Dare to Dream; Then Write it Down

The light reflected off the clear surface, obscuring his view slightly, but he immediately noticed a shape that moved through the darkness toward the wall. It was higher up, coming from the ‘ceiling’. It moved along the wall, likely also watching them, by using what appeared to be multiple sets of arms. This wasn’t ET or a Martian. It looked nothing like what they’d concocted in their heads about aliens.

It was moving closer to Hope, who was still staring at the clear xenonite.

Without taking his eyes off the alien, he reached down to tap at Hope’s helmet to get her attention.

Even just at a glance, she could see the stone-skinned alien above her once she stopped focusing on the wall.

Rising to her feet, she stood next to Grace as they watched the Eridian slowly move. Whether it was deliberate or not, it entered the light that Hope had tucked up along the wall and made itself more visible to the two.

Five appendages and a large, stone body. It wasn’t bipedal, like them. It didn’t seem to have any differentiation between the appendages; they were simultaneously both arms and legs. Each tipped with the three digits they’d seen before. It looked like a massive stone spider, though with a few less legs.

Grace leaned in closer.

The Eridian copied him, trilling a low tone in the language it used.

Not sure what else to do, Grace lifted a hand and made a peace sign.

“Hi,” he said finally. The alien turned in place, backing up slightly from the wall. It rotated and moved, giving them a better view of the body as a whole. It climbed back along the wall, away from where it had gravitated to Hope, and over to where Grace had taped the Ramen A in place. Slowly, the humans followed.

The Eridian reached out, pointing at the crudely made ship. Then, it made a grabbing motion. Like it wanted to pick up the strange gift.

Hope was certain it wouldn’t survive their atmosphere. The frail noodles would burn up in seconds.

The Eridian abruptly leapt up, grabbing the wall with all ‘hands’ and slammed its body against the xenonite with a thud. Hope flinched back at the sudden movement, but Grace immediately screamed and scrambled backward—he grabbed Hope as he went, nearly knocking the woman on her ass, while he brandished the wrench he’d brought. She stumbled to a stop behind him, his hand still grabbing at the shoulder of her suit.

Whether intentional or not, he put himself between her and the assumed danger.

The Eridian made a higher pitched whistling-screech sound, its distress also evident.

When Grace swung the wrench down out of reaction to the scare, the alien countered by backing away from the wall and lifting two of its arms, fingers closer in, like it was trying to protect itself. Almost like a scorpion, the arm that was above its body lashed forward threateningly.

“Grace!” Hope snapped, yanking the wrench from his hand and tossing it back toward the Hail Mary. It skittered several yards from the force of her throw.

He didn’t even fight her on it. “No, no, no, I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Waving his now empty hands to show he wasn’t a threat, he tried to calm his erratic heart as he realized the Eridian hadn’t actually meant to scare him. “You scared me when you went…ahhhh!” He raised his arms over his head, feet spread, to mimic the open bodied posture the Eridian had done when it jumped on the wall.

Hope, now left standing like a referee to the side, watched as the alien mimicked the way that Grace stood.

Two arms went overhead, standing on the other three, it mirrored him. When Grace lowered his arms, so did the Eridian. When he raised them again, it copied.

The scientist paused for a moment, closing his eyes as he tried to wrap his head around the absolute absurdity of the situation. Looking over at Hope after he regained just some of his bearings, she was focused entirely on the Eridian on the other side of the wall.

She was going to smack him for this.

Adjusting his arms, he moved slowly side to side in a silly dance. One of his arms lowered across his waist, hand to elbow, while the other stayed raised. He looked like someone trying to do the macarena, but had forgotten the moves. When he was copied, Hope turned to look at him and he could see the shake of her head even inside her helmet.

So, he was dancing with an alien. Sue him.

He started wiggling his hips as well, and the Eridian still mirrored him by swaying its body more while stepping side to side.

“You’re absolutely ridiculous,” Hope laughed, quietly but it was there.

He could only smile, moving on to a wave motion with his arms. Again, their new little friend copied him.

Hope couldn’t even hate it. Historically, dance was a solid means of communications between those who don’t speak the same language. This wasn’t a matter of two tribes meeting for the first time, but it was still a method of passing along knowledge.

The Eridian could see them and was using mimicry as a way to communicate.

Grace kept switching through the poses, first flexing like he was a Greek sculpture, then the pose famously used by Usain Bolt. The Eridian did it’s best to mimic. Considering the difference in their limbs, it wasn’t half bad.

Behind her, Grace laughed. A whistling chirp sounded from the Eridian—it was laughing, too.

With their broken means of communication passed, the two approached the wall again. Hope angled the light she still carried, standing behind Grace’s shoulder now, to give them a better look at their new friend.

“He doesn’t have a face, does he?” she asked.

“I can’t see one,” Grace answered quietly.

The light was able to show that it wasn’t just all one solid rock colour. There were gemstone looking accents along the arms and near the joints that connected to the main body. Additionally, there were markings carved into the appendages. Like tattoos. Maybe birthmarks, but they didn’t look naturally formed, so it must be a way that they carried stories or names.

“Mysterious,” Grace declared. “Faces are overrated!”

The Eridian reached forward and tapped on the wall, a series of sounds accompanying the movement. Just as the rest of their communication had been so far, Grace copied him and tapped the wall as well.

But then the Eridian did it again. The sounds he made were a bit faster paced, higher pitched. Like he was repeating himself with more urgency.

Behind him, Hope stepped away to follow the direction of his pointing—because, yes, she realized he was pointing.

Grace knocked on the wall again. “You like tapping, huh?”

Taking some of the light with her, Hope moved toward the opaque xenonite wall. Nestled in a shelf-like groove was another container, waiting. This one looked different than the others. Instead of a tube, it was shaped like a chest roughly the size of a small jewellery box. Atop the lid, among the other etchings and thread-like patterns, a little insignia of the Hail Mary decorated the front of the container.

Tapping slowly against the wall, Grace hummed out a series of ‘bum, bum, bum’ tones, slower than the Eridian’s prior taps.

Even though he had completely misunderstood him, the Eridian copied Grace and tapped at the wall while making a sound that seemed to mimic the ‘bum, bum, bum’ from the scientist. But then it started rapidly tapping at the xenonite, pointing directly at where Hope was now standing just behind Grace with the package in her hands.

Bless this stupid man, he kept tapping at the wall with increased speed, completely missing the point.

Smack.

While it wasn’t hard, the sudden swat across the top of his helmet threw him slightly off balance.

“Ow! Hope!”

Turning around quickly, irritation initially coating his tone, he immediately simmered down when he spotted the xenonite container she was holding. Okay, she had a valid reason to swat him.

“Oh. You were pointing. You’re not tapping.” He looked back at the Eridian. “Sorry.”

Hope wasn’t sure if Eridians could sigh, but the way that his body deflated slightly when Grace finally got it made her think that it was entirely possible. She smiled, unable to contain her amusement over the entire thing.

“Stop smiling!” Grace chided. Even if he couldn’t see her through her helmet at the angle she was standing, this was the exact kind of situation Hope would find amusement in. Him, embarrassing himself. Her, getting to smack him again.

Saying nothing, Hope just held out the container so Grace could open it. He wasn’t wrong.

A slight hiss of air sounded as the Eridian atmosphere escaped from the container. As soon as he lifted the lid away, a circle of wire-thin xenonite was revealed. Along the wire were small circles of clear xenonite, roughly the size of marbles. Grace pulled it free, lifting it up toward the Eridian and placing it directly in the light of his headlamp.

Two concentric rings with little marbles of translucent xenonite.

Grace tried very hard not to make the comparison that it looked like a very flimsy set of decorated handcuffs.

The last two gifts had been relatively easy to understand but this one was a bit more random.

“I don’t have one of these,” Grace announced as he held it up, not sure what else to do with it. “I love it! Thank you!”

He seemed to realize that neither of the humans understood what it meant. Bowing forward, he lifted two of his hands up above like he was raising something. Hope stepped in closer, still holding the container, as she tried to follow along.

Grace wasn’t much better. “Put this on my head?” To demonstrate, he placed the rings above his helmet.

The Eridian repeated the movement instead of agreeing, denying his guess.

“I think…he wants us to take off our helmets,” Hope realized.

The Eridian chirped, body shaking excitedly. He didn’t have a ‘face’ per say, but he turned what appeared to be the front of his body in Hope’s direction, directly acknowledging her words.

He could understand them! Maybe not word for word, but while they had no clue what his sounds meant, he seemed to be rapidly picking up on their English.

“You understand us,” Hope gasped. She stepped in closer to Grace’s side, right at the wall. “Can you understand us?”

Again, he chirped excitedly as his body shook.

Thrilled, Hope turned to look at Grace. “These guys are geniuses!”

“Geniuses that want us to take our helmets off,” he reminded, leaning closer to her to stress the seriousness. He shook his head at the alien. “No. It’ll—” Grace imitated an explosion with his hand, like his head blowing up. The Eridian seemed to say something else, making a gesture with its hands, but neither of them could quite parse out what it was. “That’s a big ask.”

The lights behind them dimmed suddenly, then went dark.

Grace turned around, surprised. “What?”

The smaller work lights she’d brought still worked, but once the others went dark the majority of the tunnel rapidly went black again.

“Damn,” Hope muttered. The connection she made with the wires was rushed, imperfect. Something must have shifted loose after all their moving around. Getting thrown across the EVA room when the door opened initially likely hadn’t helped. “I got it.”

Stepping back from the wall and their new friend, she made her way back toward the clusters of wires that ran among to the lights and the camera Grace had thought to bring along.

Grace faced the Eridian again and pointed back toward the airlock. “This has taken a turn.” Whether he was referring to the request that they remove their helmets or the sudden darkness from the lights going out, even Grace wasn’t sure. He just suddenly had the urge to get back inside. Where there was safe, breathable air. Confirmed. “Thank you for the…what I hope is not handcuffs.”

He couldn’t help it; the Eridian’s request had panic swelling in his chest. ‘Big ask’ is an understatement.

If they took their helmets off, no more astronauts. No more Hail Mary crew. No more Earth.

Hope was crouching next to the wires he’d dragged out, checking the connection before she made a simple twisting motion. One of the lights behind him flickered back to life, lighting up where the Eridian was still standing on the other side of the wall.

Waiting for them.

Grace kept rambling to himself. “I’m sorry about the whole helmet thing. Unfortunately, we need oxygen to breathe, so…”

Hope watched as he stopped a few feet shy from her, his expression going slack for a moment.

His own words finally triggered a moment of understanding. Lifting the ‘handcuffs’ again, he counted the little marbles the wire threaded through. “Two rings of eight,” he recalled. “O2.” Sighing, he realized that the Eridian knew exactly what he was asking. “You little rascal,” he muttered, finally looking back. “Hope, you’re right; they’re geniuses. This is oxygen!”

Brandishing the rings over his head, the Eridian chirped in celebration; he understood that Grace knew what the gift meant. Then, he repeated the sound he made and lifted his hands up—taking off a helmet.

Still, big ask. Could he just blindly trust that the alien was right, and he’d correctly used oxygen in their half of the tunnel? “I…still don’t think I can do it, though. Sorry.” He kept backing up toward the airlock, motioning to the Engineer. “Come on, Hope, you’re the one who can properly fix the wiring. I mean, unless you trust me with the electronics again.” She hesitated, looking between Grace and the Eridian.

This wasn’t what she’d pictured when it came to meeting them.

It’s hard to know what to expect when you’re encountering an alien species for the first time—Astrophage didn’t count. But this sentient rock spider had so far learned about their atmosphere, their air, their ship, even portions of their language. He had pressurized the tunnel perfectly, matching what they had on the Hail Mary.

The canisters they received had the Eridian atmosphere in them. If the two had been running at their full mental bandwidth, they’d have thought to be more thorough when opening the canisters to sample the air inside. So far, the smell of ammonia and heat were their only leads.

Their new alien friend was much smarter than them. He’d used what was contained inside the canister to understand they needed breathable, oxygen rich air. So, he’d created it for them. He’d completely filled their half of the tunnel so they would be safe. He’d even pressurized it.

Grace’s steps gradually slowed as he, too, was left thinking over everything that had been done thus far. They’d trusted him enough that he was even anchored to their ship, fused to their hull with some foreign glue that for all the knew could melt clean through it.

Was it really so far outside the realm of belief that he got their air right?

With shaking hands, he reached up for the seal beneath his helmet. Blood rushed in his ears, drowning out all other sound.

Leap of faith.

The hiss of his helmet seal alerted Hope to what he did a moment too late. “Grace!”

Looking over at her, he held his breath for a moment longer. One hand was reaching out for him, hovering in the space between them, as she carefully looked over his face.

Finally, Grace took a long, deep inhale.

~

“Ryland Grace, if you break one more thing on my ship, I will eject you out the airlock!” To get her point across, she had grabbed his ear and pulled. He may have squealed at the sudden burn. He would deny it forever.

“We need to see better in the tunnel!”

“Then ask me! Don’t just start ripping out wires and lights!”

He kept the table between the two of them once his ear was free, hiding in the lab. Hope on a warpath was the exact last person you would want coming after you. He’d seen her angry.

Grace lingered out of reach as she flitted around the lab, collecting equipment. There were several storage drawers with extra engineering equipment—among them were rechargeable LED work lights with magnetic backs. They could be clipped to the EVA suits or mounted to the holds on the Hail Mary’s hull. They wouldn’t be able to magnetize, but the risk of them detaching and floating away wasn’t worth it anyway.

The NASA logo on each of them confirmed that they were specially designed for work in a vacuum, so they wouldn’t break in the rigors of space. Temperatures could swing from extreme heat to extreme cold, so a regular old light would not survive the job.

“You can’t do hull repairs in the dark. We packed plenty of ways to see.”

Additionally, she hauled out a long bundle of extra wiring and a tool pouch.

Whereas Grace had just grabbed one of the mounted lights and pulled, sending sparks flying as he scrambled to get his hands on any light available, Hope actually detached them properly. It only took her a few minutes before there were several lights that they deemed unnecessary throughout the ship.

The lab remained untouched, since it was going to be the central hub throughout the mission. But so many lights through the corridors or in the dorm weren’t required.

Irritated, Hope lifted up the light he’d torn off.

Unlike the others, this one had several wires sticking out the back of it. Sloppy and damaged.

“I know you’re no slouch when it comes to basic wiring. You’re going to be the one to fix this.” She tossed the light at him. The zero g meant to floated directly into his hands. Grace gaped at her. “Don’t look at me like that, didn’t you hold your students responsible when they broke things?”

“But…you’re an engineer! You could fix this in two minutes!”

“I’m not the one who broke it,” she reminded. Green eyes narrowed at him.

Finally, he looked a bit bashful. “I’m sorry…I was a bit excited.”

Though, he would much rather be watching the feeds as their new alien friends retracted the tunnel and started doing additional work on it. Hope noticed that they’d left behind the handles they’d installed on the Hail Mary’s airlock, so they were going to come back.

“I’ll even make your life easier and turn on the centrifuge,” she placated a moment later, using one of his ropes to send herself toward the corridor leading to the control room.

The little rock alien had told her to turn on the centrifuge, and she could only imagine they had one reason. They were intelligent, so they likely understood why the centrifuge existed. They knew it made gravity. And if they were intending to reattach the tunnel, it was very likely they were going to orient themselves with the Hail Mary so both ships would spin in unison, giving the tunnel gravity as well.

Their ship was smaller, and likely easier to manoeuvre in those small increments. So, Hope would adjust the positioning of the Hail Mary so when she turned on the centrifuge, the ship would still be in a position that allowed the Blip A to attach their tunnel.

Now, she just dearly hoped they had a damn good pilot because that meant they’d be reattaching the ships while they were actively in motion.

Doing some quick calculations in her head, she manoeuvred them around appropriately before she engaged the centrifuge. She had to turn off the alert from the computer regarding the proximity to the other ship; it did not want the centrifuge engaged while so close. The triple tone warned Grace that it was coming on before the soft shudder travelled through the ship as they disconnected from the engines.

By the time the centrifuge was fully engaged, the Blip A had mimicked their movement and was spinning around in a similar rotation.

Initially, they were off by several meters. Since the Hail Mary could no longer use thrust to alter the placement of the ship, the Blip A took over and carefully lined themselves up until they mirrored each other perfectly.

Grace joined Hope in the control room shortly after gravity came back. Together, they watched through the window and the monitors as the tunnel extended a second time. Their accuracy was spot on, again, and soon the familiar clunk and groan of the ship’s anchoring together sounded along the hull.

Hope waited with bated breath.

She already disliked the unknowns of being attached to the other ship by their hull, but now while they were in active movement?

Thankfully, everything settled and no further sounds came through from the airlock or the rest of the ship to suggest something was tearing or broken.

Grace bumped her shoulder. He was already vibrating with excitement.

“Round 2!”

They were getting faster at their EVA suits—the gravity helped exponentially—and short minutes later they were standing in their airlock with the new light setup that Hope had rigged together. It was now hardwired into the panel of the EVA room. Several of the ship’s lights would be placed near their airlock, providing light but not needing to drag them all the way to the dividing wall. That was where the portable work lights came in hand.

She clipped one to Grace’s shoulder and handed him a second that he could use as he pleased, then did the same for herself.

Before she moved to depressurize the room, Grace picked up one of the wrenches that was mounted to the wall. Of course, he chose the largest of the set. Holding it like a baseball bat, he seemed to test the weight of it in his hands as Hope watched on.

When he finally looked at her, she was scowling at him through her helmet.

“What?”

“A wrench? Really?”

He blushed. “It’s just a precaution!”

“Please, don’t start an interstellar incident with an intelligent alien race.”

“There is nothing wrong with being prepared. I probably won’t even need it.”

She motioned back to the rig that he had taken it from, the other equipment left in their assigned slots. “Then don’t bring it. It’ll only slow you down if you need to run.”

“Why would I need to run?”

“Why would you need to hit something with a wrench?”

He pulled the wrench in closer to himself. Clearly, it offered him some peace of mind. So, she’d let it go. But she still sighed and shook her head as she turned back to the control panel.

She wouldn’t voice it, but the man looked like an electrician about to go on the strangest job of his life. Thick bundles of wire were looped over one shoulder with lights dangling freely, all lit up and casting the EVA room in bright LED light. This was on top of with the portable work lights she’d attached to him, the two regular flashlights he’d found in the lab and stashed in the pocket on his thigh, his headlamp, and now a wrench.

With her back to him, she didn’t bother fighting the smile from how amusing he looked.

“Set?”

“Set.”

The room depressurized around them, preparing them for the same environment they’d encountered on each excursion so far, and the panel lit up green.

Hope popped the seal on the door and was slammed backward.

The outer airlock door flew open from the abrupt pressure change, flinging wide and directly into the Engineer. She was thrown back, directly into Grace, lights and all, and the two went down hard against the inner door. The collision knocked the air out of both of them—they were left lying there, stunned, as their lungs fought to function again.

One of the lights was digging painfully into the back of Hope’s hip, forcing her to arch and roll. This shoved her helmet back against Grace’s, who hitched and gasped as air tried to return to his lungs. He watched as Hope rolled onto her knees beside him, quickly assessing the front of her suit to make sure the door hadn’t caused any damage to the front panelling.

She wobbled, disoriented.

“Owwww,” he groaned, slipping further down the door now that she wasn’t pinning him. He was still draped with lights, but the two flashlights had gotten flung out of his pocket in the turmoil and somehow he was now sitting on the wrench.

Hope may be small, but the velocity of the door swinging open and throwing her backward made it feel slightly like he’d been hit by a car.

“What happened?”

Hope looked down at the reader strapped to her arm. It allowed them to monitor their suit integrity, oxygen levels, pressure levels, and temperature. Currently, the readings around them were sitting at 22°C with an exterior pressure of 21.1 kPa.

Momentarily baffled, she looked between the readings on the screen and the now open airlock. “They pressurized the tunnel,” she breathed out.

“What?” Quickly, Grace looked at his own suit’s readings.

She was right. The current pressure that had rushed in from the tunnel was an exact pressure to what was usually aboard the Hail Mary. Not quite Earth’s pressure, but one they could safely survive in.

“That’s why the door blew open,” she grumbled, rocking herself slightly to the side and stretching. She could feel something pop near her sternum, likely some rib cartilage righting itself after she took a solid double-hulled aluminum door, with nearly 3 tons of pneumatic force behind it, straight to the chest. “They pressurized the tunnel to match ours.”

Leaning back on her hands, she tried to take a proper, deep breath. Her diaphragm spasmed, causing her inhale to stutter.

“That hurt.”

Grace nodded along. “Definitely going to leave a mark.”

Slowly, the two pulled themselves back up. Hope recollected the lights had had been lost when they slammed back into the inner door. Thankfully, none appeared to have broken. Grace reclaimed the wrench again and Hope refrained from making a comment. He had broken her momentum with his body, she’d let him have the wrench.

Hopping down into the tunnel, only a short few feet of distance, felt strange. She’d become accustomed to the smooth surface of the ship, designed to have flat inner panels to walk on when gravity was engaged. The tunnel was bumpy and uneven, disrupting her footing.

Less gracefully, her companion followed with his bundle of wires and flashlights until he basically slid out of the airlock. He reminded her of a toddler learning how to climb off the couch safely.

“Leave a bunch here, just point them in,” she directly, slipping some of them from his shoulder to help.

He was still carrying one of the loops, which would be able to make it several more yards in before he ran out of slack. At the last minute, he’d also remembered to grab one of the cameras throughout the ship, technically used for the video logs. It, too, was connected to the remaining bundle of wires.

Hope looked further in, toward the wall, once several of the lamps had been placed. “Grace, look.”

Turning his entire body to face into the tunnel, the light had provided enough view that they could see the barrier wall they had encountered last time. Except it was now made up entirely of the clear, glass-like material. One giant window through to the other side.

Grace gasped. “Well, that’s new.”

The uneven surface of the xenonite tunnel slowed them down a bit, but it was still faster than trying to move around in zero g. Grace placed the camera where they’d be able to see the wall before he approached it, while Hope took the time to place one of the work lights that she’d had hooked to her suit.

It wasn’t as smooth as glass. There were ripples and grooves throughout the surfaces. It was still done in panels, as well, so it had a flow to it that looked more like clear glacier ice.

Grace found one of the nooks that was created naturally in the wall and placed his light there, aimed down so they’d be able to see whatever came forward. He kept the wrench in hand.

