It was hot. Too hot; every breath scorched Simon’s lungs. He couldn’t think. And someone was pressed tight to his back, skin on skin.
Hands roamed his body—soft palms and long clever fingers, stroking and teasing. They were slick—wet. Wet with his blood; it was under the fingernails, sinking into the lines of each knuckle, smearing across Simon’s skin wherever they touched him.
Simon reached back to touch in turn, but his left arm wouldn’t move. It was gone, a ragged dripping wound where it should have been.
There was a hot line along the cleft of Simon’s ass—hard, throbbing with each beat of an alien pulse.
Grace’s breath washed over his ear. “You want it?”
A desperate noise wrenched its way out of Simon’s throat.
Teeth nipped at his earlobe. “Tell me.”
Simon trembled and whined. He couldn’t make himself say “yes”; couldn’t bear to say “no”—
And opened his eyes to darkness.
It wasn’t complete darkness; he could make out the vague shape of the ceiling struts arching overhead. He was in his quarters.
He’d been dreaming.
Simon rubbed his hand across his face and groaned. “Frell.”
It was too hot under the covers, his own sweat damp and sticky on his skin. Simon tossed the blankets aside, panting for breath.
He was hard, his pulse pounding in his groin, cock aching where it was trapped beneath his underclothes. Simon pressed at it with the heel of his palm, hoping to soothe the ache.
There was a quiet thunk, and Simon caught a glimpse of movement in the dark.
Something was in here with him.
Grace’s logic was as follows:
Point the first, time was relative. Rocky only slept every eighty-six hours or so, and while Simon seemed to need sleep about as regularly as Grace did, their waking hours were staggered a bit. Strictly speaking, aboard Mari, there was no “morning.”
Point the second, “breakfast” was a social construct. There really was no biological reason why certain foods were considered “breakfast foods,” beyond baseline human needs for protein and carbohydrates early in the day.
Point the third, Grace was the only human on board. There wasn’t anyone in a position to call out his eating habits as any kind of deviation from the human norm. This far from Earth, he was the human norm.
Therefore: ramen for breakfast was perfectly fine, as long as he put bacon bits in it.
Grace was forced to consider several additional points when a ragged, terrified shout echoed down the corridor and he nearly dumped boiling water all over himself.
He muttered a minced oath under his breath and sprang back from the mess, bolting from the central chamber and out into the corridor. The noise had come from the direction of Simon’s quarters—the voice shouting had been his.
As Grace drew closer, there was a crash; Rocky’s voice joined the cacophony, sharp shrieks and trills that the translator microbes failed to process. Simon’s door was open; Grace stumbled through, but hesitated in the doorway.
Simon had backed up against the far wall of his quarters. He wasn’t wearing his prosthetic, and his right arm was curled protectively across his chest. He was also mostly naked.
His bedside table was missing. Grace quickly located it at the base of the wall near the door, dented along one side; Simon had thrown it across the room.
He’d apparently been trying to hit Rocky, who was sitting in his ball in the middle of the floor. Four of his legs danced uneasily in place, rocking the ball slightly from side to side, while the fifth—the rearmost—was raised in what Grace guessed was an eridian threat display.
“Get the frell away from me!” Simon was screaming at him. “Out! Get out!”
Neither of them seemed to be hurt, and Grace couldn’t see anything else that constituted an emergency. “Guys?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
“He was watching me!” Simon shouted back. “I was asleep and he broke in and—”
Rocky interrupted with a fresh bout of shrieking—all Grace’s translator microbes caught was “rude” and “yell” and “throw.”
Simon replied with a string of profanities, and the room dissolved once more into incoherent noise.
A crackling squeal resounded through the room; Grace doubled over, covering his ears. Simon flinched away, backing further into the wall. Even Rocky fell silent, limbs curling in as he hunkered down under the sonic assault.
It took Grace a moment to realise the sound had come through their comm chips.
“What the frell was that?” Simon groaned.
“Apologies,” came Pilot’s voice over the comm. “There appears to be some feedback on the comm system. I merely wished to inform you all that Mari’s sensors have detected a strong infrared light source moving parallel to our current course.”
