Project Hail Mary

Chapter 6

Okay, if I’m going to die, it’s going to have meaning. I’m going to figure out what can be done to stop Astrophage. And then I’ll send my answers off to Earth. And then…I’ll die. There are lots of avenues for painless suicide here—from overdosing on meds to reducing the oxygen until I fall asleep and die.

Cheerful thought.

I eat a delicious tube of “Day 4—Meal 2.” I think it’s beef-flavored. The food is getting chunkier now. There are actually some solids in there. I think I’m chewing on a little cube of carrot. It’s nice to feel some texture in the food for a change.

“More water!” I say.

The NannyBot (as I’ve come to call it) quickly takes my plastic cup away and replaces it with a full one. It’s funny. Three days ago those ceiling-mounted arms were a mechanical monster that haunted me. Now they’re just…there. Part of life.

I’ve found the dormitory to be a good place for thinking. Now that the dead bodies are gone, anyway. The lab doesn’t have anywhere comfortable to relax. The control room has a nice chair, but it’s cramped and has blinking lights everywhere. But the dormitory has my nice, comfortable bed I can lie back on while I think about what to do next. Plus, the bedroom is where all the food comes from.

I remembered a lot over the past couple of days. Looks like Project Hail Mary was a success, because here I am, in another star system. Tau Ceti, I assume. It makes sense that I’d mistake it for the sun. Tau Ceti is very similar to the sun as stars go. Same spectral type, color, and so on.

And I know why I’m here! Not just in vague terms like “Oh hey, the world’s ending. Make that not happen.” But very specifically: Find out why Tau Ceti wasn’t affected by Astrophage.

Easy to say. Hard to do. Hopefully I remember more details later.

A million questions run through my mind. Some of the most important are:

• How do I scour an entire solar system for information about Astrophage?

• What am I supposed to do? Throw some of my Astrophage fuel at Tau Ceti to see what happens?

• How do I steer this ship anyway?

• If I do find useful information, how do I tell Earth about it? I think that’s what the beetles are for, but how do I upload data to them? How do I aim them? How do I launch them?

• Why would I, of all people, be part of this mission? Yes, I worked out a bunch of stuff about Astrophage, but so what? I’m a lab coat, not an astronaut. It’s not like they sent Wernher von Braun into space. Surely there were more qualified people.

I decide to start small. First I have to work out what this ship can do and how to control it. They put the crew in comas. They must have known it might mess with our minds. There has to be an instruction manual somewhere.

“Flight manual,” I say out loud.

“Ship information can be found in the control room,” says the NannyBot.

“Where?”

“Ship information can be found in the control room.”

“No. Where in the control room can ship information be found?”

“Ship information can be found in the control room.”

“You kind of suck,” I say.

I make my way up to the control room and take a good long look at every screen. I spend an hour in there cataloging what each area seems to say, and make guesses as to what the functions are. What I’m really looking for is something like “Information” or “Here to save humanity? Press this button to learn more!”

No such luck. After hours of poking at screens, I’ve found nothing. I guess they figured if the crew are so brain-mushy that they don’t remember how to use the ship, they’re probably not useful as scientists anyway.

I did find out that any screen can show any instrument panel. They’re pretty much interchangeable. Just tap the upper-left corner and a menu shows up. Pick whatever panel you like.

That’s nice. You can customize what you’re looking at. And the screen directly in front of the pilot’s seat is the largest.

I decide on a more tactile approach: I’m gonna start pushing buttons!

Hopefully there’s no “Blow Up the Ship” button. I think Stratt would have kept that from happening.

Stratt. I wonder what she’s doing right now. Probably in a control room somewhere with the pope making her a cup of coffee. She was (is?) a really domineering person. But gosh darn it, I’m glad she was in charge of making this ship happen. Now that I’m aboard it and all. Her attention to detail and insistence on perfection are nice to have all around me.

Anyway, I bring up the “Scientific Instrumentation” panel on the main screen. It’s the same panel I spent a lot of quality time with earlier—the one that currently shows an image of Tau Ceti. It has the word “Helioscope” in the upper-left corner. I hadn’t noticed that before. The left side of the screen has a bunch of icons. Other equipment, I assume. I press one at random.