The way the light caught the xenonite threw rainbows across the surface. It was strangely beautiful.

Hope crouched to inspect the lines and connections of each of the panels. There weren’t any lines that looked like weld points. More like each of the pieces had been glued together. Likely, they’d used the same adhesive that kept the handles they placed on the Hail Mary’s hull.

When he wasn’t able to spot anything on the other side, Grace knocked on the surface.

“Anybody home?” he called, looking around. Hope stayed crouched a few feet away, running one hand over the panel. It was hot, even through the resistant gloves of the suit. Was that because of the process of them making it, or was their atmosphere detectable even through the xenonite? “I like what you’ve done with the gravity,” Grace continued, pointing back at their side of the tunnel.

Then, same as before, he gave their elusive neighbours a thumbs up.

To Hope’s shock, he lifted up a bundle of ramen. Where had he been keeping that? She was so focused on how he looked like a lightbulb factory thew up on him, she hadn’t even noticed anything else he was carrying.

“I made you a ship,” he declared, holding up some taped together ramen that looked like a very loose representation of the Blip A. No acknowledgement came from the other side. “It’s ramen.”

He looked around, unable to see where he could put the little Ramen A. Hope, already perplexed with the entire situation, decided to just go with it. She had learned pretty early on that Ryland Grace was someone you needed to just go with the flow; his brain was a twisted mess of thoughts even before the amnesia, and trying to keep up with him was pointless.

Aside from their obvious size and height difference, the belt around Hope’s hips was the easiest way to tell the two apart from afar. Several things were clipped onto it, one of which was a roll of duct tape hanging near her hip, that could always come in handy during an emergency. She freed it from its clip and held it out to the scientist. “You’re unbelievable.”

“I had to give them something,” he whispered back, like their new friends would hear them through their helmets and comms.

“Ramen?”

Grace shushed her, taking the tape and waving her off. She huffed out a laugh, watching him carefully tear off a strip of tape and use it to secure the Ramen A to the wall. “I only made one,” he kept going, ignoring the engineer in favour of securing his gift. “I’m not sure how many of you there are.”

Thankfully, the camera Grace had brought was recording the entire exchange.

If they succeeded, Earth would get to enjoy watching the absolute lunacy they had decided to ship off to space to save them.

~

The two non-astronauts peeked through the port window of the inner door, helmets smacking together until they actually took turns, to see only blackness throughout the second window of the outer door. When no additional noises came from the direction of the tunnel, Hope released the airlock on their side.

“Do we just…open the door?” Grace mumbled finally, unsure what to do next.

He’d been so amped for the thought of meeting an alien, he didn’t actually consider how that would work.

“Like, are they in there waiting for us?” he asked in a near whisper.

Hope moved to the second door and tried to peer into the tunnel. Inky blankness stared back. Even when she angled her helmet so the light on the side shined through the port hole, it only allowed her to see a few feet ahead. It mostly just reflected off the window.

“I mean…I guess? We can’t just stay in here. The entire point of cutting a hole in the ship was to make contact with them.”

“You’re never going to let that go, are you?”

“Probably not.”

Fair enough. He held a grudge against another scientist for years after he lost his job. He couldn’t fault Hope for being cranky that she had to cut a hole in her masterpiece.

She pulled back from the door and motioned toward the tunnel. “So, shall we?”

Grace hesitated. “Maybe…you should stay here? I mean, one of us should stay on the ship unless this goes sideways, right?”

“Under normal circumstances, I’d agree. But we’re literally fused to them now. And I have no clue how to detach us from this tunnel. If they’ve got ill intentions, there’s no getting out of it now.” She accessed the panel to release the second airlock, careful with the large gloves of her EVA suit. Thankfully, the screen was designed for easy access while wearing such bulky equipment. “Stop stalling.”

“I’m not stalling!”

He was. He was totally stalling.

She gave him a deadpan stare through her helmet as the room depressurized, equalizing them with the tunnel outside. It was the same ‘air’ that had been in the vacuum before the tunnel was attached, so the system recognized it as just another EVA.

As Grace opened the door, she engaged the lights outside. It wasn’t much, more as a way to act as a beacon for an astronaut on an EVA, but it would at least give them a bit more light than just their headlamps.

Neither would admit how much their hearts were racing in that moment.

"Ready?" Grace asked one last time.

In response, Hope pushed out of the airlock. A leap of faith.

Grace panicked slightly, reaching out to grab her boot but missing her by a hair. “Hope!” he whisper-shouted after her, like he was afraid their new neighbours would hear him. “You’re supposed to be the one that’s super cautious and has a plan for everything! I’m the bone headed one who leaps without looking!”

She floated slowly into the tunnel, rapidly creating distance between them. Both still wore a tether, if only for making it back to the ship faster if anything did go wrong, and Grace was sorely tempted to grab hers and yank her back.

He hesitated a moment longer, lingering in the door of the airlock, before he heaved a deep exhale and latched his tether to the outer clip next to Hopes.

The engineer was already a few yards deep, now pressing her hands to the ‘floor’ of the tunnel. She was inspecting the material they had made the tunnel out of, leaning in as close as her suit would allow. She could feel the heat pressing in on them through the suit. “I think this is xenonite. It looks a little different from the other pieces they sent us, but maybe it’s because it’s a different mixture.”

“Makes sense,” Grace breathed out. He was still trying to get his bearings, moving into the tunnel with significantly less enthusiasm than his counterpart. “This was a much bigger scale than the models they sent. That was probably more ‘pure’ than this.”

Using the wall like a rock climber, Grace eased his way along to get closer to Hope. She was using a similar technique, but it looked more like she was hand-walking along the floor. His lizard brain still tried its best to keep him oriented in ‘up’ or ‘down’ while Hope seems to have grasped that, without gravity, there was no such thing.

Grace pushed off the wall in an attempt to meet up with Hope. Instead, he flew past her and collided with the opposite wall.

As he collected himself and adjusted his hold on the grooves in the xenonite, he looked toward the other end to see if he could spot anything. A few more feet in, a solid wall completely blocked the tunnel. It wasn’t the other ship, it was too close, so it was deliberately placed there by the aliens as they were building it.

“Hope, look at this,” he called, somewhat breathless.

She looked up from where she had been examining the tunnel walls, her light joining his in illuminating the blockade in the middle of the tunnel. “Oh…that’s smart,” she mumbled, pushing herself in his direction. “Our atmospheres are so different, they created a barrier between us. The other end of the tunnel must be pressurized and suited for their environment.”

“But it’s solid,” he pointed out. “How do we even know if they’re there?”

Each section of the wall differed from another. Colours and textures, even the size of the panels. It’s like they were trying to show off what their technology was capable of.

Hope carefully grabbed Grace’s arm, pulling in close to the wall for a better look. Each piece had texturing added in. She wasn’t sure if it was just a natural result of the process from creating it, or if they were some sort of engraving that had meaning. It didn’t look random, but it could just as easily be a mark from whatever machine created it.

While Hope was distracted with the process of how the wall might have been made, Grace was inspecting the different sections. As he was looking near the lower section of the wall, he spotted the clear piece that resembled a panel of glass.

He nudged the engineer.

She turned immediately, leaning around his shoulder to see what had caught his attention. Her eyes widened.

“It’s clear!”

It was one of the smaller panels. If they placed a hand on it, even Hope’s hand would cover the majority of the panel’s surface. Grace swiped his fingertips gently across it, picking up the faintest bit of texture through the gloves. Not only was it clear, it was much smoother than the rest.

Hope moved to his other side, getting a better vantage. Her hand stayed resting on his shoulder, using him as her anchor point so she wouldn’t drift away.

Decided to go for it, Grace tapped his fingers against the clear xenonite. Not too hard, but with enough force that it made a knocking sound.

Then, they waited.

Movement.

The Eridian’s three-fingered ‘hand’ slaps down onto the other side of the panel, creating a thud they could hear even inside their helmets. A high pitched, rhythmic tone followed the movement. Grace yelped, immediately throwing himself backward from the shock.

Unfortunately, Hope was directly behind him. She didn’t even have the chance for her own instincts to kick in before he slammed into her and sent them both tumbling backward toward the Hail Mary. Hope corrected first, grabbing onto the jut-out of xenonite with one hand and Grace’s tether with the other. It brought him to a solid halt as well and yanked him back toward her like he was on a bungee cord.

For a moment, all they could hear was one another breathing through the comms in their helmets.

Hope’s heart raced at the abrupt scare, but she forced herself to take deep breaths as she waited for Grace to get his bearings.

They shared a silent glance across the tunnel before slowly easing back along to the wall, returning to the small section of clear xenonite.

This time, Hope stayed low and out of Grace’s path if he flinched back again. Not that it would do them much good—their tethers were crossed and nearly tangled from the number of times they’d overlapped one another. If he took flight again, she’d be pulled along for the ride. He lingered close to her shoulder, letting them both see through the small window.

The appendage appeared again. Slower this time.

Softer trilling sounds reached their ears. Muffled within the suits, but it seemed to be how the Eridian’s were able to ‘talk’.

The hand looked like stone, tapering down into narrow digits that folded out from the end. It had three ‘fingers’, all perfectly closing in together to create a blunt end. One of the digits opened up, knocking on the panel. Copying what Grace had done a minute prior.

Hope smiled. They liked to mimic.

“Hello,” she mumbled. Not sure if they could hear her, but it felt odd not to say something.

Reaching forward slowly, she tapped one of her fingers against the panel. There was barely any force behind it. She didn’t need to get their attention, it was more of a reply than anything. After, she pulled her hand back but opened her palm with her fingers spread out. Almost a wave, but without the back-and-forth movement.

The creature on the other side copied her, opening the three digits. She smiled.

Then it pulled back into the darkness, disappearing for a moment. The two humans waited silently, wondering what it would do next. Already, their minds were reeling over what they’d seen. Even though they had basically seen only the equivalent to a hand, it was amazing how different the Eridian looked in comparison to them.

The stone-like exterior explained how they could survive such an intensely hot atmosphere.

Their new friend returned, holding what looked like a little man made of xenonite pinched in its claw. While Hope knew it was meant to represent them, Grace recognized that it was also the pose he had made when he caught the first canister. He’d thrown an arm up, triumphantly holding up the package to show them that he’d gotten it. They mimicked the way he’d stood and created a little metal man to represent him.

“Is that me?” he mumbled.

One of the digits moved, still holding the xenonite Grace between the other two, like he was pointing at them. It reminded Hope of someone trying to show a ‘what you said’ gesture.

Another of the alien’s arms appeared, this time holding a model of the Hail Mary. It even had the new tunnel attachment as part of the model. It let the model float in their view, before tapping it gently and making it spin. It was in the exact direction that the ship would rotate when they used gravity.

“They want us to turn on the centrifuge,” she pointed out.

Bringing the xenonite Grace back, they watched as it showed him travelling along the tunnel and back to the Hail Mary. “I don’t understand,” Grace said first, pushing closer to the panel. He was nearly lying on top of Hope, but she said nothing.

“Go back inside,” she answered for them. A chirping sound seemed to echo through the tunnel, likely coming from their new companion. The same digit as before pointed at her.

Yes, it seemed to say. What she said.

To drive the point home, it repeated the movement of xenonite Grace moving back along the tunnel and stopping at the ship.

To clarify, Grace motioned between the two of them, then back toward the airlock. “You want us to go back in our ship?” More sounds came through from the other side of the panel. It was almost musical, not creating actual speech like a human’s vocals. “But we just got here,” he tried to argue.

The sounds deepened and the alien was clearly growing impatient, repeatedly demonstrating with his little figurines that he wanted them back in their ship.

“Okay, okay,” Hope agreed first, lifting up a hand in a very human, placating gesture. “We’ll go in.”

Grace, not knowing what else to do, lifted a hand and gave the Eridian a thumbs up. He looked at his own hand and realized what he was doing. There was no way they knew what a thumbs up was, especially in terms of agreeing.

“Okay, we’ll talk to you later.”

Backing up to give Hope space, the two slowly pushed away from the wall.

They could still see the little stone hand as they pushed backward, waving to them through the clear panel. Hope turned away first, grabbing Grace’s tether that was now tightly tangled with hers, and pulled him along as she used the jut-outs on the bottom section of the tunnel to ‘run’ toward the airlock.

Grace let himself be pulled along. It was much faster than trying to follow her pace. He let Hope glide into the airlock first while he caught himself on the edge and took a moment to unclip them from the hull. Even as he closed the airlock door, he kept looking out through the port to try and keep an eye on the wall.

It was in vain, though, since they were too far away for the headlamps to properly illuminate that far.

Hope was floating behind him when he turned around, the EVA room hissing as it repressurized to the Hail Mary’s atmosphere.

She was smiling. “We just met an alien,” she stated calmly.

Grace, the professional scientist that he was, was not calm.

“We just met an alien!”

The EVA room repressurized and Hope scrambled to take off her helmet. Her hair was a mess once it was off, her braid rapidly coming undone from the rubbing of her trying to move her head inside the confined space.

“Why engage the centrifuge? Do they realize what it does, and they want gravity?”

“But we can’t do that with the tunnel attached,” he pointed out, having a bit more trouble getting his helmet off as he tried not to push his glasses into his eyes.

“Maybe they’re going to disconnect first?”

They wouldn’t get any answers in the EVA room. They still had camera feeds that would show them the exterior of the ship, though. So, the two rapidly stripped out of their EVA gear—hanging everything up properly at Hope’s insistence. It will just take longer to put on if you have to scour the room for a runaway glove.

Back in just their thermals, they crowded around the monitor again to watch as the strange machine they used sheered the tunnel off of the Hail Mary. It retracted rapidly, putting space between them again.

“What are they doing?” Grace mumbled, leaning in closer to the screen to try and get a better look.

Hope hummed in thought. “It must have something to do with that wall. Did you notice how all the pieces looked different from one another?”

“And how did they make a clear one?”

“I really want to ask. But I think we’re a little bit away from having those discussions.”

~

Sitting at the U-shaped table in the hanger on the carrier was disconcerting.

It reminded her too much of the first meeting they had, when Stratt had broken down the entire premise of Project Hail Mary. Arriving off a fighter jet, queasy and drugged with a sleeping pill, but refusing to step away.

It had made an impression on the rest of the board. The other project leaders.

It wasn’t always positive. Many of them thought she was standoffish and rude, refusing to cooperate well with others. Not entirely untrue; she went out of her way to avoid them. But her job didn’t require her to sit at a table and drone on and on to a group that had all the information already in front of them.

She even dumbed it down for them, so they’d understand the engineering behind the ship.

And yet, still, she was stuck sitting in those damn meetings.

Grace, too, was hauled in. He plunked himself down with a bag of candy in tow. Carl usually lingered nearby, the scientist’s ever-present shadow. Hope was fairly certain he was the one supplying him with the never-ending supply of candy. She’d caught him on several occasions eating from a pack of Skittles.

Their latest meeting was based on the Astrophage numbers. They needed a new way to improve the breeding program; it was too slow. Grace and Hope had already spent several evenings brainstorming new plans, but regardless of the size of the lab, it was too slow. They’d miss their deadline.

Unfortunately, that increased the pressure and restrictions on the use of Astrohpage. Every little bit became a commodity, which started to make it harder for those who needed it for experiments. Dimitri was left arguing with the rest of the board every time he needed some for his spin drive tests, even Hope was left in heated arguments when she and the other engineers were trying to work out the right mixture for the hull.

It was understandable; why keep using Astrophage when it lessened their breeding numbers? But it was needed to confirm the accuracy of their equipment. They couldn’t just leave such tests to the end, when they had better numbers. They needed to know any issues now, so they could properly work them out.

Time was of the essence.

Which brought them to the present, hours after their meeting was meant to conclude.

Hope sat to Grace’s right. Arms folded and leant back in her seat with her chair angled toward him; it meant she was facing the head of the table, where the projector screen showed several more members of the Project that couldn’t physically be present. Everyone had a thick packet of information in front of them that provided a breakdown of their current data. The ship, the Astrophage, the launch window, the travel projections, possible crew options—without Hope.

Usually, she’d be tucked in the back corner where she could pretend she wasn’t even there.

Grace had bribed her with a fresh coffee, saving the spot next to him and immediately waving her over once she’d stepped into the room. He was wearing one of his goofy shirts under the pale blue lab coat they provided.

When she sat down beside him, he pushed the coffee in front of her.

Wordlessly, she tossed a bag of Maynards Swedish Berries onto the table in front of him.

The smile he turned on her made her cheeks warm, but she refused to acknowledge him and instead took a long sip of her coffee. Ridiculous amounts of sugar and cream, exactly how she liked it. He’d seen her brew it enough while they worked, she wasn’t surprised he caught on to it.

The coffee and candy had long since been finished, and the scientist and engineer were both sick of sitting in that meeting.

Near the end of the table, opposite them at the U-shape, was the ‘staggering waste of carbon’ himself, Dr. Sarnowska. Grace had done his absolute best to ignore him thus far, pretending he didn’t even exist. He’d done the same when he was left sitting next to him at his initial briefing on day one. The shock of the situation had made it easier.

“We can redirect a significant percentage of the Astrophage if we remove the slurry that lines the crew quarters—or at least minimize it. The amount running through the hull is unnecessary,” he started, already sitting with his arms crossed, looking annoyed.

Grace could feel his jaw tick. Hope sighed audibly next to him. She looked forlornly at her empty coffee cup.

The man kept going. “Polyethylene has been used on space crafts with exceptional results. It provides a barrier against radiation to protect the crew and is 30% lighter. We will be able to use the Astrophage for fuel and lighten the ship.”

Hope looked over to Stratt. “Like I said, for every genius you picked up there’s an idiot to balance it out.” Grace nearly choked on his spit.

Dr. Sarnowska, as infuriating as he had been when Grace dealt with him at that last conference in Denmark, scowled directly at Hope. “I beg your pardon?”

The Engineer met his glare with a frigidity that could deep freeze a volcano. Grace was absolutely tickled.

“You can beg all you want, it won’t change anything,” she snarked back. “The Hail Mary isn’t just another craft we’re sending around the moon. High-Density Polyethylene may have worked for the ‘sunny’ radiation for our brief stints into space, but we’re talking about interstellar travel at 0.92c and encountering hard ionizing radiation; a stray hydrogen atom hitting us is basically a nuclear warhead. Astrophage has a super cross-section. Even neutrinos can’t bypass it; alpha and gamma rays become a non-issue. This ship is getting launched into deep space, not going to the Moon.”

Grace braced a hand against his mouth and slouched slightly in his chair; he was fighting to hide a smile. He was both wildly entertained and burning with pride. He’d seen how smart she was when it came to the Engineering side of things, but to hear how effectively she’d picked up the science behind the crazy little microbes from their lessons was thrilling to witness.

She didn’t just regurgitate information; she understood it and was able to apply it to the effectiveness on an interstellar ship. A ship she was building.

He’d made the mistake of starting an engineering argument with the literal lead engineer from NASA.

Hope turned just slightly in her chair, angling herself to face Sarnowska properly. It also placed her between Grace and his old rival, making a shield of herself—even unintentionally. “Making the ship lighter in favour of giving the crew cancer within a few months of their trip seems like a rather moronic trade off.”

Grace’s smile couldn’t be contained behind his hand. Carl was standing a few feet off, in his peripheral, and he swore he could see the man’s lips twitch.

“A thermal wall around the crew at 96.4°C would boil them. You’ve had to place a cooling system through the entirety of the crew quarters,” he argued back, tapping a finger down on the information packet regarding the ship with unnecessary force.

“The cooling system isn’t for the crew,” Hope pointed out, halting Sarnowska from saying anything further. “It’s for the shield. The intent is to keep Astrophage below its threshold.”

Dimitri perked up, already nodding in understanding. His entire work for the ship centered around Astrophage as well, he knew exactly where she was going with this. “The perfect blackbody heat sink.”

Hope tipped her head toward him but kept her eyes on Sarnowska. “Exactly. It’s the defense against black body radiation, but it will also take excess heat and convert it into mass. It protects the crew and the ship. The Astrophage slurry acts as the perfect defense for the crew against radiation while eating the heat that is produced by the friction of travelling through deep space—heat that would otherwise melt the hull.”

She stood up and picked up her papers from the meeting. Obviously, she was done with the conversation. Stratt said nothing to stop her.

“But if you’re so worried about using it as fuel, you’ll be happy to know it’s actually classified as a reserve tank. In the case of an emergency, the entire hull becomes a 20,000-kilogram fuel tank. I don’t care how light it is, your plastic is just dead weight.”

Grace jumped up when Hope turned to leave, intent on following her out. “From a waste of carbon to an idiot; is that an upgrade or a demotion?” he chirped mockingly before darting after the engineer. Was it petty? Yes. Was it immensely satisfying? Oh, yes.

He wanted to hug her. Would she hit him if he hugged her?

He jogged to keep up with her, still smiling. She may be short but damn, she walked fast. “That was amazing. I’d pay to watch that again.” Taking the chance, he draped an arm over her shoulder and tugged her in against his side suddenly.

When he felt her tense, he immediately released her and moved to put a bit of space back between them. She didn’t say anything about the hug but looked over at him when he stepped aside.

Hope raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Sarnowska got me fired from academia after I called him a staggering waste of carbon a couple of years ago,” he admitted. He’d never actually told her about what happened. She’d heard snippets of his ejection from academia, mostly from Lokken who seemed to take pleasure in pointing it out, but she’d never actually asked.

He assumed she already knew, maybe after someone else told her.

“Well, you’re not wrong,” she answered easily. “He’s so fixated on the science; he doesn’t know how to look at the bigger picture. You need to step back and look at things as a whole; looking at things too close blinds us to important information.”

“Stuck in his microscope,” Grace agreed.

She gave an exasperated shake of the head. “Science was never a study of absolutes. It’s changing constantly, new theories and new revelations as technology evolves. What science believed a century ago is already outdated or disproven. It’s not a field you can be dogmatic in.”

“Exactly!” he nearly shouted back, validated. People turned to look at them, judgement clear on their face. “Sorry,” he followed it up, wincing. Inside voice, he reminded himself.

Hope pursed her lips. “He’s an idiot.”

“Thank you!”

“You’re enjoying this a bit too much,” she laughed softly.

He cleared his throat and adjusted his lab coat. “You’re right. I’m better than that.”

