Project Hail Mary

Chapter 22

Total darkness.

No lights. No monitor glow. Not even the LEDs on the lab equipment.

“Okay, stay calm,” I say. “Stay calm.”

“Why not be calm, question?” Rocky asks.

Well, of course he didn’t notice the lights go out. He doesn’t have eyes. “The ship just shut down. Everything stopped working.”

Rocky scuttles a bit in his tunnel. “You equipment quiet now. My equipment still working.”

“Your equipment gets electricity from your generator. Mine’s powered by my ship. All the lights are off. There’s nothing working at all!”

“This is bad, question?”

“Yes, it’s bad! Among other problems, I can’t see!”

“Why ship turn off, question?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Do you have a light? Something you can shine through the xenonite into my side?”

“No. Why would I have light, question?”

I bungle in the darkness, feeling my way around the lab. “Where’s the ladder to the control room?”

“Left. More left. Continue…yes…reach forward…”

I get my hand on a rung. “Thanks.”

“Amaze. Humans helpless without light.”

“Yes,” I say. “Come to the control room.”

“Yes.” I hear him skitter through his tunnel.

I climb up and it’s just as dark. The entire control room is dead. The monitors are off. Even the airlock window provides no relief—that part of the ship happens to be facing away from Tau Ceti at the moment.

“Control room also have no light, question?” says Rocky’s voice—presumably from his bulb in the ceiling.

“Nothing—wait…I see something….”

Off in one corner of one panel, there’s a small red LED. Definitely glowing, though not very bright. I sit in the pilot’s seat and squint at the control. The seat wobbles a bit. My repair job on it was subpar, but it’s anchored back to the floor again, at least.

Instead of the usual flat-panel displays found all over the control room, this one little section has physical buttons and an LCD display nearby. The light is coming from a button.

Obviously, I push it. What else would I do?

The LCD display comes to life. Some highly pixelated text appears, stating: PRIMARY GENERATOR: OFFLINE. SECONDARY GENERATOR: OFFLINE. EMERGENCY BATTERIES: 100%.

“Okay, how do I use the batteries…?” I mumble.

“Progress, question?”

“Hang on.” I peer all around the LCD panel until I finally spot it. A little switch, covered by a plastic safety shield. It’s labeled “Batt.” It’ll have to do. I lift the shield and flick it.

Dim LEDs light up the control room—nowhere near as nicely as the normal lights do. The smallest control screen—and only that screen—comes to life. The Hail Mary mission patch shows on the center of the screen and the words “Loading Operating System…” appear at the bottom.

“Partial success,” I say. “My emergency battery engaged. But my generators are offline.”

“Why no work, question?”

“I don’t know.”

“You air is okay, question? No power, no life support. Humans turn oxygen into carbon dioxide. You will use all oxygen and become harmed, question?”

“It’s okay,” I say. “The ship’s pretty big. It’ll take a long time for the air to be a problem. It’s more important that I find the cause of this failure.”

“Machines break. Show me. I fix.”

Not a bad idea, actually. Rocky seems to be able to do pretty much anything. Either he’s gifted, or all Eridians are like that. Either way, I’m incredibly lucky. Still…how well would he do working on human technology?

“Maybe. But first I need to figure out why two generators would both die at the same time.”

“Good question. More important: Can you control ship without power, question?”

“No. I need power to do anything.”

“Then, most important: How long until orbit decays, question?”

I blink a couple of times. “I…don’t know.”

“Work fast.”

“Yeah.” I point at the screen. “First I have to wait for my computer to wake up.”

“Hurry.”

“Okay, I’ll wait faster.”

“Sarcasm.”

The computer finishes its boot process and brings up a screen I’ve never seen before. I can tell it means trouble, because the word “TROUBLE” is in large type across the top.

Gone are the pleasant user-interface buttons and widgets from before the blackout. This screen is just three columns of white text on a black background. The left is all Chinese characters, the middle is Russian, and the right is English.

I guess under normal operation, the ship changes language based on who is reading the screen. And this “safe boot”–equivalent screen doesn’t know who will be reading it so it’s in all our languages.

“What is happen, question?”

“This screen came up with information.”

“What is wrong, question?”

“Let me read!”

