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Ships in the Night

On their way to Erid, Grace and Rocky make a chance discovery on a rogue planet that might offer new possibilities for who can go home and how - but will also force them to confront themselves and their insecurities in a very literal fashion. This chapter took longer because I had covid. I hope it's up to snuff.

Chapter 1/? - Erebus

Chapter 2/? - Khaos

Chapter 3/? - Phoebe

Chapter 4/? - Hypnos

Grace grabbed a random packet out of the food stores, added water, and shoved it in the microwave to warm up while he paced restlessly up and down the kitchen. If they had made it all the way to Erid before he ever found out that Eridians were supposed to wear clothes, he wondered, would he have been mad? Maybe. There was something awfully patronizing about the idea that Rocky didn’t have to tell him because Grace wouldn’t have known any better. It had probably seemed funnier when they were going their separate ways at the end of the mission... but he would have gotten over it. It would have become something they’d laugh about later.

Was he mad now? He didn’t know. It was hard to think about that when he wasn’t sure what galaxy he was in.

The microwave chimed. Grace stirred his food on the way to the table, where he sat down heavily and stared at the opposite wall for a minute or two. How were they going to get out of this? Rockwell said the whole thing was one big machine... did that mean they could figure out how to control it? Assuming they could, how did they even know which universes they’d come from? What if they got it wrong?

Grace knew he was getting ahead of himself. This was like when he’d first realized Tau Ceti had a Petrova Line – fifty thousand questions were swarming in his head all at once. He couldn’t try to answer them yet. He needed to break them down and pick a starting point, and for that he needed to be in a more coherent state of mind... like Rocky had told him, he needed to eat and sleep.

That was a tough order, though, because escaping this place felt really, really urgent. Grace had sent his message back to Earth, and Rockwell and Gracie had apparently managed to send one to Erid, but that left two planets in two different universes, home to billions of sentient beings who didn’t know that the solution to the End of the World had just been waylaid. How was he supposed to calm down when he might be stuck out here, falling through the cracks in reality for the rest of time, just like whatever that furry green octopus had been? Had anybody been waiting for them to make it home with an answer to something?

The sound of footsteps made him turn his head. They were footsteps in twos rather than fives – a familiar sound, and yet one that did not belong in this space, where Grace had only ever heard it in time with his own movement. The same sound when he knew he was sitting still produced a whole-body shiver. Grace looked...

... and nearly jumped out of his skin, because for a moment he thought the man who’d come to sit down across from him was a total stranger.

A split second later he realized no, it was still Rockwell. He was now dressed in a blue flight suit, and he’d shaved and trimmed his hair. He no longer looked like a homeless biker, but he definitely looked like a guy who’d done his own haircut. He also still looked very much like he could punch Ryland Grace straight through the hull into the vacuum beyond, so Grace wasn’t going to mention it.

Gracie, however, made a distressed sound. What Rocky do to face question? she asked.

That made Rockwell smile. “What’s the matter, Girlfriend? You don’t like it?”

Grace hoped nobody noticed him wince at the word girlfriend.

Hurt? Hurt? Gracie asked.

“No, it’s just hair. It’s extruded protein,” Rockwell assured her. “It’ll grow back.”

Oh, good.

Rockwell chuckled, and turned to look at Grace, then at the still-untouched food in front of him. “Whatcha got?” he asked.

Grace had been so deep in the rock-tumbler of his own thoughts that he hadn’t actually noticed what he’d warmed up for supper. “Uh... looks like spicy chorizo mac and cheese,” he said. “You want some?”

Rockwell looked tempted, but then shook his head. “Nah. You’re gonna need that.”

“I don’t think one meal more or less is gonna make that much difference,” Grace said. “I’m gonna end up living on pureed taumoeba sooner or later.”

“I’m not there yet. I’ve got a couple more years of coma slurry,” said Rockwell with a grimace.