When he was in academia, Grace was arrogant. Not that he didn’t have the right to be; he was exceptional at his work and had the unique ability to think outside the box. So many of his peers were stuck in their linear ways, refusing to alter their views.

But his arrogance made him out to be a person he regretted. Not that he didn’t stand by what he’d said, just how he’d gone about it.

As loathe as he was to admit it, his ejection from academia did the job of humbling him to that arrogance. He knew his worth, his intellect, but he also knew when to flaunt it. Or rub it in. Becoming a teacher forced him to understand the patience of guiding others, not pushing his ideas onto them.

Kids don’t care if you were a professor or a doctor or an ordinary man. He liked to think that the kids loved his class, but that was likely because he taught them using fun, game-like methods rather than boring lectures.

He and Hope had discussed at length how Stratt gravitated toward arrogance when looking for more to join the Taskforce. But it was only arrogance that she sought out. She had cast aside Grace’s attempt at modesty, like it was a weakness.

Hope had pointed out that arrogance needed humility. Without it, that arrogance became an unchecked ego and people became blind to their flaws. Only the best knew how to dance the fine line between the two.

He taught science to his students, and they taught him humility in return.

It made him wonder who taught that to Hope. Or how she’d come to understand the importance of the two. She didn’t flaunt her mind, even though she was certain of her potential. For every bit of confidence she had, she hid just as much.

Grace suspected that for Hope, it was a bit of Imposter Syndrome.

Even with two doctorates, she didn’t like being referring to as ‘Dr. Emrys’. Even those she didn’t like were told to just call her Hope.

She was almost as bad as him when it came to taking a compliment. Usually, she winced when someone made a point about her intellect. The ship was one of the large exceptions, mainly because she compartmentalized it as its own thing, not just an extension or product of herself.

If someone said it was an amazing ship, she didn’t accept that as a compliment on herself. Instead, she took it as only a compliment on the actual ship.

That’s definitely something that keeps a person humble. Feeling like a fake in your own mind prevents unchecked arrogance before it even has a chance.

That’s all just in theory, though.

As much as Grace liked to think they were friends and got along well, she still didn’t open up to him much. Personal life was a big no, and even certain past jobs made her clam up and slam down her defenses.

The best way to learn about Hope, he’d come to discover, was to observe her. Her mannerisms, her way of speaking, her actions or reactions, how she interacted with those around her.

She was a book. The book just happened to be written in an encrypted dead language and was chained shut with a tungsten lock.

~

“What do you remember?” she asked first, wanting to understand exactly where they were starting out.

Grace recounted the memories that had come back so far. He was from San Francisco, he was a middle school science teacher, he was approached by Stratt about Astrophage just after the ArcLight probe had splashed back down. The tests he had done before they took the rest of the sample away, and how he and Carl had accidentally bred a fourth dot.

Hope had snickered at the reminder.

Arriving on the Ganzu—throwing up in an orange pilon after he got off the jet—and the briefing about Project Hail Mary. His assigned spot next to Hope and their evening lessons where he helped to teach her about Astrophage and the required equipment for studying it.

Rum. Skittles. Twizzlers. Coffee.

“Dimitri was the one working on the spin drives. He called you Little Engineer.” Hope’s expression softened with fondness. The boisterous Russian was one of the few on the project she didn’t mind the company of. “And Lokken, she was brought in for the centrifuge.” His expression soured.

Lokken and Grace were kept apart. She was less than enthusiastic about his prior research regarding water and evolution, and he was still very defensive over the entire thing. They improved after some time with her on the carrier, but she had a habit of rubbing both Grace and Hope the wrong way. She insulted Grace’s research and Hope had to deal with her constantly wanting to alter the ship beyond the centrifuge.

The woman had a habit of inserting herself where she wasn’t wanted and offering unsolicited advice. Hope finally warned Stratt she’d lock Lokken in the Spin Drive chamber if she said one more thing about her wiring diagrams—and when she said lock, she meant using her laser weld her to seal her inside.

Grace continued, “The comas; a special gene was required. It was only one in every seven thousand people. But it was better than the astronauts killing each other in the four years it took to get here.”

“You remember the important bits,” she answered calmly. She was closer to the ceiling of the lab, holding a rope between her crossed ankles to keep herself in place.

Grace, on the other hand, was nearer to the floor and was steadily spinning himself in circles. Stretched out and crossing his legs, he spun around like the hands on a clock.

“I don’t remember you being on the mission roster.”

Hope went quiet.

Grace stopped spinning himself when they were face to face again. Several feet separated them with Hope basically floating directly above him. She was still wearing her white thermals with her braid pulled free at her back.

She uncrossed her arms in favour of grabbing one of the tethers. The urge to fidget was overwhelming.

“Stratt always planned to have someone that she could count as a backup. Someone who—if absolutely necessary—could do all three tasks. The coma technology was still rather untested, especially given the circumstances of the mission. And the fully automated medical system had to be made from scratch; it left a lot of room for possible issues. But she loved having a backup plan.”

“And you volunteered?” He struggled to picture it. She literally just said how risky it was.

Hope shook her head. “Not at first. We were barely into the construction phase when she asked me.” She huffed a laugh. “I wanted to know why she was setting the mission up for four people, not three. I told her she was looking for a unicorn.”

Grace fiddled with the rope. “But…you changed your mind. You agreed.”

“I did,” she mumbled, refusing to look him in the eye. She watched his hands, or looked past his ear, or examined the strange cat-eye shirt he was wearing; anywhere that meant she didn’t have to look him in the eye.

“Why?”

Her grip tightened on the rope. “I wasn’t leaving anything behind. She knew that when she made the offer. But…I dedicated my life to creating ships that carried people safely through space. This ship…it was so much more than just a trip around the moon or a probe going to Venus. Knowing that I could be here to realize the Hail Mary’s true potential…”

Green eyes lifted to look around the ship.

“I had to see this through.”

There was more to it. He could see that, but he also knew when to stop pushing. Asking why someone chose to go on a mission to their death was something far too personal, even in their bizarre circumstances.

“But you don’t know why I’m here?” he switched up, giving her the privacy she deserved. He could be patient. Perhaps he already knew and the answer was just buried in his mind, or she’d feel comfortable enough to be honest with him in the future.

“I’m sorry, Grace, I wasn’t awake for that,” she sighed. “But your memories have been coming back, that should come back, too. In time.”

If he could have dropped his head back in zero g, he would have. “I’m so sick of waiting for them to come back on their own!” Of all the questions he had, that one was the one that bothered him the most. It seemed to bug Hope, too.

Actually, his presence on the Hail Mary bothered her a lot.

Her smile was soft, almost apologetic. “Trying to force it isn’t going to be reliable. Your brain will just supply whatever it can throw together and give you inaccurate information.” He already knew that from past attempts. It also came with quite the headache behind the eyes.

Beginning to spin himself again, he asked, “How did we successfully breed the Astrophage we needed? Last I remember, our original plans weren’t working.”

“We paved over the Sahara Desert.” He halted again.

“What??”

“Well, not all of it. You and Stratt took off and picked up Dr. Redell, whom you sprung from a New Zealand prison. It was his idea.”

“What??”

“Wait until you hear about what we did to Antarctica.”

Grace’s voice picked up a few octaves. “What did we do to Antarctica?”

“Nuked it.”

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes and curled in on himself. He regretted asking now. “My head hurts.”

Hope took pity on him. “By nuking the ice, they released more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What was previously our greatest weakness became our best defense. They started to deliberately cause warming of the planet as a means of buying more time. Not a lot of time, maybe a decade after all their efforts, but every spare month counts.”

“So, we paved over a desert and bombed Antarctica. I thought the kidnapping was bad.”

“Yea, she did a lot more of that before we were done. You were there for several of the new recruits, so you’ll actually know more about that than me once it comes back to you.”

Grace snorted, looking up at her again. She was actually meeting his eyes now. The heaviness of the previous topic had shifted and with it her defenses came back down. Good. He didn’t like knowing he’d upset her. “What, Stratt didn’t bring you along on the field trips?”

“Most of that happened after I was sent to the Cosmodrome. I was relegated to Kazakhstan once construction of the ship was truly underway. We needed to have everything sent up in a specific schedule so the specialists with the ISS could put it all together. You guys joined later, but you were with the Taskforce on the carrier for a while longer than me.”

Grace pictured their space on the Ganzu. Trying to remove her from the equation felt wrong. Like suddenly missing a limb. Most times he thought back to it, Hope was lingering on the edge.

Even if he didn’t see her, he knew she was there. He remembered the smell of her coffee all throughout the day. Or the conscious effort he made to be quiet when he knew she’d dozed off for a few hours of sleep.

While he had technically already lived through it, he didn’t like the thought of remembering the work on the carrier without his caffeine addicted neighbour. Maybe that’s why those memories weren’t coming back? He didn’t want to relive them, so they stayed dormant and out of reach.

Gace huffed. His brain could at least give him the courtesy of throwing in a nice one every now and then.

As he was thinking, Hope watched over his expressions carefully.

He was getting frustrated. Frustrated with his brain, frustrated with the amnesia, frustrated with the circumstances he found himself forced into.

Pushing off the ceiling gently, Hope reached down to press a palm against his chest—forcing aside the realization of how solid he’d become. “Go easy on yourself. I’ll try and fill in whatever blanks you come across. But you do remember the important parts.”

Grace grabbed her hand. Small and chilled, dwarfed in his palm as he closed his fingers.

“We’re here to solve the Astrophage problem. Focus on that, and the rest will follow.”

“Always the logical one,” he mumbled, keeping hold of her hand.

Hope laughed, soft and breathy. “Someone needs to be the voice of reason. The first alien contact you ever had, you poked it with a nanosyringe and killed it. God knows what you’ll try and do with this one.”

He gaped at her, though the amusement was apparent. “I killed a microbe that’s eating our sun! If anything, it was heroic!”

“Oh, yea, hero of Earth. Taking out Astrophage one microscopic microbe at a time with his trusty nanosyringes.” He yanked on her hand, pulling her down abruptly to cut off her laugh. The force pulled her into him and knocked both down into the floor—weightless, Grace’s back bounced off harmlessly. Hope’s weight pushing down onto him, however, forced the air out in an ‘oof’.

“Smart aleck.”

“Smart ass.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“Oh, Grace, if I told you some of the swearwords the Russians taught me, your ancestors would blush.”

The teasing was already bringing that familiar flush to his skin. His ears rapidly pinked up, carrying through to his cheeks. It was only in part caused by her teasing, that he’d had some time to get familiar with again. The rest of the fact that she was basically still lying on top of him. Twisting slightly onto her side, her hand remained held to his chest and her hip was pressed into his abdomen. She’d drawn her knees up slightly, so her foot was pressed to his thigh above his knee.

Hope disliked touch to such a degree that she avoided handshakes.

But she wasn’t pulling away from him. She didn’t try and keep that distance. It softened some of the anxiety buzzing in his chest. While he wouldn’t start offering to braid her hair or anything, it helped to know she wouldn’t push him away when he reached out.

“Proximity Alert.”

They jolted. “The tunnel!”

Hope used one of the ropes he’d set up and pulled herself away from him. Subconsciously, Grace’s hand tightened on hers as she withdrew from him. An instinctual panic. When it sharply halted her momentum, turning her back to face him, he winced.

“Sorry.”

She didn’t scowl or scold. She smiled. “Let’s go meet our new neighbours.”

The two surviving crewmates may have decided to place their faith in the aliens, but they knew to be prepared all the same. They’d stay in their EVA suits in case something went wrong; if the hull was breached it would be a nightmare to fix, but it could be fixed. What could not be fixed was letting themselves die if the breach occurred without their EVA suits.

While Grace was plastered to the door of the outer airlock, Hope used one of the screens just outside the small room to pull up the feeds for the hull cameras. They Blip A had closed the distance between their ships, the massive machine dwarfing them, so they had less than 50 meters between the two.

“That’s…a bit close for comfort,” Hope muttered to herself. If any accidents happened, they’d never survive a collision.

And the distance only got smaller.

Once they were only a few meters shy of the tunnel, the hull robot that had been on the Blip A reached for the Hail Mary with an impressive set of telescoping arms. There were five in total, each holding something.

“What’s it got?” Grace asked, moving away from the window to join Hope at the screen. “Uh…you should put on your helmet now.” His was already in place, with his glasses safely perched on his nose.

“I think they’re handles. They’re going to anchor us to the tunnel. Our smaller size, it makes sense. Rather than trying to manoeuvre themselves close enough and risk damaging our hull, they can pull us in.” She was trying to pull her helmet on as she spoke and keep an eye on the feeds.

Grace held her chest plate to keep her somewhat oriented, but his focus was also glued to the screen.

She was right.

The robot arms attached the five handles around their airlock and used them to slowly pull the Hail Mary in closer. They could distantly feel the movement of the ship, but since they were currently floating off the floor it barely registered for the two. The room basically moved around them. Not the tilt like the centrifuge, but instead like they were being displaced.

Grace bumped into Hope before he grabbed one of the handles on the wall.

Now that he’d seen Hope use them, he came to realize they were everywhere. Especially around the stations like they one they were using.

“The hull isn’t magnetic,” he said suddenly, remembering Hope saying that once before; the Hail Mary’s hull was a nonmagnetic aluminum. “How’d they get them to stick?”

With her helmet safely intact, Hope nodded in understanding. “Must be some kind of adhesive. But that actually makes sense. They don’t have to understand our docking system if they just glue the tunnel around our entire airlock.”

“You’re not happy about that, are you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

To follow-up her statement, the ship groaned around them. It weighs over 100,000-kilorgams. It was not designed to be yanked around by its airlock. Hope ground her teeth, the muscles in her jaw popping, but refraining from making a comment.

They had the courtesy of making the movement slow, so she knew the ship could handle it.

The tunnel made contact with a muffled clunk.

~

It was with those screens that he was able to turn on the outside feed for the ship—the hull was covered in cameras to monitor for any damage and during EVA’s—and watch Hope tether herself along the hull like a pro.

He wondered if the aliens realized it was someone else. She was smaller than him, so that made it easier to tell them apart, but the suits were nearly identical. Considering how advanced they’ve proven to be thus far, he didn’t doubt they could tell this was a new, strange Earthling meandering along the hull. The skill level alone was likely a give away.

She used the hooks on the tethers like they were extensions of herself, barely needing to pause or take the extra time to reposition them. That was the most time-consuming part of an EVA; you needed to make sure you were secured with the second tether before removing the first. Safe, but slow.

The hull had been designed to make it as seamless as possible, including long tracks that allowed them to move along without this connect-disconnect system, but that still took practice to use properly.

She made it look deceptively easy.

Grace pouted. They watched him faceplant into the hull when grabbing the first canister and here she was, fresh from a coma, walking along with ease.

However, it did help to calm some of the nerves squeezing his chest regarding her being outside.

After a few short minutes, Hope had gotten herself into position to leap from the Hail Mary’s main structure to the tank. It didn’t need to be a powerful jump, she could basically nudge herself off of the ship and just float across, but it needed to be accurate, so she didn’t accidently bypass the tank and ricochet into space. If she used too much force, she could miss the chance to grab at the protruding metal holds and possibly snap the tether.

“I can feel you panicking from here,” she said through the comms.

He forced his hands to relax the white-knuckle grip they’d had on the seat.

“Me? Cool as a cucumber. But, uh, please don’t accidentally fly off into space. I’d be very lonely.”

“Maybe our new friends would save me.”

“Let’s not test the theory.”

Hope smiled within her helmet and doublechecked her tether. She’d keep herself anchored to the main cabin with the longer tether, giving lots of slack to close the gap, and bring the second, shorter one with her to clip to the tank so she could work.

She’d had a fair amount of simulation practice when it came to the EVA suit, but working in water was not remotely close to actual zero g. When she came up early, she’d had the chance to explore the exterior of the Hail Mary with the other specialists, but it felt different now that she was alone.

No one to come out and get her if she untethered.

Grace definitely couldn’t pilot well enough to come collect her, and he was right about not testing if their new friends would give her a lifeline. Realizing that if something happened to her, he’d literally be on a ship without a captain, made her decide in that instant that he needed to learn to pilot.

He didn’t have to be a good pilot. Just enough to survive.

She tried to ignore the tremor in her hands as she lined herself up. Tools were clipped to her suit, tether was secure, and she was lined up perfectly. No more wasting time.

The daunting vastness of space closed in around her in her peripherals, swallowing the Hail Mary whole. She forced herself to focus on the ship. Her ship.

With a soft push, she floated away from the main hull.

It was slow enough that she was able to look carefully for the best place to grab as she approached the tank. They were huge, it wasn’t like the fuel tanks were a small target. She already had her other tether in hand to secure herself, so as soon as she made contact with the aluminum hull she snapped it in place.

The feeling of free floating in space was not her favourite, but the entire ordeal was over in seconds. The best comparison would be drifting in the ocean and looking down to nothing but black. It was a disconcerting feeling.

She could almost hear Grace sigh through the comms once she was safely on the fuel tank.

Carefully scanning the surface, she tried to determine the best place to cut that would be less damaging to the ship. Also, where would afford the best repair. Even if she had top notch equipment the best money could buy, a patch against the rigors of space was likely to fail. One advantage to was that they only needed it to hold traveling around Tau Ceti; no trip home to worry about.

Bleak.

Knowing she could very easily overthink it, Hope moved toward one of the interior sections of the tank—the false assurance that it was exposed to less space dust—and shortened her tether so it kept her anchored in closer to the surface while kneeling. The downside of using hand tools meant she had to fight against the zero g. Every movement she made wanted to propel her off the ship.

Grace watched from inside, nervous.

The Taulight made it easy to watch her. It was like someone was shining a blinding spotlight directly on her bright red suit. Did that make it easier for their new friends to watch her as well? They had no clue how their technology worked yet. It would be fascinating to see what new things they could learn from one another—Astrophage aside.

He wanted to talk to her, but he also didn’t want to risk breaking her concentration.

So, instead, he tucked himself into the co-pilots seat—it still felt too weird to use the pilot’s chair—so he had the scope on hand and the monitors all angled to where she was working outside. If she so much as slipped, he wanted to know. He kept his thermals on just in case. Getting into the suit was not quick, but he would be damned if he didn’t give it his best if she needed his help.

“This feels sacrilegious,” Hope finally said after a few minutes of quiet. Her back was to the cameras.

“Should we say a blessing?” he smarted back, leaning forward to watch the monitor closely. She was still working away, not letting the conversation break her focus.

“Hail Mary, Full of Grace—WAIT.” Hope started to absolutely cackle through the comms. Grace’s eyes widened as he, too, finally registered the irony of the entire situation. His face flushed pink at the fact that he hadn’t made the connection before this moment, either.

He had an excuse, his brain had more holes than a xeolite matrix.

Hope finally had to take a break to straighten up, very obviously laughing. Even from the posture he could see on the monitor, it was easy to tell. When she laughed like that, it was with her head thrown back and her entire body shaking with the force.

Getting her to that point was rare. She usually tried to dim down her reactions. Which resulted in the adorable snort she did.

“I can’t believe we never thought of that before. How poetic.”

Hot with a blush, Grace wiped his hands down his face as Hope resumed her work. He could still hear the faint sound of her repressing another laugh as the revelation continued to dance around in her hand. “Hope, we need to focus,” he interrupted, trying to pull out his best teacher voice. It was surprisingly easy and rolled off the tongue naturally.

“Oh, yes, sir, Dr. Grace.” Of course, that started another round of snickers from the engineer.

Finally, she snipped the circular piece free. She tucked it away safely in her pouch for the moment. Taking a bit of extra time, she smoothed out the edges of the cut she made, trying to prevent as much drag and exposure as possible. She was regretting now that she hadn’t pressed harder about getting better tools on board. They wanted lightweight and easy. A Nibbler would have made this job faster and better for the ship.

Only when she was satisfied, for now, did she return her tools carefully to their place and grab the little disc.

The outside was polished aluminum from the exterior of the hull, not very thick, and the inside was covered in a layer of insulation. Technically, everything was double walled, so the fuel tank was still enclosed. Now, it just had a weak spot.

A weak spot that she knew would keep her up at night until she had the chance to fix it.

The tether kept her secure as she stood up and turned to face the other ship.

“Should I just throw it?”

“I think that works best. They’ll see it’s from the ship, that’ll make our intentions clear. We’re agreeing, and we gave them some of our hull to make sure it’ll work.”

With a bit of force behind it, Hope threw the little disc off into space. It flipped end-over-end as it rapidly approached their ship. They didn’t need the time required to suit up and get outside, the little multi-armed robot along their hull was able to manoeuvre along a track with considerably more speed. She dearly hoped they caught it, because if she had to cut another hole she might actually scream.

In a few short minutes, the piece of their hull was safely in one of the robot’s ‘hands’.

Then, it waved.

“What?” Hope blurted out.

“It waved! I waved at them earlier! Wave back!” Grace yelled through the comms, sounding abnormally excited over a waving robot. “Alien contact! Come on, Hope, wave back!”

Feeling only slightly ridiculous, the engineer lifted a hand and waved back.

The robot waved again.

“Nope, not getting into that,” she muttered to herself. That’s a cycle that could get her stuck out here for hours. Making sure her pouch was closed tight and she had everything secure, she crouched down to grab one of the holds while unclipping her tether. The original one attached to the crew module had remained safely in place the entire time.

Propelling back to the Hail Mary’s crew section wasn’t as nerve-wracking. Something about leaping toward safety instead of away from it. It was a relief to be that much closer to safe, pressurized air that took some of the anxiety away.

She took a quick, cursory glance around to check over everything that she could see. The ship looked remarkably similar to the state it left in. There was some marking to the hull, friction from space debris, but otherwise it was in the same condition. She nodded to herself, proud and satisfied, and quickly moved back along the hull to the airlock.

In her mind, it had only been a few months since she had finished the last blueprint for the Hail Mary. The coma warped time and their conception of it. It was only yesterday she’d been looking down at Earth from the observation window, barely disconnected from the ISS.

Grace was already on the other side of the inner door, waiting, when she slipped back into the EVA room.

It was strange to be on this side of the equation. Hope sealed the outer door and let the room pressurize. It didn’t take nearly as long as it would for someone on the ISS or other crafts. Since the Hail Mary was never meant to return home, the entire ship was kept at a lesser pressure. Their bodies didn’t need to be prepared for returning to Earth. It made it much easier to go in and out for EVAs.