Rocky can be a real pain in the butt when he’s worried. I read the status report.

“The ship’s keeping me alive, but not doing anything else right now.”

“Give me generator. I fix.”

“First I need to find it,” I say.

Rocky slumps. “You not know where you ship parts are, question?!”

“The computer has all that information! I can’t remember all that!”

“Human brain useless!”

“Oh, shut up!”

I climb down the ladder to the lab. The emergency lighting is on in here too. Rocky follows along in his tunnel.

I reach down, grab my tool bag, and continue onward to the next ladder. He continues following me.

“Where you go, question?”

“The storage area. It’s the only place I haven’t completely searched. And it’s the very bottom of the crew compartment. If the generator is accessible to the crew, that’s where it’ll be.”

Once in the dormitory, I crawl into the storage space. My arm hurts. I climb around to inspect the bulkhead with the fuel bay. My arm hurts more.

At this point, my arm just always hurts, so I try to ignore it. But no more painkillers. They just make me too stupid. I lie back in the storage compartment and let the pain subside a bit. There must be access panels in here, right? I can’t remember the exact layout of the ship, but critical equipment is probably inside the pressurized area. For this very reason. Right?

How do I find it, though? I’d need x-ray vision to know where—oh, hey!

“Rocky! Are there any doors in here?”

He is silent for a moment. He taps on the wall a few times. “Six small doors.”

“Six?! Ugh. Tell me where the first one is.” I put my hand on the compartment ceiling.

“Move hand toward your feet and left…”

I follow his directions to the first door. Man, they’re hard to see. The emergency lighting in the dormitory is meager to start with, and the small amount getting into the compartment is dismal.

The panel is secured with a simple flat-head screw that controls a latch. I turn it with a stub screwdriver from my toolkit. The panel swings open to reveal a pipe with a valve on it. The label reads PRIMARY OXYGEN SHUTOFF. Definitely don’t want to mess with that. I close the cabinet.

“Next door.”

One by one, he leads me to each door and I check what’s behind it. I know he can sonar-sense the shapes behind the doors but that’s no good. I’d rather just look at what’s there than have him describe what he senses in our limited shared language.

Behind the fourth door, I find it.

It’s a lot smaller than I expect it to be. The whole cubby is about 1 cubic foot. The generator itself is in an irregularly shaped black casing and I only know it’s a generator because it’s labeled as such. I see two thick pipes with shutoff valves on them, as well as several fairly normal-looking electrical wires.

“Found it,” I say.

“Good,” comes Rocky’s voice from the dormitory. “Take out and give to me.”

“I want to look at it first.”

“You bad at this. I fix.”

“The generator might not survive your environment!”

“Mmm,” he grumbles.

“If I can’t fix it, you can talk me through it.”

“Mmm.”

The two pipes with shutoff valves must be the Astrophage supply lines. I look a little deeper into the cubby and find labels. One is “fuel” and the other is “waste.” Clear enough.

I use a wrench to unscrew the hose bib on the “waste” line. As soon as it comes loose, a dark liquid drips out. Not much—just what was between the shutoff valve and my end of the hose. It must be whatever fluid we use to carry away dead Astrophage. I got some on my hand—it feels slimy. Maybe it’s oil. It’s a good idea, actually. Any liquid will do, oil is lighter than water, and it won’t corrode the pipes.

Next I unscrew the “fuel” line. It, too, sloshes brown liquid out. But this time, it smells awful.

I wince and bury my face in my arm. “Ugh! God!”

“What is problem, question?” Rocky calls out from below.

“The fuel smells bad,” I say. Eridians don’t have a sense of smell. But while it took a long time to explain sight to Rocky, smell was easy. Because Eridians do have a sense of taste. When you get down to it, smell is just tasting at range.

“Is natural smell or chemical smell, question?”

I take another halting sniff. “Smells like rotted food. Astrophage doesn’t normally smell bad. It doesn’t normally have an odor at all.”

“Astrophage is alive. Maybe Astrophage can rot.”

“Astrophage can’t rot,” I say. “How could it rot—OH NO! OH GOD NO!”

I wipe my hand across the foul-smelling gunk, then wriggle out of the compartment. Then, keeping my gunky hand in the air and not touching anything, I climb up the ladder to the lab.