Tau Ceti disappears. The top-left corner changes to read “External Collection Unit.” The screen shows a diagram of a featureless rectangle. There are some controls here and there to change the angle and to “open bow side” and “open stern side.” Okay. Noted. Not sure what to do with that information. I press another icon at random.

This time it changes to “Petrovascope.” Beyond that, there’s just a black screen with an error message: PETROVASCOPE CANNOT BE USED WHILE SPIN DRIVE IS ACTIVE.

“Hmph,” I say.

Okay, what’s a Petrovascope? Best guess: a telescope and/or camera that looks specifically for the IR light that Astrophage emit. It looks for the Petrova line via the Petrova wavelength so it’s a Petrovascope and we really need to stop putting “Petrova” in front of everything.

Why can’t I use it when the spin drive is active?

I don’t how a spin drive works, or why it’s called a spin drive, but I do know I have one in the back of the ship and it’s consuming Astrophage as fuel. So it’s my engine. It probably activates enriched Astrophage to use them as thrust.

Ah…that would mean there’s a ridiculous amount of IR light coming out the back of the ship right now. Like…enough to vaporize a battleship or something. I’d have to do the math to know for sure but—I can’t help it, I want to do the math right now.

The engines consume 6 grams of Astrophage per second. Astrophage stores energy as mass. So basically, the spin drive converts 6 grams of mass into pure energy every second and spits it out the back. Well, it’s the Astrophage doing the work, but whatever.

I bring up the “Utility” panel on a smaller screen to my right. It has a bunch of familiar applications, all ready to go. One of them is a calculator. I use it to calculate the mass-conversion energy of that 6 grams…good Lord. It’s 540 trillion Joules. And the ship is emitting that much energy every second. So it’s 540 trillion watts. I can’t even fathom that amount of energy. It’s considerably more than the surface of the sun. Literally. Like…you would get hit by less energy if you were on the surface of the sun than if you were standing behind the Hail Mary at full thrust.

I’m decelerating right now. Have to be. The plan is to come to rest in the Tau Ceti system. So I’m probably pointed away from the star and slowing down—having spent a really long time at near light speed during the trip.

Okay, so all that light energy will hit dust particles, ions, and anything else between me at Tau Ceti as I plug along. Those poor little particles will be brutally vaporized. And that’ll scatter some IR light back at the ship. Not much compared to the engine output, but it would be blinding to the Petrovascope, which is finely tuned to look for trace amounts of that exact frequency.

So no using the Petrovascope with the engine on.

But man. I would love to know if Tau Ceti has a Petrova line.

Theoretically, any star infected with Astrophage should have one, right? The little blighters need carbon dioxide to breed. Can’t get that from the star (unless you go way into the core, and I don’t know if even Astrophage could survive those temperatures).

If I see a Petrova line, it means that Tau Ceti has an active Astrophage population that, for some reason, hasn’t grown out of control like it has everywhere else. And that line will lead to a planet that has carbon dioxide. Maybe there’s some other chemical in that atmosphere that impedes the Astrophage? Maybe the planet has a weird magnetic field that messes with their ability to navigate? Maybe the planet has a bunch of moons that the Astrophage physically collides with?

Maybe Tau Ceti just doesn’t have any planets with carbon dioxide in their atmospheres. That would suck. It would mean this whole trip was for nothing and Earth is doomed.

I could speculate all day. Without data, it’s just pure guesswork. And without the Petrovascope, I don’t have data. At least, not the data I want.

I turn my attention to the Navigation screen. Should I mess with it? I mean—I don’t know how to fly this ship. The ship does, but I don’t. If I push the wrong button, I’ll be dead in space.

Actually, it would be worse than that. I’d be hurtling toward Tau Ceti at—I check the info on-screen—7,595 kilometers per second. Wow! A couple days ago, that was over 11,000. That’s what constantly accelerating at 1.5 g’s will do for you. Or “decelerating,” I guess. From a physics standpoint it’s all the same. Point is, I’m slowing down with respect to the star.

There’s a button on-screen that just says “Course.” That seems reasonable to tap, right? Famous last words. Really I should just wait until the computer feels like the trip is done. But I can’t help myself.