“Infrared?” Grace asked, with an inkling already of what that meant.
“The signature is consistent with a large population of Astrophage,” Pilot said, confirming his suspicions.
Simon’s brow furrowed. “Another infected star?”
Grace shook his head. “Your average star pumps out so much light across the whole spectrum that the infrared produced by Astrophage just gets lost in the noise.”
“So what does that mean?” Simon asked. “The Astrophage is just … out there, on its own?”
“It migrates,” Grace conceded, “but even in transit, I don’t think any natural population of Astrophage would produce a signal strong enough to get Mari’s attention.”
“Could be ship using Astrophage as fuel,” Rocky proposed, uncurling from his huddled position.
Except that nobody out here used Astrophage that way. So far, Grace had encountered only one other species with Astrophage-powered ships.
Rocky seemed to realise that as well; he was practically vibrating with anticipation.
“Pilot,” Grace asked, “could we change course to intercept the signal?”
“Easily, Dr. Grace.”
The source of the infrared signal was, in fact, a ship. Grace didn’t have a handle on the meters-to-motras conversion rate yet, but scans showed it was maybe 150 meters long—gigantic by the standards of any ship from Earth, but utterly dwarfed by Mari, who was six times its size.
The projection on the strategy table showed an elliptical core section surrounded by an elaborate hull-mounted rail system, elongating the ship’s silhouette into a jagged-edged rhombus. Grace had never seen a ship quite like it, but the design was oddly familiar—it had the same flat planes and geometric patterns as some of Rocky’s engineering projects.
“Spectral analysis indicates the vessel is made primarily of xenon,” Pilot offered, clearly baffled by that particular reading. “Its composition and silhouette match Peacekeeper records of the ship Rocky was taken from.”
Rocky stood upright in his ball, legs stretched out to lift his body as high as possible, even though he couldn’t perceive the projection on the table. The vents atop his carapace fluttered wildly.
Simon, meanwhile, hung back in the doorway of the command—properly dressed, now. Grace couldn’t blame him for giving Rocky a wide berth, although he wasn’t sure why Simon was avoiding him as well.
“Rocky,” Grace said carefully, “is it possible your people sent more than one ship?”
“Not possible,” Rocky replied. “Fact. Second ship planned as redundancy. Still building when Rocky ship launch.”
The US military personnel on the Petrova Taskforce had introduced Grace to a saying: “two is one and one is none.” It was an ethos embraced by just about every space agency on Earth: anything important had to have a backup. Even the personnel slated for the mission.
If they’d had the time or resources to build a backup ship, they would have. Evidently, Erid had managed to follow through on the same idea.
From his spot in the doorway, Simon asked, “Why’s it going so slow?”
Grace twisted to give him an incredulous look. “It’s travelling at nearly the speed of light.”
“And Mari caught up to it no problem,” Simon pointed out. “We could fly circles around that thing, if we needed to.”
“Yeah, well it’s supposed to be impossible to travel faster than light,” Grace complained, throwing his hands in the air. “And I can’t figure out why it isn’t, because nobody I’ve met so far can tell me how a ‘hetch drive’ works!”
“Signs of life aboard ship, question?” Rocky interrupted sharply.
“The vessel has not altered its speed or trajectory in any way,” Pilot replied. “Either the crew has failed to notice our approach, or …”
“Or there’s nobody on that ship to notice,” Simon concluded. “Heat signatures?”
“Inconclusive,” Pilot said. “The interior of the ship seems to be … quite warm.”
Grace winced. “Yeah, that’d be the atmosphere full of superheated ammonia.”
“Mari is finding it difficult to distinguish between the background heat and any potential living bodies.”
“Can we hail them?” Simon asked.
“I have been sending hails on all standard comm bands,” Pilot replied. “So far, there has been no response.”
“The eridians might not be using any of those channels,” Grace pointed out.
“Why the frell not?”
“Before Rocky ran into the Peacekeepers, his people thought they were alone in the universe. It’s not like they knew what standards everybody else was using.”
