Chapter Text
Rocky moving back into the Hail Mary is a tedious process.
Both my ship and the Blip-A are cruising through interstellar space without thrust which means we are suspended in zero gravity.
I don’t have a problem with that, or at least, not a very large one. I can move around fine albeit a bit clumsily.
Rocky’s five legs are also great for moving around in zero-g, but that only works if he can use them. But his movements are of little effect when he is trapped inside his Xenonite sphere.
So it’s less ‘Rocky moving into the Hail Mary’ and more ‘me moving Rocky into the Hail Mary.’ He did his best packing all the stuff that he needed in crates and already bringing them to the airlock inside the tunnel so that I can carry them over.
The crates are not my priority, though. My priority is getting Rocky on the ship and bringing him somewhere where he can be useful. Which means that I have to give him an environment to move around in freely.
I decide to give him most of the dormitory just like last time. I still know how to reinstall the Xenonite barrier that can hold back 29 atmospheric pressures. In record time, the room is prepared. I could have done it even faster if I had sacrificed the entire room, but I doubt the nanny bot and the rest of the medical equipment can survive the Eridian atmosphere.
Now I only need to bring Rocky in.
Which provides me with a great challenge.
How?
Both ships are in zero-g and I can’t activate the centrifuge with the tunnel attached to the Blip-A. Well, I could, but it would rip the tunnel apart if the Blip-A can’t rotate at the same speed.
And we can’t rotate the Blip-A due to its lack of fuel. And there is too much live Taumoeba loose on Rocky’s ship for me to bring any Astrophage over. Technically we could find a way to stop the Taumoeba from eating anything we brought aboard (for example by waiting a bit until all the Taumoeba had starved or remodeling parts of the ship with other materials than Xenonite that Taumoeba can’t get through) but the easier option was to somehow get Rocky from the nose of the ship to the dormitory, which is at the opposite end of the crew compartment.
Everything without gravity.
Have I mentioned that his Xenonite ball isn’t the most optimal way to move through zero-g?
“Maybe I can push you around,” I suggest to him.
Rocky laughs (or at least the Eridian version of a laugh. It’s more of a high-pitched collection of random notes) “Grace too light.”
In zero gravity making something move is, in theory, easier than on a planet as everything is weightless here, but mass is still a problem. The higher the mass of an object is the higher is its inertia and that still applies in space.
It is the reason that, when I try to push Rocky’s sphere in the direction of the Hail Mary, I’m actually the one being pushed back. Rocky does the same giggle-laugh again while I float back to him.
I have to anchor my feet to the tunnel walls to move him, so that I don’t drift away again. My arms burn, but his sphere starts to slowly float in the right direction, rotating gently. “You are incredibly heavy.”
“Rocky small for Eridian,” he beeps.
“Not small enough,” I mumble as I drift alongside him. At this speed it will take multiple minutes for his ball to reach the open airlock of my ship.
“Boring, boring, boring,” he says while pitching forward inside the spinning ball. He shuffles around for a bit, trying to stabilize himself, but gives up quickly. There isn’t an ‘up’ and ‘down’ in zero-g anyway.
“Don’t complain,” I move ahead, pulling myself through the airlock in the nose of the ship and into the control room. “You just have to wait. That’s not that bad.”
“Boring.”
“You’ve said.”
His ball scrapes against the edge of the airlock and bounces off at an odd angle. He also starts to yaw to the left slowly. “Bad, bad, bad. Rocky don’t like.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say absentmindedly. I need to prevent him from bumping into any of the screens. I can’t have him damaging any of the equipment in here, we still need it to navigate to Erid.
But how do I make him stop without getting stuck between a rock and a hard place? I really don’t want to be crushed between his sphere and the hull.
I position myself similarly to before with my feet against the nearest wall and wait with outstretched arms for Rocky’s ball to come into reach. It worked once. If I can’t cancel his momentum fully in time he might squish me a little bit, but I should be fine.
Like an unstoppable force the Xenonite contraption bears down on me. Nope, that won’t work, I think, just as my arms get pressed backwards slowly. I spin 180° and try again, this time pushing with my feet.
And…
The ball stops moving. Phew.
Carefully I extract my hands from between the screens and buttons. It looks like I hadn’t pressed anything by accident. I sink down into the pilot chair (or try to, but I just end up hovering slightly above it). Perhaps finding a solution to the Blip-A’s lack of ability to spin would have been easier. I haven’t even gotten Rocky past the first room and the dormitory is farthest from the airlock.
“Grace done, question? Grace not done,” Rocky complains.
“Give me a minute,” I tell him with an appropriate amount of annoyance in my voice. “I need to find an easier way to get you through the ship.”
“This fine,” he says, completely contradicting his earlier complaints.
“No, not fine. I can’t risk having you break something in the lab. All the equipment there is irreplaceable.”
“Then be careful.”
It takes almost twenty minutes to get Rocky down to the dormitory. I move his ball around slowly, constantly adjusting the vector. Everytime I move him it costs a lot of my energy, so the entire process takes a lot longer than I hoped, but at least we’re not in a time crunch. At the end I just let his ball bump into the floor of the room and he leaves a little dent. That’s fine. Beneath the dormitory is only the small storage room with personal items of the crewmembers. I could lose that room if the wall to the dormitory is damaged too greatly to hold 29 Atmospheric pressures. I haven’t been down there in months anyway.
