Chapter Text
Chapter 1
Have you ever worn a spacesuit?
I’m going to assume that the answer is no. Let me describe it for you.
A spacesuit—or for the purposes of our discussion, an EVA suit, meaning extra-vehicular activity, as in you’ve made the very questionable decision to leave the safe confines of your spacecraft—is a special type of environmental suit, and to do its job it needs to meet four extremely important standards. First off, it needs to be pressurized. People think this is to stop you from exploding, but that’s a myth from bad scifi movies. The pressure problem you really need to worry about is whether the oxygen is going to fizzle out of your blood, which is the first thing the vacuum of space does to an unprotected human body. After that, you just swell up like a sad human balloon. Don’t worry. By that point, you’re already pretty dead.
This leads into the second very important job the suit needs to do, which is to keep your environment in that sweet spot between 65-80°F, instead of the -250-250°F that you can get in space, depending on whether you’re in shade or full sun. Not very comfy. The third job your suit needs to do is protect you from radiation. You’ve never seen a sunburn like what the unshielded rays of a star can do to you. And the fourth job is to shield you from microasteroids and other space junk, which is a lot more important than it sounds.
Oh, right, I forgot the fifth job. It needs to give you air. You need to breathe.
As you can imagine, this is a pretty big job for a humble piece of clothing. As far as clothes go, at least in terms of protecting a body from ambient conditions, spacesuits are playing in the big leagues. They’re as much a vehicle as they are a garment. With up to sixteen protective layers between yourself and the all-consuming void, including but not limited to cooling tubes, pressure-controlling gas bladders, tear-resistant materials, thermal insulation, light reflection, and water-, fire- and radiation-resistant fabrics, you can imagine that they’re a little too bulky to wear around the house. Thankfully the newer suits have specially-engineered materials at the joints, which are easier to bend than the old suits from the ‘60s, but they’re definitely still a hassle to move around in. Still, they keep you alive in some of the most extreme environments the universe has to offer, and at the end of the day that’s what matters.
And this, or rather a modified version of this, is what I wear out my front door every Thursday morning to catch the bus to work.
When I first arrived on Erid, I thought my life was over. Sure, I’d survived the journey, at least for the time being, and both Erid and Earth were safe. That was the most important thing. But I was also pretty sure that I was going to die.
It was…not a good time, waking up on Erid. Yeah, I said waking up. I might have made first contact with the Eridians through Rocky, but Erid very much made second contact to me, given that I was unconscious at the time. The last thing I remember about being on the Hail Mary is talking to Rocky late one night about what happened on his ship. The way he and the others watched their crewmates fall asleep one by one, listened to their hearts stop beating, and never wake up, until there weren't any others but him. How his worst nightmare was—and probably still is—having to witness the same thing happen to me, or anyone else he cares about. That night I reassured him, sick as I was, that he would never have to do that for me. We were so close to Erid, only a few short months by our clock. Surely, I could find a way to make the food stretch a little further...somehow.
I should have known better. He volunteered to watch over me while I fell asleep, which I thought was a nice gesture, given how weak I was by that point. When I woke up in an unfamiliar environment, surrounded by aliens, in my own little transparent case and covered by tubes, it was pretty clear what he’d done to save my life.
I’ve never asked him what those months after he’d had Armando sedate me and put me back into a coma to reduce my caloric needs must have been like for him. He’s never talked about it, either.
In any case, it worked, at least well enough to get me to Erid alive. The first few years were extremely touch-and-go, but now, I’ve got a pretty good thing going. For three days a week, I teach middle school to a bunch of thirty year olds. They’re cute kids. Seriously, you don’t know adorable until you’ve seen an excited rock-spider-creature jump up and down with three hands in the air.
…Look, I’ve been on Erid for a while, alright?
An Eridian day is 5.1 Earth hours, and Eridians typically sleep for about two of their days (roughly ten Earth hours) and then are awake for another three (fifteen hours). Translating into human terms, that means my "days," which I keep track of by an Earth-typical day-night cycle in the dome, last just slightly over 25 hours. It's not a bad deal; I get an extra hour of sleep every day, which, trust me, is a necessity for a human on a planet with this much gravity. Eridian weeks last six repetitions of these sleep-wake cycles, or to a human mind, from Monday to Saturday. I teach from Monday to Wednesday and get Friday and Saturday off. But on Thursdays, I go in to a lab at the enclave's space exploration and aeronautics thrum to work with the xenobiology team. I’m technically a consultant, but since my boss is my best friend’s mate, the odds of me losing my job are pretty slim.
Also, I saved the planet, so. You know. There are some perks.