Grace tried to imagine eating that stuff on purpose, and nearly gagged. He knew he’d have to do it himself eventually, if he didn’t want to starve before they reached Erid, but... he swallowed hard, dropped the fork into his tray of pasta, and pushed it across the table to Rockwell.

“You sure?” the man asked.

“Very sure,” said Grace.

“Thanks.” Rockwell took the biggest forkful he could and put it in his mouth. NASA’s freeze-dried space rations were a long way from perfect. No matter how thoroughly Grace stirred, there were always a few bits that were like eating chalk, while the rest was kind of soggy and never tasted quite right... but Rockwell’s eyes closed in bliss as he chewed. “Mmm. Oh, shit, that is delicious,” he said.

Grace had to smile at that. He wondered how long it had been since this man had a real meal, and it was nice to have been the one who provided it. In fact, seeing Rockwell enjoy the macaroni was a lot more satisfying than eating it himself would have been, so Grace just sat and watched through the next few mouthfuls.

Rocky not joking, said Gracie, astonished.

Both humans looked up, not sure which Rocky she was referring to. She had two claws spread out against the xenonite and was leaning against it as if trying to get a better view – which Grace supposed she sort of was. The multiple points of contact would give her a better sense of the vibrations hitting the surface, allowing her to perceive more detail.

Humans watch each other eat question? she said.

“That’s not what I said,” Rockwell told her. “I said we eat together. It’s a social thing.”

Human-Grace not eating. Just watch.

“That’s because he doesn’t have any food,” said Rockwell.

“I gave it to him,” Grace agreed.

Rockwell also seemed confused by the situation. Human-Grace needs food, too. Should also eat.

Humans always eating, Gracie agreed. Need a lot of food to fuel so many cells.

Grace looked across the table at Rockwell and got a brief nod as acknowledgement. The only two humans in the galaxy who knew what it was like to be henpecked by a rock. “Guess I’ll heat something else up for myself,” he said.

He actually paid attention to what he was getting this time, and chose the sweet and sour chicken, which had the advantage of strong sugar and vinegar flavours that mostly overwhelmed the taste of the heavily processed meat. While that heated, he filled two bottles of water and passed one to Rockwell. The other man nodded a thanks and downed a third of it before coming up for air, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve and pointed a thumb at the Eridians.

“Whose voice is that?” he asked.

“I... don’t know,” Grace admitted. It was just something he’d found in the ship’s sound library, and he didn’t think of it as belonging to anybody but Rocky. “It’s the one we liked. It might be one of the characters from Mass Effect.” It certainly didn’t sound like Rockwell, who spoke in a baritone that went with his broad-shouldered build. “Whose voice do you use for Gracie?” He remembered half-hearing it over the radio link.

“Sigourney Weaver,” said Rockwell, mouth full.

It wasn’t that it was a bad choice. It was just... “why?”

“Because I didn’t have enough sound clips of Majel Barrett.”

“So you were really set on it being a woman, huh?”

Rockwell chewed and swallowed and then said, as if talking to somebody rather dim, “Gracie is a girl’s name. I told you, that’s all the thought I gave it. If I’d known I was going to run into this bullshit I might have picked something different.”

That made sense, and it wasn’t any more arbitrary than Grace’s choice of name and pronouns for Rocky, but he still wasn’t comfortable with it. “What did you... uh...” he made an effort. “Why did you call her Gracie?”

He was not prepared for the answer. “Gracie was my Mom’s goldendoodle,” said Rockwell. “She’s about the same size and colour.”

“You named me after a dog?” Grace blurted.

“Well, you didn’t get any further than he looks like a rock,” Rockwell reminded him.

That was... fair. Grace had no idea what Rocky’s actual name meant, let alone whether there would be an English equivalent. He probably ought to ask sometime. In that moment, however, he found himself trying to remember whether the Sims’ ‘negative interaction’ icon made a noise when it popped up, because he could have sworn he’d heard something like it.

Fortunately, one of the Eridians provided a subject change. Why humans talk while eat question? Gracie wanted to know.

