Rabbit's Shitposting

Pain came first. Not as a sensation with edges, but as the entire shape of existing — total, formless, everywhere at once, the way water is everywhere to something drowning in it.

Then: dark. Not the dark of closed eyes. The dark of nothing, of not being sure eyes were a thing he still had.

He had died. He was almost sure of that. The blood filled up the sub, his skin and flesh was melting together with metal around him. He died, He died and yet he was not dead,

And then came the voice. Male, full of fear and stress, dripping with adrenaline. And the melodies... Something was playing sounds that he couldn’t pin point to any instrument he ever heard before.

They were around him. The sounds.

[You are whining so much, convict.]

Convict. The word landed somewhere behind his ribs, familiar in the worst way, like a brand pressed twice into the same scar.

They hadn't asked his name before they sealed the hatch. He remembered that clearly, clearer than almost anything else — the woman with the clipboard, the two guards who wouldn't look at him, the manifest that just said DESIGNATE 7 — STATION INCIDENT — TERMINAL DISPOSAL. No name. Just a number and a crime he still, even now, even dying, wasn't sure he'd committed.

Before that, he'd been brother. Softer word. Worse, somehow. Eden had never asked his name either, not really — they'd given him a new one the day he walked in, the way you'd name a dog you intended to keep. Brother when he did what they wanted. Butcher when he didn't, near the end, when the things they wanted him to do stopped feeling like faith and started feeling like the other word, the one nobody in Eden ever said out loud.

Nobody had used his real name in so long he wasn't entirely sure he could still hear it in his own head without it sounding like a lie.

I'm not, he thought back, or tried to, unsure if thoughts even worked like words to whatever this thing was. Whining. I'm dying. There's a difference.

They never gave us your name.

The memory surfaced whole, unbidden, sharper than anything else in the fog — the woman's face, unbothered, almost bored, like she was declining a receipt rather than erasing a person. He'd fought them for it. Really fought, hands cuffed, throat raw, screaming it into the recycled air of the transport bay until two guards had to drag him the rest of the way to the sub.

"WHAT'S MY NAME—"

"They never gave us your name," she'd said, shrugging into her jumpsuit like the question bored her. "Just the designation. Seal him up."

That had been the last human voice he heard before the hatch closed. Not his name. A shrug.

So when the voice in his skull, the first time, before he even understood it was a voice and not just the sound of his own mind breaking apart under pressure and radiation and blood-that-wasn't-blood — when it had murmured, low and half-formed, almost accidental —

Simon.

— he'd gone still in a way that had nothing to do with the crushing dark outside the hull.

Nobody knew that name. Not the woman with the clipboard. Not the guards. Not even Eden, who'd buried it under brother the day he arrived and dug it up again only to spit butcher at him on the way out. He hadn't said it out loud in years. He wasn't sure he'd said it silently in years, even to himself, because a name you can't use stops feeling like it belongs to you at all.

And something in the freezing, crushing black of that sub had known it anyway.

[...] The presence in his skull went very quiet, the way something goes quiet when it realizes it has been overheard doing something it shouldn't. [That was not meant to surface.]

You know my name. Not a question. He didn't have the strength for questions anymore, only the flat, exhausted certainty of a man who had just found the one thing more frightening than dying alone in the dark. How do you know my name.

[I have been inside you a long time, convict.] The word came back fast, defensive, reaching for the old distance like a hand reaching for a dropped weapon. [Longer than you have been aware of me. I know things I should not know. I have not decided yet if that frightens me too.]

Say it again.

[No.]

Say it.

[...]

[Simon.]

Grace's breathing had evened out into something closer to sleep than exhaustion, arm still resting loose against the tubing, when Rocky finally let himself do the math he'd been avoiding since the moment a second heartbeat joined the two that were already stretching the ship's supplies thin.

Three mouths now. One of them barely a mouth at all — six pulsing slits and something ancient behind the man's ruined eye — but still. A third body that would need feeding, whatever feeding even meant for something built out of iron and salt and mutation.

Ryland rubbed his face with both hands before sighing loudly.

“GRACE LOUD AIR LEAK. GRACE DOES THAT WHEN STRESSED. WHY STRESSED, QUESTION. WE FIX HUMAN. NO STRESS NEEDED. STATEMENT.” Rocky got onto the bed next to Grace and loafed almost like human cats do. It’s surprising, really, how much he had in common with how earthly creatures act sometimes.

“Food, Rocky. I don’t know if we can make it with the amount we have. Maybe if we breed more taumebas but the vitamines....” He put his hand onto Rocky’s xenonite suit. Ryland often done that when he needed comfort. It was the closest to touching another living being.

“MAYBE ROCKY FOOD GOOD? ROCKY HAS A LOT FOOD.” He moved his carapace up slightly.

“No... Heavy metals buddy, remember? Even if that guy is mutated, I highly doubt that lead and mercury would be any good to him.”

Rocky sat back down, upset. He remembered that humans can’t have heavy metals of course. Things that are good for Eridians are poison to Humans. He just hoped that Grace forgot and that he wouldn’t waste his last bits of sustenance on someone who might not even make it.