The “bus” ride from my biodome to the Thrum isn’t long, but even twenty minutes in an ammonia atmosphere would be deadly, so getting to work on Thursdays is a hassle that involves suiting up before I leave the biodome, signing out with the Eridian scientists and guards at my front door, getting to the bus stop on time, praying to God it’s not late or early (some things are the same everywhere), and then trying to squinch myself into the barely-six-foot-tall xenonite shuttle tube that forms the basis of Eridian public transit and bracing myself for the rapid stop-starts that a quintapedal species can handle much more easily than a bipedal human. The people on my morning commute are used to seeing the extraterrestrial in a funny suit holding on to the ceiling grip-holds for dear life by this point, but since I’m kind of a celebrity, I still occasionally get some looks or little kids asking questions.
The Thrum, thankfully, has a narrow corridor set up for me on most floors, made of transparent xenonite and filled with oxygen, so I’m able to shed the suit at the front doors after passing through the airlock and put on my infrared glasses. “Morning, Cold-Peak-of-the-Mountain,” I whistle as I come in through the front door, holding up the little xenonite decahedron that functions as my ID card.
“Good morning, Dr. Ryland-Adam-Grace,” the security guard says in reply, not bothering to check it; I’m the only human on the planet, after all, and not exactly an unfamiliar face. I would prefer just “Grace” or even “Dr. Grace,” but full names are a sign of respect on Erid, and I think Mountaintop is still a little in awe of me. “By the way, Dr. Sound-of-the-Earth-Shuddering-At-Faultlines,” That’s Adrian’s full name, “–was asking for you.”
“Everything okay, question?” I ask, frowning. I’m basically fluent in Eridian these days, which is useful, since I can’t cart my classroom organ around everywhere and playing the little piano on my phone to get by while moving around the city is a pain in the ass. I still can’t do a lot of the tri-tone whistles, and according to Adrian and Rocky I still have a very thick “human accent,” but most people can understand me, at least at work.
“Didn’t seem like it. You might want to hurry.”
“Right, thanks.” I hurry off down the hall, noting the way that the Eridians crawling along beside me or monkey-barring their way down the ceiling are a lot more rushed than normal. Even partly muffled by the tube, there’s a lot of urgent, discordant overtones and vent-wheezing, all layering overtop each other too much for me to pick up any individual words. But I can tell Mountaintop was right. Something is going on.
I reach my office in a state of growing concern, and am greeted by a downright explosion of Eridian panic. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I whistle three times, holding up my hands as at least ten of my coworkers shout various versions of “There they are!” and “Finally!”, rushing down the hall crowd around my door. “What’s going on, question? The door guard said Adrian was asking for me.”
“Grace.” I look over the rest of them and spot Adrian by her size, since the infrared glasses can’t detect color. Although I’ve spent almost two decades around Eridians by now and am well aware that they don’t have different sexes, I still can’t help but think of her as a “she”—partly because she’s never seemed to mind, and partly because Rocky thought it was a very funny example of “earth humor” to have the translation program render her speech in the voice of Talia Shire when we first met. “We’ve been waiting for you. Something…has happened.”
She sounds hesitant, her voice pitched with discordant overtones that jar against each other like uneasy sine waves. That's...not a good sign. Adrian is steady and solid, a calming, methodical presence to Rocky’s boundless energy and curiosity. If she’s worried, then I definitely am.
“Tell me,” I insist, and she gestures for me to follow.
I assume that we’re going to go to the xenobiology lab, but instead I follow her and the others up the wide vertical tubes that serve as an Eridian stairs (my tunnel has a little spiral staircase, which I find easier to navigate than a ladder) down to the basement, and then use the subterranean tunnels to move into the next building without me having to re-suit. There are even more people heading down here, all going one way, and when we hang a right towards the manned-spaceflight division building and take the stairs up to the first floor, I know things are serious. The first story of the spaceflight building hosts mission control for the Thrum; right now there aren’t any active missions, so when I find the room so full of Eridians that some are climbing up the walls, the hairs on the back of my neck start to rise. What in the world is going on?
And then I see Rocky. Rocky is an engineer for the Thrum; he doesn’t even work in this building, let alone in this office. To be fair, neither do me or Adrian. There’s only one reason we would all be in mission control right now.
“Grace,” he says urgently, hurrying over to me. “Did Adrian tell you, question?”
I shake my head, but I can already guess what’s happened. “It’s the ships, isn’t it. One of them came back.” It’s not a question, and I don’t phrase it as such.
Rocky bobs, the Eridian equivalent of a nod. “It’s the Pilgrim. Mission control received a message about 2200 seconds ago.” About twenty earth minutes, then. “We tried to call, but the biodome team said you’d already left.”
Two more ships were sent up after the Starsaver, which is the official name for what I spent half a decade calling “Blip-A.” Like the Starsaver, the other two ships—the Pilgrim and the Worldseeker—never came back. It was assumed that all hands had perished from radiation sickness, just like Rocky’s crew. But if there’s a ship incoming, there must be survivors—and casualties. “Do we know how many are still alive, question?”