“That’s just how we do things,” Grace told her with a shrug. “Everybody needs to eat, so we might as well do it together. Most of the time there’s one or two people in a group who did most of the cooking, so they get to watch everybody enjoy what they made.”

But use same hole for eat and talk, Gracie said. Can do both at once?

“We don’t do both at once,” said Grace.

“We’re doing it right now,” said Rockwell at the same moment, only to fall prey to perhaps the finest example of instant karma Grace had ever seen, and start choking on a piece of pasta. He coughed a few times, drank more water, and then coughed some more, while the Eridians watched in mounting distress. “I’m okay! I’m okay!” he wheezed. “It just went down the wrong tube!”

This explanation did not soothe them. Food where air goes?

“I said I’m fine.”

Still breathing funny!

“It takes a minute. I’ll live, I promise.” Rockwell shook his head. “They have a point. The part where the food tube crosses the air tube is one of the human body’s nastier design flaws.”

“So don’t talk with your mouth full,” Grace suggested.

Rockwell shrugged one shoulder, conceding that, and finished his water before he got to work scraping the last of the sauce out of the bottom of the mac and cheese container.

They finished their meal with the Eridians still in semi-disbelief that the disgusting act of taking in nourishment was something humans used as an excuse to gather. Then Grace yawned, which set Rockwell off to do the same.

Humans yawn together, too, Rocky observed.

“Yeah. Nobody knows why,” Grace told him. He’d explained yawning before, but the idea that it was contagious hadn’t come up. There’d never been anybody else here to demonstrate. “When one person yawns, everybody...” he had to stop as talking about it made him yawn again. Rocky had been right when he’d said Grace needed to eat and rest, and now the first of those tasks was taken care of. “I guess I’ll try to get some sleep.”

“Me, too,” said Rockwell, balling up the empty macaroni container.

This shocked the Eridians into a moment of complete, baffled silence.

Humans eat together, Gracie said carefully, as if parsing a difficult math problem. Also sleep together, question?

Grace would have let that slide, but Rockwell laughed and clapped him on the shoulder and said, “well, he already took me to dinner!” He cackled to himself as he headed for the bedroom, leaving Grace with his face burning.

Human-Grace okay question? asked Rocky, who couldn’t see him turn red but could absolutely hear the blood that had rushed to the shallow capillaries.

“Yes. He was making a joke,” Grace explained. “Uh... sleeping together is a polite way humans describe mating.”

Rocky seemed to chew on that for a moment. Talking about mating is impolite, question?

“Kind of, yeah.”

Like talking about eating on Erid, Gracie suggested.

“Talking about eating is impolite?” That was the first Grace had heard about it. How much had Rocky, believing he was the only Eridian Grace would ever meet, been messing with him? “Is this another thing like the clothes, where you were gonna tell me eventually?”

Rocky has been in space long time, was the apologetic reply. Forgot manners.

Great. Now instead of nightmares about going to school naked, Grace could dream about showing up on Erid that way. Naked and with his mouth full.

Human-Rocky said humans eat together. Thought he was joking, said Gracie.

“Eridian-Rocky said Eridians eating looks beautiful,” said Grace. “I thought he was serious.”

Rocky made a sound like a sad dolphin.

Grace didn’t bother with pajamas in space, although they’d packed him some. Rockwell seemed to be the same way – he’d climbed into one of the upper bunks, having correctly surmised that the messy one was the one Grace used, and passed out on the mattress in his flight suit and bare feet. Grace kicked his orange coverall under the bed and, wearing just his t-shirt and briefs, pulled the quilt over himself.

He’d wondered if Rocky would still think he needed watching if there were another person in the room. Evidently he did, because after a moment Grace heard the familiar fivefold footsteps on the xenonite, and Rocky scuttled in. Rather than use the shelf he’d built as a lookout spot directly over Grace’s bed, however, he stayed in the tunnel where he could be equidistant from both humans.

I watch first, while Gracie eat, he announced. Then Gracie watch, while Rocky work.

