Project Hail Mary

Chapter 19

Rocky was dumbfounded by relativity. For the first couple of hours, he simply refused to believe me. But then, as I showed more and more about how it explained his trip, he came around. He doesn’t like it, but he accepts that the universe uses rules that are much more complicated than we can see.

And since then, we’ve spent an eternity making chain.

I made molds as fast as I could and Rocky cranked out links as fast as xenonite would set. It was a good system—one with a geometric progression of results. Every new mold I made added one to the number of links Rocky could make per batch.

Chain, chain, chain.

If I never see another chain again in my life, it will be too soon. Ten kilometers of chain—each link just 5 centimeters long. That’s two hundred thousand links. Each one connected by hand or claw. It worked out to each of us working eight hours per day for two weeks doing nothing but connecting links.

I saw chain whenever I closed my eyes. I dreamed of chain every night. One of my dinner packets was spaghetti and all I could see were smooth, white chains instead of noodles.

But we got it done.

Once we had all the links made, we assembled them in parallel. We both made ten-meter lengths that we linked into twenties, and so on. At least we could be efficient that way. The tricky part was putting it all somewhere. Ten kilometers is a lot of chain.

The lab ended up being sort of a holding area. And even then, it just wasn’t big enough. Rocky—ever the talented engineer—made large spools that could just barely fit through the airlock. With a whole bunch of EVAs, I mounted them to the hull. Then I stored the chain on them in 500-meter chunks. But of course, to do EVAs I had to spin down the centrifuge. So everything from that point on was in zero g.

Ever assemble chain in zero g? It’s not fun.

The final assembly of those 500-meter chunks was challenging, to say the least. I had to connect all twenty of them together while wearing my EVA suit. Fortunately, I had the manipulator device from the IVME. NASA didn’t intend for it to be a chain-making tool, but that’s what I used it for.

Now Rocky and I float in the control room. He’s in his bulb and I’m in my pilot’s seat.

“Status of probe?” I say.

Rocky checks his readouts. “Device is functioning.”

Rocky did a good job on the sampler probe. At least, I think he did. Engineering isn’t my forte.

The sampler is a steel sphere, 20 centimeters across. It has a nice, thick ring on top that connects to the chain. Small holes perforate the sphere along its equator. They lead to a hollow inner chamber. There’s a pressure sensor in there and a few actuators. The pressure sensor knows when the probe is at the right altitude, and will trigger the actuator to seal off the chamber. It’s a simple matter of rotating the inner chamber shell a few degrees to deliberately misalign the holes in the outer sphere. That misalignment, along with some well-placed gaskets, will seal the local air in the chamber.

He also added a thermometer and heater in there. Once the sampler seals, the heater will maintain whatever temperature the air inside started at. Simple stuff, really, but I hadn’t thought of it. Life can be pretty picky about temperature ranges.

The only remaining piece is a small radio transmitter that broadcasts a weird analog signal I wasn’t able to read or decode with my equipment. Apparently it’s a very standard Eridian data connection. But he has the receiver for it and that’s what matters.

Just like that, with minimal complication, Rocky had made a life-support system for Adrian life-forms—a system that didn’t need to know the conditions to provide in advance. It just maintains the status quo.

He really is a genius. I wonder if all Eridians are like that, or if he’s special.

“I guess…we’re ready?” I say. I’m not exactly brimming with confidence.

“Yes,” he quavers.

I strap myself into the pilot’s seat. He uses three of his hands to grip handholds in his bulb.

I bring up the Attitude Control panel and initiate a roll. Once I have the ship pointed backward to our direction of travel and parallel to the ground below, I halt the rotation. Now we’re hurtling along, butt-first, at 12 kilometers per second. I need that to be almost zero.

“Orientation is good,” I say. “Initiating thrust.”

“Yes,” says Rocky. He watches his readout screen intently. It shows him the textured version of my own screen, thanks to that camera he set up earlier.

“Here goes…” I fire up the spin drives. We go from zero g to 1.5 g’s in under a second. I am pressed back in my chair and Rocky grabs a support with a fourth hand to stay steady.

