Hail Mary full of Grace, Blackjack and Aliens?! (Short Story) - Chapter 05 (Patreon)

The first few days of the trip were spent going over the instruments and making sure that everything was in tippy-top shape and nothing would fall apart. Construction in zero gravity made a lot of things easier, but there were only Rocky and Grace who did the work (and the drones and Mary), so Grace wouldn’t have been surprised if they had missed something that an army of scientists and engineers back on Earth (or Erid) wouldn’t have.

To his surprise, nothing fell off, nothing burst into flames, and there wasn’t any unexplained radiation anywhere they could put the sensors.

“Speed stable, Captain Grace,” Mary reported. “Structural integrity 100%. Astrophage tanks intact.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Rocky and Grace do good work,” Rocky celebrated, moving up and down at his own station. “Grace worry too much.”

Grace leaned back in his own chair, took his cup from the cup holder, and took a sip, his eyes moving from screen to screen, taking in the information and letting his power work through it. It spotted a few inefficiencies, but most of them could be fixed while in transit.

He was never a good programmer, but his power didn’t care about things like that. It just showed into him an IT department’s worth of coding skills and told him to do science. It was great, because for once he didn’t have to force himself to come up with solution after solution to monumental issues, while also being a bit funky, as it was doing the thinking for him.

Grace really didn’t know how to feel about that. It certainly saved his and Rocky’s lives, but it was a bit terrifying to use something whose origin he couldn’t see, and whose beginning or end he couldn’t understand.

“It works. That’s good…” Grace finally said. “Now we just need to make sure it wouldn’t fall apart before we get to Erid.”

“If ship fall apart, Grace and Rocky not survive,” Rocky stated plainly, though Grace could hear the joking thrill behind the translation. “Rocky thinks not worry. Worry not useful against fundamental forces of universe.”

Then the small rocky alien slowly turned toward Grace, and Grace knew for a fact that he was grinning. Or doing the Eridian equivalent. Even he could feel the corner of his mouth twitching upward.

“Keep that up, Rocky, and I will show you videos of eating etiquette on Earth,” he threatened as he idly adjusted a few knobs.

Rocky flinched back. “Grace monster! Rocky innocent!”

“Would you like to turn on the projection for the movie, Captain Grace?” came from Mary, and Rocky instantly turned toward the speaker.

“Gasp!” They had added that one recently to the translator, and Rocky delighted in using it whenever possible. “Mary betray Rocky?”

“Of course not, Engineer Rocky,” came the deadpan reply from Mary.

Rocky turned back to Grace. “Rocky thinks Grace and Mary in alliance. Rocky suspicious…”

Grace just sipped his cup and didn’t look at his best friend. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Gasp! Gasp! Gasp!”

After that, life turned into a sort of routine.

Well, Grace would call it routine, but with the presence of two different races and a probably nascent machine intelligence, Armando, and George the Forge II, it was anything but routine.

The first thing Grace did, with Rocky’s help was upgrading the Food Printer using his new knowledge, and just for fun, leaving in the option for geometrically shaped food. Over the last few months, he had gotten used to square potatoes and eggs.

The new machine could produce high-quality food from the feed material and recycle biological remnants with incredible efficiency. Grace, to his slight disgust, even found that his power provided a way to recycle and purify biological waste, so he had spent a few days updating that system on the Hail Mary.

His new power even offered a machine that would produce food for Eridians, which he made a small one for Rocky. Rocky was highly suspicious of the machine, but Grace insisted he try just in case. Rocky refused to eat it in front of him, but he came back a few hours later, noticeably moving slower, and declared it was adequate and that he would be keeping it in his habitat for future testing purposes.

Grace just smiled and went back to his work.

His next long-term project was sitting down and properly writing down things that had happened, things that he had discovered and done. He went over the discovery of how the astrophage reacted to Adrian, the process of discovering the properties of the life on Adrian, the collection method, the ‘troubles,’ and then the experimental process where Grace and Rocky bred the taumoeba into the biological lifeform that would save both of their planets.

Granted, he had to take a small break when it came to describing the collecting process, as the memories threatened to be overwhelming. Thankfully, Mary was paying attention, and before Grace could spiral into his nightmare, Rocky came rolling in and started chattering, distracting him.