“I go aboard,” Rocky said, rolling back toward the door. “Look for survivors.”
“What—? No!” Grace chased after him. “Rocky, what about the radiation? You could get sick.”
“It’s unshielded?” Simon said, appalled.
Grace managed to outpace Rocky and step into his path; the ball collided lightly with Grace’s shins, its occupant whistling in annoyance. “Eridians don’t know about cosmic radiation,” he explained, moving to block Rocky’s attempts to roll past him. “Their atmosphere’s so thick, it doesn’t reach the surface of their planet. They have no natural resistance. Rocky, stop. I’ll go instead.”
At the thought of donning the EVA suit, his stomach lurched.
Simon didn’t seem to like the idea, either. “The atmosphere in there will crush your suit like a flibisk egg.”
Before Grace could ask what the heck a ‘flibisk’ was, Rocky said, “Peacekeepers have pressure suit.”
Grace blinked down at him. “They did?”
“Needed suits to board ship,” Rocky explained. “Used sometimes to enter Rocky workshop, quarters.”
Grace didn’t want to think about why the Peacekeepers might’ve needed to enter Rocky’s space. “Is it still onboard?”
“Don’t know,” Rocky said. “Maybe.”
Simon found the pressure suit in the cargo bay, buried under a stack of crates containing what looked to be spare Peacekeeper uniforms. It was heavy; even with Simon’s prosthetic, it took Grace’s assistance and the use of a hover sled to get it down to the maintenance bay.
Rocky was in his workshop, putting the finishing touches on a new docking ring for the transport pod—one that would be compatible with the airlock on the eridian ship. He’d had to cannibalise the quarantine chamber he’d built for Simon in order to get enough xenonite for the job.
If there was anything wrong with the suit, it was better to find out now and not while Grace was aboard the other ship. Simon stood the thing upright in the middle of the maintenance bay; it was functionally a one-piece bodysuit, with a hatch in the back for its occupant to climb in and out.
Grace hesitated as he approached the suit, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.
“Something wrong?” Simon asked.
Grace jumped, as if he’d forgotten Simon was there. “Fine,” he blurted out. “I’m fine. It’s fine.”
Before Simon could question him further, Grace climbed awkwardly through the rear hatch of the suit. He fed his arms and legs through the suit’s limbs, settling his weight for a moment before looking back over his shoulder and giving him a nod.
Simon sealed up the hatch and moved to the suit’s wrist monitor, tapping in the commands for a full systems check. Within a few systems, the results started to come back: the suit was in good working condition, with no serious faults detected.
Through the dome of the helmet, he could see Grace staring straight ahead, breathing heavily through his mouth.
Simon keyed his comm chip into the suit’s channel. “Grace?”
It took a moment before Grace licked his lips and replied, “Y—yeah?”
“Can you breathe okay?” Simon asked. “The suit says life support is working, but if you’re—”
“It’s fine,” Grace interrupted, voice strained. “I’m—it’s fine.”
Simon turned his attention back to the wrist monitor. “I’m going to start the calibration routine,” he said, keying in the appropriate sequence. “Can you try taking a step forward?”
The suit didn’t move.
Simon glanced up from the monitor. “Grace?”
Grace was panting harder now, fast and panicked, shaking so hard his glasses had slipped to the end of his nose. Tears streamed down his face, his eyes wide and unseeing.
“Rocky?” Simon called; his voice cracked. “Is he okay? What’s happening?”
“Not know,” Rocky trilled back in alarm. “Grace wear other suit before. No problems.”
“Before,” in this case, meaning the time he’d boarded a derelict leviathan and wound up not only fleeing for his life, but chopping Simon’s arm off with a hatchet.
Grace’s mouth was moving, but the comm couldn’t pick up whatever he was saying. Simon leaned in closer, just barely hearing Grace’s rasping voice through the helmet: “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—“
Simon darted behind Grace and unsealed the rear panel, yanking it open. Grace threw himself backward out of the suit, barely managing to keep his feet; Simon instinctively reached for him, but Grace reeled away, blind with terror as he fled.
