Chapter Text
That’s it. The beetles are sent, and it’s time to turn around and save Rocky.
Let’s put off the impending mental breakdown and consider the problem of how I’m going to actually find Rocky. Luckily for me, the computers aboard the Hail Mary are quite good at finding out where things are based on just the position of stars, even if I’m…. not.
It’s really amazing to think about, to be honest. Since I’m now roaring back to Tau Ceti with a lovely 2Gs of acceleration after an ill-advised U turn manoeuvre which put me right into my own Petrova line ‘chemtrails’ (Piloting is hard, okay?), all that I have to go off for navigation is the positions of the stars. At this distance, Tau Ceti is definitely the brightest star in the sky but it’s still just that; a star. Without an atmosphere to make the sky blue, even the sun back in low Earth orbit on the ISS probably felt like just a really bright star. Or something.
Okay let’s stop thinking about Earth for a second.
But yes, it’s an odd thing to look out the window and see nothing but blackness. I know intrinsically that if I turn off the lights and let my eyes adjust to the darkness, I’ll start being able to see stars, so long as the outside of my ship isn’t caught in Taulight (or sunlight too I suppose). But I have no reason to do that right now; there will be plenty of time for that on the way back to 40 Eridani.
Rocky has told me that Erid experiences about 2.1 times Earth gravity, and so that’s what I’ve set the ship’s acceleration to, to try and get a feel for it. I'm very optimistically hoping that Rocky can find some way to magically make his heavy metal enriched food edible to humans and carefully not thinking about starving to death slowly. Hopefully they can work out some way to get me down to the surface so I don’t have to live in orbit induced microgravity for the rest of my life. He also told me that they have a space elevator… maybe there’s some way to build a room like halfway up it? To experience Earth gravity? Although that doesn’t really sound safe, I guess. We’ll see.
Mary complained a bit at the acceleration rate (hopefully none of the lab equipment gets broken by the G force… maybe I should have checked that), but aside from locking a coma patient in a room with two corpses that one time she’s surprisingly compliant to having the scientists do whatever the heck they want to it. No baby proofing here. The crew were trusted to do whatever they needed, and having botched safety protocols hassling the crew was probably deemed a bad idea.
My current plan of action is as follows: get back to Tau Ceti, insert into stellar orbit like before, and then use the Petrovascope to try and find Rocky’s trail. Once I find the trail I can follow it right to where Rocky is, but by now the taumoeba will have gotten into his fuel lines and turned his highly enriched astrophage fuel into horrible sludge. So his engines will have cut off, and therefore he will have drifted forward at constant velocity. Newton’s first law. With no force, he'll just keep the same speed.
Technically, even if I do nothing, because he’s already got the right heading he will eventually reach 40 Eridani… in probably thousands of years. And then blow right past it at relativistic speeds. Not good. Don’t think about it.
Funny thing about relativity is after a certain amount of time we don't really get much that much faster but to us, the distance to our destination will appear to shrink (length contraction), while an outside observer won't see the distance shrink but will see our clocks gradually getting slower compared to their own viewpoint (time dilation). Mind bending stuff. I'm glad I could just read out the wiki page for Rocky when he wanted a more detailed explanation, back when we were making the chains, because after years of teaching at high school I was quite rusty on the exact mechanics. Still, it turns what should have been a 16 light year journey into something that can be experienced in just 4. I think. I might be mixing up the distances between Earth and Erid here, I'll check later.
But meeting an object in space isn’t as simple as just spotting it from far away and parking nearby. Space is unbelievably, incredibly vast. As someone who majored in their special interest it always makes me laugh when a spaceship entering or leaving the solar system is like “we’re just passing Neptune now btw haha”. Actually getting anywhere close to a planet is a LOT of hard work. And also luck, that the planet is in the right spot. To make an analogy, if you’re leaving the solar system at 12 o’clock on the hours hand on a clock, if the planet is at one minute past? You won’t be able to make out any surface features. It’ll be a dot. A very bright dot, to be fair, but a dot still. And that’s not even taking the vertical height into the equation. Tau Ceti, from Earth, is near the ecliptic in the night sky, but not quite on it, so we kind of have to angle away from the plane of the planets to get here. No gravity assists for us.
As you can probably tell, I have a lot of free time while waiting to get back to Tau Ceti. I have been narrating a bit of my thought process, out loud, to Rocky’s little enclosure here, still on the ship. Devoid of ammonia now, of course (“Rocky not leave BOMB on hail mary. Grace stupid stupid stupid. If crack xenonite, ship go boom, grace die, statement.”) but it’s nice to pretend.
What was it my kids always said? Ah, yes. I’m very normal about this.
Where was I? Right. Space is big.
Meeting up with Rocky’s ship needs me to know his exact velocity in relation to me, which requires some kind of space sonar. A really advanced sonar. The ship has onboard computers designed to renavigate around rogue asteroids, but if you’ll see my previous point (exhibit A: space is big) this system hasn’t kicked in a single time while I was awake. And now that I’m checking the logs, it hasn’t actually been needed a single time. Which is lucky, I suppose, but also just a fact of the matter that asteroids and ice particles and other space debris, even in an asteroid belt or Saturn’s rings, are so far apart that you’ll never see more than one at the same time near each other. Good for not crashing into things. Bad for rendezvousing with a spaceship. I can’t just match position otherwise I’ll coast right past Rocky at dozens of times the sound barrier (in Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. Not in vacuum. Obviously) or worse, crash right into him and kill us both. Incredibly unlikely due to exhibit A but I don’t want to risk it. Even if I magically had Rocky’s exact position and velocity relative to me right now, I couldn’t gun my engines right at him, because when I do a U-turn and flip over, the Blip-A would get caught in the engine exhaust Petrova line and blow up. Which is bad.