However, in the end, he had managed to write up several versions of what had happened on the Hail Mary. One version was a clinical thesis, devoid of as much emotion as possible, with properly cited sources (thanks to Mary), experiments, and proper methodology. At least he hoped it was proper methodology. It had been a while since he had done any proper research write-up.

The next one was more colorful, with some of his personal comments and feelings, and felt more like writing a diary than writing a report. He included small drawings and anecdotes. Rocky saw him doing it and asked about it, so a third version was made where Rocky ‘read’ his report and commented on everything.

Grace didn’t really mind, as it was hilarious to hear Rocky’s thoughts.

Then Rocky actually realized what Grace was doing and went into a small panic mode. Apparently, he never really thought about what was going to happen when he arrived back on Erid, and they asked him what had happened.

“Grace! Bad! Bad! Bad!” Rocky practically howled as he scrambled around inside the see-through xenonite tunnel in front of Grace, who was just sipping his apple juice from his favorite cup, long used to Rocky’s behavior. “What if when Rocky arrives other Eridians ask him and Rocky not know? Rocky maybe say something stupid. Like Grace! Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Grace sighed. “Rocky. You have a crystalline brain. You remember everything, and you read my report.”

Rocky froze, then slowly turned back toward Grace with his whole body, radiating awkwardness. “Oh. Yes. Rocky smart.”

“That’s questionable…”

“Grace mean!”

“Rocky stupid.”

“Grace stupid.”

“I noticed that the two of you are arguing,” Mary interjected. “Would you like help with that?”

Grace and Rocky both went silent.

“No, Mary,” Grace said. “We’re good.”

“Understood.”

Another activity they spent time on was examining the droids that Grace could summon. Now that he didn’t need as much material as possible, he would occasionally summon a few, pull them apart, feed the materials from the frame into George the Forge just in case he needed to craft something, while the electronics were carefully picked apart and put away into their own containers, and Rocky and Grace tried to figure out how certain parts worked.

The mechanical parts weren’t hard, as Rocky just took a look at them and immediately knew how they worked. Grace just sat there and, with Mary’s help, wrote up technical drawings and technical specifications.

The problem was the brain of the droid. Neither of them was great at coding, at least not in any conventional sense. Grace technically had an absurd amount of programming knowledge buried somewhere in his Tinker ability, but he couldn’t simply access all of it whenever he wanted. It came to him when his power decided it was relevant, and even then, he often understood how to build or modify something without fully understanding the code used to make it function.

That was when Grace realized they actually had someone with coding ‘knowledge’ on the ship. So they hooked up one of the droid brains to Mary and had her try to translate what was there into a language both Grace and Rocky could understand.

It was slow going, mostly because Mary wasn’t the best at communicating things she wasn’t programmed to understand, and because neither Grace nor Rocky were good at coding. Still, progress was being made, and Grace hoped that it would be of some use in the future.

He wasn’t really sure, because thirty-plus years of development back on Earth could mean that by the time his Beetles reached the solar system, humanity had long since solved the dimming sun problem and were flying around the solar system in spaceships and replicators. Based on how explosive technological development was in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, plus all the discoveries they had made during Project Hail Mary, Grace expected rapid development of technology all across the globe.

Or it could be that thanks to the global cooling, humanity would stagnate, forced to focus on survival instead of technological development. He didn’t really like to think about those projections, but he knew there were a lot of them that predicted wars and destruction for the dwindling resources the moment Hail Mary left the planet.

He hoped that it was the first one, and tried not to think about the second one.

Still, he made sure to slowly translate the ideas swirling around in his head into technical drawings, plans, and specifications for manufacturing and construction. He started with simple ones and slowly worked his way upward into more and more complicated vehicles. Over time, Grace was sure he had learned at least something about engineering, but he didn’t have anything to test his knowledge against, so he just shrugged and made sure that Rocky reviewed his plans.

Another fun activity was Rocky telling Grace about Eridian society, trying to teach him the more complicated parts of the language and just sharing what he could. Grace dutifully noted everything down for future generations.