He collided with the nearest bulkhead, huddling there in the corner between a strut and the wall behind it.
Simon couldn’t shake the feeling he should be … helping, somehow. Grace would be helping, if Simon was the one crying and mindless with terror. He took a half-step toward him.
A wordless, sobbing noise wrenched its way up Grace’s throat, and he slammed his fist into the wall.
Simon froze.
Grace drew his fist back and hit the wall again, heedless of the damage he was doing to his hand. A broken sound fell out of him—helpless frustration and rage.
He was taller than Simon, but nowhere near as bulky. The prosthetic alone would likely be enough to keep Grace at bay if his anger turned on Simon—but Simon wasn’t sure he could do that without hurting Grace in turn. Better to keep still and avoid drawing attention to himself.
Rocky, though, was moving—clambering across his workshop and through the hatch into his ball, rolling it across the floor toward Grace.
Simon made a warning noise behind his teeth and reached out to stop him, but Rocky ignored him completely and forged onward until the edge of his ball bumped Grace’s foot.
Grace whirled in place and wrapped both arms around the ball, clinging tightly and pressing his face to its surface.
“Sorry,” he mumbled into the xenonite barrier. “Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry …”
“Grace friend not be sorry,” Rocky insisted, settling his body against the side of the ball touching Grace.
Simon finally let himself take a full breath. Whatever violent impulse had sent Grace’s fist into the wall seemed to have passed.
And Grace wasn’t going to the eridian ship. He couldn’t. Which was just as well—there probably wasn’t anyone still alive over there.
But what if there was?
What if someone was dying alone aboard that ship, right now? Would they ever know how close they’d come to being saved?
“Grace,” Simon said, as gently as he could manage.
Grace sniffed and peered up at him from where he was still wrapped around Rocky’s ball.
“Get up,” Simon told him. “I need you to calibrate the suit for me.”
Grace blinked. “What?”
It took some manoeuvring to dock the transport pod with the eridian ship. According to Rocky and Grace, the ship didn’t have artificial gravity in the same way Mari did; the gravitational force created by its constant acceleration pushed toward its stern, so Simon had to orient the transport pod perpendicular to its direction of travel to make sure the two gravity planes lined up.
The other airlock was larger than standard; luckily, the docking clamp Rocky had built was up to the task, latching onto the eridian ship’s hull to bring the two hatches together and sealing off the gap with a short xenonite tunnel.
Simon ran one last check on the suit, then climbed through the rear hatch and closed it up behind him. He opened a comm channel back to Mari. “Pilot?”
“Yes, Simon?”
“Could you tell Rocky and Grace I’m about to board the eridian ship?”
“We’re here,” Grace cut in. “Me and Rocky, I mean. We’ll be with you the whole time.” Grace went quiet for a moment. “… Thank you. For this.”
Something uncomfortable squirmed in Simon’s chest. “I’m sorry,” he said, awkwardly. “For … earlier.”
There was brief, confused silence. “You mean, in your quarters?”
“Yeah,” Simon rasped out. He stepped into the airlock. “I was just … scared.”
The hatch closed behind him, and a few microts passed as the air cycled out.
“When eridians sleep,” Grace said, “they’re completely paralysed. And they’re stuck like that until the sleep cycle is finished. They can’t wake up if … if something happens.”
The airlock’s outer hatch opened, and Simon stepped out into the short tunnel between the two ships. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Grace echoed. “So when an eridian sleeps, their friends watch over them. To keep them safe. That’s what Rocky was doing. He shouldn’t have come into your room without asking, but … yeah.”
“Oh,” Simon said.
“Anyway. Just thought that might … help.”
Rocky had loaded an acoustic override signal into the suit’s onboard computer; Simon played it back from the wrist monitor, and the outer hatch of the other airlock opened. He stepped through and waited another few microts for the airlock to repressurise, then stepped through the inner hatch.
Ahead of him was complete darkness.
“Dark in here,” Simon remarked aloud; there was a tremor in his voice he couldn’t quite control.