I tap the button. The screen changes to show the Tau Ceti solar system. Tau Ceti itself sits at the center, denoted with the Greek letter tau.

Ohhhh…that’s what the lowercase t is on the Hail Mary crest. It’s a tau, for “Tau Ceti.” Okay.

Anyway, four planetary orbits are shown as thin white ellipses around the star. The locations of the planets themselves are shown as circles with error bars. We don’t have super-accurate information on exoplanets. If I could figure out how to get the science instruments working, I could probably get much better info on those planet locations. I’m twelve light-years closer to them than astronomers on Earth.

A yellow line runs almost directly into the system from off-screen. It bends toward the star somewhere between the third and fourth planets and into a circle. There’s a yellow triangle on the line, way far away from the four planets. Pretty sure that’s me. And the yellow line is my course. Above the map is the text:

The final digit decrements once per second. Okay, I learned a couple of things here. First off, I have about five days left (closer to six) before the engine cuts off. Second off, the readout has four digits for days. That means this journey took at least one thousand days. Over three years. Well, it takes light twelve years to make this trip, so it should take me a long time too.

Oh, right. Relativity.

I have no idea how much time it took. Or, rather, I have no idea how much time I experienced. When you get going near the speed of light, you experience time dilation. More time will have gone by on Earth than I have experienced since I left Earth.

Relativity is weird.

Time is of the essence here. And unfortunately, while I slept, Earth experienced at least thirteen years. And even if I find a solution to the Astrophage problem right now, it would take at least thirteen years for that information to get back to Earth. So that means there’ll be an absolute minimum of twenty-six years of Astrophage misery on Earth. I can only hope they are coming up with ways to deal with it. Or at least ameliorate the damage. I mean, they wouldn’t have sent the Hail Mary out at all if they didn’t think they could survive at least twenty-six years, right?

In any event, the trip took at least three years (from my point of view). Is that why we were put in comas? Was there a problem with us just being awake for the duration?

I only notice the tears when the first of them drops off my face. That decision to put us in comas killed two close friends of mine. They’re gone. I don’t remember a single moment with either of them, but the feeling of loss is overwhelming. I’ll be joining them soon. There’s no way home. I’ll die out here too. But unlike them, I’ll die alone.

I wipe my eyes and try to think of other things. My whole species is at stake here.

Judging by the path on the map, the ship will automatically put me in a stable orbit around Tau Ceti, between the third and fourth planets. If I had to guess, I would say that’s probably 1 AU. The distance that Earth is from the sun. A nice, safe distance from the star. A slow orbit that takes about a year to complete. Probably longer, because Tau Ceti is smaller than the sun, so it probably has less mass. Less mass means less gravity and a slower orbital period at a given distance.

Okay, I have five days to kill until engine cutoff. Rather than mess around with stuff, I’ll just wait it out. Once the engines are off, I’ll fire up the Petrovascope and see what’s out there. Until then, I’ll try to learn as much about the ship as I can.

I’ll do just about anything right now to keep from thinking about Yáo and Ilyukhina.

Technically the carrier was named the People’s Liberation Army Navy Gansu. Why their navy has “Army” in its name I’ll never know. Regardless, people stopped calling it that and started calling it Stratt’s Vat. Despite objections from the sailors aboard, the name stuck. We wandered around the South China Sea, never getting too close to land.

I’d spent a blissful week doing nothing but science.

No meetings. No distractions. Just experimentation and engineering. I’d forgotten how much fun it was to get immersed in a task.

My first breeder prototype had demonstrated another successful run. It wasn’t much to look at—mostly a 30-foot-long metal pipe with a bunch of ugly control equipment welded on here and there. But it did the trick. It could only generate a few micrograms of Astrophage per hour, but the concept was solid.

I had a staff of twelve people—engineers from all over the world. A couple of Mongolian brothers were my best engineers. When I got a call from Stratt to meet her in the conference room, I left them in charge.

I found her alone in the meeting room. The table was strewn with papers and charts, like always. Graphs and diagrams adorned all the walls—some new, some old.