Grace nodded and laid his head down. He would have been a bit disappointed if Rocky hadn’t showed. After being unceremoniously shipped off the planet by people who fully believed they were sending him to his death, it was deeply comforting to know somebody wanted to look out for Grace’s safety.

First time Rocky watch Grace sleep, Grace say ‘weird’, the Eridian added.

“Yeah,” said Grace.

Not weird to have other human sleeping in same room, question?

“No, that’s pretty normal,” Grace told him. “Remember I explained to you how days work on Earth?”

Yes. Atmosphere transparent to light. Day side bright. Night side dark.

The Eridian words the translator rendered as ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ actually meant something like ‘light-loud’ and ‘light-silent’, but the analogy got the idea across. “Right, so since humans can’t see when it’s dark, we sleep at night. There will be several people in the same house, or even in the same room, all sleeping.”

What if danger? Rocky insisted.

“Well, the more people there are, the better the odds that somebody will wake up,” Grace said. “And then that person can wake everybody else.”

So safe and comfortable to all sleep together. Sorry, to all sleep at same time, said Rocky.

Rocky hadn’t believed at first that sleeping humans could be awakened by a disturbance, not until he’d seen for himself how an alert from the ship jolted Grace out of slumber. The idea of taking comfort in others who were also asleep must be such a foreign concept to him. Even – dare Grace say it – an alien one. “Yeah, that’s how humans work.”

Rocky shifted his weight a bit. Grace want Rocky to leave, question? Human-Rocky sleeping here is better?

“No, you can stay. I know it makes you feel better,” Grace said, “and I’m used to it now. It’s not weird anymore.” Certainly not as weird as hearing Rockwell breathing above him and having to process the idea that these two very different beings were in some way equivalent. “Good night, buddy. It’s been a strange day.”

Yes, Rocky agreed. Tomorrow will be strange also.

Grace didn’t doubt it.

-

It was possible to hear the exact moment an Eridian fell asleep. The acoustic properties of their bodies would change as the circulatory system cooled, making a series of clicks that corresponded almost exactly with the discontinuity in consciousness. The sound tickled something deep in the Eridian brain, prompting others nearby to become more alert and focused, putting aside any of their own tiredness for now. They could relax later, after others were awake.

Human sleep was much more of a process, a gradual slowing down which, the first few times Rocky had witnessed it, was uncomfortably close to watching somebody die. Their hearts pumped only two thirds as often. Intake of air slowed and steadied, and all the loud gurgling processes of their incredibly complex digestive systems eased. Knowing that humans could be awakened by a loud noise gave Rocky an irrational urge to shout and stop the process before it could come to too terrible a conclusion.

Now he was learning something new: that there were different kinds of human sleep. Grace tended to move around when he slept, rotating his blanket so that he went from stretched out under the full length to curled under the shorter width and then back again. Rocky had asked about the purpose of this, and had been told Grace didn’t realize he was doing it. He also talked in his sleep sometimes, although what he said was invariably nonsense.

Human-Rocky did it differently. He’d lain down flat on his back and was quite still, with his mouth wide open. Every time he inhaled it made a vibrating sound something like the one he’d made by buzzing his lips earlier, although if possible even wetter. Since humans could be woken by a sudden noise during sleep, it didn’t seem right that they could also make sudden noises during sleep, and again, he rather wanted to do something about it...

But Gracie was just in the other room. Rocky was politely ignoring her while she ate, but he knew she was there and she could hear this. If there were something wrong with her human, wouldn’t she try to intervene? Human-Grace could also hear it – he didn’t wake up all the way, but he mumbled something and pulled a pillow over his head. He would absolutely know if this were dangerous or abnormal, so it seemed it must be neither.

“If I were a human,” Rocky mused, “that is how I would sleep.” What a strange thought. He didn’t like it, and that made him wonder if he had done anything human-Rocky didn’t like. Had this man been thinking, if I were an Eridian, I would not feel affection for my ship? Did that make him uncomfortable?