“Yeah, uh … eridians don’t have eyes. They don’t need lights, so … they don’t have them.”
Simon reached for the suit’s wrist monitor and switched on the helmet lamp. He couldn’t help recalling the last time he’d stepped onto a dark alien ship with only a small light to guide him—but aside from the darkness, the eridian ship was nothing like the inside of a leviathan.
He focused on the straight lines and sharp angles of the ship’s interior, so unlike a leviathan’s organic arches and curves, as he trudged down the corridor. The suit’s exoskeleton was motorised, but it didn’t interface directly with his brain; it was motion-sensitive. Every time Simon moved a limb, there was a fraction of a second before the suit responded appropriately, and he had to abort every stride slightly before he actually wanted it to stop. It was more tiring than he’d thought it would be.
The light from the helmet lamp caught something that glittered along one wall of the corridor: a set of taut metal strings, suspended about a finger’s width from the bulkhead. Curious, Simon reached out and plucked one; the string vibrated all down the corridor, off into the darkness, and an answering hum resonated through the rest of the ship.
It had to be some kind of communications system, like the signal Rocky had given Simon for the airlock door.
Before long, he reached a junction point in the corridor; one path ramped upward, while another looked to be heading down. “I’m at the end of the airlock corridor,” Simon called in. “Where am I going from here?”
“Engine room,” Rocky suggested. “Back of ship.”
“The engineering section is right next to the ship’s Astrophage tanks,” Grace explained. “Rocky was stationed there on his own ship—that’s probably what saved his life. If there’s any survivors, that’s where they’ll be.”
Simon took a moment to orient himself—“back” meant “down,” with the ship’s centre of gravity where it was—and took the corridor that sloped gradually downward. The eridians had taken pains to ensure their ship was navigable in both free-fall and artificial gravity; the corridor spiralled in rigid segments, branching off occasionally into other sections of the ship.
There was a shadow ahead of him—an irregular rounded lump, breaking up the sharp angles of the walls and floors around him. Simon turned his helmet lamp on it to find a five-legged, stone-shelled body slumped across the floor.
“I found an eridian,” he reported back.
“Alive, question?”
“Uh …” The eridian didn’t seem to be breathing, but Simon had no idea whether they even did that. “Not sure. They could be unconscious, but … how do I check an eridian’s pulse?”
“Try move limbs,” Rocky instructed. “If rigid, hearts not beating.”
Simon manoeuvred awkwardly onto his knees and reached out for one of the eridian’s bent limbs. He tried to straighten it, but it didn’t move; whatever passed for muscle beneath its carapace was locked in place.
“Dead,” Simon confirmed aloud, then winced. “Uh … sorry.”
“Is okay,” Rocky assured him, although a low, untranslatable croon accompanied the words.
Simon heaved the suit upright again and continued down the corridor. There was another eridian a few motras along, and another two not far from that one—all of them dead, their limbs completely rigid.
Then the corridor opened up into what Simon guessed was the engine room. It was just as dark as the rest of the ship, but from what Simon could see with his helmet lamp, the space was huge—easily as big as one of Mari’s cargo bays. Rising out of a platform at the centre of the room was a towering pillar, its sides covered in sand or some other fine-grained material. Unreadable symbols appeared in relief on its surface, constantly scrolling and changing.
Eridians didn’t have eyes. They couldn’t rely on screens to show them the status of their propulsion system; this was their main monitor.
Simon turned, casting the beam from his helmet lamp around the room’s cavernous interior. There were more eridians down here—easily a dozen of them, all dead.
“Rocky,” he asked, “how many people were on your ship?”
“Twenty-three,” Rocky reported. “Same number second ship.”
These eridians, plus the ones Simon had found in the corridor, would account for the bulk of the crew. “There’s a lot of bodies down here,” he reported. “I think they must’ve all been hiding out together.”
“Learned Astrophage helped,” Rocky guessed—then, with another low croon, added, “Learned too late.”
Simon swallowed; there was something heavy in his throat. “Is that what happened on your ship?”