Rocky clatters along in his tunnel. “What is wrong, question?”

“No, no, no, no…” I say with a squeak at the end. My heart is about to beat right out of my throat. I think I’m going to puke.

I smear some gunk onto a glass slide and shove the slide into the microscope. There’s no power for the backlight, so I grab a flashlight from the drawer and shine it at the plate. It’ll have to do.

I look through the eyepieces and my worst fears are realized. “Oh God.”

“What is problem, question?!” Rocky’s voice is a full octave higher than normal.

I grab my head with both hands, smearing foul gunk on myself but I don’t even care. “Taumoeba. There are Taumoeba in the generator.”

“They damage generator, question?” Rocky says. “Give me generator. I fix.”

“The generator isn’t broken,” I say. “If there are Taumoeba in the generator, it means there are Taumoeba in the fuel supply. Taumoeba ate all the Astrophage. We have no power because we have no fuel.”

Rocky raises his carapace so fast he clunks it against the roof of his tunnel. “How Taumoeba get into fuel, question?!”

“There are Taumoeba in my lab. I didn’t keep them sealed off. I didn’t think to. Some probably got loose. The ship has a bunch of cracks, holes, and leaks ever since we almost died at Adrian. Some small hole in a fuel line somewhere must have let Taumoeba in. It only takes one.”

“Bad! Bad bad bad!”

I start to hyperventilate. “We’re dead in space. We’re stuck here forever.”

“Not forever,” Rocky says.

I perk up. “No?”

“No. Orbit decay soon. Then we die.”

I spend the whole next day examining the fuel lines I can get to. It’s the same story everywhere. Instead of Astrophage suspended in oil, it’s Taumoeba and (let’s call it what it is) a lot of Taumoeba poop. Mostly methane with a bunch of other trace compounds. I guess that explains the methane in Adrian’s atmosphere. Circle of life and all that.

There’s some live Astrophage here and there, but with the overwhelming population of Taumoeba in the fuel they won’t live long. It’s pointless to try to salvage this. It’d be the same as trying to separate good meat from the botulism infecting it.

“Hopeless,” I say, slamming the latest fuel sample onto the lab table. “The Taumoeba is everywhere.”

“I have Astrophage on my side of partition,” Rocky says. “Approximately two hundred sixteen grams remaining.”

“That wouldn’t power my spin drive for long. Thirty seconds or so. And it probably wouldn’t live long enough. There’s Taumoeba everywhere on my side of the partition. Keep your Astrophage safe on your side.”

“I make new engine,” Rocky says. “Taumoeba turn Astrophage into methane. React with oxygen. Make fire. Make thrust. Get to my ship. Much Astrophage there.”

“That’s…not a bad idea.” I pinch my chin. “Use Taumoeba farts to propel ourselves through space.”

“No understand word after Taumoeba.”

“It’s not important. Hang on, let me do the math….”

I pull up a tablet—the computer screen in the lab is still offline. I don’t remember the specific impulse of methane, but I do know that a hydrogen-oxygen reaction is about 450 seconds. Call that the best-case scenario. I had 20,000 kilograms of Astrophage, so pretend that’s all methane now. The ship has a dry mass around 100,000 kilograms. I don’t know if I even have enough oxygen for this reaction, but ignore that for now….

Concentration is a constant struggle. I’m groggy and I know it.

I type away on the calculator app, then shake my head. “It’s no good. The ship would get less than 800 meters per second velocity. We can’t escape Adrian’s gravity with that, let alone cross 150 million kilometers of the Tau Ceti system.”

“Bad.”

I drop the tablet on the table and rub my eyes. “Yes. Bad.”

He clicks along his tunnel to hover above me. “Give me generator.”

I slump my shoulders. “Why? What good would it do?”

“I clean and sterilize. Remove all Taumoeba. I make tiny fuel tank with my Astrophage. Seal generator airtight. Give back to you. You hook up to ship. Power restored.”

I rub my aching arm. “Yeah. It’s a good idea. If the generator doesn’t melt in your air.”

“If melt, I fix.”

A few hundred grams of Astrophage isn’t enough to fly around the galaxy, but it’s more than enough to power the ship’s electrical system for…I don’t know…the rest of my life at least.