By the time the journey was halfway done, with months having passed, Grace could somewhat confidently say that he could understand a lot of what Rocky was saying even without the translator’s help. Granted, that was when Rocky made sure he didn’t speak rapidly, otherwise becoming a chorus of voices that, while sounding beautiful, made no sense to Grace.

That was why the translator still sounded like it had at the beginning. If Rocky started to talk properly, the translator struggled to convey the information in a timely manner using the limited vocabulary of English.

Grace was a bit jealous that Rocky managed to learn English so fast, and because he wanted to show up Grace, he also learned several dozen other Earth languages that were included in the knowledge module on the Hail Mary.

Grace spoke a bit of Russian courtesy of Dimitri, Chinese due to Xi and Yao, and even a bit of Dutch he had picked up while standing next to Stratt and trying not to die from embarrassment.

The thought of Stratt sent him into a brief bout of melancholy, the memory of their last ‘talk’ coming back to him – his desperate pleas, the cold look on everyone’s faces as they held him down. Thankfully, Rocky was there, and moments later he was focused on something else.

When they weren’t focused on science or improving themselves, their free time was spent sharing the cultures of their two very different societies.

Well, mostly Grace was showing Rocky media and games from Earth, while Rocky sometimes told great epics from Erid that had been handed down for generations in his family. And seeing how long Eridians lived – several hundred human years – some of those stories had been passed down for a very, very long time.

Earth still had the advantage when it came to variety, though. They watched a ton of movies, with Grace having to occasionally explain certain cultural things to Rocky, listened to music with Rocky criticizing almost everything, and played video games.

It took them a while before they could build a controller that Rocky could bring into his incredible hot habitat, but with George the Forge II and the materials from the droids, they managed eventually.

It looked completely different from the one Grace used, with two distinct parts that Rocky could operate with two of his arms. Between those two parts were several of Rocky’s ‘cameras’ that translated two-dimensional images and information into three-dimensional images for him to see on his tablet that always reminded Grace of those sandy Zen gardens. And thanks to the ‘multi-cam’ setup, it was extremely detailed and had no lag.

“Rocky not understand. Why does small human not build bridge? Is human bad engineer?” he asked as they sat in the expanded don’t-go-crazy-room, where Grace made sure to build a nice couch for himself, and Rocky had an Eridian equivalent.

On the screen before them was one of the most recognizable video game screens on Earth. Grace idly wondered how gaming would evolve while he was away from Earth as he answered. “Because the game is not about building, Rocky. The game is about jumping on mushrooms.”

“Rocky not like jumping on not-animal-and-not-plant,” Rocky stated. Grace knew that the translator had the word for mushroom, but Rocky was still annoyed with Grace’s inability to explain why mushrooms weren’t exactly animals or plants.

“But think about the princess!” Grace exclaimed from his couch, where he half lay and half sat, munching on some red vine approximation that the Food Printer managed to create.

“Princess not Grace so Rocky not care,” came the immediate and petulant reply.

“Awww…” Grace smiled. “What if the Princess is Mary?” he asked.

“Is Mary in the moving entertainment application?” Rocky asked.

“No, Rocky,” Mary replied before Grace could.

“Then Rocky not care. Rocky wants to play something else.”

Grace rolled his eyes, pressed a button on the arm of the couch, summoning a holographic screen before paging through the list of games available – almost everything – before he landed on something he thought Rocky would enjoy.

“How about this, buddy?” he asked, and the screen switched from brown bricks and a red plumber uniform to a very simple interface, which he clicked through until the screen split into two, showing two views of a forest biome and a square tree.

Rocky gasped. “Tree strange!”

“Yeah, the game is like that,” Grace mumbled around the snack in his mouth as he walked forward and started punching the tree.

“Grace hurting plant life?” Rocky asked, though Grace could see him trying to figure out the controls.

“It’s a game, Rocky. Not real. Fiction. You wanted to build, and this game is about building.”

“Build what?” his alien friend asked.

“Whatever you want,” Grace answered as he began mining deeper after building a wooden pickaxe. “Just be careful of the zombies.”

“Oh. Rocky remember. Rocky didn’t like those movies.”