Once the green light gave the all-clear, Hope popped the seal on her helmet and pulled it carefully overhead. It was snug, it was designed that way, and pulled at her hair as it came off.

Grace opened the inner door once he knew it was safe.

Hope took one look at him and pinched her lips against another round of laughter.

“Hope! Come on.”

She waved her hands in front of her, taking a deep breath to stop the urge to laugh. “Sorry, sorry. I’m done, I promise.”

He leveled her with a stink eye for a second but let her off the hook. When she didn’t react again, he entered the EVA room with her and started helping her take off the front panel of the suit. She shimmied back into place so the suit would remain properly hooked up, hanging next to Grace’s, as he helped remove her gloves one at a time.

“How long do you think it’ll take before we get any sign from them?” she asked after a moment, moving her head this way and that to give him access to the clips that attached the chest piece to the back where their oxygen was stored.

“Really, I got no clue. I mean, how do they even plan to do it?”

“Good question.”

He offered a hand, helping her to pull herself out of the suit so it remained in place on the hooks. His foot pressed down on the boot of her suit, anchoring it in place, and allowing her to slide up and out of it like a glove.

The thermal layer was tight against her skin, more so than anything else she wore. Hope leant more in the direction of loose sweaters, cargo pants or coveralls. It was strange to be able to see the exact outline of her body beneath the suit. She definitely looked more filled out than she had before the coma.

He’d been able to see it in her face already, but now he noticed the additional roundness to her hips and thighs. When his brain tried to remind him of his accidental stares at her chest while she was still asleep, he violently forced the thought back.

“Looks like it’s back to waiting,” she commented, glancing toward the exterior airlock. “I have a feeling this one might take a bit longer. They’ll have some planning to do.”

Grace hummed in agreement. “Maybe…you could fill in some blanks for me?”

Meeting his eyes, soft and hesitant, she sighed gently. “Yea. I think we need to figure out exactly what’s knocking about in that head of yours.”

Somehow, it felt like they were discussing how to dig up a corpse.

~

Hope jolted slightly at the abrupt wake up. She was disoriented for only a moment as she sat facing the expanse of screens and controls along the wall in front of her. The computer’s alert registered a moment later and she turned toward the radar screen. She had to unstick her hands from her skin when she pulled them out of her suit.

Grace appeared quickly, having heard the same announcement, and nearly flew into the co-pilot’s seat in his rush. “Another one!”

Blinking away sleep, Hope brought up the screen of the newest little projectile currently flipping its way through space. Looking over the readings that the ship could provide, she hummed. “Well, you’ll be happy to know they are very smart. Looks like they caught onto the airlock; it’s being sent directly toward it.”

She also spotted the completed diagnostic scan. There was a small message window, basically indicating that something had been found. However, no warning had come up. It found something, but it wasn’t something dangerous or detrimental to the system. Likely just a file or an update that was done since the last diagnostic.

It wasn’t emergent, so she put it aside in her mind to check on later.

Grace manoeuvred around her chair, holding onto the back of it so he could see where she was looking. “They’ve been paying attention. I always come and go from the same place, so they decided to make it easier. How thoughtful.”

“Looks promising that we won’t be getting into an interstellar battle with an alien race,” Hope joked. Her voice was roughened with sleep—though not nearly as bad as when she’d first woken up. “They definitely got your message about sending it faster, you only have a few minutes to suit you up.”

Unclipping herself from the harness, she immediately floated up from the seat. She tried to shake the blood back into her legs, but zero g made that slightly more difficult.

Even if their new friends had perfect accuracy, they needed someone to open the outer airlock door and catch the package. Grace—somewhat reluctantly—kept on his thermals so he could slip into the EVA suit quickly and go and get whatever response came their way.

A selfish little part of him wanted to make Hope do it, since she had the actual training required for the EVAs, but most of him didn’t want to risk her going out into space while still fresh from her coma. She was still partially drugged and not even able to digest solid food. He’d stick with the EVAs until she was fully safe and capable to do it.

So long as she didn’t fight him on it, because Hope would win that fight.

Don’t ask him how he knew—because he literally did not know.

Quickly getting into the airlock, Hope helped Grace shimmy his way into the pieces of the suit. The lack of gravity definitely made the entire process more complicated, but having someone with him to help improved the timing greatly. She was able to pull the different pieces into place while he braced himself, preventing his body from being shoved around.

And if something floated away, she was the one to chase after it.

Grace watched how she kept herself oriented in space, trying to take mental notes.

Muscle work was completely different when in zero g. While gravity was engaged, the body knew exactly how to move in order to propel or lift. If he was standing and flexed his torso forward, his upper body would be pulled down until he was basically bent at the hips. Doing a similar action in zero g just curled him into a ball and took his feet away from the ground.

Hope was conscious enough of her body and how it moved that she was able to use the surfaces around her and conscious muscle effort to keep oriented. While he accidentally sent himself into a spiral with no control, she was able to turn a basic 90 degrees as planned.

It seemed a lot of her technique was based in practice. Working around the Hail Mary before her coma likely meant it was a more natural feeling to her and gave her plenty of time to work out the kinks. It was also recent in her memory; to her brain, she was awake and floating around Earth a day ago.

She gave him the same thumbs up as before. Giving him space, she had backed up while keeping one of her feet anchored on the wall behind him and her other leg pulled toward her. He tried very hard not to think of the positioning. “All set?”

He mirrored her with a thumbs up of his own. “All set.”

Hope left him in the airlock, sealing the inner door from inside. Once he had the green light, Grace turned to the outer door. She remained waiting this time, not needing to move the ship, and watched through the small port for him to open the outer door.

The little canister—maybe the same one, possibly new—was tumbling end-over-end in their direction. They definitely had accuracy; it was heading straight for the airlock. Grace wouldn’t even have to tether himself to the outside hull.

He backed up and waited. Less than a minute later, the little package came floating through the open doorway and directly into his waiting hands.

Feeling compelled to acknowledge them somehow—he had when he got the first one—he moved toward the opening and gave a large, dramatic wave with his whole arm. No clue if they actually knew what a wave actually is, but he wanted to give them something. They must have some way of viewing him, how else would they be able to so accurately send the canister?

They were prepared this time. Once the airlock was pressurized and safe, the inner door was opened and Hope—wearing her heat-resistant gloves used for welding—took the canister from him.

Immediately upon opening the door, Hope was assaulted by the stink of ammonia. Having expected it, she was able to brace herself a bit—but it was still a potent shock. Taking the canister from him, the heat from it was registered even through the thick welding gloves. It was sent faster than the last one, spending less time in the vacuum, and therefore retaining more of its heat.

If one of them were to touch it with their bare hands, it would likely be similar to touching the burner on a stovetop.

The first package wasn’t anything deadly to them, so Hope decided to go for it while Grace was stripping out of his suit.

Turning the end to the right, it popped open with a faint hissing sound.

Still half in his suit, Grace watched as she extracted a different model from inside the confines of the metal tube.

Instead of the small pieces that were provided the first time, the entire container held one large model. The end that opened—previously a cap in the last canister—made up a base for her to lift up between them, casting the now empty canister aside to float around as it cooled.

It was two separate structures connected by a long, thin line. Upon closer inspection, one of them was very obviously the Blip A, while the second, smaller, structure was the Hail Mary. It brought their distinct size difference into perspective. The line between the two connected directly with their airlock.

Hope drifted closer to Grace, now only wearing the bottom half of his EVA suit, and rotated it around so he could see as well.

“They want to meet,” he breathed out. “That’s…wow.”

“How are we going to do that? Should we do that?” Hope grabbed the handle next to the airlock to be sure she didn’t drift away. “Sending things back and forth is one thing, but attaching our ships together? We don’t even know if we’re compatible with xenonite.”

“We can send them a sample of our hull?” he proposed.

She got that same look on her face that she had when she noticed the skittles floating in the control room. Uh-oh.

“You want me to cut out a piece of our hull?”

“I mean…I could do it—” The look on her face confirmed that was not the issue and he should not continue.

“The hull, Grace? The hull??”

Grace lifted his hands as though to deflect her irritation. “Just a little piece!”

She looked tempted to hit him with the model, but took a deep, calming breath. If they were going to successfully create a connection like their new friends wanted, then yes, they would require a chunk of their hull. If she had the means onboard, she’d just recreate the material and send them that but while she had many tools to repair the hull, none of them included spare sheets of aluminum.

It’s a suicide mission; there’s no need to bring along raw materials for repairs.

Grace watched Hope’s thought process play out on her face.

She knew the logic. She even agreed with the logic. But there was a painful reality around putting a deliberate crack in the integrity of the ship. Additionally, the ship was her baby. Hope laboured over this massive machine with the singular goal of ‘it must survive intact’.

“Where would be the best place on the ship to remove a piece of the hull?” he asked gently. He knew that she knew that it was necessary. Now they needed to move past that.

Hope sighed. “The fuel tanks,” she answered reluctantly. “Most of them are empty, they’re useless now. And they’re kept separate from one another, so compromising one won’t cause immediate issues.”

She looked like she was in pain.

Was this how he looked when someone tried to argue with his results?

“What issues could it cause?”

“The ship needs to be thought of as a whole,” she explained, motioning around them. “Removing a piece from an empty fuel tank might seem fine because it’s not over the pressurized zones, or from a tank that still carries fuel, but it will lessen the integrity of the ship.”

“Even in space?”

Hope met his gaze, completely serious. “Space is unpredictable. It’s a bad place to have a chink in your armour.”

“They might have information we need. Is it risky? Oh, for sure. This is a stranger in a van offering candy. But we really need the candy.”

Some of the seriousness in her face faded and she looked stuck between baffled and amused. “That’s a terrible analogy.”

“But accurate.”

So, Hope suited up.

Grace tried to convince her to let him deal with it, but when she spiraled into an explanation of making a smooth cut in order to provide the best chance for maintaining hull integrity and a possible repair, his brain logged out. It included the importance of understanding how to use a pair of Aviation Snips that should not have come across as complicated as it did.

Then she started to mutter about needing to cannibalize a panel from inside the ship to repair the hole and he decided it was best not to press the issue.

“Can you please not use the word cannibalize when we’re the only two humans on the ship?”

“If I ate you, I’d get diabetes.”

She won the argument once she pointed out that she was going to have to leap from the main crew compartment to the empty tank. Crawling all the way down the hull to where the cabin connected with the fuel tanks—the same place that disconnects when the centrifuge is engaged—was an option but would take far too long. She’d have to backtrack toward the far end to get to the empty tanks.

So, she’d be leaping the several yards through empty space. Twice, because she needed to jump back.

“There’s a kit in the lab, in drawer 17E. It’s literally a tool pouch designed to clip to the EVA suits for any needed repairs. Bring me the whole pouch.” She was already pulling out the white thermals that she needed to put on, removing it from the package that was labelled with her name.

“17E, got it,” Grace gave a quick thumbs up before he disappeared down the corridor toward the lab. He could make use of his new web system.

Quickly, Hope shimmied out of her flight suit. Left in her tank top, underwear, and socks, she hustled to pull the legs of the thermals up, so she wasn’t still floating in the airlock in her underwear when Grace came back. Though, she had a feeling he had no clue where drawer 17E was even located, so she likely had time.

The material wasn’t the most pleasant, and the tubes didn’t move entirely naturally with the body, but if it kept her temperature regulated while she was outside, she’d live with it. Especially since without it, she would eventually die in space.

Thermodynamics at their finest.

She had just finished pulling the cord on the back of the thermal suit, zipping up the back, when Grace nearly bypassed their airlock with too much momentum. “I will get the hang of that eventually,” he vowed. He held up the tool pouch. “This?”

“That’s the one,” she confirmed. He hooked it to the wall for the time being and moved to help her with the EVA suit. It was significantly easier with two people.

She was also much slimmer than him, and even though her suit was smaller to match, she was able to slide into it with less wiggling than he required. He basically held the material in place—while it was also mounted to a stand to make the entire process easier—as she pushed herself down. The suits were one piece for less risk of a leak and opened at the chest, where a panel closed into place once the astronaut was inside.

Grace offered a hand once she was too far into the suit to reach the wall, letting her use him for leverage downward.

Her hand was cool to the touch.

How cold would she get while working out in space? He didn’t know how long it would take, and he knew the gloves of the suit were thick and designed to keep them warm, but he wondered. And worried.

Once her arms were in place, she was able to use that leverage to pull herself the rest of the way. He helped her attach the pouch to her suit as she instructed, leaving her to double check that he had done it correctly. Then the gloves went on, and finally her helmet.

Even though he wasn’t the one going out, Grace felt his heart in his throat as he looked at her through the clear visor.

She had only just woken up. Regardless of how prepared she might be, memories intact as they are, there was no telling what can happen out there. The thought of something happening to her made his stomach twist. At first, he thought it was because it would leave him alone, again, but…that wasn’t it.

The thought of Hope getting hurt, or lost in space, left him with a pit so deep in his stomach it made him nauseous.

“You sure you don’t want me to do it?” he asked one last time.

She shook her head, even though the movement was restricted inside the helmet. “No. It’s my ship. If anyone is going to cut a hole in it, it’s me.”

Reluctantly, he nodded. “Alright. Fair enough. Be careful, though.”

“Don’t worry; if anything happens to me, you still have Armando.”

He huffed a laugh. The nauseous feeling didn’t abate, but he could appreciate her trying to bring some levity. “Upgrade. He doesn’t throw stuff at my head.”

She shoved him away. Once again, the momentum in zero g got the better of him and Grace went pinwheeling backward. “Oi!”

~

Grace also left his thermals on. He’d likely have to go out again—though, he wasn’t looking forward to that.

To make his life easier, since he was still accidentally flinging himself around when trying to manoeuvre in the lab without gravity, he started tying tethers all over the place. Just spare rope he found in one of the storage compartments. Probably meant for something else, likely EVAs, but it would do.

It could occupy him for a bit and helped him to get from A to B far more practically.

Hope shook her head as she watched him basically make a web of red, orange and blue tethers all over the place. They criss-crossed at different angles, far enough apart that he was able to grapple from one to the next with much more ease. He made it so he could climb along to the nearest computer setup, taking him exactly where he needed to be.

It was fine with her so long as it stopped him from creating a mess. He didn’t knock things over nearly as much when he wasn’t accidently smashing into a shelf at terminal velocity. So long as she didn’t end up clotheslining herself on one, they could stay.

Once he eventually got his bearings, which she knew he would, they’d likely come down anyway.

This wasn’t going to be a quick and easy mission. Technically, they had no clue what they were looking for. It was going to be a lot of checking around the system for an answer as to why Tau Ceti wasn’t dimming like the rest of the stars around it. What made this star different? They were flying into this entire situation blind.

The first order of business—after the aliens—was getting a sample of the Astrophage in this system. If they were lucky, it would tell them why Tau Ceti wasn’t dimming.

While he worked through the lab, Hope buckled herself into the pilot seat and ran through a quick systems check. They’d burned slightly less fuel than expected, which was always a plus. They also had a lot more food stored for the two of them since it was down from a four-person crew, to two.

No structural damage, no fuel tank warnings, all spin drives running smoothly.

The trip to Tau Ceti had been smooth for the Hail Mary, all things considered.

Setting up a diagnostic scan for the internal systems, a notice popped up on the monitor that it would take roughly 2 hours for a full diagnostic to be run. It would do so smoothly in the background, not interfering with any of their needed activity. They could still do EVAs, their oxygen and water weren’t affected, and power would remain on without a hiccup. It would just be longer than she liked. She wanted the assurance that the software was as fully functional as the hardware.

She did trust the crew that had built the ship. She’d loomed over their shoulders like an omen long enough to be certain they were the best of the best.

It also made her feel better that no warning messages or alerts were present on any of the monitors. The only thing that showed up was the proximity alert for Blip A, their new neighbour. That alert would remain for as long as they were parked side by side.

So, while Grace was playing Spiderman and building his web out in the lab, she curled herself up in the pilot’s chair and closed her eyes. The straps dug in slightly uncomfortably, but she’d rather deal with that than floating around.

Exhausted from the coma recovery and abrupt excitement that followed, she was asleep within minutes.

After he had finished with his web of ropes, Grace became aware of the empty room. Having Hope awake had rapidly become the norm. Now, looking around the room after several hours and not being able to find her...set him on edge. As though, if he looked away, she’d disappear. Or he’d wake up and she’d still be in the bunk beside him, deep in a coma, and everything had just been a dream.

That would be one crazy dream.

Even just the fifteen minutes while she was eating and showering, he’d found himself looking over his shoulder for her. The sensation of her fingers through his hair remained like a phantom whisper.

Twitchy about not having eyes on her, he left the lab and headed for the control room. He copied the movements he’d seen Hope use, manoeuvring with significantly more grace. He just needed to tell him body not to try and move like there was gravity, because it never worked.

Once he saw Hope, he halted as quietly as he was capable of and nearly ran face first into the co-pilot seat.

She was sitting cross-legged in the pilot’s chair, small enough that she still had room on either side of her legs within the confines of the armrests, and her arms were crossed over her chest like an X. Carefully leaning around the chair to get a better look, he realized why.

Sleeping in zero g meant that your limbs would float away from you. It was why they’d sleep strapped down when in their bunks, pinned in placed to attempt to make it as comfortable as possible. Since she was not in her bunk, her arms and legs would have just floated up without restraint.

The harness for the seat kept her butt—and therefore her crossed legs—in place, but not much else.

So, she’d slipped each of her hands into the upper part of her flight suit, slightly unzipped, at the opposite shoulder. It gave the impression of a mummy. The weight of the harness’s straps pinned her hands at her collarbone and prevented them from moving.

Hope also had notoriously cold hands. He knew that from experience. Her fingers basically always felt like she’d just pulled them from an ice-bath. Once she realized how warm he ran, she made a habit of sticking those icy digits down the back of his shirt collar.

—wait, when did she do that?

He flinched slightly. Trying to force a memory never worked well for him. He knew Hope had stuck her hands down the back of his shirt, but trying to actually bring up the memory only resulted in a headache right behind his eyes.

To help herself now, she’d tucked each hand into the flight suit. She was warm and her pinned hands meant no floating limbs.

The length of her braid had drifted up over her shoulder, but it wasn’t interfering with her rest.

He had to give her credit, it was smart. It would have been uncomfortable—in his opinion—but Hope spent most of her time seated in a very similar position. It was perfect for her. The first several weeks they’d been stuck on the aircraft carrier had seen her sitting nearly identical to this. She curled herself into her chair, hunched over her tablet or computer, and worked.

The posture of a shrimp was one she knew well. Not that he had much right to judge her; he was usually slouched in his seat with his feet kicked up. He learned quickly not to do that in her station.

A glimmer near her hands caught his eye.

The necklace he’d seen in the video log drifted near her neck, mostly tucked out of place but it had been dislodged when she opened her flight suit enough for her hands. She must have grabbed it from her things when she was going through her tote.

While he’d seen the Iron Ring—which looked like it was made of something else, likely titanium or steel—he had not seen the little dime-sized engraving coin. The little disc was connected to the chain through another link, so it drifted up more easily.

Curiosity won out and Grace hovered just a little closer.

He could smell the soap from her shower.

It was the emblem for Project Hail Mary. The same one he had seen engraved on the commemorative plaques along the main wall while he was first exploring. A sleek outline of the Hail Mary with a star that represented Tau Ceti was placed ahead of it. Likely, it had been gifted to her when she joined the mission, or maybe it had been added to her things as a surprise when she woke up.

It drifted, slowly rotating. Writing?

What did it say?

The writing was far too small for him to read unless he got closer, which was too risky when it came to possibly waking her up. Not only would that be awkward—Hope waking up to him staring fixatedly toward her chest? No, thank you—but he didn’t want to risk disrupting her sleep.

Mary would alert them to their next delivery, which Grace would bet arrived within the next hour or so, so she needed to sleep while possible.

He couldn’t fault her for forcing herself to stay awake; seriously, how often could one say they got to communicate with aliens?

More importantly, they were aliens that had a Petrova Line. They were intelligent, they wanted to talk, and they were dealing with the same issue as Earth. This is the entire reason for their mission. To discover everything there is to Tau Ceti Astrophage and the Petrova Line so they could send it back to Earth. There’s no time for sleep!

He watched Hope’s face for a moment, relaxed. Some of her hair had slipped from the braid she’d done and fell over her forehead.

Well, maybe some sleep.

He remembered the feeling of waking up from the coma. Running around the ship, trying to figure out where he was and what he was doing on a ship in space. It made him feel like he’s just finished a triathlon with no training. Every muscle in his body was lax with exhaustion, and he’d slipped off the ladder several times while climbing up and down.

Hope waited until her work was done before she let herself rest.

As he watched her sleep, he realized that she looked different.

He hadn’t noticed when he’d watched her during her coma. As his memories trickled back, he was able to differentiate this Hope from past-Hope.

It wasn’t just because the usual signs of sleep deprivation fading, or that her hair had grown out. She was softer. She nearly lived off of coffee, so she had always tended to remain on the slim side. Bordering on unhealthy. But now, after 4 years of liquid meals tailored for their perfect health and an abundance of sleep and muscle stimulation, she had filled out differently.

Her sharp cheekbones remained, and her slim stature was unmistakeable. She was always going to be smaller. But her collarbone wasn’t as visible, and the dimple that she had in her right cheek popped more easily when she smiled.

When he’d held her earlier, he hadn’t felt bones. Her ribs weren’t evident under his hand and her vertebra didn’t press out against the skin at the back of her neck.

Of all things, it took a 4-year long coma for Hope to finally reach a healthy point. Physically, at least. There was more going on with her if she agreed to come on a one-way to space.

Grace reached for her without conscious intent; his fingers caught the loose lock of hair and brushed it back from her face. His fingertips barely skimmed her forehead before carding back through the soft strands. Her braid wasn’t as meticulously tight as it used to be; this one was plaited back almost lazily, letting the strands start to slip.

Her only reaction was a deeper exhale, like a sigh in her sleep, as her subconscious registered the touch.

For some reason, the action felt automatic. Natural. Like when she’d left the lab earlier and stroked a hand down the back of his hair. Muscle memory.

Maybe it was just humans searching for contact, gravitating closer while isolated away from the rest of humanity. Maybe it was something he couldn’t remember, something that was there but out of his reach.

Damn his broken brain.

Grace remembered enough to know that Hope wasn’t cold to him. While the engineer kept herself at a distance, even from him to a degree, he was welcomed in closer than the others had been. She laughed and joked with him. Yes, she threatened him with candy related violence when he got on her nerves, but she that actually a good thing coming from her.