“Okay. Yeah. That’s a good idea. At least we’ll have the ship back online.”

“Yes.”

I trudge to the hatch. “I’ll get the generator.”

I really shouldn’t be using tools in my state, but I press on. I go back to the dormitory, get into the crawlspace, and detach the generator. Or maybe it’s the backup generator. I don’t know. In any event, it turns Astrophage into electricity and that’s the point.

I get back into the dormitory proper and put the generator in our airlock there. Rocky cycles the airlock and brings the generator to his workbench. Two claws get to work on it right away. A third points to my bunk. “I work on this now. You sleep.”

“Make sure you don’t get Taumoeba in your Astrophage over there!”

“My Astrophage in sealed xenonite container. Is safe. You sleep now.”

Everything aches, especially my bandaged arm. “I can’t sleep.”

He points more firmly. “You tell me humans need to sleep eight hours every sixteen hours. You no sleep for thirty-one hours. You sleep now.”

I sit on my bunk and sigh. “You make a good point. I should at least try. It’s been a hard day. Night. Whatever. A hard day’s night.” I lie back in the bunk and pull the blanket over me.

“That sentence make no sense.”

“It’s an Earth saying. From a song.” I close my eyes and mumble. “…and I’ve been working like a dog…”

A moment passes while I drift off…

“Whoa!” I shoot bolt-upright. “The beetles!”

Rocky is surprised enough to drop the generator. “What is problem, question?”

“Not a problem! A solution!” I leap to my feet. “The beetles! My ship has four smaller ships aboard called beetles! They’re made to take information back to Earth!”

“You tell me this before,” Rocky says. “But they use same fuel, correct? Astrophage all dead now.”

I shake my head. “They use Astrophage, yeah, but each beetle is self-contained and sealed. They don’t share air, fuel, or anything else with Hail Mary. And each beetle has 120 kilograms of fuel aboard! We have plenty of Astrophage!”

Rocky waves his arms in the air. “Enough to get us to my ship! Good news! Good good good!”

I wave my arms in the air too. “Maybe we won’t die here after all! I need to do an EVA to get beetles. I’ll be right back.” I hop off the bunk and head to the ladder.

“No!” Rocky says. He skitters over to the partition and taps the divider. “You sleep. Human no function well after no sleep. EVA dangerous. Sleep first. EVA next.”

I roll my eyes. “All right, all right.”

He points back to my bunk. “Sleep.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Sarcasm. You sleep. I watch.”

“This doesn’t seem like a good idea anymore,” I say into my radio.

“Do task,” Rocky replies mercilessly.

I slept well and woke up ready to face the day. I had a nice breakfast. I got some stretches in. Rocky presented me with a sealed, fully functional generator that will last basically forever. I installed it and got the ship’s power back on without a hitch.

Rocky and I chatted about the best way to use the beetles to get back to the Blip-A. Everything seemed like a good idea until just this moment.

I stand in the airlock, all suited up for an EVA, looking out onto the vast nothingness of space. Planet Adrian reflects its pale-green light at me, illuminating the ship. Then it drifts off out of view. I’m in darkness. But not for long. Because the planet shows up again in the top of my vision twelve seconds later.

The Hail Mary is still spinning. That’s kind of a problem.

The ship has little Astrophage-powered thrusters on the sides to spin up and spin down for the artificial gravity. They don’t work, of course. They’re full of Taumoeba poo just like everything else. So here I am on another EVA that has to deal with gravity. But instead of Adrian’s gravity, it’s centripetal force threatening to fling me off into the void.

One death is as good as another. So why is this worse than my little Adrian sampler adventure? Because this time I have to balance on the nose of the ship. One false move could lead to death.

When I got the sampler, I stayed close to the hull, kept well tethered, and had lots of handholds all around just in case I lost my footing.

But the beetles are stored in the nose of the ship.

The nose is oriented toward the other half of the ship, thanks to the way the centrifuge system works. That puts the beetles at the “top” of the crew compartment from the point of view of the centripetal gravity. I have to get up there, open the nose, and get the little ships out. All while hoping I don’t slip. There are no tether points at the nose. So I’ll have to clip on to a point lower down. Which means if I fall, I’ll have time to pick up a good head of steam before the tether goes taut. Will it hold? If not, the force of the centrifuge will fling me off into space and I’ll become Adrian’s newest moon.