“We don’t know. But we assume there must be at least one,” Adrian answers from behind and slightly above me; she’s made room for more people entering the room by climbing up the wall. My brain is spinning: There’s another survivor? Someone else like Rocky, lost alone there among the stars? Why didn’t they ever come back? Did they reach Tau Ceti and find the Taumoeba, too? It's going to be a very unpleasant reunion if we have to explain that not only have they actually been gone for around quite a bit longer than they think, but that the astrophage problem has already been solved and their sacrifice has been for nothing.
“At least one Eridian,” Rocky corrects her, and I blink, looking back at him. “Grace—there’s someone else aboard. A human.”
I stare at him and Adrian. The room around me suddenly seems to fade away, leaving just the three of us standing in the silence and the pitched roaring in my ears.
A human.
A human on an Eridian ship that was assumed dead and adrift in the stars, forever.
A human, coming to Erid.
“That’s not possible,” I say, in English. Rocky, the only one here who’s truly fluent in my native tongue, shifts his legs.
“There’s no other explanation.”
“How– what do you mean, question?” I demand, switching back into Eridian. “How can you know–”
“The message we received was in a Human language,” Adrian interrupts. “We think it is English, but we're having a hard time understanding them. Grace—we need you to translate it.”
I look around the room. Everyone else has gone quiet; they’re not staring at me, exactly, but they are all listening with rapt attention. I grip my cane and nod. As if to translate, Rocky turns towards the director and gestures with his claw.
The doors are locked and shut. The room is still filled with an eerie hush, which is as rare among Eridians as I am. A few people, remembering my reliance on sight, politely step aside so that I have a clear view of the texture-pad set into the center of the room, which begins to vibrate and ripple as the received message plays over the speakers. At first there's nothing but a faint, static-like hum, and then two fuzzy crackles that I would recognize anywhere: the sound of a human tapping their finger against a microphone. Rocky's right, I realize. There's really someone else up on that ship, someone like me.
Then a voice speaks up in raspy, accented English, echoing around the room: "Greetings to the people of Erid from the people of Planet Earth."
And my heart stops.
Several Eridians turn towards me, concerned at what they probably think is a burgeoning health emergency with their local extraterrestrail. I suck in a breath, and my heart starts to race again. No, I decide, and it feels like a very reasonable decision. I refuse to believe that this is happening. If I refuse hard enough, maybe it won’t be.
“This is Captain Eva Stratt of the Terran Spacecraft Mater Misericordia, currently aboard an Eridian craft whose name translates in this language to Pilgrim. We are in extreme distress. I repeat, we are in extreme distress. There are seven survivors of the original crew manifest of twenty-five aboard, all suffering from radiation poisoning in cases ranging from moderate to severe, all now unconscious. I am currently piloting this vessel alone.”
Her voice is hoarse, and her accent is thicker than I remember, as if she's let her English fall out of practice. That's probably why the Eridians couldn't translate her, I realize; none of them except Rocky are fluent in my native language, and those who are semi-fluent have had a sample size of one for what English even sounds like, and—wait a minute, did she say she's piloting the ship? An Eridian ship? Also, seven survivors? All the more proof that this isn’t really happening, I decide. A numb feeling is creeping up my fingers and toes; it would almost be pleasant, if not for the increasing pressure on my chest.
“I am not confident in my ability to dock this ship on your space elevator without assistance. I cannot speak your language, but if you send me audible instructions, I do have the ability to translate them. I believe there is someone on Erid who may be able to translate this and other messages between us. If not, then I am well and truly verneukt.”
I let out a strangled laugh that startles the nearest Eridians. It’s cut off as the voice continues: “Doctor Grace.” The whole world goes cold at the sound of my name, and I lean heavily on my cane, my breath coming fast and harsh in my ears as the tightness around my chest increases. I think I might be having a heart attack. “I can understand how much of a shock it must be to hear my voice. But I ask you to set aside your feelings for the time being. This crew is in grave danger. For their sake, and mine—I sincerely hope you are down there.”
The message ends. The room’s texture-pad goes still. I grasp at my chest, struggling to inhale. It feels like the office’s life support system is failing, not providing me enough oxygen, and that thought makes me panic and hyperventilate even more. “Grace?” Rocky says warily, stepping forward. “Are you alright, question?”
No. No I’m not. I look up. Everyone is still crowded around me, and I remember that only Rocky and Adrian know the full story of what happened between me and the woman on the other end of that radio signal.
I straighten up. I brace myself on my cane. I can have my breakdown later, in private, at home. Right now there are lives at stake. “How long did it take this message to reach us, question?”
“We sent a basic radio signal back to estimate their location. Based on their position, it would have left the Pilgrim just under one second before we picked it up,” an Eridian scientist I know as Thunderclap speaks up in a low rumble. That’s four earth seconds. Assuming they're slowing for re-entry, at a not-insignificant fraction of the speed of light… I turn to Rocky, my mind stumbling over the math as it reels.
“They’ll be here in less than forty-eight Earth hours,” he calculates for me, quietly.
Two days. The ship will be here in less than two days, with seven radiation-sick Eridians and one human aboard.
And we’ve all got a lot of work to do.