Stratt sat at one end of the long table, with a bottle of Dutch gin and a lowball glass. I’d never seen her drink before.

“You wanted to see me?” I said.

She looked up. Her eyes had bags. She hadn’t slept. “Yeah. Have a seat.”

I sat in the chair next to her. “You look terrible. What’s going on?”

“I have to make a decision. And it’s not easy.”

“How can I help?”

She offered me the gin. I shook my head. She topped off her own glass. “The Hail Mary is going to have a very small crew compartment—about 125 cubic meters.”

I cocked my head. “That’s actually kind of big as spaceships go, right?”

She wiggled her hand back and forth. “Big for a capsule like Soyuz or Orion. But tiny for a space station. It’s about one-tenth as big as the International Space Station’s crew compartment.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

“The problem”—she picked up a manila folder and dropped it in front of me—“is that the crew will kill each other.”

“Huh?” I opened the folder. Inside were lots of typewritten pages. Actually, they were scans of typed pages. Some were in English, some in Russian. “What is all this?”

“During the Space Race, the Soviets briefly set their sights on Mars. They figured if they put people on Mars, the U.S. moon landing would be trivial in comparison.”

I closed the folder. The Cyrillic writing was nonsense to me. But my guess was Stratt could read it. She always seemed to know whatever language was being used.

She rested her chin on her hands. “Getting to Mars with 1970s technology would mean using a Hohmann transfer trajectory, which means the crew would have to spend just over eight months aboard a ship. So the Soviets tested out what happens when you put people together in a cramped, isolated environment for several months.”

“And?”

“After seventy-one days, the men inside were getting in fistfights every day. They stopped the experiment on day ninety-four because one of the subjects tried to stab another one to death with broken glass.”

“How big will the crew be for the mission?”

“The current plan is three,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “So you’re worried what happens when we send three astronauts on a four-year trip in a 125-cubic-meter compartment?”

“It’s not just about them getting along. Each crew member would spend the whole trip knowing that they’re going to die in a few years. And that the few rooms on that ship are the only world they will know for the rest of their short lives. The psychiatrists I’ve talked to say that crushing depression is likely. And suicide is a real risk.”

“Yeah, that is some rough psychology,” I said. “But what else can we do?”

She picked up a stapled sheaf of papers and slid it toward me. I picked it up and read the title: “A Study of Long-Term Primate and Human Coma Patients and Detrimental Aftereffects—Srisuk et al.”

“Okay. What am I looking at here?”

“That’s a study by a failed company in Thailand.” She swirled the gin in her glass. “Their idea was to put cancer patients into induced comas for their chemotherapy treatments. The patient gets the chemo, but doesn’t have to be awake to suffer through the process. Wake them up when the cancer goes into remission. Or when it’s no longer treatable and it’s time for hospice. Either way, they skip a lot of misery.”

“That…sounds like a great idea,” I said.

She nodded. “It would be, if it wasn’t so lethal. Turns out the human body just isn’t supposed to be in a coma for a long time. Chemo lasts months, and often needs additional rounds after that. They tried various means for medically induced comas on primates, and the primates either died during the coma or came out of it with mush for brains.”

“So why are we talking about it?”

“Because they did more studies—this time on historical human coma patient data. They looked at humans who had come through long comas relatively unscathed and tried to see what they had in common. They found it.”

Old Russian space-agency documents were a mystery to me, but scientific papers were my forte for a long time. I flipped through the paper and skimmed to the findings. “Gene markers?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “They found a collection of genes that give a human ‘coma resistance.’ That’s what they’re calling it. The sequences are in what scientists used to think was junk DNA. But apparently it’s something we evolved a long time ago for some unknown reason and still lurks in some people’s genetic code.”

“Are they sure these genes cause coma resistance?” I said. “They correlate, but do they cause it?”

“Yes, they’re sure. The genes are found in lower primates too. Whatever it is, it goes way back in the evolutionary tree. There’s speculation it might go all the way back to our aquatic ancestors that used to hibernate. In any event, they ran tests on primates with those genes and they survived long comas with no side effects. Every single one of them.”