"You could just... let me worry about the food math, you know," Ryland said quietly, his hand still resting against Rocky's suit, thumb tracing an absent line along one of the seams. "You've got enough to worry about. I'll figure it out."

"NO." The word came out sharper than Rocky meant it to, chord cracking slightly at the edge. He softened it, but only barely. "GRACE ALWAYS SAYS THAT. GRACE FIGURE OUT MEANS GRACE EAT LESS. ROCKY NOT STUPID. ROCKY WATCHES."

Ryland's mouth opened like he was going to argue, and then closed again, because there wasn't really an argument to make. They'd had this fight before, in a dozen smaller shapes, over three years — Rocky noticing a portion untouched, Ryland claiming he wasn't hungry, Rocky counting the bags in storage with the same obsessive precision he counted stars, and always, always, the math coming out wrong in the same direction.

"Fine," Ryland muttered instead, dropping his hand back into his lap. "Fine. What's your plan, then, genius. We can't grow taumebas fast enough to matter before the vitamin deficiencies actually start doing real damage — and now we've got a third person who might need an entirely different diet we don't even understand yet."

Rocky's legs shifted against the mattress, an uncomfortable scrape of stone against fabric that made Ryland wince on principle alone. "ROCKY DOES NOT KNOW YET. ROCKY THINKING." A pause, chords dipping low, almost reluctant. "MAYBE NEW HUMAN NOT NEED SAME FOOD AS GRACE. BLOOD DIFFERENT. BODY DIFFERENT. MAYBE STOMACH DIFFERENT TOO."

"That's..." Ryland blinked, sitting up a little straighter despite the exhaustion dragging at every line of him. "That's actually not a bad thought. If his biology's that far off baseline, his caloric and nutrient needs might not overlap with mine at all. He might not even need the same vitamins that are the problem for me." He was already reaching for the datapad on the side table, wincing as the movement pulled at the needle still taped into his arm. "We won't know until Armando finishes running deeper analysis, but if there's any chance his metabolism runs differently enough that we're not fighting over the same limited resources—"

"GRACE. ARM."

"What?"

"NEEDLE. STILL THERE. GRACE PULLING."

Ryland glanced down, sheepish, and eased his arm back down onto the armrest. "Right. Sorry. Habit."

Rocky watched him settle, watched the tension in his shoulders ease by maybe one degree, and let himself have a small, private moment of something that wasn't quite relief but lived in the same neighborhood as it. This was the version of Grace he could work with — the one chasing a problem with his brain instead of quietly starving himself out of some misplaced sense of duty. Rocky just needed to keep him in that mode for as long as possible, redirect the guilt into research instead of self-sacrifice, one conversation at a time if that's what it took.

"ROCKY HAS IDEA," he said after a moment, turning something over in his thoughts the way he'd turn a broken part looking for the failure point. "GRACE REMEMBERS ALGAE TANKS. SMALL ONES. BACKUP OXYGEN SYSTEM, NOT USED MUCH."

"The emergency scrubber cultures? Those are barely enough to matter, they're not calibrated for—"

"NOT FOR EATING YET. FOR GROWING FASTER. ROCKY CAN MODIFY. MORE LIGHT, MORE NUTRIENTS, MAYBE ENOUGH PROTEIN TO STRETCH RATIONS. NOT GOOD FOOD. NOT TASTY FOOD. BUT FOOD."

Ryland huffed something that was almost a laugh, rubbing at his tired eyes. "You're proposing we eat emergency algae."

"GRACE EATS WORSE WHEN GRACE FORGETS TO EAT AT ALL."

"...Fair point." He let his head fall back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling, at the tangle of pipes and cable runs that had become as familiar to him as his own hands over the years. "Okay. Algae. We'll add it to the list of things I never thought I'd be grateful for. Right after taumebas and hostile alien engineers."

"ROCKY NOT HOSTILE."

"You threatened to weld my boots to the floor last week."

"GRACE DESERVED IT. GRACE TRIED TO GO EVA WITHOUT TELLING ROCKY FIRST."

"That was one time."

"THAT WAS THREE TIMES."

Ryland actually smiled at that, small and tired but real, and something in Rocky's chest — the strange, hollow cavity where his mercury heart sat — eased another fraction. This, at least, he knew how to navigate. Bickering. Familiar rhythms. The comfortable architecture of an argument that both of them knew wasn't really about boots or algae or EVA protocols at all.

A content trill escaped Rocky’s body. It’s okay. He can help Grace. He can get him sustenance he needs. He just needs to look through information on algea they had on Hail Mary. And they had a lot, actually. One good think about Stratt that Grace told him about, was that she was very VERY particular about everything, One of those things was putting all the information you could find on earthly world wide web.

Rocky jumped off of bed and towards the lab to grab human thinking device. Long time ago Grace covered the keyboard with tape so Rocky could actually use it in his xenonite suit. Text to speach turned on in accessibility settings was also VERY helpful.

He found the human thinking machine tucked into the corner of the lab, screen still smudged faintly from the last time Grace had used it one-handed while eating with the other. Rocky settled his bulk in front of it, upper limbs finding the taped-over keys by memory more than sight — not that sight had ever been the relevant sense here anyway.

Grace walked slowly into the lab after Rocky. “What ya looking for?” Grace grabbed onto the door frame, That transfusion really took a tool on him.