“Crew sick,” Rocky confirmed. “Cells dying. Not understand why. No infection. No injury. No reason.”
“Rocky was the only one who didn’t get sick,” Grace added. “The Astrophage in the fuel tanks absorbed the radiation before it could reach him.”
“Tried to fix. Could not fix. Crew die. Rocky alone.”
Alone in the vast dark, waiting to die.
“For how long?” Simon asked.
“Forty cycles, approximate.”
Simon’s reverie shattered. “Forty?”
“Eridians have long lifespans,” Grace assured him. “It wasn’t as long for him as it would be for—”
“You said eridians aren’t safe without someone to watch them sleep,” Simon shot back. “Rocky had nobody to watch him for thousands of nights in a row. He would’ve been terrified for decades, he should be—” his voice faltered, “—insane.”
The comm line went quiet.
Simon would be the first to admit his interactions with Rocky weren’t exactly normal. Up until now, he’d put that down to the friction between them—cultural differences, maybe. He’d never met another eridian. He had no idea what they were supposed to be like.
If Rocky were, by eridian standards, utterly deranged … would anyone aboard Mari be in a position to tell?
Did it really matter?
“I, uh …” Simon cleared his throat. “What should I do with the bodies?”
“Oh. Heck.” Grace groaned. “Each of those is going to weigh, like, five hundred pounds.”
Simon wasn’t sure how that translated to real units, but from what he knew of Rocky, he guessed that was pretty heavy.
“Leave bodies,” Rocky said decisively. “Bring supplies. Crew not need now.”
“Yeah,” Simon agreed, voice tight. “Yeah, I can do that. What do you need?”
“Chemicals for xenonite,” Rocky said. “Should be in storage compartment on ♩♬♫ side of—”
“Wait, on what?” Simon interrupted. “Is that treblin or hamman side?”
“Facing back of ship, is ♪♫—”
“I don’t understand.”
Rocky emitted an annoyed trill.
“Hang on,” Grace broke in, “he’s gesturing—”
A shiver crawled up Simon’s spine, unease churning in his gut; the anxiety wasn’t coming from him. It was Mari’s.
“Dr. Grace?” Pilot broke in, alarmed.
“What’s wrong?” Simon asked, not waiting for Grace’s reply.
“Mari has detected a signal at the edge of her sensor range,” Pilot replied. “Another ship is approaching.”
Grace’s knuckles were white where he gripped the edges of the operations console, watching the approach of the other ship through the viewport.
This far from any star or other light source, it was a vague silhouette against the blackness of space. Pilot sent a projection through to the strategy table; the new ship appeared to consist of several rotating sections stacked vertically along a central axis. No one section perfectly matched the next, as if each had been patched together from whatever was on hand at the time.
“The ship appears to be a sheyang pirate vessel,” Pilot informed them. “I am receiving an audio transmission.”
The operations console lit up, and the message began to play. “Unknown leviathan,” said a low, croaking voice. “I am Captain Vatrec. I claim right of salvage over this vessel, and yours. You will submit to my boarding party, or you will be destroyed.”
“The sheyangs have activated their weapons system,” Pilot said, voice quavering. “They are targeting Mari.”
Grace’s heart jolted in his chest. “Shields up?” he said, instinctively.
“We have no shields,” Pilot replied. “Our only defensive option is to starburst.”
“But Simon’s still on the eridian ship.”
“And Mari has no intention of leaving without him.”
“I’m heading back to the transport pod,” Simon assured them. “Just give me a few minutes and I’ll—”
“The transport pod cannot return without passing through the sheyangs’ field of fire,” Pilot warned him sharply. “Their weapons are fully capable of destroying the pod. Mari insists you stay where you are until the danger has passed.”
“Let pirates board,” Rocky offered. “Wait until outside ship, then vent hangar. Easy easy easy.”
“No, listen—” Simon started.
“You want to kill them?” Grace yelped, rolling right over him.
“Pirates want kill Grace Rocky Mari.”