“Okay. I see where you’re going with this.” I put the paper down. “Do DNA tests on all applicants, and use only the people who have those coma-resistance genes. During the trip, put the crew in comas. They don’t have to experience four years of getting on each other’s nerves or introspection about their deaths.”

She raised her glass to me. “It gets better. Having the crew in comas makes the food situation much easier. Powdered, nutritionally balanced slurry pumped right into their stomachs. No need for a thousand kilograms of diverse meals. Just powder and a self-contained water-recycling system.”

I smiled. “This seems like a dream come true. Like suspended animation in sci-fi novels. Why are you drinking and stressed-out?”

“There are a couple of catches,” she said. “First off, we’d have to develop a completely automated monitoring and action system to take care of the coma patients. If it broke down, everyone would die. There’s more to it than just monitoring vitals and pushing the right drugs through an IV. It would have to physically move and clean the patients, deal with bedsores, diagnose and treat secondary issues like inflammation and infection around the various IV and probe entry points. Stuff like that.”

“Okay, but that seems like something the global medical community could work out for us,” I said. “Use your Stratt magic to boss them around or something.”

She took another sip. “That’s not the main problem. The main problem is this: On average, only one in every seven thousand humans has that genetic sequence.”

I sat back in my chair. “Whoa.”

“Yeah. We wouldn’t be able to send the most qualified people. We’d be sending the seven-thousandth most qualified people.”

“Three-thousand-five-hundredth most qualified people on average,” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“Still,” I said. “One seven-thousandth of the world’s population is a million people. Think of it that way. You’d have a pool of one million people to look through for candidates. All you need are three.”

“Six,” she said. “We need a primary crew and a backup crew. Can’t have the mission fail because some guy gets hit by a car crossing the street the day before launch.”

“Okay, then six.”

“Yeah. Six people of astronaut caliber, who have the scientific skills necessary to work out what’s going on with Astrophage at Tau Ceti, and who are willing to go on a suicide mission.”

“Out of a population of a million,” I said. “A million.”

She fell silent and took another sip of gin.

I cleared my throat. “So you either take your chances with picking the best possible candidates and maybe they kill each other, or you take your chances on yet-to-be-developed medical technology to automatically care for a lower tier of talent.”

“More or less. Either way, it’s a terrible risk. It’s the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make.”

“Good thing you already made up your mind, then,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “Huh?”

“Sure,” I said. “You just wanted someone to tell you what you already know. If you leave the crew awake, there’s nothing you can do about the psychosis risk. But we’ve got years to perfect the automated-coma-bed technology.”

She scowled a bit but didn’t speak.

I softened my voice. “Besides. We’re already asking these people to die. We shouldn’t ask them to suffer emotional torment for four years too. Science and morality both give the same answer here, and you know it.”

She nodded, almost imperceptibly. Then, she downed the rest of her gin. “All right. You can go.” She slid her laptop over and began typing.

I left without another word. She had her stuff to deal with and I had mine.

The memories are coming back more smoothly now. I still can’t remember everything, but it’s no longer an epiphany when they happen. It’s just sort of…“Oh hey, I know that. Always knew it, really.”

I guess I’m one of those people with coma resistance. That explains why I’m here instead of any of the far more qualified candidates that should have been sent.

But Yáo and Ilyukhina probably had those genes, too, and they didn’t make it. My guess is the medical robot wasn’t perfect. They must have had some medical situation arise it couldn’t figure out.

I shake off their memory.

The next several days are an exercise in patience. I learn more about the ship to distract myself.

I catalog the entire lab. One of the first things I find is a touchscreen computer in a pull-out drawer in the center table. It’s actually a fantastic find, because it has a bunch of research-related screens. As opposed to the panels in the control room, which are all about the ship or its instruments.

I see a bunch of math and science apps—most of which are off-the-shelf that I’m familiar with. But the real boon is the library!

As far as I can tell, this panel can bring up literally any scientific textbook ever written, every scientific paper ever published on any topic, and a whole lot more. There’s one directory just called “Library of Congress,” and it appears to be the entire digital catalog of everything that’s ever been copyrighted in the United States. No books about the Hail Mary, unfortunately.