“ALGEA. INFORMATION, NEED TO MODIFY FOR GROWTH. STATEMENT”

“Hey – Don’t run away while I’m half conscious,” Grace grumbled, leaning heavily against the doorframe.

Rocky turned, his carapace shifting as he prepared a snarky chime about fragile humans needing to sit down.

He never got the chance.

The ship's comms suddenly crackled to life, Armando’s flat, mechanical voice echoing sharply through the lab and bouncing off the xenonite walls.

PATIENT STATUS UPDATE.

EYE MOVEMENT DETECTED.

CONSCIOUSNESS REGAINED.

Grace froze. A cold, sharp spike of adrenaline instantly washed away the heavy, dragging exhaustion in his bones.

He looked at Rocky. Rocky looked back.

“Oh Gods—” Grace exclaimed. “Rocky! Help me carry them to the med bay! We need Armando!”

Rocky run up to Ryland as fast as his eridian legs allowed him, almost tripping over. I guess not only Grace was getting careless when excited. He cursed at himself in his mind for it.

Grace carried body of a person from the sub out if it, bloody sludge hissing as it came with contact with his EV suit. They will worry about it late. Now the priority it to get this guy into med-bay.

Rocky moved closer, so Ryland could place lower part of strangers body onto his xenonite covered carapace. Suit cracked slightly under the pressure. How was that ever possible? It never did under Grace before? How heavy was that human?

Both of them run towards room with nanny bot holding unknown man and just hoping he is still alive.

As soon as they got inside the med-bay, Grace screamed louder than he probably wanted. It made Rocky’s non-existing ears ring.

“Armando! Emergency! Quick! Medical attention needed!” And just like that white mechanic hands with singular camera lens working as an eye grabbed unconscious human from Rocky and Grace.

Nanny Bot didn't pause for a second. Its mechanical arms glided across the ceiling track with smooth, robotic precision, lifting human off Rocky and Grace’s arms as if his dense, heavy frame weighed nothing at all.

With a dull THUD, the bot deposited individual onto the central medical bed. Overhead, the diagnostic monitors instantly flared to life, screaming with harsh red alerts and high-pitched alarm tones:

‘CRITICAL RADIATION EXPOSURE

UNKNOWN BIOLOGICAL MUTATIONS DETECTED

HEART RATE: 28 BPM — DROPPING’

Grace frantically hit the quick-release seals on his EV suit, practically kicking his way out of the bulky boots so he could reach the emergency medical cabinet. “We need to decontaminate him first—if that blood-ocean residue gets into his bloodstream or stays on his skin, it’s going to eat him alive!” Grace yelled, his voice cracking from panic and exhaustion. He wiped sweat from his forehead, his hands shaking like the time he woke up and realized he was alone, in space years ago.

All Rocky could do at that moment was just running around and praying that Ryland isn’t gonna do a stupid thing like for example – touching that dying man covered in toxic acidic blood.

“Armando! Toxicology scan! Quick! And clean them for a love of everything. We need to see what blood is their and what is the moon!”

In the mean time, Rocky run up to one of the cabbinets, looking for something to clean off the blood off of himself and well... everything. Some time ago, Grace put extra tape on all the containers so rocky could see what was inside. Usually it was for like, Rocky making a mess while being in his xenonite ball and running around, knocking everything and Grace being angry at him and making Rocky clean it up himself. Rocky never thought that they will need this for cleaning off blood.

While Rocky searched through the cabinets—his upper appendages tracing over the tactile tape markers Grace had put on every latch so he wouldn't knock over supplies in his suit—Armando’s mechanical arms whirred into action above the bed.

Two articulated spray nozzles extended from the overhead ceiling rail, blasting a pressurized mist of neutralizing saline and chemical binder over the stranger’s battered form. The thick, dark crimson sludge sizzled and dissolved, draining away through the perforated medical bed into the ship's waste collection unit below.

As the foam washed away the acidic ocean residue, Armando’s precision shears made quick work of the stiff, torn rags clinging to the man's torso.

Grace stumbled closer to the bed, gripping the stainless-steel railing so hard his knuckles turned white. His breath hitched in his throat as the foam cleared.

Now that the thick red sludge was gone, the full nightmare of the stranger's anatomy lay exposed under the bright bay lights.

His left arm ripped above elbow, boney pieces poking out of fleshy wound that has been melted shut by the acid. It looked horrible but it still wasn’t the worse part. His whole left part of the body was mutated, skin partially melted, growths similar in look to teeth and scales. His face was the most affected by mutations. Left cheek was now turned into another pair of mouth, filled with bone growths looking like giant fangs in irregular shapes and sized.

Before Grace could even fully comprehend what he was seeing, mechanic voice could been heard in the room TOXICOLOGY COMPLETE.

PRIMARY BLOOD COMPOUND: 50% HEAVY IRON MATRIX / 50% ORGANIC SALINE.

FOREIGN PATHOGEN DETECTED: UNIDENTIFIED CELLULAR MUTAGEN.

WARNING: CRITICAL DEPRECIATION OF OXYGEN-BINDING PROTEINS.

Grace stared at the screen.

“Fifty percent what?”