I quadruple-check the tethers. I ran two of them, just for safety. They’re firmly anchored to a hard point in the airlock and also to my suit. They should be able to handle the force if I fall.

“Should.”

I step out, grab the top of the airlock, and pull myself upward. I’d never be able to do this with all my gear on at full gravity.

The angle of the nose cone is shallow enough that I don’t slide off. I check the tethers again, then crawl up the nose toward the top. The centrifuge action shoves me to the side as I go. I have to stop every couple of feet and let friction with the hull zero out my lateral motion.

“Status, question?”

“Making progress,” I say.

“Good.”

I reach the nose. The artificial gravity is weakest here, being closest to the center of rotation. That’s a nice little benefit.

The universe lazily revolves around me every twenty-five seconds. For half the time, Adrian fills my entire view below. Then I get a few seconds of Tau Ceti’s burning brightness. Then nothing. It’s a little disconcerting but not too bad. Just mildly annoying.

The beetle hatch is just where it should be. I’m going to have to be careful here. I don’t want to damage anything.

This was all designed to be a suicide mission. They didn’t care about the Hail Mary getting home. The mechanism inside has pyros to blow off this hatch. Then the beetles can launch and find their way back to Earth. Good system, but I need this hatch intact for when I go home. It’s all for the aerodynamics.

Yes, aerodynamics.

The Hail Mary has always looked like something out of a Heinlein novel. Shiny silver, smooth hull, sharp nose cone. Why do all that for a ship that’ll never have to deal with an atmosphere?

Because of the interstellar medium. There’s a teeny, tiny amount of hydrogen and helium wandering around out there in space. It’s on the order of one atom per cubic centimeter, but when you’re traveling near the speed of light, that adds up. Not only because you’re hitting a whole bunch of atoms but also because those atoms, from your inertial reference frame, weigh more than normal. Relativistic physics is weird.

Long story short: I need the nose intact.

The entire panel and pyro assembly is attached to the hull with six hex bolts. I pull a socket wrench from my tool belt and get to work.

As soon as I unscrew the first bolt, it slides down the slope of the nose cone and falls away into the unknowable distance.

“Um…” I say. “Rocky, you can make screws, right?”

“Yes. Easy. Why, question?”

“I dropped one.”

“Hold screws better.”

“How?”

“Use hand.”

“My hand’s busy with the wrench.”

“Use second hand.”

“My other hand’s on the hull to keep me steady.”

“Use third han—hmm. Get beetles. I make new screws.”

“Okay.”

I get to work on the second bolt. This time I’m very careful. I stop using the wrench halfway through and do the rest by hand. The fat fingers of the EVA suit are awful for this. It takes ten minutes just for this one bolt. But I get it done and, most important, I don’t drop it.

I put it in a pouch on my suit. Now Rocky will know what I need him to duplicate.

I unscrew the next four bolts with the wrench and let them fall away. I suppose they’ll be in orbit around Adrian for a while, but not forever. The tiny amount of drag we’re getting up here will slow them down bit by bit until they fall into Adrian’s atmosphere and burn up.

One bolt remains. But first, I lift up the opposite corner of the assembly enough to make a finger-width gap. I slip a tether in through a vacant bolt hole and clip it to itself. Then I clip the other end of the tether to my belt. Now I have four different tethers attached to me. And I like it that way. I may look like space Spider-Man, but who cares?

I still have two more tethers coiled on my tool belt ready to go if needed. There’s no such thing as too much tether.

I unscrew the final bolt and the assembly slides down the nose. I let it past me and it halts at the end of the tether. It bounces a few times and knocks into the hull, then sways.

I look into the compartment. The beetles are right where they’re supposed to be, each in their own cubbies. The four little ships are identical except for a small engraved name on each bulbous little fuel bay. They’re labeled “John,” “Paul,” “George,” and “Ringo,” of course.

“Status, question?”

“Recovering beetles.”

I start with John. A little clamp holds it in place, but I easily force it open. Behind the probe is a compressed air cylinder with a nozzle pointed outward. That’s how they’re supposed to be launched. They’d need to be far away from the ship before they start up their spin drives. Even an adorable little baby spin drive will vaporize anything behind it.