And the reference manuals. So many reference manuals. Data on top of data with data in between. I guess they figured solid-state hard drives are light, so there was no reason to be stingy with information. Heck, they may have just burned the data into ROMs.

They gave me reference material on stuff that can’t possibly be useful. But hey, it’s nice to know that if I need the average rectal temperature of a healthy goat, I can find that out! (It’s 103.4°F / 39.7°C.)

Playing with the panel leads to my next discovery: I know how I’ll report back to Earth with the beetles.

I knew they’d be involved, but now I know specifics. In addition to the absurd data storage array aboard the ship, the panel also has four comparatively small external drives mounted: John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Each one of those shows 5 terabytes free. It’s not a huge leap to assume that’s the beetle’s data.

So how do I launch them when the time comes? To find out, I head to the control room.

I have to dig through a few layers of UI on the Beetles panel to find the launch command, but I find it. As far as I can tell, it’s just a button labeled “Launch.” I guess they orient themselves based on stars and head toward Earth on their own. The Hail Mary did the same thing to get here, so they know how to do it. No reason to introduce human error in the course selection.

While I’m here, I poke around the Scientific Instrumentation screen. The first few subwindows are the helioscope, the Petrovascope, and a telescope that can see in the visible spectrum, IR spectrum, and a bunch of other bands.

I play with the visible-light telescope. It’s kind of fun. I can look at the stars. I mean, there’s nothing else out there. Even Tau Ceti’s planets would just be little dots from where I am. But it’s still nice to see the outside from my confined little world.

I also found a dedicated EVA screen. It has more or less what I would have expected. There are a bunch of controls for the EVA suit itself, so an operator in the control room can manage any issue with the suit during an EVA. That way, the person in the suit doesn’t have to deal with it. Plus, it looks like the ship has a complicated tethering system on the hull. Basically a bunch of tracks that the tether hook can run along. They really figured an EVA would be important. Probably to collect local Astrophage.

If there is any.

If Tau Ceti has a Petrova line, then there’s Astrophage to be collected. Getting ahold of some would be step one. Getting that down to the lab, and seeing if it differs from the Astrophage on Earth. Maybe it’s a less virulent strain?

The next two days are, basically, me worrying about what happens next. Oh, I know what happens next—I’m just worrying about it anyway.

I fidget in the control room and watch the seconds tick away.

“You’re going to be in zero g,” I say. “You are not going to be falling. You will not be in danger. The acceleration of the ship will stop. But that’s okay.”

I don’t like roller coasters or water slides. That dropping sensation scares the pants off me. And in a few seconds I’m going to feel that exact sensation because the “gravity” I’ve been experiencing will stop altogether.

The seconds tick off. “Four…three…two…”

“Here we go,” I said.

“One…zero.”

Right on schedule, the engines shut off. The 1.5 g’s I’ve been feeling all this time vanishes. Gravity is gone.

I panic. No amount of mental preparation would have worked. I straight-up panic.

I scream and flail around. I force myself to curl into a fetal position—it’s comforting and keeps me from hitting any controls or screens.

I shiver and shake as I float around the control room. I should have strapped myself to the chair, but I didn’t think to. Dummy.

“I’m not falling!” I scream. “I’m not falling! This is just space! Everything is fine!”

It’s not fine. I feel my stomach in my throat. I’m going to puke. Puke in zero g is not okay. I don’t have a bag. I severely underprepared for this. I was stupid to think I could just talk myself out of a primal fear.

I pull the collar of my jumpsuit open and tilt my head down. I’m just in the nick of time. I puke out the entirety of “Day 9—Meal 3” into my shirt. I hold the collar tight to my chest afterward. It’s disgusting, but contained. Better than letting it float around the control room and becoming a choking hazard.

“Oh gosh…” I whimper. “Gosh…this is…”

Can I do this? Will I be rendered completely worthless from this point on? Will humanity die because I can’t handle zero g?

No.

I clench my teeth. I clench my fists. I clench my butt. I clench every part of me that I know how to clench. It gives me a feeling of control. I’m doing something by aggressively doing nothing.

After an eternity, the panic begins to ebb away. Human brains are amazing things. We can get used to just about anything. I’m making the adjustment.