Armando repeated the result.

PRIMARY BLOOD COMPOUND: 50% HEAVY IRON MATRIX.

“I heard you the first time.”

Grace rubbed both hands over his face. His brain was desperately trying to make sense of the numbers, but every explanation he came up with was worse than the last.

Humans did not have blood like that.

Nothing he knew of had blood like that.

He looked back at the stranger.

The man's chest rose.

Barely.

Once.

Twice.

Then stopped.

“Armando?”

CARDIAC ARREST IMMINENT.

“Yeah, I got that part.”

Grace grabbed the defibrillator of the shelf. He never used it before but he watched enough medical serials to operate it... right?

Grace pressed the paddles against the stranger's chest, thumb hovering over the charge button.

"Armando, charge to—"

SHOCK NOT ADVISED. RHYTHM NON-SHOCKABLE. ASYSTOLE DETECTED.

"What? No, he's — his heart stopped, that's exactly what this is for—"

DEFIBRILLATION REQUIRES SHOCKABLE RHYTHM. CURRENT RHYTHM WILL NOT RESPOND TO ELECTRICAL COUNTERSHOCK. BEGIN CHEST COMPRESSIONS. ADMINISTERING EPINEPHRINE.

One of Armando's thinner arms swung down with a preloaded syringe, sinking it into the IV line already taped to the man's remaining arm before Grace could even process what was happening. The paddles suddenly felt useless in his hands. He dropped them onto the tray with a clatter.

"Compressions. Okay. Compressions, I can do compressions—"

He put his hands where a human sternum should be, and stopped.

The slits were right there. Six of them, still faintly pulsing, glistening under the bay lights like something that hadn't finished deciding whether it was a wound or an organ.

"Armando, where do I — I can't push there—"

COMPRESS TWO CENTIMETERS LATERAL TO PRIMARY SLIT CLUSTER. AVOID DIRECT CONTACT WITH GILL STRUCTURE. STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY OF STERNUM UNKNOWN.

“The duck you mean unknown? Whatever” Grace put his hands trying not to touch the gills. He lined his palms up where Armando indicated, locked his elbows the way he vaguely remembered from some CPR poster in a middle school hallway a lifetime ago, and pushed.

The chest gave under him — too soft in some places, unnervingly rigid in others, like pressing down on a ribcage assembled out of spare, mismatched parts.

One and two and—

His brain, unhelpfully, unforgivably, supplied the beat.

Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive—

"Oh my god, shut up," Grace muttered out loud, to himself, to no one, his arms already burning on the fourth compression.

CLARIFY REQUEST. NO VERBAL INPUT DETECTED PRIOR TO STATEMENT. Rocky's carapace clicked twice, sharp and fast — the sound he made when something didn't compute, which was rare, and which he hated. "GRACE MAKING NOISE. GRACE MAKING NOISE MEANS GRACE UPSET OR GRACE HYSTERICAL. WHICH ONE, QUESTION."

"Neither! There's a — there's a song, humans use it, it keeps the rhythm right for compressions, it's stupid. Don't — don't ask me to explain right now—"

Two and three and four—

Rocky didn't ask. Rocky had learned, over three years, that asking Grace to explain something mid-crisis only ever produced more words and less action, and right now Rocky needed Grace's hands to keep doing the thing that was maybe, possibly, keeping a stranger from staying dead.

Instead, Rocky moved.

He couldn't help with compressions — his upper limbs were built wrong for it, too rigid, too strong, he'd crack ribs that already sounded fragile on his sonar map. But he could do the thing he was actually good at. He scanned the monitor bank Grace wasn't looking at, translating the scrolling human text into shapes he understood, cross-referencing it against every scrap of xenobiology data the Hail Mary's databanks carried on hemoglobin analogues and closest he had — which was, admittedly, mostly notes on his own mercury-based blood chemistry, which was about as useful here as a recipe for bread would be to a fish.

"ROCKY FINDS NOTHING. NO REFERENCE. BLOOD LIKE THIS NOT IN ANY DATABASE. NOT EARTH. NOT ERID."

"Great. Great, that's — that's great, Rocky, thank you, very reassuring—"

RHYTHM CHECK IN THIRTY SECONDS.

Grace's arms were shaking now, more from the strain than the panic, sweat dripping steadily off his jaw onto the stranger's ruined collarbone. He didn't stop counting. He didn't stop humming, either, quieter now, almost involuntary, a thin thread of sound under his ragged breathing.

Rocky's five legs carried him closer, close enough that his carapace pressed lightly against the partition separating their air. It wasn't much. It wasn't anything, really — a few centimeters of xenonite between them, same as always. But it was the only comfort he had to offer with hands that couldn't cross the gap.

"GRACE DOING GOOD," Rocky chimed, low, steady, deliberately calm even though nothing in his own chords felt calm. "GRACE KEEP GOING. ROCKY HERE."

RHYTHM CHECK.

The monitor screamed for one horrible second — a flatline tone that made Grace's stomach drop straight through the floor — before it caught, stuttered, and resolved into a slow, ragged, but present beeping.

SPONTANEOUS CARDIAC ACTIVITY DETECTED. HEART RATE: 31 BPM. RISING. RESUME AUTOMATED MONITORING. HUMAN ASSISTANCE NO LONGER REQUIRED FOR THIS PHASE.