John comes out pretty easily. The probe is bigger than I remember—almost the size of a suitcase. Of course, everything seems bigger when you’re holding it on an EVA with awkward gloves.

Ol’ John weighs a lot too. I don’t know if I could even lift it in Earth’s gravity. I tie it off to the backup tether, then reach in to get Paul.

Rocky can work fast when he needs to. And he needs to.

We’re in a questionable orbit around Adrian. Now that the computers and guidance systems are all back online, I can see the orbit. It’s not pretty. Our orbit is still highly elliptical, and the closest part of it is way too close to the planet.

Every ninety minutes, we touch the tippy-tippy-top of the atmosphere. It’s barely an atmosphere at that altitude. Just a few confused air molecules bouncing around. But it’s enough to slow us down just a teeny, tiny bit. That slowdown makes us dip a little deeper into the atmosphere on the next pass. You can see where this is going.

We scrape the atmosphere every ninety minutes. And I honestly don’t know how many times we can get away with it. For some reason, the computer doesn’t have models for “oddly elliptical orbits around the planet Adrian.”

So yeah. Rocky is in a hurry.

It takes him just two hours to disassemble Paul and understand most of how he works. This was no easy task—before we passed Paul into Rocky’s area of the ship, we had to make a special “cooling box.” The beetles have plastic parts inside that would melt in Rocky’s air. A big lump of Astrophage took care of that. Astrophage may be too hot for humans to touch, but it’s cool enough that plastic won’t melt, and of course it has no problem absorbing the extra heat and keeping things at 96 degrees Celsius.

Paul has a lot of electronics and circuitry inside. Rocky doesn’t follow that too well—Eridian electronics isn’t nearly so advanced as Earth’s. They haven’t invented the transistor yet, let alone IC chips. Working with Rocky is like having the world’s best engineer from 1950 on the ship with me.

Seems odd that a species could invent interstellar travel before inventing the transistor, but hey, Earth invented nuclear power, television, and even did several space launches before the transistor.

An hour later, he’s bypassed all the computer controls. He doesn’t need to understand them to bypass them—it’s just a matter of knowing what wires to directly apply voltage to. He jerry-rigged the spin drive to be activated by an audio-driven remote control. Pretty much everywhere humans use radio for short-range digital communication, Eridians use sound.

He repeats the process for Ringo and John. This time it’s much faster, because there’s no research effort. That leaves George unmodified. The little beetles don’t have much thrust, so the more of them we use the better, but I have to draw a line somewhere. I want to keep one safely in reserve, unmodified, ready to fulfill its original mission.

Thanks to Rocky, I might just survive this suicide mission, but there are no guarantees. The Hail Mary is in bad shape, to say the least. Several fuel tanks are gone, there’s damage and leaks all over the place. There are Taumoeba sneaking around waiting to eat whatever replacement fuel Rocky gives me. I can count at least a hundred ways the trip home might fail. So, before I set out, I’m going to send George on his way with all my findings and some Taumoeba aboard. I would much rather have kept two in reserve, but we need three beetles to be able to vector the thrust so we can angle the ship whatever direction we need.

Rocky passes the three modified beetles through the dormitory airlock to my side.

“You mount on hull,” he says. “Aim forty-five degrees out away from centerline of ship.”

“Understand.” I sigh. Another EVA on a spinning ship. Yay.

But what else can I do? We can’t zero the rotation without thrust.

I do the EVA. The only hard part is getting to the right place. The airlock is near the nose, and I need to mount the beetles on the rear section. And the ship is currently divided into two halves connected by nothing but five cables. But the designers of the Hail Mary thought of this. There are loops all along the cables that you can attach a tether to.

I’m getting better at the extremely odd skill set of EVAs in non-zero gravity. And unlike my death dance on the nose of the ship, the rear has lots of handles. Mounting the beetles is easy enough. I attach them to handles on the hull to immobilize them while Rocky’s xenonite glue sets and makes a permanent bond.

In the end, I have John, Paul, and Ringo evenly spaced in a ring around the hull, each one angled so their engine points 45 degrees away from the long axis of the ship.

“Beetles set,” I say into my radio. “Inspecting damaged area.”

“Good,” Rocky replies.