It seemed to make human-Grace very uncomfortable that human-Rocky called Gracie ‘she’. This seemed strange, since human-Grace had said that on Earth, eggs were laid only by females... surely that would make all Eridians closer to female than male. Rocky would have asked, but he was a bit worried about making human-Grace angry. He was already upset about learning of Rocky’s lack of manners in space.

Human-Grace had never been angry with Rocky. Annoyed and complaining that he was bossy, yes, but never angry and shouting. The two of them needed each other too badly, out here in the depths of space, to fight...

Except maybe they didn’t anymore, because they had other company now. The company of their own kind. Might that not be better for both of them?

The blanket had rotated one half pi radians and human-Grace was on his side under it with his stocking feet sticking out, when Gracie arrived to take over. She settled next to Rocky and said, “I’m finished. You can go work on the xenonite.”

“Thank you,” said Rocky, but he didn’t get up right away. “Is that normal? Human-Rocky making noise when he sleeps?”

“Yes, always. He says all humans do it.”

“Human-Grace doesn’t do it,” Rocky pointed out.

Gracie gave a sarcastic hum. “You told human-Grace we don’t wear clothes in space...”

“No, I didn’t. I just didn’t tell him we wear them on Erid.”

“... and that Eridians eating looks beautiful. Maybe it was the same thing. Maybe he pretended it’s normal because he was embarrassed about it.”

Was that why Rocky had done that, because he was embarrassed? Or was it just because they were funny things to tell an alien who didn’t know any better?

He changed the subject. “Humans are social,” he said. “They are supposed to be in groups.”

“That’s right,” Gracie agreed, “but I think smaller groups than we are. That’s why they only sent three.”

Rocky had assumed the humans only sent three because their thinking machines did so much of the work of navigating... but that was a possibility, too. It did not make him feel better. “Do you think it’s better for them to be with other humans than with us?”

“It’s good for human-Rocky, I think,” Gracie decided. “He cleaned himself up. He hasn’t done that since we left Tau Ceti. It has been good for you, too,” she added, slightly snide. “You also made yourself presentable.”

“I was alone for a long time!” Rocky protested. “I developed bad habits.”

“So did human-Rocky. Now he has to break them because there’s another human, just like you do because there’s another Eridian.”

Rocky got to the point. “Do you think the humans will both go back to Earth now? And we will both go back to Erid?”

“I don’t want to go back to Erid,” said Gracie.

That was a shock. “You don’t? Erid is home,” Rocky pointed out.

“I don’t remember Erid,” Gracie reminded him. “I don’t remember my friends. I don’t remember my family. Human-Grace said he doesn’t have any family, so maybe I don’t either, but when I think about it...” she made a tremulous whistling noise. “There will be people there who know me, but I won’t know them. What if I’m not who they remember? What if they don’t like me anymore?”

Rocky did not know how to respond to that, and he realized that nobody on Erid would, either. Eridians normally had perfect memories, except in cases of traumatic brain injury. Why had that happened to her? Rocky hadn’t lost his own memory because of the radiation, and neither had any of his crewmates... were Eridians different in the two universes, or was the radiation different? Either way, it would be very difficult for others to accept.

“So you will go to Earth?” he asked. “Earth is cold and the air is full of oxygen.” He had some rather direct experience now with what a miserable environment that was.

“Rocky says we will figure something out,” said Gracie. “Nobody knows me on Earth. If I do strange things on Erid, everyone will know there’s something wrong with me. If I do strange things on Earth, the humans will think it’s just because I’m an alien, and they won’t worry about it.”

“Maybe human-Grace can give you some idea who you were on Erid,” Rocky suggested.

“I don’t think he wants to talk about it,” said Gracie.

Rocky thought about some of the things human-Grace had said they’d done to him on Earth, and decided maybe it was better for Gracie if she didn’t hear about it.