Grace's arms gave out before his brain fully processed the words. He didn't so much sit on the stool behind him as collapse onto it, missing it by enough that his hip caught the edge and he half-slid, half-fell the rest of the way down. He didn't care. His hands were shaking too hard to hold anything anyway.

Armando's arms swept back in without hesitation, threading new lines, adjusting the drip, doing a dozen small precise things Grace didn't have names for and didn't try to learn right now. The bot didn't need him for this part. Nobody needed him for this part.

That was the thought that finally caught up with him, sitting there with his palms still tingling from the compressions, staring at a chest that was — technically, medically — alive again because of him.

He wasn't a doctor.

He was a teacher. A ducking high school science teacher. He was a scientist with doctorate back in the days, that’s true, but that was before that whole situation with calling lead in his field a useless waste of carbon after laughing at his paper about potential stellar life forms who didn’t need water not oxygen to exist and develop. He was right of course. Shame that no-one on earth will ever know about it though.

He let out a short, humorless laugh at that, the kind that had no actual amusement behind it, just air needing somewhere to go. Funny, really. His new best friend and the one person that made it possible for Earth to survive is something that his colleagues never believed could exist. He picked up his head with tired grin plastered across and looked towards Rocky standing in the corner, feeling useless at that moment. “He’s stable buddy. We got a new crew mate”

Rocky's carapace shifted, some of the tension bleeding out of his stance at the sound of Grace's voice actually sounding like Grace again — tired, cracked at the edges, but him. "CREW MATE." He turned the word over like an unfamiliar tool, testing its weight. "GRACE SURE, QUESTION. HEART STOPPING TWICE NOT USUALLY GOOD SIGN FOR NEW CREW."

"It stopped once. The second time was just—" Grace waved a vague hand, "—dramatic pause. For effect."

"NOT FUNNY."

"A little funny."

"NOT FUNNY." But there was no real heat behind it, just the familiar rhythm of an argument neither of them meant, the kind that existed mostly to hear the other one still talking. Rocky's legs clicked once against the deck, softer now, almost thoughtful. "GRACE SAVED STRANGER. GRACE HANDS SHAKING, GRACE SCARED, GRACE NO DOCTOR. GRACE SAVED STRANGER ANYWAY."

“ Yeah... Yeah I guess you’re right Rocky. I guess I did” Grace looked at his hands red and pulsating from the presser he has been putting on another man’s chest. He saved another human. This time he was confident. Sure, he did send all the tapes with findings and the beetles with taumebas inside towards earth but he had no idea if they actually made the way back. But this? This time he actually saved another human.

He flexed his fingers slowly, watching the color come back into them, watching the tremor start to ease. It wasn't the same as sending data back through the void and hoping — hoping the Beetles made it, hoping someone on Earth was still alive to catch them, hoping four years of sacrifice added up to something more than a very expensive, very lonely gesture into the dark.

This was different. This had a heartbeat. Right now, ten feet away, a chest was rising and falling because of something his own hands had done, not something he'd launched and lost sight of and would never get confirmation on. He didn't need Earth to tell him this one counted.

"Guess you did," he echoed back to himself, quieter, mostly for his own benefit. Then, louder, aiming for something steadier: "Okay. Okay. Let's not waste it, then."

He crossed to the second bed, the one Armando had already prepped, tubing coiled and waiting, and sat, offering his arm without needing to be told twice this time.

PREPARING TRANSFUSION LINE. DONOR TYPE O NEGATIVE CONFIRMED — COMPATIBLE FOR STANDARD HUMAN EMERGENCY TRANSFUSION. WARNING: RECIPIENT BLOOD CHEMISTRY DEVIATES SIGNIFICANTLY FROM HUMAN BASELINE. COMPATIBILITY BEYOND ABO/RH TYPING CANNOT BE VERIFIED. PROCEEDING IS NOT A GUARANTEED SOLUTION. LIMITING VOLUME TO 350 MILLILITERS PER PRIOR ASSESSMENT.

"Yeah, yeah, I remember, you already lectured me about my sad little malnourished body once today." Grace held still while the needle found the vein, only a small flinch giving him away. "And the other part — the might not even work part — noted. Filed. Doing it anyway."

Rocky's carapace hadn't moved from the corner, but his attention hadn't left Grace either, tracking the new line running red out of him same as it tracked everything. "GRACE GIVING BLOOD NOW. GRACE ALREADY WEAK. ROCKY SAYING THIS AGAIN BECAUSE ROCKY THINKS GRACE NOT LISTENING FIRST TIME."

"I heard you the first time, Rocky."

"ROCKY REPEATING ANYWAY."

Grace huffed something that was almost a laugh, watching the line pull slow and dark from his arm, thinking distantly that if he passed out from this, at least he'd already be lying down.

The minutes crawled by in the particular silence of two people — one human, one not — watching a third one breathe.

TRANSFUSION COMPLETE. 350 MILLILITERS ADMINISTERED. MONITORING RECIPIENT RESPONSE.

Nothing happened for a moment. Then the numbers on the overhead display shifted, slow and small, but shifted — oxygen saturation climbing a single, stubborn percentage point.