“If the sheyangs detect the death of their boarding party, they will most likely open fire,” Pilot pointed out.
Simon’s voice broke through: “Frelling listen to me!”
His voice cracked around the words, scared and desperate, and Grace’s mouth snapped shut.
Simon breathed heavily down the comm line.
“Okay,” Grace said. “Okay, Simon. We’re listening.”
A moment passed as Simon composed himself, and then he said, “Pirates are cowards. They’ll fight if they think they can win, but they’ll retreat if they’re worried they might lose. You just need to convince the sheyangs we’re too much risk to be worth it.”
“Right, okay.” Grace thought it over and drew a blank. They had no weapons. They had nothing to threaten the sheyangs with. “How … do we do that?”
“… Do you still have those Peacekeeper uniforms?”
Some frantic digging through the crates they’d found in the cargo bay turned up what Grace was pretty sure had to be a captain’s uniform: a knee-length black jacket with red accents. The collar was high and way too tight, pressing against Grace’s windpipe; he wedged a finger in to try and loosen it, struggling to breathe. “I can’t do this.”
He tried to back away from the operations console, but collided with Rocky, who’d rolled his ball directly behind him. One edge hit the back of Grace’s knees, and he nearly collapsed.
“Grace call respected colleague ‘staggering waste of carbon,’” Rocky opined, shoving Grace forward again. “Grace tell Rocky this.”
“Okay, but that was—” Grace raked his hair back from his face and realised his glasses were still hanging from his ear. He pulled them free and folded them, tucking them into his pocket. “I was really burned out, and I’d already decided I was done with academia, and it was the tail end of a two-week conference and—I was under a lot of stress, okay?”
Rocky seemed to consider this for a moment. “Grace not stress now, question?”
Grace had to give him that.
“I am opening a channel to the sheyang vessel,” Pilot reported.
Grace bit back a whimper and tried to stand up straight.
Up on the viewport, the bridge of the sheyangs’ ship flickered into view. Taking up most of the frame was the face of an alien who looked like nothing so much as a giant toad, with slick greenish skin. Its wide mouth turned down at the edges into a permanent, unimpressed frown.
“Peacekeeper,” said the alien, with a touch of caution. His voice was familiar—this was the Captain Vatrec who’d demanded their surrender.
“Yes.” Grace scrambled to remember what Simon had told him to say. “Captain Melkor, Ustar Regiment, special duty assignment. I command this leviathan.”
Vatrec scoffed. “You claim to command a leviathan with no control collar?”
“Our technology has advanced,” Grace replied. “We no longer need to collar leviathans to control them. And you’re interfering with an ongoing operation.”
“We merely claim right of salvage over a derelict vessel,” Vatrec said—already backing off his threat to board Mari. Good.
“The vessel in question is part of a Peacekeeper test flight,” Grace replied. “You will keep your distance, or my crew will be forced to take defensive action.”
“You’re bluffing,” Vatrec said. “Leviathans have no weapons. Your threats are empty.”
The reality of the situation caught up with Grace all at once. Here he was at the ass end of the universe, inside a living spaceship flown by a giant crab. His roommate was a talking rock. He was trying to bluff with no cards in a poker game against Kermit the Frog. And Kermit had a gun.
He just barely swallowed a hysterical burst of laughter and, instead, said, “We have a command carrier patrolling this sector. I’ve already called them in—they’ll arrive within a few minutes. What happens when it gets here is up to you.” He glared at the screen. “If you value your lives, be somewhere else.”
With that, he reached across the operations console and closed the channel.
“Think that worked?” he asked faintly.
“We’re about to find out,” Simon replied.
A few seconds passed—and then the sheyang ship dropped back from the eridian vessel, pulling away.
“The pirate vessel is departing,” Pilot reported. “At maximum speed, by all appearances.”
Grace’s knees buckled; a controlled collapse brought him to the floor, where he rested his forehead against the warm xenonite of Rocky’s ball. His eyes drifted shut as a shuddering sigh left his body.
“Grace save Mari,” Rocky said. “Grace very brave.”
“I’m not,” Grace mumbled into the ball.