After that, Rocky went back to the lab and began trying to duplicate the structure of the strange piece of xenonite they’d found – but the questions remained on his mind. When he’d first thought that this was a chance for all of them to go home, there’d been the problem that some of them wouldn’t be going back to the same home they’d come from. They didn’t know how different his Erid was from Gracie’s, or human-Grace’s Earth from human-Rocky’s. Now... maybe that was a good thing. If Gracie came to Rocky’s Erid she wouldn’t have to worry about people there knowing her, and human-Grace wouldn’t have to worry about people being cruel to him on human-Rocky’s Earth.

Coming home with somebody from another universe would be hard to explain, but no more so than coming home with an alien would have been... but he no longer wanted to bring it up. If everybody could go home to an approximation of their own worlds, then there was also a possibility that everybody else could just go back to Earth without him.

-

Grace’s alarm went off at eight am, the way it always did. He yawned and rolled over, and saw that Rocky was there watching him. For a moment, he was able to convince himself that yesterday had been some kind of messed-up dream, and now it was just him and his alien buddy alone on their ship again. Then he looked again, and realized that Rocky was still wearing clothes.

“Crap,” he muttered, scrubbing at his face. “I thought the other Eridian was gonna take over.”

Gracie watch while Rocky work, was the reply. Rocky stop working, now Rocky watch again. Two more glitches while humans sleep, he added.

So the whole nightmare was still going on. Great. “Where’s the other human?” asked Grace, realizing the upper bunk was empty.

Human-Rocky is in the kitchen.

Grace splashed some water on his face, then put some pants on and stumbled into the kitchen to find some coffee. He was sort of hoping Rockwell had already made some, but the man was not busy with food. Instead, he was screwing a panel back onto the wall below the water dispenser. He was listening to metal music again, but now at a far more reasonable volume.

“How long has the ice machine been broken?” he asked as Grace came in.

“A few weeks?” Grace guessed. He hadn’t kept track. “I was gonna do something about it eventually, but it’s just ice.”

Rockwell finished with the last screw and banged on the panel to be sure it was secure. “I fixed it,” he said. “Anything else need work? You wanted the Eridians to have different voices...”

“I can do that,” said Grace quickly. He felt strongly that he didn’t want anybody else messing with the translator. “I’ll take a look at it over breakfast.” He scooped up his cobbled-together chimera of a device and took it to the table, then rehydrated two packages of scrambled eggs and hash browns. It was true that every meal he gave Rockwell was one less for himself, but having tasted it he could not let the guy eat coma slurry.

“Thanks,” said Rockwell, sitting down to eat. He took a mouthful, then pointed at Grace with his fork. “You’ve got two more spacesuits. Do you mind if I strip them for parts? I won’t take any of the life support,” he promised. “Just some pieces to fix my radio and make another hand for Gracie’s suit.”

“Go ahead,” said Grace, scrolling through the last twenty-four hours worth of Eridian speech.

So Rockwell disassembled the HUT from Ilyukhina’s suit, while Grace tried to figure out how to differentiate between the two Eridians. Their singing sounded the same to him, but fortunately they were, in fact, just different enough for the computer to tell them apart. He was able to assign the voice he’d been using – apparently belonging to a puppeteer and voice actor named James Ortiz – specifically to Rocky, and after wrestling with the idea for a few moments he gave up and made Gracie’s voice Sigourney Weaver.

“Rocky, say something,” he said.

I am Rocky! the Eridian declared. The translator repeated the words in Ortiz’ familiar voice.

“Okay, good,” Grace said.

“Gracie,” said Rockwell, who had evidently learned nothing about talking with his mouth full, “say, get away from her, you bitch.”

Won’t, said Gracie. Rude. The translation turned the first word into Weaver’s voice, but the second was still Ortiz’. Grace frowned and started trying to refine the algorithm a little.

Proximity alert, said Mary.

Grace swore and put his fork down. Rockwell swore at greater length and dropped the spacesuit parts he was working on, and both of them climbed up to the cockpit.