“Hehe…” Grace laughed, remembering Rocky’s screams when he had shown him the Romero movies.

“Rocky is going to get revenge,” Rocky promised, just as he also started mining downward. “Grace not expecting, then bamm, Rocky revenge. Glorious!”

“Good luck there, buddy…” Grace replied.

For a few minutes, they played in silence, slowly meeting up and starting to build together. Rocky vanished into the depths, and Grace started to build a place where they could store the things they had mined.

Then he saw Rocky freeze out of the corner of his eye.

“What’s up, Rocky?” he asked, wondering which part of the game managed to do that.

Then Rocky spoke up. “Is Mary playing?”

“No?” Grace offered.

“Rocky wants to play with Grace and Mary,” Rocky declared.

Grace sighed and was about to speak up when a third screen appeared in front of them.

Grace smiled softly as Rocky rejoiced. “Mary! Rocky happy to play with smart person! Not dumb Grace!”

“Of course, Rocky,” Mary replied in her characteristic flat tone. “It is enjoyable to play with less intelligent collaborators.”

“Yes. Yes,” Rocky replied happily, while Grace just snorted and continued playing.

Five minutes later, Rocky froze again.

“Hey! Rocky understand! Mary rude!” he exclaimed, turning toward the ceiling and one of the speakers.

“Of course, Engineer Rocky,” came Mary’s answer, somehow sounding flat and smug at the same time.

However, in the end, everything ends.

Including their trip.

Though, instead of sadness, they all greeted it with triumph.

The taumoeba was ready, sealed inside a small, self-propelled rocket that would carry it the rest of the way to Threeworld. It was technically a vehicle if one thought hard enough, so Grace managed to build one with his Tinker power. The problem was that neither of them had thought far enough ahead to build an actual rocket launcher on the Hail Mary. Instead, they would have to use one of the airlocks as a makeshift launch bay, opening the outer doors only after the rocket had been secured, powered up, and given its navigation data.

Granted, first they would have to input the navigation data, as Rocky didn’t really have much information about Planet Three, as the Eridians called it, or Threeworld, as Grace called it.

Thankfully, he had taken the time to build another scanner for the Hail Mary. It was capable of scanning over larger distances using light reflections, but would provide less refined results than the first one. But even then, it was enough for them to use it when arriving at the Eridian system to orient themselves.

The rocket contained the device to disperse the taumoeba into Threeworld’s atmosphere, which would hopefully start the process of halting the star’s dimming and keep the astrophage in check. It was powered by an engine Grace created using the droid batteries, allowing it to reach the target without any issues.

Rocky, Grace, and Mary also made sure to build a device that was capable of projecting data in a way that Eridians would understand and be capable of parsing without spending a lot of time setting up communications.

Thankfully, with Rocky there, that went very smoothly, though Grace still worried that something would go wrong.

Rocky was practically always moving, never stopping once ever since the calendar started counting down the last two weeks of their journey. Honestly, Grace envied him a little. He would be coming home to an entire world waiting for him. A partner that loved him.

Even if he returned to Earth, what would he see? Maybe some thankful people, but most of those he would consider calling friends (and who would maybe call him a friend) were probably already dead. And even if humanity remembered him, it was probably mostly from history books or, worse, the recordings made of his appearance during the Project.

‘Stratt was right. There really was nothing on Earth keeping me there…’ he mused as he watched Rocky roll around spastically.

Eventually, the special alarm, playing We Are the Champions, went off, and both Grace and Rocky sprang up from where they were sitting in the don’t-go-crazy-room, playing around in the cubic world they had built.

They both rushed toward the cockpit, with Mary's announcements going off above their heads.

“Arrival in the Eridian system is imminent. Engine cut-off in six hundred seconds…” Mary declared as Grace sat down in his chair and began running through the checklist, making sure everything was going well.

“Fuel good. Shields held. Drift…?” he mumbled.

“Drift estimated between three hundred and five hundred thousand kilometers,” Mary reported softly.

“Expected,” Grace replied. “Anything on the scanners yet?”

“Negative, Captain Grace.”

“Thank you, Mary. Keep scanning, please.”