Hope was closed off. She had been from day one. For someone who worked with nearly every team on the Ganzu, she was also the most reclusive. When standing among a group, she kept herself apart. She would clasp her hands behind her back, sometimes even twisting them into the material at the back of her shirt, so people wouldn’t try to shake her hand. She angled away from conversations, hoping not to be pulled into them. Her headphones basically lived either on her head or around her neck, excluding herself from her surroundings.

Except…with him.

She would shift one side of her headphones off her ear when he was there, listening to him babble on about his work. Her music played lower when he was around in the event she needed to hear him.

She turned her chair to face toward his lab, even if she wasn’t directly engaging with him.

She cut through his station to get to Dimitri, though she could have gone around and saved herself time.

Getting a reaction out of Hope, even one that included being threatened with a Twizzler, was better than the cold shoulder others received.

But overall, Hope had become his friend. He remembered enough to understand that part. For someone who kept the world at arm’s length, it was a massive compliment. Between his tendency toward arrogance and annoyance and her temper and reservedness, it was a surprising companionship.

Now, she looked at him with sadness in her eyes.

The longer she was awake, the clearer she became. At first, everything had been lethargic and murky. She’d followed his lead while she recalibrated to the situation in which she found herself. Hope loved to plan. She always had things mapped out before she did anything; said plans had been completely changed when she didn’t wake up on time.

And her crew was gone.

Her mind may have come through the coma intact, but she had her own demons in her head.

Grace didn’t doubt his presence alone made her look at him that way. She’d confirmed what he had already felt; he wasn’t meant to be here.

The last she knew, he was safe on Earth. She came up here assuming he was safe—or as safe as someone can be on a doomed planet.

He didn’t know what Hope’s plan was when she came to the Hail Mary, when she accepted to be the fourth member of the crew, but he knew that she must have had one. He was not part of that plan.

Maybe that’s what made her look at him like someone in mourning.

~

Hope had been hauled out of her cave of Engineering and was sitting with Stratt in the office she had commandeered on the Ganzu. She had the latest printouts of the ship stacked in front of the older woman, the top page showing the blueprints for the dormitory section. Once it was officially signed off, it would be sent along to the techs to begin construction of the individual modules.

It was rare she had to meet with Stratt, but this one was unavoidable.

“Pardon?” Stratt looked up from the pages.

Hope lifted three fingers one by one. “Pilot, Engineer, Scientist. Those are the three required specialities for the mission. But you have the ship setup for four people. What makes a fourth necessary?”

Stratt straightened up, putting down the paper. “I’m surprised, Dr. Emrys, I figured you would understand.” Hope scowled at the jab but waited for her to continue. “The success of a mission such as Project Hail Mary relies on studying all the variables. We need to anticipate what can go wrong before we even launch.”

“Redundancy,” Hope pointed out.

“Exactly. A fourth crew member who has a solid understanding of all aspects of the mission. Someone who can pilot and repair the ship and understands the science needed to study Tau Ceti and the possible Astrophage present in the system.”

Hope pushed her hair back as she slouched slightly in her chair. She’d been awake for the past 38 hours and it was rapidly catching up. No amount of coffee would get her brain back to full function. “You’re looking for a unicorn,” she sighed.

Stratt watched the woman across from her, the same blank look on her face that seemed ever-present.

It had already been several weeks since Hope was first brought to the Ganzu and she had systematically built the perfect ship—on paper.

In that time, she and Grace had been sequestering themselves away roughly once a day to work on the scientific part of the project. He taught her how to use all of the equipment that they would be bringing with them, which made it significantly easier for her to design the lab and how best to place everything for the simulated gravity of the centrifuge.

She had started okaying the layout of the lab with him to be sure it was set up for optimal convenience, especially when the centrifuge sent them back to the drawing board.

He also taught her everything they knew about Astrohpage to that point and would fill her in on anything new that came up during the continued studies of the tiny microbes.

It was not a graceful partnership, though the two apparently provided ample entertainment for the others on the carrier when Hope inevitably lost her patience with Grace. Again.

“Actually, I’m looking for you.”

Hope went completely still in her seat. Stratt was nearly certain she had stopped breathing.

Her? On the Hail Mary?

As the Engineer was still trying to compute what she had just been told, Stratt forged ahead. “The fourth crew member is the backup, yes. If anything happens to the pilot, the engineer, or the scientist on board, there is someone who can take their place. You said so yourself, anything can happen once the Hail Mary takes off for Tau Ceti. This is one such way we can be prepared.”

“By…sending me into space to die?” Hope finally spoke up, not quite shouting.

“By sending our best possible chance for success,” she corrected calmly.

Hope felt hot. A random, intense heat that crowded under her skin and brought sweat to her forehead. Colour drained her from face so rapidly she looked on the verge of passing out for a moment. Everything she had been pouring into the ship suddenly changed. Was this Stratt’s plan from the beginning? Submerge her in the thick of everything so she couldn’t deny the logic of it?

Because there was logic. Someone could die during their coma. Someone could be injured or lost during an EVA or any other number of possibilities. They had a backup crew here on the ground that would take over if something happened to someone on the Primary crew, it made sense to have someone on the ship itself that would serve the same purpose.

“And if I say no?”

Stratt tipped her head in a small show of acquiescence. “We try to find someone that has similar qualifications to act as the backup.”

Hope scoffed. Even she knew that was a long shot. Especially considering how rare the gene was for the coma. Which, apparently, she has. Suddenly, it made sense why they required medical tests of all the crew on board the Ganzu aircraft carrier. She was weeding out those who wouldn’t even qualify for the mission.

Hope had rare qualifications as it is but add on the genetic chain that allowed her to survive a coma…the odds of finding someone else with those qualifications was a greater longshot than the Hail Mary itself.

“How long have you been planning this?” she asked quietly, her eyes fixated on Stratt’s hands. Fingers laced atop the desk, still and relaxed. How was she always so relaxed?

“Since we confirmed you are coma resistant.”

“Were you gunna tell me before the launch, or just surprise me in Tau Ceti?”

“Once we confirmed you could understand the necessary science. You’ve been progressing well with Dr. Grace.”

The sweat that had erupted after the initial shock was rapidly cooling on her skin, leaving a chill to set in. She could still feel her hair dampening, but the internal burn had subsided slightly. Now, she just felt heavy and weak. A body trying to recover. “He knew?”

“No,” Stratt immediately denied. “Very few knew of the plan for a backup, and who we were considering. Aside from the original Project Hail Mary leaders, you are the only one we have told. Dr. Grace is entirely under the impression his lessons with you are for the betterment of the ship.”

Need to know. Stratt definitely functioned on that logic. Grace didn’t need to know that Hope was being considered for a suicide mission, so he was kept in the dark. Regardless of the fact that it was his lessons with her that filled in the missing piece in her qualifications.

“You have no family. No children. Your husband is gone. You don’t even have pets. You’ve dedicated your life to send others into space, crafting the ships to keep them safe and provide them the greatest chance for success. Yes; I am asking that you give up your life for this mission. For our greatest chance of success.” Silence fell over the room, stretching between the two women like a fog.

Even though she was wearing her coveralls properly today, zipped up beneath her collarbone, she could feel shivers setting in. Her stomach rolled. But also, at the base of her skull, rage simmer like an exposed nerve.

“Take some time to consider,” Stratt concluded, beginning to straighten the papers they had been discussing before Hope had decided to ask the question that apparently would blow up her entire life.

Or potentially end it, as was apparently the case.

Hope didn’t even have a usual retort. She slowly rose from the chair and exited the room without saying anything.

Stratt watched her leave. It was the quietest the engineer had ever been with her.

The usual bustle of the carried didn’t slow, however, and crew members dodged passed her as she meandered through the halls. Going back to her station suddenly felt stifling, so she made her way up toward the flight-deck instead. Less people lingered around, but the few that were present shouted warnings as soon as they say her.

She waved them off, motioning over to the section she’d seen other people hang around. Sneaking cigarettes or just trying to escape the cramped quarters inside. It was far from the edge of the ship, and the metal walls created a perfect buffer against the wind.

Most of the crew was likely in the cafeteria now considering it had already been close to dinner when she went up to meet with Stratt. This meant that the little nook was empty and gave her some much needed solitude and privacy.

Sinking down against the wall until her butt hit the floor, she heaved out a harsh breath. A dull roll of nausea settled low in her stomach and the back of her throat.

Could she really accept?

Stratt wasn’t wrong. She had no family, blood or otherwise, and basically dedicated every moment of her life to work. The most contact she had outside of her job was Abe. The few friends she stayed in contact with were also through work. It was a bleak thought, but she wouldn’t be leaving anything behind. Not even a lineage.

Squeezing her hands, her knuckled popped against the force.

Even with the wall acting as a buffer the wind cut around the corner and further chilled the sweat that had broken out across her skin.

“Fuck,” she breathed out, bowing her head down to her knees.

What a weird way to consider suicide. How does someone start to consider such an offer? Could it even be called that?

The metal of the ship was cold against her back and under her butt, grounding her to the moment. The roar of wind and waves helped to cut out the world more effectively than her headphones ever could. No sound carried over from the crew that had caught her coming on deck, but they also gave her a wide berth. She probably looked pale and shaky even just at a glance. It was likely that they assumed she was just seasick and going to hide around the corner to throw up.

Which was still a possibility.

“You hiding?”

Hope flinched in surprise, looking up to where Dr. Grace was leaning around the corner, looking down at her. He was wrapped in the large, knitted cardigan he favoured. It would do well to protect him from the chill.

She forced her tense muscles to uncoil again and looked back out toward the sea. “Not many places to do that,” she deflected. “Never thought I’d say that an aircraft carrier is starting to feel too small.”

“Which is why I came looking for you. People here eat like animals, and you missed dinner.” Grace held out a metal thermos, the cap screwed on tightly. He was holding a fork against the container as well. “It’s just ramen, but pretty sure the last thing you ate was…coffee.”

Hope huffed out a laugh. He wasn’t wrong.

He didn’t wait for an invitation and plopped down beside her. The thermos was offered again, now within reach. Knowing better than to deny the man, pushy teacher that he was, she grabbed it and the fork. Popping the fork in her mouth to free her hands, she unscrewed the lid and carefully placed it at her feet.

A low roll of nausea was still there, but maybe some food would actually help. Anxiety on an empty stomach tended to make things worse.

Grace watched her discretely from the corner of his eye, making sure she was actually going to eat. He noticed the tremor running through her arms and hands first, then realized her entire body had a minute shake to it. Like when the wet cold of winter sets into your bones and you can’t escape the chill.

“You’re shaking.”

“Not exactly the Caribbean up here,” she replied easily, shaking out her shoulders as though that would stop the tremble. She wasn’t wrong, the wind coming off the water was frigid and the wall only buffered so much of it. Grace watched her a moment longer before he reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag of sour Skittles.

Fork still hanging out of her mouth, Hope looked over at the sound of a crinkling package.

He felt her stare and looked up before he had even opened the candy. “Don’t judge me.”

Hope took the fork and stuck it inside the thermos instead. “Me? Never,” she teased.

Both fell quiet as they turned their focus out to the ocean. The sun was setting rapidly over the horizon. It would only grow colder as the light disappeared. Grace crunched away at the candies he brought as Hope slowly made progress through the hot ramen. It was spicy and had a creamy sauce, which she tried to avoid getting all over herself.

The warmth settled in her stomach and helped to soothe her nerves, while warming her against the cold.

The shaking didn’t subside,

“How’d the meeting go with Stratt?” he asked after a few minutes.

Hope paused, wondering if she should tell him. Grace had been vocal about how he didn’t understand the decision of the Primary and Secondary crew volunteering for the mission. ‘How do you just volunteer to die?’.

“Business as usual,” she answered. Better he does not know, at least for now. Once she came to an actual decision, she’d reconsider. Eventually, he’d find out. She knew she would have to tell him once she made her choice. No point is stressing the man when she was still likely to say no. “What’s next on the lesson plan, Dr. Grace?”

Grace scoffed. “For you? Sleep. You’ve been at it for nearly 40 hours. Dr. Lamai suggested I hide a sleeping pill in your dinner.” Hope paused mid-chew. “I didn’t!”

~

Out of curiosity, she held the soldering iron to the base that made up Tau Ceti for several seconds, but not a single mark was left behind when she pulled it back. The iron didn’t get that hot in comparison to other tools, so it wasn’t a great surprise, but it still made her curious about the strange material.

As she soldered some wire of their own, looping it around like a coil to make sure it was easily noticeable, Grace hovered around her shoulder.

“Strong stuff,” he marvelled, watching her little experiment. “What if the spectrometer isn’t wrong, and this is actually xenon? Maybe they have some way of making it a solid?”

Hope nodded along slowly, focusing on her work. Thankfully, everything stuck pretty well considering the strange solid-xenon. “I want to learn how they did that. This stuff puts our metals to shame.”

“We should call it xenonite,” he declared. “It’s made of xenon, but it’s not the exact same as xenon. Xenonite. I was also thinking, we should give i a name. Like, we’re humans. Or Earthlings, but that feels like a bad comedy.” He was rambling again. “And they’re from Eridani system, so maybe…Eridians? Sounds like iridium, which is definitely one of the cooler sounding periodic elements.”

She was left to fight a smile as she listened to him go on about naming their new neighbours and the foreign metal they used. Maybe it was the teacher in him. But it could very well be the scientist in him, too. Both loved naming things.

“Sure, Grace. Xenonite created by the Eridians. Better than calling them E.T.”

“Right! We should attach a note or something, like a little piece that says ‘Earth’. ‘Look at the little Earthlings’.” Did he just quote Independence Day?

“You think they read English?” she replied, setting aside the solder to let the metal cool. When she glanced back at him, he was hovering close. He’d stripped down the top section of his suit, showing that he was wearing a black t-shirt with a pair of large yellow cat eyes on the front. “Did you clean up the control room like I asked?”

Grace pouted, slouching. “Do I have to do that now?”

“Would you rather do it after we turn off the centrifuge?”

Grace made a face, already imagining trying to chase after Skittles in zero g. “Alright, fine.”

She watched him turn reluctantly toward the control room. “And start strapping some shit down before it all starts floating again!”

“Language!”

“Bite me!”

It was familiar. The jabs and backtalk. This had been most of their life on the Ganzu, stationed side by side but so drastically different. She wanted to be annoyed—maybe a small part of her was—that he was still so messy, but in reality, it was a strange comfort while so far from home.

Not that she’d tell him that.

Looking at the little model and her handiwork, she huffed. Fine. It only took another minute to attach a tiny piece of paper to the wire. It stuck out like a flag, with EARTH written in pen. It was ridiculous, they’d never know what it said. She also had her doubts the paper would even survive. Grace had told her that the canister was traveling between their ships for over forty minutes, in the vacuum of space, and was still hot when it got it inside.

Grace had done some back-of-the-napkin math, muttering under his breath, and decided their atmosphere was likely hotter than the boiling point of water. It would have lost close to 100 degrees of heat during the trip, and it was still hot to touch when he got it back inside.

The paper would likely burn up in their atmosphere.

And yet, Grace wanted a note. So, she added the note.

Carefully, she folded the model back into the narrow shape it came in and slipped it into the canister. The only way they were going to get the message back to the other ship was to send it back in the original packaging, as much as they both wanted to keep it to examine the material.

They were keeping the other little piece they received, the Petrova model. Hope wanted to do some more tests on the metal, and Grace didn’t see a reason to send it back. What would they do, give a thumbs up? ‘Yes, we, too, have a Petrova line’. They’d get to that point eventually.

She twisted the ends back into place, locking the canister, and placed it aside. The lab needed to be cleaned up. More things had been removed from their storage drawers and containers, which meant more debris to float around. They needed to turn off the centrifuge to send the canister back, and she was tired of flicking things away before they could smack her in the face.

Doing her best to return everything to the state it was in when she went to sleep provided her the chance to see more into Grace’s initial days awake. While the ship is in thrust, several of the tables would be sideways and were designed for multipurpose; table and whiteboard. He’d written on one of them, working out in longhand to figure out where he was. There were even gravity calculations, which he must have written out to try and prove—or disprove—that he was actually on a ship travelling through space.

On the bottom of the whiteboard, he’d scrawled out home in 113.8 years :(

He was calculating how he could use the remaining fuel to get home, so he’d already picked through the computers to find their tank percentage. Most of their tanks were emptied out by the time the Hail Mary reached Tau Ceti, leaving enough for them to explore within the system but getting home would be impossible. The math made her frown for a moment, because while it would take them too long to survive the trip, the Astrophage wouldn’t take them that long.

Until she realized he wasn’t doing the calculations with Astrophage.

He hadn’t remembered what that was when he first woke up, he was making the calculations for the use of regular rocket fuel.

Even without any memory, his brain just wanted him to go home.

Unease prickled at the back of her neck again. The unsettling pit in her stomach told her that there was more to this than either of them knew. The radio silence, the early coma, the amnesia.

It lined up in a way Hope greatly disliked.

She wouldn’t say it. She could be wrong. Even if she was correct, though, how do you tell someone they were sent to die against their will?

Her thumb swiped at the whiteboard right next to the frowning face he’s drawn. Normally, she’d say it was childish. But this time it just made everything feel that much more gut wrenching.

She couldn’t even put herself in his shoes in that moment. Waking up to nothing familiar, not even yourself, but knowing enough to calculate that you were going to die in space. Alone. She’d been under, their friends were dead, and he was left with only a broken brain to try and parse out where he was and how he got there.

“Hey, so I think I got all the Skittles, but can you promise not to hit me if I…missed…one…” Grace trailed off as he caught where she was staring at, forgetting that he’d even written out those calculations when he’d first woken up.

The deep gnawing hopelessness came back. When he’d seen those numbers, every bit of will had bled from his body like an open wound. It was in part why he spent so much of his time sitting with Hope. Even if she wasn’t awake, her being alive had provided a temporary balm. Even without remembering who he was, or why he was there, he was given a tiny glimmer of hope that he wasn’t alone. Either he sat with her or he’d have stayed curled up in the fetal position on the floor.

He didn’t want to die at all. But he definitely didn’t want to die alone.

“Your math was right,” Hope said quietly. “But you were using the wrong fuel,” she tacked on. Her thumb swiped the board, wiping away the frowny face.

Her back was to him. It didn’t stop Grace from hearing the thickness in her voice. He knew that feeling well.

“But even with Astrophage, we don’t have enough,” she finished. She wiped away the entire bottom line of the calculations. If they were to turn around, even right that second, they’d be dead and gone by the time the Hail Mary returned to Earth. Not that there would be a reason to go back. If they didn’t solve the problem with the sun, there wouldn’t be anyone or anything to go back to.

Grace’s voice was small. “I know.”

He picked up one of the rags he’d used while working through his thoughts. It was stained from the many colours of the dry erase markers.

Reaching past Hope, he swiped a line down the entire board, removing chunks of his equations. It didn’t change the reality, but it felt better not to be faced with it.

Hope took the rag from him and wiped away the rest. “I’m impressed. Your brain was running on one broken cylinder, and you still got the math right.”

Grace bumped her shoulder with his. “Told you I was good at math,” he boasted with a smile. It was a bit forced, not the true smile he usually wore. But it was better than the alternative. “Did you finish the model?”

“Yea, it’s back in the canister.” She was avoiding looking at him, turning the other way around so she could keep her back toward him as she went for the canister. All of the soldering supplies were already packed away and their storage containers put where they belong.

Hope snagged the canister before she turned and tossed it to him. Grace was distracted enough by catching it that he didn’t see the glossiness of her eyes.

“No promises I won’t hit you if you missed a skittle. The control room is probably the worst possible place you could’ve dropped your candy.”

He withheld his pout this time. She was right, of course. Keeping things out of the delicate equipment in the control room was pretty high on the list of rules. His shoulders still drooped.

“I’m going to secure the stuff down in the dorm before disengaging the centrifuge. You should put your suit back on while you still have gravity.” She looked down at the white thermals that were pulled down to his hips. “Unless you want me to do it?”

Grace paused a moment, looking at the canister. He only had to throw it out of the airlock, so there wasn’t any need for running along the hull this time. The thought of going back out into the vacuum of space was less than appealing, but if he could just toss the item from the airlock, that made everything easier.

“Can you make sure we’re positioned to face them? I’ll just give it a toss?” To show, he pretended to prepare for a two-handed underhand toss with the container.

She barely shrugged. “Yeah, that’s easy.” Disappearing down the hall, she left him to get ready while heading for the dorm.

For you, Grace thought. She could probably manoeuvre the Hail Mary blindfolded, with one hand behind her back. His messy attempts while trying to get away from the Blip A gave him a taste of just how delicate the controls actually are for the ship. With his luck, he’d accidentally run into the alien ship.

Is spaceship insurance a thing?

Bringing the canister with him, he tucked it aside in the airlock before he started collecting the pieces of his suit. The main bits made it to the hooks, but the gloves and chest piece that disconnected from the oxygen pack had wandered off in the zero g.

He pulled the thermals back up, using the cord on the back to zip it back up. It was uncomfortably tight. He looked forward to getting back into his regular clothes, or even the flight suit he had on before. At least those fit him. Did he grab the wrong size earlier?

By the time Hope came back, he was on the final touches of the suit and was trying to get the helmet on without knocking his glasses askew again.

“Let me help,” she interrupted him, taking the helmet and tapping his hands away. She slipped the helmet down carefully, having him angle his head so the glasses weren’t forced down his face as she pulled it on. He had to bend slightly as she stretched to make up for the height difference.

She doublechecked his equipment with practiced ease, rotating his arm to check his monitor and make sure the levels were reading okay.

It made him wonder more on Hope’s place on the ship.

Not that his memory was the most reliable thing at the moment, but what had come back to him hold him that she wasn’t on the roster for the mission. Stratt was looking through possible candidates for the Pilot, Engineer, and Scientist, but this backup position wasn’t one he remembered yet. His memory was still stuck early on in the planning.

She obviously had training. Not just on the ship itself, but with the equipment. The suit was familiar to her. She knew what to check. She seemed to have a handle on zero g, which could be chalked up to her time on the Hail Mary without the crew. She just seemed to be overall prepared to be on the mission. Not just the ship.

Why Hope? She seemed like the most overqualified person to send to their death.

