans built them to go really deep underwater and - and -”
He gestured vaguely at the drifting vessel.
“And that is one of them.”
Rocky stared at the image for a few seconds, his body going still as he processed the information. “So submarine not designed for space travel, question?” Rocky said slowly.
“No,” Grace said immediately. “Not even in the slightest."
“But is currently in space.”
“Yep.”
A beat of silence washed over them as they both looked back at the screen. The submarine continued its slow, silent spin. Rocky spoke again. “This mean there humans inside, question?”
Grace immediately shook his head before Rocky even finished the sentence.
“No way,” he said firmly. “Absolutely not. There’s no way someone survived in that thing. I mean look at it. That thing’s falling apart. Even if someone somehow launched it into space - which I have no idea how they would even do - they wouldn’t have the life support, the propulsion, the radiation shielding… nothing about that thing works for space.”
He gestured helplessly toward the rust-covered hull drifting across the monitor. He felt like tearing his hair out just looking at it. Out there. Existing.
“I don’t even know how it got here. There aren’t any planets nearby and it’s coming from a direction of actual pure darkness. There isn’t a single star from where it's coming from. It makes no sense.”
The room went quiet for a moment as the two of them simply watched the vessel rotate slowly in the blackness. Grace felt his brain trying to process the situation and failing.
A submarine in space in front of a region of space that didn’t even have stars. Nothing about this was normal and it was starting to stress him out. The last year or so has been so mundane and boring that the sudden appearance of this water vessel in the middle of space felt like emotional whiplash.
Rocky broke the silence first. “Rocky and Grace should go look,” he said.
Grace turned his head toward him in disbelief. Except he shouldn’t be that surprised. Of course that was Rocky’s suggestion. That was exactly what Rocky had done when he first encountered the Hail Mary, after all. He had approached an unknown alien vessel drifting through space and decided to investigate it.
Grace supposed that had worked out pretty well for both of them the first time.
Still, something deep in his gut twisted uneasily. And for some reason, he had the feeling that it might not work out so well the second time.
“I don’t know about that,” Grace said cautiously. “The chances of anything alive being in there are basically zero.”
Rocky shifted his weight slightly. “But chance is not zero,” he replied stubbornly.
Grace groaned softly, pushed his glasses down to dangle down his jaw, and rubbed his face.
“It’s also way off our current trajectory,” he said, gesturing toward the navigation display. “We’d have to burn fuel to intercept it, then burn fuel again to get back on course. That’s not exactly a small detour.”
Rocky didn’t answer immediately. Grace could feel the argument coming before it even started. They’d done this dance enough times over the past year that he could practically predict the rhythm of it.
However, when Rocky spoke again, his notes were much gentler than he expected. “If humans inside and they are alive,” Rocky said quietly, “we must help them.”
Grace winced slightly.
That was a direct hit to his guilt button.
He stared at the screen again, watching the submarine drift silently through the darkness. His brain immediately started doing the math automatically, calculating trajectory changes and fuel costs whether he wanted it to or not.
He hated how easily Rocky could make him feel like a coward. But sighed out the irritation. That wasn’t fair. Rocky didn’t make him feel like a coward; that was all Grace. On the contrary, Rocky made Grace braver.
And technically, Grace knew he was right. The odds of anyone surviving in that thing were practically nonexistent. The vessel didn’t even belong in space. It was probably just some bizarre piece of debris that had been thrown out of wherever that strange starless region came from.
But still. If someone was in there -
Grace exhaled slowly.
And, if he was being honest with himself, the curiosity was already eating at him. A submarine floating through deep space made absolutely no sense, and Grace had never been very good at ignoring scientific mysteries.
With a tired sigh, he leaned forward and started pulling up the navigation controls.
“Alright,” he muttered. Rocky perked up slightly.
Grace began running the calculations, plotting the new course that would bring them closer to the strange vessel drifting aimlessly through the empty stretch of space.
“I swear,” Grace added under his breath as numbers filled the display, “one day this curiosity thing is going to get us both killed.”
“Like cat.” Came Rocky’s response and it was obvious through the pitch of his voice he was attempting to hide his excitement.