As Rocky had already observed, there had been more glitches overnight, so it was not exactly a surprise to find that they were no longer in the globular cluster. In fact, not much was visible through the window at all – everything was shrouded in interstellar dust, smudges of it lit up ghostly blue-white by half-concealed stars. An astronomer, Grace observed, would have loved it.

The navigation computer was still complaining that it couldn’t get a lock on any familiar objects, so they ignored it while Rockwell got in the pilot’s seat and Grace checked the radar.

“There it is,” he said, pointing. They were approaching a rubble asteroid that was tumbling along on an almost polar orbit of Erebus.

“Gracie,” said Rockwell. “What do you think, is that gonna hit us? The trajectory is...”

Gracie can hear screen now! she interrupted, holding up Rocky’s sight gun. Won’t hit Hail Mary. Will come very close to Blip-A. Adjust yaw negative pi over eleven radians.

“Thanks.” Rockwell punched it in. “I wish we’d had one of those at Tau Ceti.”

Will teach you to make, Rocky promised. Gracie will need on Earth. Gracie goes to Earth, correct, question?

“That’s the plan,” said Rockwell. Thrusters fired, and the connected ships rotated slightly to let the asteroid tumble harmlessly past.

Been thinking, Rocky said.

Gracie whistled. Dangerous, she said, which made Rockwell chuckle.

If whole system move, we don’t need to stay close, Rocky said. The translator voice switched disconcertingly from Ortiz to Weaver on the word don’t, but was then back to Ortiz for: can use bigger orbit, less chance to hit something, won’t lose planet.

“Good idea,” said Rockwell. “Maybe we can orbit the largest moon.”

Grace twitched, remembering his that’s no moon joke yesterday just before everything had gotten weird.

Gracie gave him another course correction, taking the figures she needed off the texture screen. They entered a transfer orbit, heading for the Mars-sized moon Grace and Rocky had noticed upon first entering the system. Grace kept his eyes on the displays as information about this object’s structure and composition began to come in.

Despite his worries, it was very much just a moon. Its density suggested a rocky core, but the surface was covered with frozen water and nitrogen, all stained pink by tarry organic compounds – tholins, Carl Sagan had once named them – that had been been exposed to interstellar radiation for countless eons. As the radar picked up more detail, they could see craters and fissures and features that looked like stretch marks, some of them filled up with shiny bluish ice in a way that suggested fairly recent melting.

That seemed strange until Grace remembered where they were. This place wasn’t always out in the void. Every time it glitched it had the potential to pass close to a star, which would play havoc with the climate. No wonder the surface looked tortured.

Then something else caught his eye, and his jaw dropped. For a moment he thought he had to be imagining it... seeing the Blip-A on the radar yesterday had been jarring enough, but this was a million times worse. Grace shut his eyes, shook his head, and opened them again, but it was still there.

“Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding,” he said.

“What?” Rockwell turned from the window to look at the radar screen. He, too, spent a moment taking it in, and then said, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

It was another Hail Mary. One set of solar panels had been torn off and the fuselage at the base of this was blackened, but the shape was unmistakable. No other vessel humanity had ever built looked like that. Finding Rockwell and Gracie out here had already been the icing on the cake of the situation... this was like pouring another layer of gratuitous ganache on top.

For a moment Grace thought about trying to contact them. He wasn’t sure he could handle more of this but something bad had clearly happened there and anyone alive on board would be grateful for the help. Then he remembered there was a way to tell from here, and checked the infra-red.

“It’s cold,” he said. That meant everything on board was turned off, including the life support. Anybody in there was well beyond help.

Rockwell let out a sigh of relief and drummed his fingers on his knee for a moment. Then he said, “Riley... are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I don’t know, John,” he replied. “What are you thinking?”

There was a moment of silence in which Grace realized he knew exactly what this man was thinking. And it was a perfectly sensible thing to propose at the same time as it was an entirely horrible one.

“Drink up, me hearties, yo-ho?” he guessed.

Rockwell nodded slowly. “Hey, uh, Rocky,” he said. “I think we’re gonna need some more of that pretty xenonite.”

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