She stepped back and gave him a questioning thumbs up.

He mirrored her, confirming everything was good.

“I’m going to go and disengage the centrifuge. Hook yourself in and hold onto something. Maybe strap that down, too.” She pointed over to the canister.

“Yes, ma’am,” he confirmed, giving a mock salute against the helmet.

A fond smile softened her expression as she closed him into the airlock, sealing the door with him inside. He could see her nod to him through the small viewport, then she was gone.

Once he and the package were strapped in, he stood with nothing but his own silence as he waited. Less than a minute later, the triple tone alarm came through the speakers, and he felt an abrupt, though minor, pull. Unlike when the ship had disconnected from the fuel tanks and engines, there was no shudder to tell him they were moving. Instead, the steadily feeling of falling grew worse and worse as gravity disappeared.

Grace held the wall to anchor himself in place, breathing through the feeling of his stomach turning as he gradually grew weightless.

It was less jarring this time. He was already adjusting to the off-and-on gravity.

The cables drew the ship in while it was still spinning, a slow and careful process, in order to make sure there was always tension on the cables. If the ship stopped its circular momentum while the living space was disconnected, there was the risk of the cables tangling or getting caught or the modules colliding with the tanks. They needed to reel in while they were still moving to make sure everything happened safely and as planned.

Only minutes later, Mary’s voice came through the comms. “Reconnection Successful.”

Leaving the canister where he had strapped it in, Grace moved over to the small view port that allowed him to see outside. With ease, Hope adjusted their alignment with the other ship to bring them back to their original position. It was such a careful, gradual movement that he barely felt it. Nothing like the sharp, jerky movements he’d been doing.

If he remembered correctly, Mary had declared it as erratic movement detected.

Soon, he had full view of the other ship again. It remained still, not trying to mirror their movements this time. Likely, they had some understanding of what they were doing. Once they were in place, she spoke up through the comms in the helmet.

“You’re all set, Grace.”

~

Grace nearly dropped the model. “What? What was that face? Are you hurt? What’s wrong?” He was already leaning around the table and starting to look her over, checking her from head to toe as though he would spot an injury. Was it a delayed reaction from the coma?

“Relax, it’s a hunger pain,” she explained calmly, getting up from her stool and massaging her fingers into the right side of her stomach. “I need to go eat. And shower, while we still have gravity.”

His shoulders immediately relaxed. “Oh, yea! You go; I’ll just be combing through some star charts!” He waved a hand over toward the computer setup. “Take your time!”

She rounded past him on her way toward the corridor, a hand reaching up like muscle memory, so her fingers caught and ran through the short strands of hair on the back of his head. Grace froze for a moment, only turning to look at her as she was disappearing around the corner.

His skin prickled with goosebumps after the brief contact, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. He felt tingly all the way to his toes. She did it like the action was familiar to her. Was it like his need to touch her while she’d been asleep? A version of comfort? She’d done something similar when he’d first hugged her.

And proceeded to babble like a nutcase.

Grace fiddled with the model in his hands, pressing the small, rounded ends into his fingertips. It felt like his brain was trying to remind him of something, but it was out of his reach.

In the dorm, Hope was greeted by the medical robot as soon as she entered. It had her first tube of food and a cup of water. Now that the centrifuge was engaged, they could use actual cups instead of water pouches.

For the moment, she did her best to ignore the mess of things all over the floor due to Grace’s lack of planning before they arrived in Tau Ceti. She’d give him a pass since his brain was malfunctioning. Amnesia was probably the only valid excuse to not prepare for zero g.

She drank the water but put the tube aside until she showered and dressed properly.

The bathroom was small, bordering on cramped. It allowed for just enough space to fit a body standing, crouching down, or kneeling. The toilet was stored in a compartment in the wall, so it could be put away to allow a bit more space but could also be adjusted to thrust gravity, centrifuge gravity, and zero g. All the water was collected under their feet to be recycled and reused through the system. Since it could also be used in thrust or centrifuge, that meant the wall and the floor had a similar setup.

Not a single drop went to waste.

Hope was accustomed to time management, and conserving water. Living on the Ganzu with so many people on board meant they had to be conscious of the water they used—it was also shared showers, so modesty basically didn’t exist. She turned the water on long enough to wet her hair before using the provided soap to scrub herself from head to toe, wiping away the coma sweat and grease from her hair.

Majority of the water went to rinsing herself off, especially her very grown out hair.

Drying off as best she could inside the small space, she opened the door—a sliding one that disappeared into the wall when opened—enough to peek out and confirm that Grace hadn’t come down for any reason. She was certain that he’d completely forget her mentioning a shower and rush in excitedly if he found the correct system, then he’d be mortified and refuse to look her in the eye for a week.

So, she dressed quickly and made sure to zip her flight suit up properly to avoid the chill of the cool air on damp skin.

She felt infinitely more human now that she was clean and back in her own, proper clothes (underwear).

Devouring the food mixture as quickly as her stomach could agree with, she pulled her damp hair back into her familiar French braid and made a mental note to cut some of it off when she got the chance. The dark strands had reached down to her mid back now, longer than she’d ever let it get before. It made her thankful that she had been told to cut it before leaving Earth.

Actually, they’d told her to shave it, but she threatened bodily harm to anyone who came near her with a set of clippers.

The relief of the shower set into her bones and Hope took a moment to sit on the edge of her bunk. She played with the sleeves, pulling them down over her hands.

It had only been roughly two hours since she woke up but already so much had happened.

Part of her was relieved to see such a familiar face with her aboard the Hail Mary, but the rest of her was terrified.

Ryland Grace did not want to go. He had vocalized it several times, both to her and with others, that he would not be able to choose death even if it meant saving the human race. He was upfront about it, never trying to put on a brave face or false impression. Ryland Grace did not want to die.

His presence on the Hail Mary felt wrong.

It also brought up concerns that Hope was remembering from her final days awake. Radio contact with the ground had abruptly gone quiet for several hours, and when they came back the entire tone seemed to have shifted. When they pressed for her to be put under sooner, they all got very dodgy when she was asking about the status of the rest of the crew. She wasn’t given a concrete reason for the change.

The doctor had babbled something about precision timing and best-case scenarios.

Had something happened to DuBois and Shapiro while she was still awake?

Hope’s jaw clenched, popping the muscles on her temple with the force. She was already well versed in Stratt’s ‘only need to know’ attitude. If something happened, she very likely ordered complete silence on the matter and to not tell Hope. This was fairly easy, since Hope’s only contact with the world occurred through radio contact with the ground, through the Taskforce.

And now neither of them had answers.

Grace’s amnesia was another question in her mind, but that was less straight forward when it came to the ‘how’. It’s very likely a side-effect from the coma, but the strange behaviors around Hope’s final days and her surprise crew member made her think otherwise.

She was not someone to believe in coincidences. Even less so when it came to Eva Stratt.

The only person more neurotic about having a contingency plan than Hope, was Stratt. The entire situation was giving her a feeling she couldn’t shake, like a tickle of anxiety in the back of her skull that warned her of danger.

But the danger had already passed. Her lizard brain just hadn’t caught up.

When she left Earth, there was some final test prep on the ground regarding Astrophage and the tools aboard the Hail Mary. Even with the centrifuge, DuBois was someone who took his job very seriously and he wanted to be certain his methods were perfect. He and Shapiro had been almost living in the simulation lab—and very likely sleeping there, but she tried very hard not to think about that particular part.

She left Earth thinking that Grace would be going back to America to continue teaching. It wasn’t as though the Taskforce was needed after Hail Mary launched. It could be monitored, tracking the trajectory, but that was the most Earth could do regarding the ship. There wouldn’t even be anyone to talk to because all of the crew would be asleep.

Eventually, they were too far away to even connect with the computer for system updates.

Her thoughts refocused when she spotted her tote where she had left it, unopened.

Each of the crew had multiple totes for their belongings, most were occupied with the important necessities such as clothing, toiletries, and other preferred tools they personally selected for the mission. But there was one that was simply items they had chosen to bring with them—sentimental, comforting, familiar.

It was this tote that was different for Grace. The different nametag—just a piece of paper taped down—told her that everything had been very abrupt.

Sliding down from her bunk, she sat herself on the floor with crossed legs. She traced her fingers over the embroidered name patch. Yáo’s and Ilyukhina’s had been opened already, likely in Grace’s attempt to refresh his memory, but had since been zipped closed and shoved back into the corner. Hers, however, was untouched.

Apparently, snooping on the living was a bit harder to do.

Opening it carefully, the first thing that greeted her was a closed wooden box. No writing or etchings, but a dark cherrywood that had been meticulously maintained over the years. Hope carefully placed that aside without opening. She already knew the contents.

It had been placed on top of her favourite henley, worn down over the years and comfortably soft. She caught the hem between her fingers and gently stroked the fabric.

Technically, she knew what was inside already. Someone had been sent back to her apartment once it was confirmed that she would be going on the mission, collecting the things that she listed to bring with her. She had given them the exact clothes she wanted, the books, the tablet. Her favourite hairbrush, an entire bag of hair ties. Stupid, benign stuff in the grand scheme of it all.

Tucked to the side, a stack of papers had been folded in half and shoved between her clothes and the side of the tote. She peeked inside for a moment, spotting the familiar writing on the first page.

Abe. Her old neighbour. The one who didn’t know how to take care of a single appliance he owned and would use that as an excuse to come over for a beer.

Thumbing to the second page, the writing changed. Her old boss, the Director of NASA. The third was an old coworker from JPL, who’d worked with her on ArcLight.

They wrote her letters.

Knowing she was still too fragile to get into that, she refolded them and returned them to the tote. Once things settled a bit she’d take them out again. But there was no rush. Not as though she was going anywhere.

What she pulled out next was unfamiliar. A small, flat box from a jewellery store, unmarked. It was a soft velvet, deep blue in colour. Hope turned if over in her hands a moment, trying to remember it. She wore only a few select pieces of jewellery; none came in a blue velvet box.

Snapping it open, she was greeted with her own necklace. A sleek, titanium chain that was as durable as it was delicate. It was thin, but strong. Long enough that she could slip it over her head instead of undoing a clasp—which it didn’t have. Only two links were made of gold where a clasp was supposed to be. The only fragile part. On the chain were two rings; her Iron Ring when she graduated from the University of Toronto, and her gold wedding band that she’d taken off years ago.

New to the chain, however, was a small pendant.

It was an engraving coin no larger than her thumb, appearing to be made from the same material as the chain. On the front was the Hail Mary mission emblem, delicately but meticulously engraved into the surface with a laser engraver. Impressive. Aerospace Titanium was notoriously horrible to work with.

Writing was etched on the back. “Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.”

It was something she’d said to Stratt. Only once, in passing, while they were still working aboard the Ganzu.

“You make it so hard to hate you,” she muttered to herself. Leave it to Stratt to give her a parting gift that she’d actually appreciate.

She pulled the chain over her head, position it under her braid, then carefully slipped the necklace into her shirt where it was safe and tucked away.

“Hope!”

Grace came bounding into the dorm with the little model in his hands and a broad grin across his face. He came to a halt when he realized that she was sitting surrounding by her belongings, most of which seemed to be clothes—just like in his tote—but he spotted the wooden box to the side of her hip almost immediately.

Her hair laid in a damp braid down her back, nearly to her waistline.

“Sorry,” he breathed, hoping he wasn’t intruding. “I found their system! They’re from 40 Eridani System!”

Timidity forgotten, Grace dropped down beside her and held up the little starburst model. He pointed to the wire that had a small swirl on it and a crystal-like bead, setting it apart from all the others. He kept enough space that he wasn’t touching any of her things, trying to keep his eyes diverted as though to preserve privacy.

“The base here? It’s Tau Ceti. They built the model all around it. I’m pretty sure they’re also asking us where we’re from, they wouldn’t need to include so many others if they just wanted to tell us their home system. Man, they’re far from home.”

Hope reached out to gently take the model from him.

“That stuff they use? The somehow-a-solid xenon. It’s super sturdy. I tried bending the wires a bit and it did nothing. I really want to know what this is. If it is xenon, how’d they turn it into a solid??” She was pretty sure he was talking more to himself than to her; which he’d done even before he was left alone up in space with only an unconscious body to talk to. He reached out to point at one of the BB sized balls. “That’s our system. I want to add something onto it so we can show them where we’re from.”

She frowned slightly. “Are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, look at that ship. Clearly, they’re a bit ahead of us when it comes to space travel. What if they’re not friendly and we give them exact directions to Earth?”

Grace shrugged. “I think if they wanted to do anything to harm us, or Earth, we’d have seen something aggressive from them. I tried to fly the Hail Mary away from them when they first showed up, but they just calmly followed, always staying 217 meters away.”

“They’re obviously intelligent,” she commented, turning the model around in her hands.

“I don’t think we really have a choice in ignoring them.”

She sighed but nodded. “You’re right. Want me to solder something onto this?”

“I was going to do it, but you are definitely better in that department. I’d probably make a mess of it.” He took the model back from her and discretely watched as she repacked her tote. She put the wooden box near the bottom this time.

Now that he was in the dorm, the medical robot meandered over and held out a wrapped parcel of food to Grace. It looked, and smelled, like a burrito. On the package was ‘Day 10 – Meal 1’.

“Ohh, thank you Armando!”

Hope paused in her packing and turned back to him with a raised eyebrow. “You named the medical robot…Armando?”

He grinned proudly. “Seems fitting, right? I mean, it’s literally just a collection of arms. I call the ship Mary, too, by the way. I’m sure that’ll come up soon.” Grace hefted himself back to his feet, now carrying the model and his next meal—thankfully, he had reached the milestone of solid food! “Did you eat?”

“If you could call it that,” she answered. He already knew all about the sludge—the coma brain made it absolutely delicious, but that wore off after a few days, and the body started to crave actual physical food again. “Nothin’ like a toothpaste tube for breakfast…or dinner. What time is it?”

She twisted in place, looking around the dorm. There were several small screens, but none of them displayed the time on the ship.

Grace shrugged. “Can’t say I really keep track of that,” he answered honestly. There were clocks on the ship, both analogue and digital. The computer clocks were the ones he tried not to look at, since they both stated their current date and time with the time differential calculated in, and the time it would be on Earth if they had never left. That one was harder to stomach. “I did notice the ship has day and night settings. Like, the lights change.”

“Yea, they wanted to recreate a 24-hour cycle for the crew. Improves mental health, sleep, daily function…” For a moment, it sounded like she was briefing someone on the ship. Like when new people showed up on the Ganzu at the behest of Stratt. Robotic and detached. “Same with the Don’t Go Crazy room. Even if the crew is only expected to be here for a few months, it takes very little time for the human brain to start to deteriorate in isolation.”

Grace picked at the wrapper of his food, looking between her and his hands. It was easy to pick up on her way of speaking. Just like she used to do while on the carrier, she kept herself apart from those around her. He hesitated a moment before commenting, “You talk like you’re not part of the crew.”

Green eyes looked up at him. “Hm?”

“‘For the crew’, ‘if the crew’. You talk about them like they’re something separate from you. Like you aren’t a part of the Hail Mary crew.”

He wasn’t wrong. She directed her focus over to the totes of their dead crew members. “It’s easier that way,” she admitted quietly. “When you sign up for a suicide mission, the last thing you want to do is get attached.”

~

“What the hell is that made of?” Hope wondered. He held it up between them, slowly rotating it on his fingertips. There didn’t appear to be a front or back, and aside from the designs etched throughout the entire surface, there wasn’t any other signs where it may open. “Looks like the same material as the ship.”

“Let’s find out,” Grace grinned. The Scientist in him was chomping at the bit to figure out what it was and what was inside.

Hope dropped onto one of the stools as he rushed through the lab to grab the XRF spectrometer. She quickly lifted her hair out of the back of her tank top, the feeling of the strands trapped against her skin beginning to irritate her, to pull it over her shoulder to start braiding it. She didn’t have a tie, but it would do for now.

The container was placed on the table in the center of the lab before he held the device out to scan it. Hope watched as confusion immediately set in over his face when it beeped.

“Xenon?” he read aloud.

“Isn’t that a gas?” Hope shook out her arms. Even just the brief minute it took to braid her hair made her arms feel like lead. The zero g had made it slightly easier on her when she woke up, but now her body was being forced to work properly to keep itself up and moving. It was draining her minimal energy. She leaned forward on her elbows. With her chin resting in one hand, she closed her eyes.

“I think this thing’s broken,” he declared, tossing it backward onto the other table behind him.

“Gentle,” she warned. She wasn’t even looking at him. “It’s an alien metal, that thing probably doesn’t know what to make of a foreign substance and probably just gives you what’s closest.”

Grace made a face at her. Of course she was bringing logic to the table.

Knowing exactly what he was like, she didn’t need to have her eyes open to already know what he did. “I saw that.”

“Wha—excuse me, I’m the teacher, I’m supposed to be the one with eyes on the back of my head. Not you.” Hope just smiled, amused, without opening her eyes.

Grace picked the strange container up and started rotating it in his hands, trying to find any sign of a crease. It was only after he’d flipped it around for the nth time that he found the tiniest sign of a ring around each end of the container. It was double ended, so it must have two compartments in it.

“It must thread open like a thermos,” he marvelled quietly. Hope, who’s head had dropped further down but still remained propped on her palm, gave a soft ‘hmm’ to acknowledge what he said. She likely hadn’t even registered it, but her dozing mind was accustomed to hearing Grace muttering and talking to himself while they’d been working side by side on the Ganzu.

He wanted to tell her to go and sleep, knowing that’s what her body was craving so badly. He should also make her eat. Armando would probably start her off on the toothpaste sludge like it did with him.

However, he knew there was no chance he’d be able to convince Dr. Hope ‘Workaholic’ Emrys to go back to the dorm while he was messing around with a mysterious alien package.

Getting a good grip on the thing, he tried twisting off one end. When it didn’t budge, he tried harder. “Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey,” he grunted, making sure he was turning in the right direction.

Nothing.

With the engineer dozing only feet away, he forced down the urge to slam it into the table in hopes it might pop open with the force—this also made him consider it wasn’t a twist top, but trying to pry the end off with his fingernails proved useless, too. And now his fingertips hurt.

Huffing, he spun it around and tried the other end.

Nothing.

Just to give it another try, he picked up the spectrometer and scanned the canister again.

“Still Xenon,” he declared, throwing his hands up. Hope’s eyes opened, like someone who’d been hovering just on the cusp of sleep but hadn’t quite gotten there yet. Grace paced around the table. She frowned when his movement drew her attention to a whiteboard on the far end of the lab behind him. He’d written on it in various coloured markers, clearly trying to parse through his thoughts and memories as they came back to him.

Each was written in different types of handwriting. This was Grace trying to discover himself in whatever way he could.

Who am I?

Science Teacher

Bay Area

Single?

Good at Cursive

Doctor of Teaching?

Always muscles?

Friends?

Carl…(Foggy)

Glasses

-Okay w/ cilantro

Hope!

Can braid?

Astrophage

HOW DID I GET HERE?

“Always muscles?” she read quietly. Can braid? she wondered silently.

Grace looked at her sharply before he whipped around to see what she was reading. He forgot he’d dragged his whiteboard of broken memories into the lab the day before. He usually had it in the observation room or the Don’t Go Crazy room. Sometimes he’d bring it to the dorm while he sat with her, talking out what he could remember and making the notes on things that were still up in the air.

“That confused me so much when I woke up. The whole coma thing made my brain hurt,” he answered. He was not supposed to be beach body buff after a coma. “It’s kinda come back to me, I know we had electrodes hooked up to us. It was weird to wake up after a 4-year coma and not look like a shriveled noodle.”

He looked over his own list, eyes darting along what he’d written out.

The last one made him pause. “You were surprised to see me,” he realized. He’d been so caught up in the fact that she was there, and awake, that he completely bypassed her initial statement. He turned back to her. “When you saw me, you asked what I’m doing here. You don’t know?”

She frowned, forming those familiar lines between her brows that he knew so well.

“I was put under before the Primary crew came up. That was always the plan, but Stratt changed things up and had me put under days before I was supposed to. The last I heard, DuBois was still the Science Officer. Shapiro was his Secondary. You weren’t even on the list.” She scrubbed her face like it could wipe away her fatigue. “Grace, you had no intention of being on the Hail Mary. You even made multiple comments about those who did volunteer. You told me you could never do it.”

To Grace, it made sense. Everything in him was telling him it was wrong. That he wasn’t supposed to be here. Like a visceral survival reaction that screamed at him that he was in danger. Likely, that was the response to knowing he was going to die. It made his eyes burn with emotion. What was he doing in space? Hope confirmed it; he was not meant to be here.

“Something must have happened to DuBois and Shapiro. I may dislike Stratt with the passion of a thousand suns, but I can’t imagine she’d ask you to come unless it was the last resort.”

Grace’s smile was tight and his eyes were glossy. “You’re gunna hurt my feelings.”

Hope didn’t return the smile. She only shook her head before reaching out for him, fingers hooking in the cuff of his sleeve. “Ryland, you were instrumental in all of this. You were basically Stratt’s right hand man through the entire project. When she went to collect new people to join, you went with her. When she needed someone to consult, she went to you. When new equipment was designed for the lab, you tested it. She valued your intellect and your opinion.”

She looked back at the board.

“I can see why she’d ask you. If anything, you were more qualified than the others. But you didn’t volunteer, and Yáo made it abundantly clear that only people willing to go would be allowed on his team. He would not have accepted someone who didn’t volunteer.”

Grace scooted the other stool closer to join her at the table. She pulled her hand back to let him move. Immediately, he missed the feeling of her fingers tugging on his sleeve. Such a minor thing. But a connection, nonetheless.

“I barely remember them. I…I know that he was strict, but an amazing Commander. I remember that Ilyukhina was a riot, she could make anyone laugh.” He fiddled with the container to busy his hands. To lighten the mood, he looked at her with a watery smile. “I remember you threatened to strangle me with a Twizzler.”

Her expression lightened as her smile, though small, returned. “Best hope they didn’t bring any on board. Just the two of us on this tin can? We’ll be lucky to make it through a month.”

“Come on, give us some credit, we called for a truce, didn’t we?”

“You bribed me with Vodka.”

“You accepted.”

“Hysteria,” she fake-gasped for dramatics. “The world’s gone inside out. Everything’s topsy-turvy.”

Grace laughed. “Up is down, left if right.” He picked up the container again. “Xenon’s a solid. Aliens are real!”