I make my way to the spot that was ruined by the fuel-tank rupture. There isn’t much to see—I jettisoned the bad tanks at the time. A rectangle of missing hull plates shows an opening where the tanks once were. The area surrounding the hole tells a tale of trauma. Black scorch marks mar the otherwise shiny hull plates. There’s clear and obvious warping on two of the neighboring panels.

“Some panels are bent. Some have burn marks. Not too bad.”

“Good news.”

“Burn marks are odd, don’t you think? Why burn marks?”

“Much heat.”

“Yeah, but no oxygen. This is space. How did it burn?”

“Theory: Many Astrophage in tanks. Some probably dead. Dead Astrophage have water. Dead Astrophage not immune to heat. Water and much much heat become hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen and heat and hull becomes burn marks.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Good theory.”

“Thank.”

I get back across the space rope bridge that is the cabling, then inside the airlock without incident. Rocky waits for me in his ceiling bulb in the control room.

“All is well, question?”

“Yes,” I say. “Controls for John, Paul, and Ringo are good?”

He holds identical control boxes in three of his hands. Each has a wire leading to a wall-mounted speaker/microphone attached to the hull. He taps a readout box with a fourth hand. “Communication established. All beetles function and ready.”

I strap myself into the command chair. This next bit is going to be uncomfortable.

We put the beetles at 45-degree angles from the ship centerline so we can use them to angle the ship as needed. It also lets us control the ship’s rotation. But we can only use the beetles when the ship is in one piece. So first I have to pull the halves together.

Conservation of rotational inertia being what it is, that means the ship is going to spin really fast. In fact, it’ll spin exactly as fast as it was when Rocky had to save me last time. We haven’t gained or lost any inertia in that time.

I bring up the Centrifuge panel on the main control screen. Well, it’s just above the original main screen. That main screen got wrecked in the Adrian adventure. But this one’s good enough.

“You are ready?”

“Yes.”

“The g-forces will be strong,” I say. “Easy for you, but hard for me. I might fall unconscious.”

“Unhealthy for human, question?” There’s a hint of quaver at the end.

“A little unhealthy. If I pass out, don’t worry. Just get the ship stable. I’ll wake when we stop spinning.”

“Understand.” Rocky holds the three controls at the ready.

“Okay, here goes.” I put the centrifuge into manual mode and bypass three warning dialogs. First, I rotate the crew compartment 180 degrees. Just like last time, I take it slow. But unlike last time, I have everything battened down. So as the world turns around and gravity changes directions, the lab and dormitory aren’t thrown into disarray.

Now I feel half a g pushing me toward the control panels. The nose is facing away from the rest of the ship again. I order all four spools to spool in without regard to ship rotation rate. The icons on the ship show the contraction as ordered and the force of my body into the restraints increases.

After just ten seconds, the forces are at 6 g’s and I can barely breathe. I gasp and squirm.

“You are not healthy!” Rocky squeaks. “Undo this. We make new plan.”

I can’t speak, so I shake my head. I feel the skin of my face stretch away from my cheeks. I must look like a monster right now. The periphery of my vision fades to black. This must be the tunnel vision I’ve heard about. It’s a good name.

The tunnel gets dimmer and dimmer until eventually it’s all black.

I wake up moments later. At least, I think it’s moments later. My arms float freely and only my restraints keep me from drifting out of my chair.

“Grace! You are okay, question?”

“Uh.” I rub my eyes. My vision’s blurry and I’m still groggy. “Yeah. Status?”

“Rotation rate is zero,” he says. “Beetles hard to control. Correction: Beetles easy to control. Ship powered by beetles hard to control.”

“You got it done, though. Good job.”

“Thank.”

I release my restraints and stretch out. Nothing seems to be broken or wounded other than my burned arm from before. It actually feels great to be back in zero g. I’m achy everywhere as a rule. Lots of physical labor and I’m still recovering from injuries. Getting that pesky gravity out of the way puts less stress on my body.

I cycle through screens on the monitor. “All systems are okay. At least, nothing’s damaged further than before.”

“Good. What is next action, question?”

“Now I do math. A whole lot of math. I have to calculate the thrust duration and angle to get us back to your ship using the beetles as engines.”

“Good.”