Grace let his head fall back onto the med bay bed, eyes closing, and allowed himself, for the first time since the moon had shown up where no moon should be, to breathe out.

Chapter 1: ANOMALY: LIVE FORM

‘ L I V E F O R M D E T E C T E D ‘

Speakers in Hail Mary yelled out after they finished scanning the moon that should not exist here. There was no planet it was orbiting. There was nothing, not even a slight possibility of one being there before. It didn’t make any sense. Why was it here?

Before any of his questions could have been answered, Grace ran past him, toward the airlock.

“WHERE GRACE GOING, QUESTION.”

Grace didn’t say anything, just zoomed straight for his EV suit.

“BAD BAD BAD. GRACE NO GO. MOON DANGEROUS. HIGH RADIATION. WILL KILL HUMANS IN 33.7 MINUTES, STATEMENT.” Rocky nervously tapped his three legs, swaying from side to side while running after Ryland in the xenonite tunnels like a big, stone hamster.

Grace didn’t listen. He never listened when his AuDHD brain latched onto a new discovery. He fumbled frantically with the magnetic seals of his EV suit, his hands shaking so hard he dropped the neck-ring latch onto the deck.

“GRACE CLUMSY. GRACE DROPS THINGS. NOT GOOD CONDITION TO GO IN SPACE.”

“Rocky. There’s something out there. Something alive. Something other than you and me.” Ryland was still fumbling with the cord attachments on his suit.

Rocky emitted a sharp, buzz-like chord at eight hundred hertz—an octave reserved for extreme exasperation. “ROCKY KNOWS. SCANNER SAYS LIVE FORM INSIDE METAL CYLINDER SUBMERGED IN TOXIC OCEAN. SCANS SHOW THAT THE COMPOUND OF IT IS NINETY PERCENT BLOOD. STILL FOOLISH. GRACE IS SOFT. GRACE HAS WEAK BONES. RADIATION WILL COOK GRACE, STATEMENT.”

“Suit can handle it.” He didn’t even look at his alien buddy, which really annoyed Rocky.

Grace’s complete dismissal of basic safety protocols made the mercury blood inside Rocky’s core surge with an agitated, heavy rhythm. The lack of eye contact was just the final insult. It’s not like ‘eye contact’ is important to Eridians, but Grace had told him before that it’s important to humans, and Rocky had gotten used to feeling Ryland's eyes on him when they talked. Grace had spent weeks explaining human social cues, insisting that looking at someone’s face showed respect and focus. Now Grace was ignoring Rocky entirely, staring blindly at a tube connection on an EV suit that was three sizes too loose around his malnutrition-worn shoulders.

Rocky angrily swayed back and forth, tapping his legs onto the xenonite tunnel’s floor—he often did that when he was getting fed up with Grace’s nonsense and lack of self-preservation instinct.

Grace finally managed to attach the oxygen line to the EV suit properly. At least that gave Rocky a minimal relief from the anxiety that was building up in his carapace.

“DONE,” Rocky whistling-chimed in high tones, his voice carrying clearly through the ship. “GRACE NO LONGER LEAKING AIR. NOW LOOK AT ROCKY. LISTEN TO ROCKY.”

Grace blinked, finally lifting his face toward the wall separating their atmospheres. His blond hair was a damp, unruly nest against his forehead, and his eyes behind his glasses were wide, dilated with frantic, hyper-focused energy. Grace was always getting so leaky when excited. Rocky always wondered how that felt. It’s not like Eridians can really feel liquids on their ‘skin’. Their body temperature around 200°C was just too high for any liquid to really stick—well, other than maybe mercury, but no Eridian wants to feel mercury on their carapace. Mercury means injury, after all.

“What, Rocky. What do you want?” Ryland sounded annoyed. He had gotten better at controlling his anger issues from back on Earth, but they still sometimes peaked out when someone—usually Rocky—tried to stop him from doing something really important to him. Rocky knew that. But he also knew that Grace often gets too focused on one thing to see the bigger picture and just goes down his own little tunnel of thoughts.

“GRACE IRRATIONAL. ANGRY. NO GOOD FOR SPACE. ROCKY WORRIED.”

It was true. For Eridians, going into space was pure sensory deprivation. There was nothing to bounce sound off of, and even if there were, sound can’t travel in space. Every time Ryland went outside the Hail Mary for any reason, Rocky felt like a part of him was slowly dying from anxiety. They had met each other what, maybe three years ago by now? For Rocky, that was almost nothing, but during those three years, Grace had become basically a part of him. They did almost everything together. Hell, Grace was even doing Rocky’s laundry. For being on a small spaceship with not enough food for its human companion, their lives were pretty domestic here. It reminded Rocky of his life on Erid and about... about Adrian. Gods, how much he missed Adrian.

But Rocky didn't want to think about Adrian right now. Adrian was back on Erid, hundreds of parsecs away, safe under the thick, warm blanket of their homeworld's atmosphere—while Rocky was stuck out in the silent void with a leaky, chaotic mammal who was about to dive headfirst into lethal radiation.