As the Hail Mary slows down, our velocity can no longer keep us in orbit. I glance at the Radar panel and it confirms that we are losing altitude. I adjust the ship’s attitude so we are pointing very slightly upward from horizontal. Just a fraction of a degree.

Even that small amount is too much! The radar shows us gaining altitude rapidly. I bring the angle back down. This is a sloppy, nasty, horrible way to fly a spacecraft, but it’s all I have. There was no point to calculating this maneuver in advance. There are so many variables and ways to mess up the math I’d be flying on manual almost immediately anyway.

After a few more overcorrections, I get the feel for it. I increase the angle bit by bit as the ship slows down with respect to the planet.

“You tell when to release probe,” Rocky says. His claw hovers over the button that will eject the spools and let the chain fall freely. We can only hope it doesn’t get tangled.

“Not yet,” I say.

The attitude screen shows we’re at 9 degrees from the horizontal. I need to get us to 60. Something catches my eye off to the right. It’s the external camera feed. The planet below is…glowing.

No. Not the whole planet. Just the bit right behind us. It’s the atmosphere reacting with the IR blast from the engines. The Hail Mary is dumping hundreds of thousands of times more energy into that spot than Tau Ceti does.

The IR heats the air so much it ionizes and it’s literally red hot. The brightness increases as our angle gets more severe. Then the affected area starts to grow. I knew it would be significant, but I had no idea it would be like this. We’re leaving a red streak across the sky, destroying anything in the air. The carbon dioxide is probably being ripped apart from pure heat energy into particulate carbon and free oxygen. The oxygen might not even be forming O₂. That’s a lot of heat.

“The engines are heating up Adrian’s air a lot,” I say.

“How you know, question?”

“Sometimes I can see heat.”

“What, question?! Why you no tell me this, question?”

“It’s related to sight…there’s no time to explain it. Just trust me: We are making the atmosphere very hot.”

“Danger, question?”

“I don’t know.”

“I no like that response.”

We angle up and up and up. The glow behind us gets brighter and brighter. Finally, we reach the correct angle.

“Angle achieved,” I say.

“Happy! Release, question?”

“Stand by. Velocity…”—I check the navigation console—“127.5 meters per second! Just what I calculated! Holy cow, it worked!”

I feel the pull of Adrian, tugging me into my seat.

This is one of those things I frequently have to explain to my students. Gravity doesn’t just “go away” when you’re in orbit. In fact, the gravity you experience in orbit is pretty much the same as you’d experience on the ground. The weightlessness that astronauts experience while in orbit comes from constantly falling. But the curvature of the Earth makes the ground go away at the same rate you fall. So you just fall forever.

The Hail Mary isn’t falling anymore. The engines hold us up in the sky and our tilt makes us scooch forward at 127 meters per second—about 285 miles per hour. Fast for a car, but amazingly slow for a spaceship.

The air behind us glows so bright the external camera shuts down to protect its digitizer.

The Life Support panel comes up on my main screen, unprompted. EXTERNAL TEMPERATURE EXTREME, it warns.

“Air is hot,” I call out. “Ship is hot.”

“Ship no touch air,” Rocky says. “Why is ship hot, question?”

“It’s bouncing our IR back at us. And it’s so hot now it emits its own IR. We’re getting cooked.”

“You ship is Astrophage-cooled, question?”

“Yes. Astrophage cools ship.”

Astrophage conduits run all along the hull for just such an occasion. Well, not the occasion of “blasting a planet’s atmosphere with so much IR light the results can melt steel” but the general situations where heat builds up. Mostly from the sun or Tau Ceti heating the ship up and the heat having nowhere to go.

“Astrophage absorb heat. We safe.”

“Agree. We safe. And we ready. Drop probe!”

“Drop probe!” He slams his claw on the Drop button.

I hear the scrape and clink of the spools sliding off the hull one at a time and falling toward the planet below. Twenty spools in all, each one drops and unwinds before the next is released. Our best effort at keeping the chain from getting tangled.

“Spool Six away…” Rocky reports.

The Life Support panel blinks its warning again. I mute it again. Astrophage lives on stars. I’m sure a little reflected IR light won’t be too much heat for it to handle.

“Spool Twelve away…” Rocky says. “Sampler signal good. Sampler detecting air now.”

“Good!” I say.