“Of course, Captain Grace.”

Looking up from his work, he saw Rocky sitting in his seat, surrounded by a reinforced bubble of xenonite, unmoving, just staring at the three-dimensional projection in the air, specifically developed for him, as it showed the estimated path the Hail Mary would take as it arrived in the Eridian system.

“You okay there, pal?” he asked.

“Rocky is okay,” he whistled. “Rocky is just… Happy. Very happy. Finally, Rocky is home.”

Grace smiled tenderly as he turned back to the wall of instruments and holographic screens in front of him. Most of it was automated, but he was still double-checking everything; otherwise, he was sure he would go crazy waiting through these last few minutes.

“What is the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?”

“Rocky is going to spend time with Adrian. Then Rocky is going to spend time with Adrian. Maybe eat favorite food prepared by Adrian.”

Grace continued smiling, feeling happy for his friend. At least one of them had someone waiting for them.

“Ohh, nice! Don’t worry, I will distract everyone so you can spend time with Adrian,” he offered. After all, what are best friends for if not playing the wingman?

Rocky shook his body. “No. Grace will also spend time with Adrian. Rocky is going to tell Adrian about Grace, and Grace is going to tell Adrian about Rocky.” He fell silent for a moment. “Grace probably is not going to eat Rocky’s favorite food.”

Grace snorted. “Sure. Why not… It’s not like I have to be somewhere…”

“Grace needs to be next to Rocky and Adrian,” Rocky insisted.

Before they could get into the discussion properly, Mary interjected.

“Engine shut-off in thirty seconds…”

Grace focused on the screens in front of him, making sure to triple or even quadruple-check his calculations with the help of the computer, until Mary spoke up again.

“Engine shut-off in five seconds…”

“Four seconds…”

“Three seconds…”

“Two seconds…”

“One second…”

The ship lurched a little, and for a very fleeting moment, Grace felt gravity vanish as his body tensed against the safety belt before the gravity engines kicked in and restored proper gravity on the ship.

“We have arrived in the 40 Eridani system,” Mary announced.

The windows turned on automatically, showing the vast emptiness of space as the ship continued to hurtle forward. Grace felt it would have been nice to arrive right next to Erid or even Threeworld, but this was good too.

“Mary, start wide-range scanning,” he called out.

“Yes, Captain Grace,” Mary replied. “Scan initiated.”

Within a few nail-biting moments, the screens lit up, and Grace saw a low-quality visual representation of the Eridian system. Thanks to the data from Rocky, Mary had already labeled the planets with their designated names: Threeworld, Twoworld, and Erid.

“Good job, Mary.”

“Thank you, Captain Grace.”

“You know what to do…”

“Course correction toward Planet Threeworld initiated,” Mary reported immediately as Grace felt the ship begin to change course. “Estimated arrival time is: three hours and twenty-two minutes…”

Grace nodded. “Good. Make it so…” he replied, feeling a bit giddy about giving the order as he leaned back in his chair, watching the screen as their little icon representing the ship became connected to the planet via a line of dashes.

“Of course, Captain Grace.”

Rocky stayed uncharacteristically silent during their short in-system trip. Grace didn’t mind. He let his buddy stay like that and instead focused on programming the navigation computer on the dispersal device and finally loading the specifically bred taumoeba into the chambers on the rocket.

Finally, he put on his reinforced space suit and moved the rocket to the airlock, waiting for the final intercept data they would get when close enough to the planet

Then, just as he was about to ask about it, the speaker in his suit dinged.

“Final intercept trajectory uploaded to the Taumoeba Dispersal Rocket, Captain Grace.”

“Thank you, Mary…” Grace replied and quickly made sure that the setup was working properly before flipping the final switch and evacuating the area, closing the heavy-duty doors behind him.

“Start the process, Mary,” he gave the order, and the room where the rocket and launching mechanism were set up began to depressurize. He kept the suit on in case something went awry, but for now he just watched through the small window on the door.

“Depressurization is complete,” Mary reported. “Opening outer door.”

The door on the hull of the rebuilt Hail Mary slowly swung open, revealing the sight of Threeworld. It was around the size of Earth’s moon and looked a bit like it, with its cratered surface, but had a very slight atmosphere – one teeming with astrophage.