“GRACE MUST LISTEN TO ROCKY,” Rocky whistling-chimed, his tone dropping to a heavy C-minor. “ROCKY SCANNER DID FULL ANALYSIS. OBSERVATION: VERY BAD CONDITION. VERY BAD BIOLOGY. BAD BAD BAD.”

Grace let out a heavy sigh, but he finally paused by the airlock frame, resting one gloved hand against the bulkhead. He glared through his scratched visor at Rocky’s stone shell. “Bad biology? What does that mean, Rocky?”

“HUMAN-LIKE FORM. BUT EVERYTHING WRONG. NO UPPER LIMB. HOLES. LEAKING FLUIDS. HEART RATE SLOWING. TEMPERATURE RISING. HUMAN BUT NO HUMAN.”

Grace froze. All his frustration evaporated in a fraction of a second, replaced by pure, manic scientific shock. “H-Human?”

He completely skipped over the part where Rocky said NOT human. Now it was personal. Another human? In space? In need of rescue? Hell, even if that was just a malfunction of a scanner—which he really doubted, since Rocky was the one who made it and he never makes mistakes—he needed to know.

“GRACE NO HEAR. GRACE HEARS WHAT GRACE WANTS,” Rocky chimed sharply, his tone rising into an irritated whistle that vibrated through the speaker on the partition. “ROCKY SAID NOT NORMAL HUMAN. SKELETON MISSING UPPER LIMB. RIB AREA HAS STRANGE OPEN SLITS.”

Rocky clicked two walking legs against the xenonite deck in a fast, agitated cadence—CLACK-CLACK.

“SKULL HAS HOLE ON SIDE. INSIDE HOLE: MUTATED. VERY DAMAGED.”

“ROCKY, I DON’T CARE. WHOEVER—OR WHATEVER IT IS—THEY NEED HELP.” Ryland put his helmet on finally and walked into the airlock, closing the door behind him. He attached his tether cord to the airlock wall and strapped on the tool belt he usually used to fix small things outside the ship, before opening the outer hatch into space.

The airlock opened with a hiss of air escaping outside. Hail Mary was staying in orbit around the blood moon, low enough that the chain Rocky made for fishing Taumeeba should be enough. Grace took a deep breath before pushing himself off the ship, slowly floating toward the face of the unknown moon.

Rocky pressed his stone carapace hard against the inner partition wall, his upper limbs twitching in a frantic, uncoordinated dance of sheer frustration. The vibration of the airlock cycle hissed through the bulkheads—a hollow, terrifying sound that meant Grace was once again putting his soft, fragile, water-filled body into the endless nothingness of space.

Stupid space blob. Irresponsible, leaky, suicidal blob.

Rocky’s echolocation couldn't reach into the vacuum outside—there was no air to carry the sonar waves, no medium to bounce his voice off of. Space was a silent, suffocating wall. Every time Grace stepped out into that void, Rocky felt as if his own mercury blood were turning to sludge, heavy and stagnant with anxiety.

Rocky’s three lower legs clicked against the floor plating in a rapid, agitated rhythm—CLACK-CLACK-CLACK. He didn't waste another second pacing the tunnel, turning his heavy, rock-armored body toward the cockpit.

If Grace was going to be an idiot, Rocky had to be the engineer who kept the idiot alive.

Just before entering, he jumped into his xenonite suit. He had made it some time ago—it was way easier to do stuff around the ship when he could actually use his appendages on the human side, even if it was a little uncomfortable for long periods. He’d pat himself on the back for it later; right now, the more important part was Ryland being an idiot.

Rocky squeezed his stone shell into the xenonite suit, the heavy seals locking shut with a series of muffled, pressurized THUNKS. The suit pinched at his upper joints—a minor price to pay for the ability to move freely outside the hot, ammonia-filled atmosphere of Blip-A without cooking Grace or suffocating himself.

He didn't wait to adjust to the awkward weight. He scurried straight to the pilot console, all five of his appendages clattering against the metal deck in a fast, heavy rhythm.

Rocky placed his little reader machine in position so the screen could actually be read by his sensors. Through external sensors, Rocky tracked Grace’s descent. The small, suited human looked ridiculously fragile against the vast, crimson sphere below. The blood moon hung there like an open wound in the void, radiating heat and unstable particles that made Rocky’s scanner readouts jitter with static.

Down, down Grace floated, guiding himself along the heavy alloy chain Rocky had forged months ago for sampling Taumeeba. The chain unreeled from the winch with a steady, mechanical groan that vibrated through Rocky’s suit.

“GRACE HAS THIRTY-ONE MINUTES OF SAFE OXYGEN LEFT,” Rocky’s voice whistled through the radio link, sharp, bossy, and high-pitched. “DO NOT TOUCH THE BLOOD OCEAN. THE COMPOUND HAS EXTREME ACIDITY. IT WILL EAT YOUR SUIT’S SEALS IN SEVEN MINUTES. UNDERSTOOD, QUESTION?”

“Copy that, Rocky,” Grace’s voice crackled back through the comms. His breathing was heavy, his pulse loud and frantic in the audio feed. “I see the vessel! It’s... oh God, Rocky, it’s a submarine. An actual submarine!”