The slight reduction of fear has a feedback effect. I know I will get less afraid now. And knowing that makes the fear subside even faster. Soon, the panic dies down to fear, which diffuses into general anxiousness.

I look around the control room and nothing seems right. Nothing changed, but now there’s no down. I still feel sick to my stomach. I grab my collar in case I need to puke again but it isn’t necessary. I hold it in.

The feeling of warm vomit squishing between my chest and jumpsuit is disgusting. I need to change.

I aim myself at the hatchway leading to the lab and kick off the bulkhead behind me. I float down and into the lab. The whole room is cluttered with random floating debris. I left things out on the table when I cataloged them. Now all that stuff is wandering around freely, wafted along by currents from the life-support air vents.

“Dummy,” I say to myself. I really should have seen that coming.

I continue onward to the bedroom. Not surprisingly, it’s also got junk floating everywhere. I opened most of the bins in the storage area to see what was inside. Now the bins and their contents drift to and fro.

“Clean me!” I say to the arms.

The arms don’t do anything.

I strip down and use the jumpsuit to wipe gross stuff from my body. I found the sponge-bath zone a few days ago—just a sink with sponges that comes out of the wall. No room for a shower, I guess. Anyway, I clean up with that stuff.

I’m not sure what to do with the gross, dirty stuff.

“Laundry?” I say.

The arms reach down and take the dirty jumpsuit from my hands. A panel in the ceiling opens and they put it in there somewhere. What happens when that fills up? No idea.

I find a replacement jumpsuit in the flotsam and put it on. Putting on clothes in zero g is interesting. I wouldn’t say it’s harder, but it’s different. I do manage to get the new jumpsuit on. It’s a little tight. I check the name patch. It says 姚. It’s one of Yáo’s jumpsuits. Well, it’s not too tight. And I don’t want to bounce around the bedroom all day looking for one of mine. I’ll organize it all later.

For now, I’m too excited to see what’s out there. I mean, come on! I’m the first human to explore another star system! And I’m here!

I launch off the floor toward the hatchway…and miss. I crash into the ceiling. At least I get my arms up in time to protect my face. I bounce off the ceiling and back to the floor.

“Ow,” I mumble. I try again, this time a little more slowly, and I’m successful. I coast up through the lab, and into the control room. Getting around sure is a lot easier when there’s no gravity. I still feel queasy but I have to admit: This is pretty fun.

I pull myself into the pilot’s chair and strap myself in to keep from floating away.

The Navigation screen reads PRIMARY TRANSIT COMPLETE. The Spin Drive screen says THRUST: 0. But most important, the Petrovascope screen says READY.

I rub my hands together, then reach for the screen. The interface is simple enough. The corner has an icon that is a toggle switch with two states: “Visible” and “Petrova.” It’s currently set to “Visible.” The rest of the screen shows a visible-light view from the ship. Seems like an ordinary camera. I poke at the screen and quickly realize I can pan, zoom in or out, rotate, and so on.

All I see is stars in the distance. I guess I should pan around until I find Tau Ceti. I swipe my finger left, left, left…just generally trying to see where the star is. I don’t have a frame of reference to work with. Every few left swipes I throw in a down swipe. Just to cover all angles over time. I do finally find Tau Ceti, but it doesn’t look like it should.

A few days ago, when I looked at it with the helioscope, it looked like any other star. But now it’s a solid black circle with a hazy ring of light around it. I realize why immediately.

The Petrovascope is a pretty sensitive piece of equipment. It’s fine-tuned to spot even the smallest amounts of the Petrova wavelength. A star will give off absolutely obscene amounts of light at all wavelengths. It’d be like staring at the sun with binoculars. The equipment has to protect itself from the star. It probably has a physical metal plate that it keeps between its sensors and the star at all times. So I’m looking at the back of that plate.

Good design.

I reach up to the toggle switch. This is it. If there’s no Petrova line here, I don’t know what to do. I mean, I’ll try to figure out something. But I’ll be kind of lost.

I flip the toggle.

The stars disappear. The hazy ring surrounding Tau Ceti remains. That’s to be expected. It’s the star’s corona, which will be emitting plenty of light, so some of it’s bound to be the Petrova wavelength.