So I need to figure out where he is, calculate his speed when his engines died, then accelerate faster than that to try and catch up, then slow myself to a stop (relative to Rocky), at a safe distance so we don’t both die, then gently coast over at low speed to Blip A and try and get Rocky’s attention. Light work. No reaction.
How the heck am I gonna do this.
I’m back at Tau Ceti now, or at least the outer orbits of it, and I’ve had an idea.
The ship’s onboard asteroid detection thing seems to work based off of radar, which is basically the same as sonar. But thinking about sonar gave me an idea. I can use the exhaust plume as a more powerful beam of light, and then use the Petrovascope to see what the infrared Petrova radiation bounces off. Because so much exhaust gets put out at once, it’ll light up objects far further away from me, way further than my radar could possibly detect. No offence to my radar; it’s honestly very powerful already. But the range it has is not nearly enough. I’ve calculated an upper and lower bound for where Rocky might be coasting and what velocities, but it’s a pretty huge range, about 4 times that of my Radar’s maximum instrumented range. So this Petrovar (name pending) will be much better.
Better test it first, to make sure the idea actually works. The Petrovascope can’t run while the engines are on, normally, because the entire screen would just light up bright red. So I’m going to fire the engines in the direction I want to look for one second, then turn them off and hustle over to my Petrovascope.
I’ve already tested the Petrovascope and it definitely still works. I found Rocky’s trail. So basically, as soon as I’ve tested this Petrovar I can start heading to Rocky.
Aaaand go.
I hustle over to the Petrovascope and flick it on. Ah. There’s a 20 second cooldown. I didn’t know about that. It makes sense, the Petrova line from my engines doesn’t fade instantly. I guess that determines my minimum instrumented range. Anything closer than about 20 light seconds is out of luck. Luckily I have the normal radar for that.
The Petrovascope comes on automatically after 20 seconds, which is quite nice of it. I’m pointing it away from the Adrian-Tau Ceti Petrova line at a region of what should be empty space. One by one I see little flashes pop up as the IR light gets reflected back, tiny stars against the night sky. Cool! It works. I’d set up the computers to record the footage so that I can try my hand at doing the relative velocity calculations. Luckily, when Stratt pirated every software on Earth, that also included Airport Air Traffic Control Radar software! So hopefully I can make a hack job solution that works in 3D space.
Wait, planes already fly in 3D space. Nevermind.
I stare at the screen a little more. It’s been around 5 minutes now and I’m not seeing any more flashes now. The last one was about a minute ago and was quite dim, so it seems like the maximum range is around 2 light minutes (the light has to bounce back, of course), which is honestly much further than I expected to-
Oh, there’s one more. Huh. That was brighter than I thought.
I check the little timer I’ve brought over. That was almost 3 light minutes away, but it was far brighter. 3 light minutes comes to about… 54 million kilometres. Hm. That is a bit weird.
I know Rocky is waiting for me, but there’s a thought in my head that won’t leave me alone, now. Because the other asteroids detected on my Petrovascope definitely got dimmer as the distance increased, but this one was different.
I’m sorry, Rocky, but I need to check this out. I start calculating the relative position and velocity of what I’m gonna start mentally calling Blip X. In my head I justify it as testing my rendezvous skills. It doesn’t make me feel better about the delay.
That is a spaceship.
I stare out of my window, my ship’s lights illuminating what I can see of the dark structure. It appears rounded and has a mirror-like reflective shine to it, like a drop of liquid mercury in free fall. I’ve checked my instruments over and over again, but there isn’t a trace of a Petrova line near it. Which means one of two things; either this ship doesn’t use astrophage propulsion. Or it’s been here, unmoving, for a very very long time. I can’t help but think of the Blip A in this situation. Is this ship… dead?
I’ve tried firing my engines in short patterns, scanning it with every external instrument I have, and nothing. I can’t make out any part of the interior, no visible windows from any part; I can’t even make out an airlock (which to be fair, Blip A didn’t have one either; Rocky had to construct his own). I feel like a bee buzzing around a flower, the way I keep repositioning. There’s a part that is almost certainly an engine bay where the propulsion comes from, and the ship is actually longer than I first thought, almost like a needle in shape, if a bit shorter in proportion (I was viewing it from an angle near the front, but it was hard to tell at first, with no visual surface features and just smooth reflection of stars. Sue me.).
The rounded edges and reflectivity are probably why it reflected the Petrovar pulse so well, come to think of it.
But no matter what I do, the ship doesn’t respond in any way. I don’t think they’re ignoring me. I think that this is just a ghost ship. A shipwreck, you could say.
It fills me with melancholy. How close were Rocky and I to becoming this? A ghost ship, floating in orbit around Tau Ceti, forever.
Well, now that I think about it, they’re in orbit, which means they were able to brake in time and come to a ‘stop’. So it does beg the question of what happened after that.
I wonder how many other ships are in this graveyard of a star system.
I wonder how many ships overshot entirely, their crews dead. Maybe this ship was like the Hail Mary, with automated piloting, but unlike on my ship, everyone died on the way, with no one left to start the mission. Who knows. I can’t even tell which star this ship came from; any Petrova line from its propulsion has long since faded.
I don’t think I will ever know.
I take another moment of silence, and pay my respects. And then I get back to work.
I’ve wasted enough time; I need to go get Rocky. Let’s go save Erid.
But in the back of my mind, I wonder about all the other star systems dimming as well, and the life those might hold. And despite ‘wet human brain with no object permanence statement’, the thought stays with me.