“ROCKY TOLD GRACE! METAL CYLINDER!” Rocky chimed back crossly, his upper appendages flying over the winch controls to adjust the tension. “HULL IS COLLAPSING. PRESSURE IS THREE POINT TWO TIMES EARTH NORMAL ON THE EXTERIOR. WINCH MAGNETIC CLAMP IS DEPLOYING NOW!”

That big magnet had been part of Blip-A. Rocky had decided to mount it onto Hail Mary when they left his ship in space around two thousand light-years from where they were now—one of the best ideas he’d had in a while.

Deep within the thick, iron-rich soup of the moon's ocean, the heavy magnetic head at the end of the chain plunged beneath the surface.

THUD.

The impact vibrated all the way up the tether, shuddering through the hull. The magnetic clamp locked onto the submarine’s rusted top hatch with thousands of pounds of force.

“CLAMP LOCKED. ROCKY RETRIEVING, STATEMENT.” Rocky declared, pulling the winch lever back.

The heavy motors roared, the alloy chain snapping taut. Slowly, agonizingly, the submerged, iron-soaked metal tube began to break the surface of the blood sea, dripping thick, dark crimson sludge into the vacuum.

Down in the dark, suffocating, reeking cabin of the sinking vessel, the violent jerk of the winch rattled the crushed bulkheads.

“Rocky, slow down! Speed! Speed will crush them at that rate!” Grace screamed into his suit intercom.

“APOLOGY APOLOGY APOLOGY.” The winch’s heavy motor dropped an octave as Rocky pulled back on the lever, the thick alloy chain slowing its frantic chugging to a steady, controlled hum.

Through his reader machine’s external sensor array, Rocky monitored the forces acting on the rusted metal cylinder. “SPEED ADJUSTED TO ZERO POINT SIX METERS PER SECOND. HULL STRAIN REDUCED BY THIRTY-SIX PERCENT. BETTER, QUESTION?”

“Better! Way better!” Grace gasped, his voice tight and ragged in the radio comms. He was clinging to the tether just above the rising submarine, his suit thrusters firing in short, clumsy bursts to keep himself oriented in microgravity. “The hull is... God, Rocky, it’s buckling. There are stress fractures all along the seam. If we hit the airlock too hard, it’s going to split wide open!”

“ROCKY IS A GOOD ENGINEER. ROCKY WILL NOT CRASH CANISTER,” Rocky chimed back sharply, though his upper appendages twitched against the controls with tense precision. “GRACE GET READY AT AIRLOCK BAY. WHEN CANISTER ENTERS, GRACE MUST SEAL OUTER DOORS IMMEDIATELY. BLOOD-LIQUID IS DRIPPING. EXTREME ACIDITY. DO NOT LET FLUID TOUCH SUIT SEALS!”

Ryland and the sub kept ascending toward the ship as the bottom hatch opened. Man, thank whoever was above for the engineers on Earth making a full-sized hatch for the Beetles that was big enough to store medium-sized vehicles, too.

With a heavy, metallic groan, the bottom hatch of the Hail Mary swung fully open, revealing the cavernous storage bay originally meant to hold all those Earth-engineered probes.

Grace used his suit’s thrusters to maneuver himself into the bay ahead of the submarine, hooking his tether securely to an interior structural beam. He unclipped the heavy decontamination spray hose from the wall panel, his hands shaking inside his bulky pressurized gloves as he waited.

“EIGHT METERS... FIVE METERS... ENTRY IN THREE SECONDS,” Rocky announced over the radio, his whistling tones tense and measured as his appendages flew over the winch console.

The rusted, iron-crusted submarine cleared the threshold of the hatch, dripping thick, dark crimson sludge that hissed and sizzled the instant it splashed against the lower bay's alloy floor. The heavy bottom hatch doors slammed shut behind it with a deafening, reverberating THUD, sealing the bay against the freezing vacuum outside.

“SEAL CONFIRMED! PUMPING ATMOSPHERE AND NEUTRALIZING FOAM NOW!” Rocky chimed through the intercom speaker, his high voice buzzing with frantic precision.

Overhead, the automated spray nozzles burst to life, covering the corroded hull in thick, bubbling white foam to neutralize the acidic, radioactive vapors before they could eat through the bay's primary seals.

Grace unhooked his safety tether, scrambling clumsily across the slick deck toward the steaming cylinder. He grabbed a heavy titanium pry-bar off the emergency wall rack, his gloved hands trembling violently as he jammed the wedged end beneath the submarine’s warped latch.

“GRACE WAIT. SCAN! SCAN FIRST! SAFETY!” Rocky yelled through the partition speaker, his stone feet clattering rapidly against his side of the xenonite glass as he hurried to watch.

“No time! They are DYING!” Ryland grabbed a handheld mini-laser to cut through the side of the sub to get to whatever was inside. As soon as the beam touched the metal and cut the first slit, the rest of the bloody liquid poured out. In that moment, Rocky was so glad Grace was still in his EV suit—otherwise, who knows what would have happened.

“CAREFUL CAREFUL CAREFUL!”

“I am careful!” Grace snapped, wiping red fluid from his helmet visor.

It didn’t take long to cut a hole big enough to get inside. It was dark, corroding, and covered in already-drying blood.

And in the middle, lying unconscious, was a person... or at least they thought it was a person.