Hope was smiling fully now. She pointed at the container. “In that case, give lefty-tighty righty-loosey a try.” So, she was awake for that comment. He should’ve known. Hope had the ability to sleep in the strangest places, but she also had the unique ability of just not sleeping.

Grace shrugged and gave it a shot. Technically, it made sense; why would aliens adhere to their rules? With one sharp twist, the container popped open with a faint hiss. “Ha!” he cheered in success, bringing the canister to his nose. The rancid smell of ammonia assaulted his senses like a physical blow and his entire brain screamed ‘don’t!’ at the same time as Hope yelling in alarm.

“Grace!”

“Oh, no!” he shouted, diving toward the glovebox just behind Hope. She jumped out of his path, abandoning her stool, and nearly tripped over her own feet in the scramble.

She watched him frantically shove the canister inside as the alarm sounded throughout the lab, with the computer’s voice calling about a ‘foreign presence detected’ as the stench of cat pee rapidly filled the lab. “Why didn’t you already have it in there??”

“You didn’t think of it either, Ms. Backup Science Officer!”

“I just woke up from a coma!”

“I have amnesia! My brain is a pile of spaghetti right now!”

Hope huffed. “Touché.”

She moved to join him at the glovebox, looking through the plastic window to watch. Grace slipped his hands up through the large black gloves and reopened the canister. In the first end, there was a ball with a tail attached to it that he removed. It looked like it, too, was made of the same material. They must have it in abundance to use it for basically everything.

“What is it?” Hope wondered, trying to pinpoint what the shape could mean. Grace just frowned and stared at it for a long moment. Something about it was so familiar.

His brain clicked a moment later. “It’s a Petrova line!”

He’d stared at pictures of that damn line for so long, it basically haunted his memory at this point.

Hope jumped at the sudden exclamation. “So, they know about the Petrova line, which means they can detect IR.” She pressed her forehead against the window, trying to look closer. Not that it would provide and better answers. “…are they in the same boat? They came here because their sun also has a Petrova line? Are they from this system, or another one?”

“Let’s see what else they have to say.” He turned the canister over and twisted open the second compartment.

This time, what he pulled out was a cluster of long, thin metal threads. There were little balls on the ends, all of the threads attaching to a central base. A moment after Grace had full extracted it, the entire thing sprang open like a jack in the box.

Hope flinched back at the same time that Grace rapidly leapt away, colliding with the table where she had previously been sitting. “Oi!” he chirped in surprise. The gloves made a loud snapping sound as he pulled them inside out.

The two shared a wide-eyed look when nothing further happened. Grace approached again first, slapping his palms against the glovebox as he looked in on what had happened to the little wired contraption. Hope followed suit, less enthusiastically, and looked past his arm to try and see what had become of the thing.

It opened up like a little burst sphere, what had previously been the base now making up a center. The thin metal wires all stuck straight out from it, each with little balls on the end, but at different lengths. Hope immediately recognized it for what it was. Her time at NASA made it impossible not to see the pattern.

“It’s a model,” she marvelled quietly.

“Of what?”

“Stars.”

~

The stroke of her fingers along his scalp slowed until her cool fingertips were resting at the nape of his neck, immobile.

With her face pressed in against his collar, encased by his arms as they floated in zero g, Hope slowly succumbed to the exhaustion her body was still recovering from. The drugs were basically out of her system, but the residual effects of such a prolonged coma were due to include exhaustion. She hadn’t really given herself a moment after waking up, going from the bag to dressed to lobbing things at Grace’s head.

He was compact, but warm. Firm but gentle. Wrapped in warmth.

The adrenaline faded and her body had nothing else to work with.

“Hope?” Grace asked quietly when he felt her hand fall away from his neck. For a terrifying moment, he was reminded of how limp his crew felt as he carried their bodies to the airlock.

Her response was a bleary hum against his chest, a half-awake sound from someone on the cusp of sleep. But it was enough to bring her back to the present. She inhaled sharply as her brain caught up again, lifting her head off of him and jolting slightly as she re-registered the lack of gravity.

Her legs kicked out of reflex, disoriented from not actually touching any solid ground.

“Sorry,” she muttered, pulling back enough to look at him properly. “Sorry.”

“You’re okay. How’re you feeling? How’s your head? What do you remember? You breathing okay—”

Hope clapped a hand over his mouth, bumping his glasses in the process. His grip on her adjusted, moving to wrap both arms around her shoulders. “Ryland, pause.” Silenced, he inhaled at the chance. “I’m just tired. My breathing is fine. My head is fine.”

She paused a moment, letting him register. Then, she removed her hand.

“Your turn. What happened?”

He started slower this time. “When the computer tried to wake you up you went into respiratory distress. You were put back under to try again after giving you bronchodilators. You were extubated 2 days ago. Uhm…Yáo and Ilyukhina were already gone. I think Yáo died pretty early on, his body was…” Grace swallowed thickly, unable to get it out. “Ilyukhina made it maybe two years.”

“Where are they?” she asked softly, her hand resting on his chest after she’d covered his mouth. The bodies weren’t in their bunks, so Grace must have moved them somewhere.

Neither really seemed to register that they were still tangled around the another. Hope’s leg was now wrapped around the back of Grace’s so the backs of their ankle’s were hooked around one another, anchoring herself to him.

“I, uhm, released them out of the airlock a few days ago. It felt wrong having them here.”

“I’m so sorry,” she breathed. “I’m so sorry you were alone. That you had to do that all alone.” It must have felt like being stuck in a prison cell. “What were you doing an EVA for?” If he had cast them out of the airlock days ago, why was he outside when she woke up?

“The alien spaceship beside us sent something. I’m almost certain it’s not a bomb.”

Hope yanked back from him, much more alert. “What?”

Grace disentangled himself from her, flailing when he realized it wasn’t as easy as taking a step back. She snagged the front of his suit when his arms pinwheeled. “They’re 217 meters off from—”

With significantly more ease than him, she pushed off of the wall that he had banged into and launched straight toward the control room. She had a lot better control over her trajectory and didn’t spin herself out of control. She used the ladder he’d climbed up and down for days like footholds, using a motion similar to running.

He wasn’t nearly as graceful as he followed her, but he tried to mimic her actions. He had to make a grab for the chair to stop his momentum while she rushed for the viewing window. Her jaw dropped open as soon as the massive ship was in her sights. It was long, with sharp gables stretching the entire expanse of it. She struggled to even comprehend how a ship like that could be made, or the specific purpose of its abnormal truss system.

“Holy crap,” she breathed out.

Turning back around, she pushed passed Grace and snagged the scope, checking that it was set to Visible. Angling the scope, she used it to zoom in and get a better view. Slowly scanning along the side, she could see where the hull actually started.

“That design is insane,” she mumbled.

Looking away from the scope, she turned to where Grace was hanging onto the back of the chair, looking between the window and Hope.

“When did they show up? You said they sent something?”

“Yea! They showed up almost as soon as soon as we got to Tau Ceti, they were definitely here before us. It looks like they also use Astrophage to power their ship, when I had it set to the Petrovascope there were periodic bursts of IR light as they manoeuvred toward us.”

Hope hummed. “Our engines were directed toward Tau Ceti to decelerate, so we were probably blasting them with the full light of our spin drives. Assuming they have a way of also reading IR frequency, we probably were throwing off more light than Tau Ceti itself.”

Grace pointed at her. “Spin drives. I’m still foggy on those.” He said it casually, something he’d had the time to adjust to over the past 9 days, but Hope frowned at him.

“What do you mean? You and Dimitri were working on the spin drives together.” Lowering herself away from the Petrovascope, she kept one hand on a handle on the nearby wall that he realized was placed there for the exact purpose of handling zero g and being able to access all the controls.

He shrugged, awkward at the sudden need to explain. It felt wrong, somehow, to admit that his brain was a pile of mush. “Yea…I don’t remember most of that. Actually, I woke up remembering…nothing. I didn’t even know my name. That was a pain. Super glad when I remembered I’m a teacher. It’s all coming back to me!...Slowly.”

Hope just stared at him for a long moment. “You have amnesia?”

“Yea, probably trauma from the coma. It comes back in pieces. I remember Astrophage and Project Hail Mary and little bits and pieces from the Ganzu. Which, excuse me, the first thing you do is throw candy at my head? Once was bad enough!”

“The dorm is a mess!” she shot back. “Clothes and totes are floating all over the place. Even in a spaceship, you’ve somehow found a way to leave your stuff everywhere.” As she was ranting, she realized there were colourful little bits floating behind Grace. She hadn’t noticed them before in favour of the alien ship outside the window. “Are there Skittles floating in my control room??” she thundered a second later, motioning behind him.

Grace looked back and realized that he must have kicked one of his candy pouches during the mad scrambled of zero g. He’d been so focused on throwing up in his shirt and then the appearance of a literal alien spaceship that he hadn’t given them much thought.

He winced.

“Oops?”

“Grace!”

“I’ll clean them up!”

Hope rubbed at her forehead before she started to let out a breathy laugh. “Amnesia hasn’t changed you at all.” Wiping down her face, she tried to shake off the absurdity of the situation. All the time she’d spent trying to prepare for the mission, this had not been one of the possible outcomes.

“At least you remember everything. I’ve been drowning out here without a life preserver.” He motioned back through the doorway that connected them to the airlock corridor. “But back on the original topic. Our new alien neighbours sent us a package. Well, they sent us two, but the first one ricochetted of the ship, so they tried again. Sidenote; the second one was sent way slower, so they definitely think I’m dumb.”

Hope snorted. “Great first impression. Where is it?”

“Airlock. It’s very hot. Absolutely reeks, too. They must have ammonia in their atmosphere because it stinks.”

Hope nudged herself off of the wall again, heading for the airlock. Grace tried to follow. The little window allowed her to see the canister floating inside, as well as bits of Grace’s EVA suit. He’s hung most of it back up, at least. The canister was a bit larger than a bowling pin, with a textured surface that reflected the light. It looked like the same metal that made up their ship.

Grace went spinning passed her, missing the airlock completely. He reached out to grab the sleeve of her suit, still hanging around her hips, but missed and went flying by with too much momentum.

“Darn it!” he yelled, finally grabbing the netting that kept everything in place.

It was still better than his attempts while he’d been getting his thermals and EVA suit on. All that spinning nearly made his sick again.

Hope pinched her lips. The familiarity of his lack of cursing and awkward behaviour was a soothing balm to the mayhem that had already taken place in such a short amount of time. He may not have his memories, but Grace was still Grace.

“Are you going to examine it?” Hope asked as she watched him get his bearings, using the netting to bring himself into what felt most like an upright position. Zero g made it hard to really feel oriented with up and down. The ship was designed to feel like it had a ceiling and a floor most of the time, so it was easy to accidentally turn yourself ‘upside down’.

He huffed, looping his arm through the netting to keep in place.

“Once I figure out how to do that in zero g, yes!”

“Engage the centrifuge,” she suggested.

Grace paused, mouth opened to speak. But nothing came out. He seemed to freeze as his brain worked without his body. Hope frowned, partially concerned as she watched the way he seemed to lag like a rebooting computer.

“Grace?” she called quietly.

A few seconds passed before he grinned and brought his hands forward to clap once, then pointed at her. “That explains the cable faring!”

Hope nodded along. “Did you just remember something?”

Grace pointed at her excitedly. “Lokken telling Stratt that properly creating new equipment wasn’t plausible in the timeline we had. Instead, she proposed a centrifuge. Stratt tried to veto it at first. She said you absolutely refused to deal with unnecessarily complex moving parts. The more simple and solid the ship, the better chance we have that nothing goes wrong.”

Hope nearly rolled her eyes. “Of all the things I told her, she used that one against me. Either way, you all still hunted me down and told me a centrifuge was being added to the design of the ship in order to create artificial gravity. Lokken was brought in from ESA to help me.” She wasn’t sure exactly how much of the exchange he remembers, but they could cover that later.

She pushed away from the airlock door, upward toward the ‘floor’ and used the ladder to guide herself back to the control room. Somehow, she kept her body deceptively level as she moved.

“When I was doing my EVA, was that what I saw? The Cable Faring system?” Grace followed her, a bit more clumsily but trying to copy her movements. He was getting better at it.

“Yea, the Zylon cables are stored on spools along the hull. Technically, it’s old tech. But it was a nightmare to make sure that a ship of this size would be able to handle it. We also had to plan around how the lab would be orientated when the centrifuge was engaged.” Hope waited as he followed her in, once again grabbing the chair.

She held onto what he was now calling the ‘oh shit’ handle, reminiscent of the handles above the passenger seat of a car. Above and to the right of the pilot’s chair was a locked in lever. Two locks needed to be disengaged, and the lever flipped into the downward position to engage the mechanism.

“This is the main centrifuge control, but I made sure another manual one was installed deeper in the ship,” she explained, unlocking it. “Since the necessary equipment for the mission needs gravity, the centrifuge was considered mission critical. If anything happens to the control room, I have a backup that I can still use.”

The lever went down with ease. Additional screens flickered to life inside the cylindrical room as the operating system registered the change.

A triple tone alarm sound repeated through the entire ship, loud enough that no one would be able to miss it.

The ship gave the faintest shudder as the main living area detached from the engine and storage tanks. They would rotate 90 degrees so the entire length of the ship would become one long tunnel, rather than a narrow rocket shape.

The strange placement of the chairs, screens and equipment in the lab made much more sense to him now. The majority of the Hail Mary’s interior design was centered around how the ship was oriented while the centrifuge was engaged. Since they were all supposed to sleep their way to Tau Ceti, making everything comfortable while in thrust was pointless.

“Come on,” she ordered, then pushed off of the wall to go back the way they had come. Once she was free of the control room, she turned herself around so she wasn’t moving feet first and carefully drifted down the corridors toward the lab. The observation window just off the lab would provide a perfect vantage point for the system as it engaged.

Everything was slow and controlled, so it provided them ample time. The ship was barely entering the rotation phase when they came to the window. It wasn’t front and center but looking out the side of the window allowed them to see their own engine bays, now separated by 104 meters of cabling. The light of Tau Ceti shown through the window as they progressed through the motion. Not as bright as their sun, but it lit up the lab pretty well.

Grace drifted away from the window as the feeling of gravity slowly returned. It felt like being in a tilting room, gradually pulling them into one set ‘downward’ direction. Hope kept herself by the window, anchoring in place so that as the centrifuge completed its cycle, she’d be sitting in the little observation space.

The lose items he’d left to float around until that point slowly returned to the floor. Grace’s feet finally grazed and pressed into a solid surface, abruptly reminding his muscles that they actually needed to do some work now.

“Lab operational,” came over the ship’s speakers.

Hope exhaled slowly. She’d woken up without gravity, so the nausea started to creep in now that they were out of zero g. It felt like her stomach was bottoming out.

Even Grace, who had experienced both, tiptoed carefully as he tried to readjust to walking. The first few steps were careful, letting him recenter himself. Once he was sure he wasn’t going to crumble under his own muscle use, he walked toward the corridor they’d used to come down from the cockpit. It was worth checking if the canister had cooled down enough to safely touch now.

He really wanted to know what was inside.

His own messiness came back to bite him, however, as his foot caught on one of the stored packages he’d pulled loose—now resting on the floor—that resulted in him tripping forward into the hallway with a grunt of surprise.

Inside the lab, Hope laughed.

~

If the tone of her voice wasn’t enough for them to go by, the scowl that set a furrow between her eyebrows definitely got the message across.

“Creating artificial gravity means we can use existing, well tested scientific equipment,” Lokken explained. She, Stratt, Grace, and Dimitri had descended on Hope’s workstation like a murder of crows—fitting, Hope looked like she was ready to end one of them on the spot.

“Even just the lab,” Dimitri tried to lessen the blow, but already Grace and Lokken were shaking their heads.

Hope set her scowl on him. “The lab is basically in the center of the ship. If you want to use centrifugal force to make gravity, the entire living space of the ship will need to detach from the engine and fuel tanks. We can’t move the lab, it’s far too late in the plans and wouldn’t make sense anyway, and we sure as hell can’t break it into three pieces by just giving the lab gravity.”

“But it can be done.”

Her focus turned to Stratt. “A centrifuge to create gravity isn’t new tech. So, yes, it can be done. But you’re talking about a ship larger than any other we’ve created before, using a technique that’s never been tried on this scale. Do you know the tensile strength we’ll need in those cables? We’ll also need to redesign where the living section connects to the engine. We didn’t intend for it to detach.”

Grace, smart man that he was, held out a large latte he had acquired in advance. When one values their life, they bring offerings to the cranky queen of Engineering.

“Do you accept caffeine sacrifices to improve mood and work ethic?”

Stratt gave him her usual look that asked, ‘what the hell?’ as Lokken actually rolled her eyes. Hope’s expression morphed for a moment to something that suggested she wanted to dump the coffee on one of their heads. But he knew her well enough by now; he could see the tiny hint of amusement she felt. That little tensing of the muscles in her upper lip that told him he almost got a smile.

“Dr. Lokken will be assisting you with this section of the project. Your focus will remain on the ship itself, designing a way for it to disconnect and reconnect safely. She and her team will focus on the cable system based on the design you’ve already created for the hull. Then she’ll send it your way to doublecheck.”

Lokken looked slightly affronted at the suggestion that she needed someone to check her work, but she could not deny the need for this woman to look over her math. She was the one who had gone through the entire design of the Hail Mary, bolt by bolt and wire by wire. If someone was going to come in and try to propose changes to it, she was going to be the final say.

Hope took the coffee from Grace. “These better be a regular occurrence.”

He gave a mock salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Dr. Grace, you and Dr. Emrys will work together to properly orient the lab for maximum efficiency while gravity is engaged,” Stratt tacked on before she turned to leave. The three professionals behind her watched her go.

Lokken spoke up first, glancing at Hope. “So, what, I answer to you now?”

For once, it was Grace that scowled. “Do you have a problem with that?”

Hope grabbed Grace’s lab coat, a powder blue one that had PHM stitched into it, and yanked him over to the chair he’d left in her station the evening before. They’d sat together for nearly two hours while discussing the plans for breeding Astrophage. The success of the Hail Mary stemmed from the use of the little microbes for fuel.

They were capable of doubling what the have, but it was turning out to be a slower process than the Taskforce would like. It took 8 days to double their current supply, and it was going to be a long way to two million kilograms. They’d miss their launch window at the rate they were going. A new plan was needed, a more effective breeding method, but everything that they came up with the night before seemed to suggest similar results to the current outcomes.

She had no clue what had taken place before the group ganged up on her, but there was a palpable tension between Grace and Lokken. Usually, the engineer was the easily irritated one; Lokken somehow had the ability to piss off the school for the first time that Hope had seen thus far.

Hope tossed her 3D printed model of the Hail Mary over to Lokken. It was one of many; she printed out a new one every time the ship was altered during the initial planning stages. “Welcome to the team, have a paperweight for your troubles.”

Dimitri chuckled, turning to leave as well. “Best of luck, Little Engineer.”

Lokken looked down at the little model. It was white, the plastic she used almost making it look like wax. She’d seen blueprints and had been given the packet of information when she arrived, but to see an actual model of it made it feel…concrete.

“It is an amazing ship,” she complimented, turning the model over in her hands.

“Yes, it is,” Hope confirmed easily. Not a boast, or overconfidence. Just fact.

She was already grabbing her tablet to pull up the blueprints of the lab. Altering the placement of things in the interior wasn’t nearly as complicated as making changes to the hull or the system, it was more tedious than anything.

“Everything on this ship is shared, so you’ll have access to the files as soon as you login. If Stratt hasn’t already, she’ll give you an access code. Don’t make alterations to the existing files, if you want to make changes create a duplicate.”

She placed the tablet with the lab layout in front of Grace, then turned back to her larger screens and opened up the CAD program. The Ganzu was a closed network. There were certain terminals that allowed outside communication, but only a select few people actually had access to them. Stratt being the main one. Everything had to go through her.

“Did you get the information packet when you arrived?”

“Yes,” Lokken confirmed, watching the familiar efficiency that Hope used as she darted through the CAD system like it was her personal creation.

The Engineer nodded. “There should be an access code for you in there. You also have direct access to the other teams on the project; send me an email when you have anything you need me to confirm. We work in stages. Don’t just try and blow through all the planning rapidly. Each step needs to be checked and rechecked before we move on. It’ll save us from having to backtrack if we were to find a discrepancy down the line.”

Lokken lifted up the model, almost like she was doing a ‘cheers’. “You got it, boss.” Her tone was dripping with sarcasm.

She’d already turned her back when Hope made a face, almost sneering at the word.

“Oh, she called you boss,” Grace teased—he still glared at the other woman’s back as she left.

Hope flicked his ear. “Don’t start.”

“Oi!” Grace covered his ear, pouting as he turned to the Engineer. In reality, it didn’t actually hurt. She’d barely tapped him. But watching her roll her eyes as she took her seat next to him made the dramatics worth it.

She pointed at the tablet. “Now that there will be a centrifuge, we have an actual floor. We can create the lab around a regular room’s design.”

Grace rotated the tablet, trying to understand exactly what he was looking at. He’s seen Hope go through enough designs and blueprints over the past weeks, he could now understand the basics of them. However, this was still a bit of a foreign language when he tried to read it. “What am I looking at?” he finally asked.

Hope turned the tablet back, so it wasn’t sideways anymore. She pointed out where the ‘floor’ would be when the centrifuge is engaged.

“This is the floor. I need you to tell me, just in basics, what layout works best regarding the lab. Just imagine how you’d want everything set up if you were the one doing the work. We’ll have to tweak it a bit just to make sure everything remains secure since the gravity created by the thrust of the engines will make everything sideways. Things that can just be moved from storage to a table aren’t as important.”

“So, just…design a lab?” he asked, tilting the tablet again.

“Exactly.”

“…uh, do you have something that I can draw on? Like paper?” As much as he loved the equipment they got to use, and how easy it made his job, he was old school in a lot of ways.

Long hand calculations and diagrams were more his forte than the 3D digital files that could be turned and spun around to view from every angle. It would take him just as long to learn how to actually use the program.

Without a word, Hope turned to the shelf of rolled papers that sat in the corner of her station. She moved some aside before finding the correct one and pulled it out. “This is a copy anyway, so you can draw right on it. I can make more if you need.”