“You did good,” Simon added, over the comm. “That last part was clever.”
“Yeah, well.” Grace shrugged. “Turns out that whole semester I spent watching Babylon 5 was good for something after all.”
Simon had ejected one of the eridian ship’s fuel tanks before making his way back to the airlock and the transport pod. Mari matched velocity with the tank, pulling in closer as the other ship continued to accelerate away from them.
Grace and Rocky monitored the whole process from the command, and as the eridian ship pulled away, Rocky began to sing—a haunting melody that echoed throughout the room, none of it even remotely parsed by the translator microbes.
“What’s that?” Grace asked softly.
“Eridian dying song,” Rocky replied. “For memory.”
In the viewport, the eridian ship grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared into the darkness of space. As far as final resting places went, Grace figured there were worse options than to travel endlessly through the stars.
Mari snagged the fuel tank with her docking web, drawing it through the open door of the transport hangar. Not long after, Simon’s pod followed.
By the time Grace and Rocky arrived in the maintenance bay, the transport pod had already landed and the hangar was repressurised. The inner door opened to reveal Simon climbing down out of the pod; he’d already shed the pressure suit, and there was a crate in his arms.
“This better be the right one,” he grumbled, setting it down. The crate was marked with eridian symbols, carved in relief.
“Is correct.” Rocky rolled forward, seemed to realise for the first time that his current situation wouldn’t allow him to carry the crate, and added, sheepishly, “Will need assistance moving to workshop.”
“I’ll get the hover sled.” Grace stepped back into the maintenance bay.
When he returned, sled in tow, Simon was eyeing the Astrophage tank. “Is it safe to have that thing aboard?”
“It’s harmless to us,” Grace assured him. “Mostly.”
Simon gave him a wary look. “‘Mostly’?”
“Well—” Grace shifted in place. “If the eridians were using this Astrophage for fuel, that means it’s, uh … well-fed. Astrophage stores a lot of energy, relative to its mass. So if that energy gets released …”
“It explodes?” Simon didn’t sound overly keen to hear the answer.
Grace pushed away the memories: fire blooming in the distance; a shockwave ripping across dry grass; a ship disappearing in a flash of blinding light; a command carrier crumpling in on itself.
“Yeah,” he said. “It explodes.”
Grace’s half of the room he shared with Rocky was, as usual, a disaster: bed unmade, clothes scattered across the floor. Within his sealed-off section, Rocky was busy unfolding some kind of spiked metal frame. There were a few empty ration canisters nearby; he’d just finished eating.
“Simon.” Rocky didn’t turn to face him; near as Simon could tell, he didn’t really have a face. “Why here, question?”
“I, uh …” Simon cleared his throat. “I was thinking about what Grace said. About you watching me.”
“Apology,” Rocky offered. “Rocky enter Simon room without permission. Grace explain. Wrong wrong wrong.”
“Yeah, well …” Simon shrugged. “You didn’t want me to sleep alone.”
“Yes.”
Simon sighed. “The station I grew up on … nobody had their own room. There wasn’t enough space. I slept every night in the dormitory, with my brothers.” He crossed his arms, shoulders hunching inward. “Then I went to prison, and … I had cellmates, but I didn’t really know any of them. We were just … alone, together.”
He could feel Rocky watching him, even without eyes.
“Understand,” Rocky said, eventually.
Simon nodded, relaxing a little. “So … thanks.”
Rocky replied with a low hum. “Simon get Grace, question? Grace watch Rocky sleep.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Simon turned back to the door, but lingered there. “Or … I can do it.”
Rocky emitted a soft, curious trill. “Simon watch Rocky, question?”
“Yeah,” Simon replied. “If … if that’s all right.”
“Yes,” Rocky said simply. “Thank.” He climbed into the metal frame, settling each of his limbs along one of the metal spikes until he was splayed out, suspended midair. Simon couldn’t imagine that was comfortable, but within minutes Rocky had gone completely still.
Simon sat on the floor at the base of the xenonite wall and settled in for a long watch.
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