I search the image desperately. Nothing at first, but then I see it. A beautiful dark-red arch coming out of the bottom-left portion of Tau Ceti.

I clap my hands. “Yes!”

The shape is unmistakable. It’s a Petrova line! Tau Ceti has a Petrova line! I do a wiggly little dance in my chair. It’s not easy in zero g but I give it my all. Now we’re getting somewhere!

There are so many experiments I’ll need to do, I don’t even know where to begin. I should see where the line leads, for starters. One of the planets, obviously, but which one and what’s interesting about it? And I should get a sample of local Astrophage to see if it’s the same as what we have back on Earth. I could do that by flying into the Petrova line itself and then scraping the dust off the hull with an EVA.

I could spend a week just writing up a list of experiments I want to do!

I spot a flash on the screen. Just a quick blip of light.

“What’s that?” I say. “Another clue?”

The flash happens again. I pan and zoom in on that portion of space. It’s nowhere near the Petrova line or Tau Ceti. Maybe a reflection from a planet or asteroid?

I can see how that might happen. A highly reflective asteroid could be bouncing enough light from Tau Ceti around that I see it on the Petrovascope, but it’s intermittent, so maybe it’s an irregular shape that’s rotating and—

The flash becomes a solid light source. It’s just…“on” now. Nonstop.

I peer at the screen. “What…what’s going on here?…”

The light source becomes brighter. Not instantly. Just gradually over time. I watch for a minute. It seems to get brighter faster now.

Is it an object headed toward me?

An instant hypothesis pops into my mind: Maybe Astrophage are somehow attracted to other Astrophage? Maybe some subset of them saw the flare from my engines, which would be the wavelength they use, and they headed toward me. Maybe this is how they find the main migration group? So this could be a clump of Astrophage headed my way, thinking I can lead them to the planet with the carbon dioxide?

Interesting theory. Nothing to back it up, though.

The steady light grows brighter, brighter, brighter, and then finally disappears.

“Huh,” I say. I wait a few minutes, but the light does not return.

“Hmm….” I make a mental note of the anomaly. But for now there’s nothing I can do about it. Whatever it was, it’s gone now.

Back to the Petrova line. The first thing I want to do is find out which planet the line leads to. I guess I’ll have to work out how to navigate the ship, but that’s another challenge.

I pan back to look at the Petrova line. Something’s wrong now. Half of it is just…gone.

It’s coming out of Tau Ceti, just like it was a few minutes ago, but then it stops abruptly at a seemingly arbitrary point in space.

“What is going on?”

Did I mess up their migration pattern, maybe? If it’s that easy, wouldn’t we have worked that out when the Hail Mary was wandering around our own solar system?

I zoom in on the cutoff point. It’s just a straight line. Like someone took an X-Acto knife to the whole Petrova line and threw away the scrap.

A giant line of migrating Astrophage doesn’t just disappear. I have a simpler explanation: There’s something on the camera lens. Some blob of debris. Maybe a wad of overexcitable Astrophage. That would be nice. I’d have a sample to look at right away!

Maybe a visible-light view will give me a better idea of what’s going on. I press the toggle button.

And that’s when I see it.

There is an object blocking my view of the Petrova line. It’s right next to my ship. Maybe a few hundred meters away. It’s roughly triangle-shaped and it has gable-like protrusions along its hull.

Yes. I said hull. It’s not an asteroid—the lines are too smooth; too straight. This object was made. Fabricated. Constructed. Shapes like that don’t occur in nature.

It’s a ship.

Another ship.

There’s another ship in this system with me. Those flashes of light—those were its engines. It’s Astrophage-powered. Just like the Hail Mary. But the design, the shape—it’s nothing like any spacecraft I’ve ever seen. The whole thing is made of huge, flat surfaces—the worst possible way to make a pressure vessel. No one in their right mind would make a ship that shape.

No one on Earth would, anyway.

I blink a few times at what I’m seeing. I gulp.

This…this is an alien spacecraft. Made by aliens. Aliens intelligent enough to make a spacecraft.

Humanity isn’t alone in the universe. And I’ve just met our neighbors.

“Holy fucking shit!”