Moving to the drafting table, one of her lesser used items, she rolled it out and pinned the corners down to keep it in place. Nearly an identical image of the one on the tablet, it only lacked in some of the extra lines and connections that expanded to the other parts of the ship, giving it the three-dimensional element.

“You realize I do not know how to draw a blueprint, right? Like, at all. I struggled to fit all the stuff in my classroom. Arranging those desks was a nightmare every year.”

“I just need the basics from you. If things don’t fit or won’t work with your layout, I’ll let you know and we’ll make the changes we need.”

Grace grinned and waved a finger between the two of them, teasing. “Is this the student becoming the teacher? I give you science lessons; you give me Engineering lessons?”

Hope’s smile was sharp. “Careful, Grace. I might just give you a written exam on calculus.” He waved the mock threat aside. He knew calculus. It might take a lot of long-hand calculations, but he’d get there. He did know that Hope would annihilate him if it came down to it. One of her Doctorates was in Electrical Engineering, focus on Aerospace. Most likely, she could do calculus in her sleep—honestly, she was usually so sleep deprived she had basically already done it in her sleep.

The blueprint in front of him wasn’t just one that she could easily read, it was her blueprint. The entire build procedure belonged to Hope.

She placed a pack of Staedtler pencils down for him to use.

“All yours. Tap me if you need me.” She was already pulling her headphones back on. Grace gave a quick double thumbs up before he picked up the back of pencils. Anything that he added to the print in front of him was going to be so crude in comparison to the crisp and accurate line-work that Hope was capable of.

She’d been working on the fuel tanks and Dimitri’s spin drives before the centrifuge had been proposed, so she returned to those plans. She’d had to wait to receive something from Lokken—which almost annoyed her more than if she was going to do all the work herself—so she had additional time to work on the connection point for the centrifuge adjustment.

Her already cramped workspace became even more so with Grace and his office chair back-to-back with hers. He had a habit of spinning in it, too. Twisting side to side as he focused—or tried to focus. On occasion, his chair would bump Hope’s if she turned a certain way to reach for her other screen or her coffee cup.

If he concentrated, he could hear the music she was listening to through her headphones.

He’d come to realize she had quite the range in taste.

It also helped him keep up on the kind of mood she was in. She leaned toward classical or orchestra music when she was really trying to focus on her work; this was a sign not to disturb her by any means necessary. If it was more of a rock playlist, she was doing significantly more ‘simple’ work, which usually meant she was just checking things over; likely for the third time.

When she came back from meetings with Stratt, there was often a loud blast of metal music easily heard through the headphones. This was also a sign not to bother her.

He’d even seen Dimitri trying to add Russian songs to the playlists. Hope would usually sit up and glare in a random direction when one of those came across her ears. It had the effect of rapidly breaking her focus, but she had a soft spot for the man and tended not to bite his head off like she would have with anyone else.

Currently, she had the music too low for him to really tell what it was. Which meant she was keeping an ear on him.

Hope kept the world at arms length. She used the headphones as a means of disconnecting from everyone else, and to present a clear sign to not bother her. It was unwelcoming to those on the carrier. She came across as rather standoffish because of it.

But Grace understood.

Putting up that wall was a way of protecting oneself.

Hope carried her life close to the chest and didn’t let the world in.

~

“Cognition assessment: what is three plus three?”

She exhaled sharply through her teeth, making an almost hissing sound. Her lips felt numb.

“Incorrect. What is three plus three?”

Trying again, she fought to open her eyes. One kept pinching shut from the light, the other rapidly watering as she forced it to stay open a tiny bit. The thing above her was just a mechanical mess of arms, encased in white plastic.

She could only hum in response, her vocal cords producing a sound but her lips and tongue refusing to cooperate with any movement.

“Incorrect.” She was able to finally get her other eye to open, rapidly blinking away the discomfort brought on by the lights. “You have been in a coma for four years, eight months, six days-” the voice floated in and out of her scope of hearing, like waves rushing in and muffling everything. One of the arms of the robot approached her face, holding what appeared to be a pouch with a straw coming from the top.

Water. The sudden realization made her aware of how dry and thick her tongue felt in her mouth. Even her throat was like trying to swallow around sandpaper.

Still unable to properly feel her lips, she bit the straw weakly and tried to take a drink. Her mouth didn’t cooperate. Because of this, some of the water escaped and…floated?

Her eyes tracked the movement of the water bubble that escaped and floated above her face. The robot was prepared, however, and another arm with a small suction tube caught the bubble mid-air and sucked it up.

Why was water floating?

“You may experience memory loss, difficulty speaking, slowed reflexes, and deceased muscle function.”

Decreased muscle function was right. When she tried to move her head, it felt like the muscles in her neck were straining against a weight. Yet the movement also pulled free her hair, which lifted around her head like it was weightless. Almost as though there wasn’t any—

Gravity.

There was no gravity.

“Cognitive assessment: what is three plus three?”

Enough of the water had gotten into her mouth that she was able to swallow, finally gaining some movement, and croaked out “six” in a rough voice.

“Correct. What is your name?”

That took a moment longer. “Hope Emrys,” she forced out.

Her brain felt like it was seared with acid for a moment, like someone stabbed it with a needle and injected her memories back inside in one hard push. Dr. Hope Emrys, Principal Architect for NASA. Assigned to Project Hail Mary as the ship’s lead Engineer and Master Technician. Currently on board the Hail Mary with a trajectory to Tau Ceti.

But she was in zero g. The longer she was awake the more sensations registered to her. She was strapped down to her cot, still wrapped up in the bag and suit that they created to keep the crew healthy during their comas—with the care of the medical robot currently hovering over her.

Lethargically, she started to wiggle one of her arms up and out of the outer bag. It had been unzipped down to her chest, thankfully, so that made the work easier. Looking down, her IV had already been removed by the robot while she was still regaining consciousness.

Far from having proper motor function, she accidentally slapped herself in the face when reaching up to feel for any other tubes. The feeding tube was also gone, and she was obviously extubated already. Only a cannula for oxygen was hooked inside her nose. Shifting her body beneath the straps, she was relieved to know that all the other tubes were also removed. She had been unconscious for the initial insert, though she had been fully aware they would be going in thanks to the debrief, and had not looked forward to the eventual removal.

“Computer, current status,” she demanded, gaining more strength in her vocals. Slowly, but it was improvement non the less.

“You are currently orbiting Tau Ceti.”

That shouldn’t be right. They had scheduled for her to wake up in advance to the rest of the crew so she could run a full systems check on the ship. Even the commander should still be asleep.

Turning her head, she spotted the empty bunk next to hers. So, they were already awake. What happened to her if she’d been kept under?

Wiggling harder, she freed her other arm and reached for the straps. The computer tried to stop her, robot arms reaching out, but Hope smacked them weakly aside and unclipped herself.  The suit they wore made it easy, skin-tight and smooth, so she slipped out of the outer bag without fuss and was soon floating above her cot.

Tired as her muscles were, they remembered the sensation of zero g and automatically grabbed at the edge of her bed to stop from moving too far. Just that tiny grasp felt like a herculean effort for her hands. It did make the rest of her job easier. She was almost certain that if she was to try and stand, her legs would have completely given out.

“What’s the crew status?”

And why was the room a mess?

Clothes and storage totes were floating freely in the air. Someone had gone through them and hadn’t resecured them before the ship reached Tau Ceti and removed their temporary gravity. The Primary flight crew didn’t seem the type to be so absent minded, even if she spent less time with them than they had with one another.

“Commander Yáo, deceased. Engineer Ilyukhina, deceased. Dr. Grace, EVA.”

Hope’s fingers slipped for a moment, releasing her grip on the bunk before she caught herself.

Deceased? They were dead? How?

Wait.

“Grace?” she repeated. “Ryland Grace?” What the hell was he doing on the Hail Mary? He was supposed to be back on Earth, driving Eva Stratt insane with random science facts and his exponentially awkward personality. He was supposed to go back to his students and continue teaching the next generation. What happened to DuBois? Shapiro?

“He’s outside?” she demanded. Her voice cracked roughly, her throat protesting the sudden use.

With new momentum, she dove for the area they had stored the flight suits. Clearly Ryland had already been through here, since the orderly packaged tote was now a mess of material with no system in sight. The mess of the dorm made considerably more sense now. She had to push a few of the other suits aside before finding one of her red flight suits, her name stitched across the patch on the breast.

She paused when one of the white totes caught her eye, clearly the one most used. Instead of the neat, embroidered nametag that sat in the left corner on the other three, this one was hand written on a piece of ochre paper and taped down with simple box tape.

Grace

_

Grace was no expert at the EVA suit, nor the actual EVA.

He was sure there was an entire alien ship getting a laugh as they watched the little red man floundering in the vacuum of space with only a tether to stop him from accidently launching himself into the abyss. He may have caught the canister sent by the other ship in the nick of time—success!—but he also ploughed himself into the hull with a sharp yank on the tether.

Without the rush to get to the cylinder before it missed the Hail Mary, he should have headed back toward the airlock more carefully. He was just too excited! Aliens! And they’d sent him something. Even carrying the mystery package back didn’t slow him down this time.

Plus, he was ready to be back inside the ship now. The vastness of space was unsettling and unwelcoming, he dearly wanted to be back behind an airlock that would keep him from dying. Also, he really wanted to know what they sent him. Was it a message? He still was partially concerned it was a bomb.

He couldn’t wait to tell Hope!

His experience with the airlock has so far been not good. First, it was for basically a funeral as he launched his other two crew members into the vacuum of space, and then when he accidentally threw himself out just minutes ago while—honestly—trying to go back inside where it was safe.

Once inside the airlock, he quickly sealed the outer door and waited for the room to re-pressurize.

As soon as he got the green light, he popped his helmet seal.

And instantly regretted it.

“Whoa!” He clapped a hand over his mouth as the stench of cat pee quickly filled his nose. He almost wanted to shove his helmet back on, but that would just lock the stink inside with him. Now scrambling to remove himself from the rest of his EVA suit, leaving just the white thermal underlayer, he haphazardly hung the pieces back up.

Now out of the thick, protective outer layer, he could feel the heat coming off of the cylinder like an oven. What kind of atmosphere did those guys have over there? The gloves of the suit were rated for some pretty intense temperatures, because he hadn’t felt a thing while carrying it.

The stench of ammonia almost made him gag at first, but the longer he was locked up in the contained space with the thing, the more he adjusted. It wasn’t like it was releasing a gas or anything, it was carrying the smell of the environment it was just in. It also spent a good forty minutes spinning in the vacuum of space while he scrambled to dress himself in a foreign suit and in zero g, so if it was still this hot, he was intrigued what the temperature of the other ship must be.

“Naughty alien canister,” he muttered at it. Free of his EVA suit and pretty done with the scent of the ammonia, he quickly released the inner airlock and pushed himself inside. He’d leave the canister in the airlock for a while; let it cool down and maybe get rid of a bit more of the smell coming off of it. Was there a way to cycle the air in there without opening either of the airlocks?

Resealing the door closed, he took a moment to just float there.

Well, that was exciting. Hopefully he’d never have to do it again!

Smack

“Ow!” he jolted in pain, flinching as something hard collided with the side of his head. “What—” Turning to see where the projectile—a small bag of candy from his tote of belongings—had come from, he was half wondering if Armando had migrated up through the lab and was lobbing things at his head, now.

Instead, Hope was at the entrance to the corridor leading up from the Don’t Go Crazy room. One hand was on the ceiling? above her head, keeping her in place. She must have dressed in a hurry, because the flight suit she wore was still down around her hips, the arms hadn’t been tied and were just floating beside her legs, the zipper half done. She had yanked on a tank top, which kept her hair pinned inside the back.

The Velcro strap for the IV was still around her arm, though she didn’t have any wires or leads hanging off of her.

“Ryland, you slob! What the hell are you doing here!” she rasped out.

Grace was instantly reminded of their time on the carrier—though still murky—when she had nailed him in the back of the head with a bag of Skittles. She remembers!

“Hope!”

Muscles did not consult with brain before Grace launched himself at her, colliding with the woman with more force than intended as he wrapped his arms around her and held tightly. She gasped at the impact, trying to find a purchase on his suit without pulling on the thermal tubing, as they went feet over head back through the Don’t Go Crazy room.

Thankfully, when they did collide with a surface, he hit first and Hope was simply crushed into him. He grunted at the edge of an entryway digging into his back but still didn’t let go. The ricochet of the wall didn’t loosen his grip at all. She didn’t fight against him as he continued to clutch her in against his chest. Relief was too small a word for the flood of feeling that took over him. He felt like someone had finally given him oxygen after being left to slowly die on CO2.

“You’re awake,” he breathed out, ruffling the hair at the side of her neck. “I was so scared you wouldn’t wake up. You couldn’t breathe. And the others—” He squeezed harder, remembering the desiccated corpses of Yáo and Ilyukhina. But that wasn’t Hope. Hope is warm and breathing and awake.

Hope is awake.

He felt half delirious with relief. He started muttering without even focusing on the words. “Don’t leave. Don’t leave again. Stay. Stay.”

Hope was left in shock, wrapped tightly in the scientist’s arms. He had wrapped one around her head, pulling her in against his chest, while the other looped around her torso. Each breath expanded her ribs slightly, telling him she was breathing. If it wasn’t for the thermal suit he had on, he was sure he’d be able to feel her heartbeat.

It was almost hard to breathe, between her face being squished into him and the restrictive hold he had her in. But she didn’t dare point it out to him. He was alone. She’d been sleeping peacefully in her coma, blissfully ignorant to him being alone. Had he watched Yáo and Ilyukhina die? Or did he wake up with only their bodies to keep him company?

Don’t leave again. What did he mean?

Unsure what else to do, Hope reached up and gently carded her fingers through the short strands of his hair.

When his body trembled, she said nothing.

~

She’s dealt with messy people; she delt with an entire hanger of them while working on ArcLight. Ryland Grace, however, was a different beast entirely.

Somehow, he left something on every surface of his lab. Including the floor. Even clothes, which was bizarre since he had quarters that he stayed in all for himself. He didn’t even have to share. Yet, somehow, there were socks and t-shirts and sweaters draped over instruments and chairs and stuffed aside on the floor.

When it started to encroach on her space, creeping along the floor like a monster from the black lagoon, she took the bag of Skittles left on his desk and threw them at the back of his head with enough force it knocked his glasses off his face.

“Ow! What was that for!”

“You’re a slob!” she snapped back. Her headphones were draped around her neck, music faintly heard still playing, and her hair was pulled into her best attempt at a bun after her braid started to turn into a sensory nightmare for the back of her neck. “I’m surprised I haven’t found a pair of your underwear dangling from a ceiling fan!”

Grace’s jaw hung open and she could already see the redness starting in his cheeks. Some of the other nearby workers slowed their own progress, eavesdropping in a less than subtle way. Someone snickered.

“W-wha—it’s not that bad!”

Hope kicked the sweater that had been sitting on the floor just inside her workshop—a dark blue zip-up that had been sitting there since yesterday—and it went sailing directly at the teacher. He swiped it out of the air before it could make contact with his face, zipper first.

“Slob!” she snapped again. “You’re a teacher, aren’t you supposed to instil values into kids like respect, cleanliness, manners? It was one thing when your own area looked like a teenager’s room threw up all over it, but somehow this hurricane you call a lab has started to migrate into my station.”

Grace’s face was entirely red now, from the tips of his ears to the collar of his goofy graphic t-shirt.

Anyone that looked into Hope’s space knew that she was neat. Everything had a place and she kept it that way. She remained organized, even when she was on her second all-nighter in a row and trying to fire off plans to everyone that was demanding them. He’d seen her use basically everything in her lab at least once, yet it was all still pristine.

The only thing that tended to look misplaced in the entire area was the coffee cups, but even those found their way into a nearby trashcan after a few hours.

Interestingly, however, she didn’t worry as much about herself. Her hair was unwashed, her coveralls were stained, her nails had black stuck under them. She took astonishing care of everything around her but made a habit of neglecting herself in the meantime. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her eat.

Shrunken down in his seat, he wasn’t sure what else he could do but apologize. He and Hope had only spent a couple of hours together, max. When she had some free time and he wasn’t consulting with the other scientists about Astrophage, they would sit down in his lab, and he’d break down the basics of Astrophage and the equipment that would be used aboard the Hail Mary by the chosen science officer.

She was to the point and serious about her work. Not that she was made of stone, he’d been able to get her to laugh much more easily than his attempts with Stratt. She just had a solid ability to compartmentalize work and socialization.

To her, Grace was work.

He was also distracting her from her work.

He held up the Twizzler he had grabbed just before she launched the small projective of hard candy at his head—which, also, impressive aim and an impressive arm, that was going to leave a bump later. “Twizzler?” he offered meekly.

Hope’s scowl shifted to an even more dangerous expression, relaxed and tilted slightly to the right. It made her look like she was calculating how much Astrophage she’d need to smuggle to incinerate his body and leave no trace for anyone to find.

“Clean up your mess, Dr. Grace, or so help me I will strangle you with that thing.”

On the other side of the plexiglass booth, Dimitri burst into loud laugher. He’d had a front row seat to the Hope and Grace drama from the moment the teacher had been moved in. They went together like oil and water, and it was quite the amusing spectacle. At least, for those who weren’t scared of possibly becoming collateral damage.

Hope disappeared back inside her workshop, puling her headphones on again.

Dimitri was still snickering as he watched Grace begin to pick up his area, looking just slightly like a kicked puppy.

Hope is stressed.

It wasn’t like she was alone with all of this work, but Stratt wanted everything to go through her and unfortunately there were just as many idiots as they were geniuses working on the project (at least in her opinion).

Old tech was safe tech for a large portion of this project. Everyone just assumed they could simply throw together a new, untried system that would require new modules, new computer systems, new wiring and harnessing. Making something specific for the mission with the risk that it failed.

It’s exhausting.

She didn’t know how Stratt did it. But then again, that woman came across as more robotic than anyone else she’d ever met.

Time was not something that she focused on while she was working. And always having the rest of the carrier blocked out with her music playing made it easier to ignore when others went to sleep for the night. She had the habit of working to exhaustion, a point that even caffeine couldn’t keep her up, and then she’d either haul herself back to her quarters or curl up on the bench in her station and catch a few hours there.

When she sent her work back to the other crew for the wiring and controls of the control room, it was starting to look like a night she’d spend in her actual bed. Her back could only take sleeping on incorrect furniture so long before it needed a real mattress.

It seemed that Dr. Grace had been waiting for that exact moment, however, as he placed a glass of clear liquid in a low-ball glass next to her mouse only moments after she hit ‘send’.

A second was in his other hand, held precariously between his fingertips.

“I come in peace,” he joked awkwardly. His shoulders were hiked up nearly to his ears, showing his clear discomfort over the exchange. “Uh…sorry about the mess,” he tacked on nearly immediately, not giving her a chance to reply to his first attempt. He motioned over to his station, as though she wouldn’t have known what he was referring to.

While not to her standards, it had been cleaned. Cluttered, still covered in scattered objects, but cleaned.

Sitting back in her chair, Hope stared at him in silence for a moment. That same pink from before started to crawl up his neck.

Finally, she used her foot to kick the stool at her drafting table over to him.

While he was catching the run-away seat, she picked up the glass he had brought and sniffed the contents.

Vodka.

Considering the number of Russians on board, it was absolutely no surprise. The bar in the ship’s lounge was stocked with an assortment of drinks, but there was definitely a plentiful supply of Vodka. “Is this your idea of a truce?”

Now perched on the stool, Grace started to absently swivel back and forth.

“Well, you did bribe me with rum when we first met.”

“That was before I understood what a heathen my neighbour was going to be,” she returned, then took a small sip of the vodka. It was chilled, likely having been kept in someone’s freezer until recently. She partly wondered if Dimitri had a hand in this.

“Me? You threatened to choke me with a candy.”

“The night’s still young.”

Grace laughed, the absurdity of the conversation couldn’t have been met with anything less. “Oh, my gosh.”

Hope caught the word use. “You know, you can curse here. No kids around.” She turned her chair to properly face him, leaving her monitor turned on to the cockpit diagram.

He shrugged in response, swirling the vodka in his glass. “Force of habit.” His eyes tracked as she took another sip of her drink, the alcohol burning instantly. It wasn’t cheap, though. There wasn’t the taste of lighter fluid that she’d come to associate with knockoffs.

“You think you’ll go back to being a teacher after this?”

The question was definitely a heavier one than she intended, but it slipped out. Most people didn’t talk about what comes after. Once Hail Mary launches, it’ll still take twenty to thirty years to hear back from them about how to fix the sun. If it was possible.

Grace paused long enough to take a drink as well, wincing at the burn. “I mean…I guess? Not like they’d need me here anymore. Besides, I kinda forced myself back into the Astrophage stuff when I realized…most of those kids could be dead in a few decades. I wanted to do what I could now to give them the best chance.”

Hope’s eyes were fixed on his hands, on the nervous movements and the twitches. He had trouble staying still but did his best to remain small so as not to disturb others. Probably made for a great science teacher. She remembered the one she had as a kid; an eclectic older man who most kids thought was absolutely bonkers. But everyone loved his class.

“Noble,” she hummed.

He chuckled, a self-deprecating sound. “More like arrogant.”

“Lucky you; that’s exactly what Stratt looks for.” Or so it seemed so far. As she’d said already, geniuses and idiots. The idiots were usually the ones that hadn’t learned the delicate line between arrogance and humility.

Grace lifted his glass to her. “To arrogance.” She snorted, but tapped her glass with his nonetheless. “What about you? Back to NASA?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “If there still is a NASA. If the world plunges into a new Ice Age, god knows what will become of the space program. If anything, our tech would be best used on Earth to try and extend the time we have. Maybe start looking into underground shelters. Honestly, I don’t know.”

If anything, that was what put a bad taste in her mouth.

She liked to have a plan. Contingencies for everything. It’s partly what made her so good at her job. But the future was officially up in the air, and no one knew what was going to come down. Hail Mary could be a complete failure, and they’re all left living on a floating block of ice with no way to save the sun.

“Well, you’re a genius,” Grace pointed out. He wasn’t saying it to kiss ass or win points after he’d made her angry. He was just pointing it out like someone does the weather. This time, it was Hope who was fighting the flush that was creeping up her neck. “Whatever is it, you’ll save the day somehow.”

The compliment made her fight an awkward smile. She never was good at accepting those. So, she deflected. “Well, Professor Grace, what do you have to teach me about molecular biology today?”

~