Chapter Text
Boredom and the spectre of malnutrition will do weird things to a molecular biologist.
Especially one with a lab full of equipment and all Earth knowledge at his fingertips, and years with nowhere to go but said well stocked lab.
It definitely helped that Rocky kept cheering him on, encouraging him to work on making taumoeba into a better food source. And creating anything he needed that could be made out of xenonite.
They’d started with the basics, of course. Isolating the existing macronutrients in the taumoeba. Mostly what they managed to get were glucose, polysaccharides, and a few triglycerides, which was pretty limited, but it made sense — it would have been pretty impossible to find usable proteins in a species that preferred to reproduce without any nitrogen around.
Taumoeba might have been carbon-based, water-based, like Grace, but as something that could reproduce in bulk without that last big element, nitrogen, they didn’t have the complete set that was the basis for all earth life — C, H, O, N.
Which could have been a problem, but they also had plenty of nitrogen and a bunch of Earth microbes on board, and Earth microbes loved to turn things like glucose and the nitrogen heavy air of Hail Mary into more of themselves. And those suckers were full of DNA.
Protein.
And B12, so that was an otherwise complex problem solved.
Grace and Rocky had had a big party when they’d gotten the first batch of bacterial protein isolate to pass safety tests.
(The vodka was long gone and the taumoeba-syrup mead experiment was just in its beginning stages, but Grace broke out the last pouch of preserved peaches and the two of them danced to all of their favorite songs for hours.)
But that was just the beginning.
The next thing on the list had definitely been Vitamin C. Without that, Grace knew, things would get ugly pretty quick.
The first step, converting glucose to sorbitol, was pretty straightforward using the lab equipment and a small amount of nickel. But it wouldn’t do much good if they couldn’t track down an acetobacter in amongst the Earth microbes aboard Hail Mary.
There weren’t any acetobacter samples in the lab, so the obvious place to look was Grace’s own microbiome. They cultured so many samples, looking for the right little bugs.
No acetobacter.
After a few months of that, the last of the third round of samples having come up with not a single acetobacter, Grace lost his momentum.
“What Grace test next, question?” Rocky asked.
Grace couldn’t answer. He just lay on the floor of the lab, shaking his head.
“Grace not give up,” Rocky insisted, tapping the floor for emphasis. “Grace find way to make better food for Grace.”
Grace rubbed at his face. “I don’t think there is anything to try next, bud,” he said. “I’m pretty sure the Vitamin C thing is a dead end.”
The rest of the ship had been sterilized via exposure to vacuum when the taumoeba had escaped; even the autohydroponic farm had had to reset from its seed reserves. There was nowhere else to look.
The fact that there were plants and seeds at all was great, don’t get him wrong. Plants were amazing for Grace’s long term prospects on Erid, but without refining taumoeba, there would simply have been no way to source the sheer volume of nutrients he would need to survive until things got established on Erid.
Anything else he could think to try would just lessen his chances of survival in the long run.
So after that last failed test, Grace moped for a couple of days.
Rocky indulged his moping for a day and a half. Then he started prodding Grace to try something else.
“Okay, okay,” Grace whined. “I’m not solving this problem, but maybe I can do something else at least a little productive.”
“Good, good, good,” Rocky said. “Not give up. Do something else and circle back.”
“We’ll see,” Grace said.
He figured he might as well take apart the coma slurry feed system to make sure he had access to all the remaining slurry. Give himself as many days of good, balanced nutrition as he could manage.
Not tasty, but thorough. And however many extra days he could get before he developed scurvy or whatever else, well, he would take those. Yeah.
The slurry in Yao’s feed system still looked fine, didn’t smell like much of anything, just the same as the usual stuff in the main supply. Heading out in the direction of the bunk, the tube was dry, crusted on the inside from years of disuse.
Grace carefully wound it up into a circle and bagged it, for the day he became desperate enough to reconstitute it.
He moved on to the next bay.
When he opened Ilyukhina’s feed system, tubes and pumps, there was a… smell. Sour, decaying. And the slurry inside was viscous in a way that threatened to turn Grace’s stomach.
That was not supposed to be like that.
His first thought had been, well, that’s not good. Less edible coma slurry isn’t good.
Second thought: was this what had killed Olesya?
It was only a few minutes later as he stared at the stinky mess, thinking how best to clean it up while something itched at the back of his mind — oh! There could be acetobacteria in there!
The same bugs that killed Ilyukhina might be the same bugs to keep Grace alive.
It felt… disrespectful, somehow, to hope.
“What happen, question?” Rocky asked, from his closest segment of xenonite tube around the corner. “Why you stop working, question?”
“I, uh,” Grace gulped, around the lump forming in his throat. “I found something.”
“Something good or something bad, question?”
“I don’t think it was good for Ilyukhina,” Grace said carefully.
“But is it bad for Grace? Is danger? Grace need help?” Rocky’s voice started to get fast and panicky, and his limbs tapped on the xenonite walls.
“No, no, I’m good, buddy,” Grace said, bagging up the parts of the slurry supply and crawling back out of the tangle of machinery.
“What did you find, question?” Rocky asked, pressing himself against the barrier.
“Something’s been living in the slurry system of her bunk,” Grace said, holding out the bagged parts. “Microbes. Almost definitely Earth microbes.”
“Germs killed your crewmate?” Rocky asked, suddenly solemn.
“I think so, Rock,” Grace answered. “But it would’ve been a simple fix, if there was someone awake to watch out for her.”
Rocky trilled sadly. “No one to watch her sleep.”
“Yeah,” said Grace, looking down at the machine parts in his hands. “But, you know, from what I remember about her, I don’t think she’d mind that finding this actually cheered me up.” He held the bag up. “We’ve got some more samples to try culturing, to find an acetobacter.”
Rocky’s limbs drummed against the xenonite as he raised his carapace in excitement. “Try again for Vitamin C, question?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Grace agreed. “Time to start another round.”
“Germs very bad for Ilyukhina,” Rocky said. “But very good for Grace.”
“I hope so, buddy,” Grace said, starting towards the lab. “I really hope.”