“Launch Taumoeba Dispersal Rocket, Captain Grace?” Mary asked.

“Yes,” Grace said simply, and the rocket was launched out of the airlock, not unlike the first message between him and Rocky. The device stumbled forward, doing cartwheels in zero gravity, before its engine turned on, and the onboard computer kicked in, orienting the rocket toward the planet.

Grace watched as the rocket flew away, its blue engine light trailing after it until he couldn’t see it anymore.

“Close the door, please,” he asked, and the door began closing. He turned around and began removing most of the suit, returning to the cockpit where Rocky was still silently staring at the screens.

Back in the cockpit, Grace cast a worried glance at Rocky, but for now he left his friend alone. He couldn’t imagine what he would be feeling on the precipice of returning to Earth, so he couldn’t say anything to comfort him.

Instead, he focused on the dispersal process.

Some time later, he watched on his screens as the rocket signaled back that the dispersal had begun, and he started to observe Threeworld through scans done every few seconds. He knew that any effect the taumoeba would have on the planet wouldn’t be immediately visible, but he was nervous, so he still checked.

It took almost half a day for the rocket to finish making its passes around the small moon, dispersing all the taumoeba he had loaded into it.

“Dispersal finished, Captain Grace,” Mary reported.

Grace smiled.

They had done it.

Now it was only a question of time before the astrophage was regulated.

Glancing toward the still silent Rocky, he looked over the screen before nodding.

“Target Erid, Mary. Full speed.”

“Of course, Captain Grace.”

They flew toward Erid at the maximum speed the Hail Mary was capable of. Even then, it took a day or so to reach the planet.

It was the first time in a long while Grace didn’t have Rocky watching over him while sleeping. Instead, Rocky stayed mostly in the cockpit, staring at the instruments or out of the windows to watch for Erid while Grace napped.

But then it happened.

The instruments lit up, and as Grace flipped a switch, an incredible sound filled the cockpit of the Hail Mary.

It sounded like an orchestra standing in line, waiting for the commander to charge, while also cautiously optimistic that the fight wouldn’t happen. There were deep, rumbling sounds underneath it all, with higher notes weaving through them and several different tones somehow happening at once without turning into an incomprehensible mess.

Somehow, Grace could tell there was emotion behind it. He heard the caution, curiosity, and some tension. It was completely alien, yet at the same time it was exactly what he had expected from the Eridians.

A second later, the translators kicked in, and Grace saw the words being written out on the screen in front of him.

“Unidentified spaceship, this is ---------- ---------- ----------! You are approaching Erid, please state purpose and identity.”

It was rather polite to Grace’s eyes. He knew Earth would have been more aggressive if an alien showed up in the solar system.

His eyes cut over to Rocky, who was frozen in place.

“Rock? Ready?” he asked gently.

Rocky shook himself and, with almost tender gentleness, tapped a button on the panel in front of him and began to sing.

Grace listened for a moment, eyes closed, as his best friend sang, before turning his eyes to the screen in front of him. For posterity’s sake, the entire communication was recorded, so he saw the moment Rocky began singing on the other end cut off almost instantly, as if whoever was there recoiled.

“This is Engineer ---------- ---------- Rocky returning! Bringing the news of a solution!” he sang.

Grace had never heard Rocky sing that hard and loud. It was beautiful…

The moment Rocky’s song ended, there was a tense silence for a few moments before a small thrill, filled with disbelief, replied.

“Welcome back, Engineer Rocky. Missed you. Have lot of questions! Follow the ----------!”

Instantly, several instruments Rocky insisted on including lit up, and the signals were transformed by Mary, displaying an approach vector for the space elevator and space station that was slowly becoming visible against the backdrop of Erid.

Grace looked over to Rocky and held out his hand, his fist touching the wall of Rocky’s enclosure.

“Fist bump?” he asked.

Rocky turned back to him and raised a hand and touched it to the transparent wall separating them.

“Yes. Fist bump.”

A/N: And we arrived on Erid. Threeworld is seeded with the taumoeba and now lets see how the first contact goes!