Rocky isn’t pleased with the collision against the floor and grumbles to himself quietly. I don’t know what he said, he had refused to tell me the meaning of a few words he frequently used, so I’m guessing they are probably swears.
“You good there buddy?” I ask as I seal the Xenonite barrier shut. The only part of the dormitory that would now be filled with Earth atmosphere would be the ladder, the lowest bed and the nanny bot.
I never slept in the dormitory while we were in Tau Ceti. The dormitory had been designed for both thrust gravity and centrifugal gravity, being able to just flip over to a 90° degree angle when the centrifuge was spun up. But I don’t like Armando hovering over me the entire time. Rocky had been bad enough, insisting on watching me whenever I slept, but he didn’t have the habit of constantly analysing my health and poking me randomly.
I tried to sleep in the lab from time to time on the aborted return trip to Earth. The mattress certainly was a lot better to me than the hard floor, especially with 1.5g pressing me down during acceleration instead of the comfortable 1g while in centrifugal mode.
But every time I laid in my bunk, I dreamt of the corpses of my dead crew members lying above me. Their beds were empty of course, but it’s hard to convince my subconscious of that. Now that I remember them properly, I’ve started to feel their absence.
Rocky chirps another complaint and I quickly return to the control room. There I convince the ship to fill the appropriate room with Ammonia and ignore all the red warning lights. Yes, I know a large part of the ship is now filled with a toxic gas and enough pressure to make me implode on the spot. I’ve done that all before (well, not the imploading part).
I wait until the screens show me 29 atm and then wait a bit longer to ensure that it doesn’t drop again, which would indicate a leak. The warning lights are still blinking red, but everything else seems fine.
Now comes the boring part of bringing the rest of Rocky’s stuff into the Hail Mary as well. At least he had promised that those containers would be a bit lighter.
It takes me multiple days to get everything on board, because I work slow in an attempt to conserve energy. I haven’t done the calculation yet on how long my food will last (for that I’ll first need to chart a course to Erid, which I haven’t done yet either, God I hope the fuel I have left is enough for the trip), but I know the supply isn’t large enough for me to waste too much energy.
Rocky isn’t much of a help, but that is because he is bound to the dormitory and not because he doesn’t want to. He mentioned the idea of building himself a Xenonite spacesuit, so that he can move around more freely in my atmosphere, but such a project will probably take months to complete.
So it’s just me carrying one box after another inside the ship, which gets boring pretty quickly.
Most of the crates contain food. The entire supply only made a small dent on what is left on the Blip-A. Rocky will have more than enough to eat.
The other thing I bring a lot over are containers filled with mystery liquids. The resin-like substances are crucial to create Xenonite. We can’t bring too much of the stuff. It’s heavy and we need to watch the Hail Mary’s mass. If the ship gets too heavy we’ll need to use more fuel and we don’t have that much to spare. We probably won’t be able to travel under thrust the entire way already, but more on that later.
The last crates contain tools and equipment, many of which I recognise from the last time Rocky lived on the Hail Mary. One of them is the camera that translates all the frequencies from the light spectrum visible to humans into something Rocky can sense. It’s dead, but it hopefully only lacks power. Living on a ship designed by and for human eyes will prove difficult for him otherwise.
I sit in the pilot chair snaking on a tube of coma slurry. bleh.
The Hail Mary is built to accelerate with 1.5g and we are approximately 10.12 light-years away from 40 Eridani.
If we do the typical flip and burn maneuver we will reach Erid in around 11.3 objective years, but taking time dilation into account means Rocky and I will only experience a third of that. Roughly 3.7 years or 44 and a half months.
That’s a long time to spend together in a space smaller than most apartments back on earth, even smaller considering that now that Rocky moved in I can’t even enter part of the ship.
3.7 years…
I don’t think we have enough fuel for that.
At least not if we want a little bit of Astrophage left by the time we reach Erid. Most of the fuel is stored in the three cylindrical fuel tanks at the bottom of the ship, but there is a thin layer of Astrophage in the hull of the crew compartments. It’s where some of the maneuvering thrusters get their fuel from and serves as a radiation shield for the crew.
If we drained all our tanks on the journey, including that one, we would be dead in space and vulnerable to radiation damage somewhere in the vicinity of Erid.
That’s a big risk, but it’s an option.
If we want to save fuel we need to think of something else.
Slowing the Mary down is our second option, 1.4g instead of 1.5. This would add over two months to our journey. I don’t have enough food for that. Perhaps I’ll figure out how to digest Taumeba before I starve, but there is no guarantee.
Option 3: A cruise phase. A period between acceleration and deceleration where the ship travels at a consistent speed, neither gaining speed nor losing it. It would be at the height of our journey so time dilation would already be pretty strong. Let’s say we travel under power for only about 7.8 light-years and cruise for the rest, then we would reach Erid in about 45 months instead of 44,5. And we would cruise for four months of that.
There is a problem with that: These four months would be in zero gravity.
It’s not an issue for me, humans are able to live for years like that (though with considerable bone density and muscle loss), but Eridians need gravity to eat and digest.
We’ll use the centrifuge then, though that is easier said than done.
The ship will be unbalanced as it’s been designed under the assumption that the fuel tanks would be completely empty when starting the centrifuge.
But Rocky and I can think of something.
And if not, we still have option one
For now we have time.
1.7 years to be exact.