“Good good,” he says. “Spool Eighteen away…air density increase…”

With the external cameras offline, I can’t see any of what’s going on. But Rocky’s readings are right in line with our plan. Right now, the chain is unfurling as it falls. Our angled engines keep us in the sky, but nothing keeps the chain from falling straight down.

“Spool Twenty away. All spools released. Air density of sampler is almost Astrophage breeding ground level…”

I watch Rocky with bated breath.

“Sampler has closed! Seal is airtight, heater is on! Success success success!”

“Success!” I yell.

It’s working! It’s actually working! We have a sample of Adrian air from the Astrophage breeding zone! If there are any predators, they have to be there, right? I hope so.

“Step two now.” I sigh. This is not going to be fun.

I unhitch my restraints and climb out of the chair. Adrian’s 1.4 g’s of gravity pulls me down at a 30-degree angle. The whole room feels tilted because, actually, it is tilted. This isn’t engine thrust I’m feeling. It’s gravity.

One point four g’s isn’t too bad. Everything’s a bit harder, but not unreasonably so. I climb into the Orlan EVA suit. This is going to be difficult, to say the least. I have to go outside and do an EVA while completely under the effects of gravity.

Needless to say, absolutely no part of the EVA suit, the airlock, or my training was remotely designed for this possibility. Who would have thought I would have to tromp around on the ship in full gravity? More than full, in fact?

Yet however much gravity there may be, there’s still no air. Worst of all worlds. But there’s no other way. I have to get the sample.

Right now, the sampler hangs at the end of a 10-kilometer chain, which is just dangling in the air. There’s no easy way for us to get it back to the ship.

When planning this all out, my first thought was to thrust away from the planet, then collect the sampler when we’re back to zero g. Problem is, there’s literally no way to do that without vaporizing the sampler. Any path I try to take to get the ship out of Adrian’s gravity—or even into a stable orbit—will mean using the spin drives. They’d push the ship along, which would make the chain and sample lag behind us and into the IR blast behind the ship. And then the sampler, everything in it, and the chain all become individual, very hot atoms.

The next idea I had was to make a huge spool that could winch up the chain. But Rocky informed me he’d never be able to make a spool big enough and strong enough to bring up the entire 10-kilometer length.

Rocky had a pretty clever thought: The sampler could climb the chain when it was done. But after some experimenting he ditched the idea. He said the risks just weren’t worth it.

So we have…this other plan.

I grab a special winch Rocky designed and attach it to my suit’s tool belt.

“Be careful,” says Rocky. “You are friend now.”

“Thanks,” I say. “You are friend also.”

“Thank.”

I cycle the airlock and look outside.

This is a strange experience. Space is black. The planet is majestic below me. Everything looks like it should when in orbit. But there’s gravity.

A red glow from the planet peeks out around the edges of the Hail Mary. I’m no dope—I oriented the ship to make sure it would shield me from the deadly heat bouncing up off the atmosphere.

The airlock door is “up.” I have to pull myself—and a hundred pounds of gear—up and through that opening. And I have to do it in 1.4 g.

It takes me a full five minutes. I grunt. I say a bunch of not-really-profane things, but I get it done. Soon I’m standing on top of my ship. One misstep and I’ll fall to my death. I wouldn’t have to wait long for it either. As soon as I fell below the ship, the engines would punch my ticket.

I attach a tether to the handrail at my feet. Will a zero-g tether save me if I fall? It’s not mountain-climbing gear. It wasn’t made for this. Better than nothing, I guess.

I walk along the hull toward the chain anchor point. It’s a large xenonite square that Rocky made. He explained in great detail how to adhere it to the hull. Looks like it did the job just fine. The chain is still attached.

I reach it and get down on my hands and knees. The gravity is absolutely brutal in this EVA suit. No part of this is how things are supposed to be.

I hook my (possibly worthless) tether to the nearest handrail and pull the winch from my tool belt.

The chain hangs away at a 30-degree angle and disappears into the planet below. It just goes so far away it’s too thin for me to perceive after a kilometer or so. But I know from Rocky’s readings it’s the full 10 kilometers down, with a sample container full of potential salvation for two entire planets full of people.

I wedge the winch between the chain and the anchor plate. The chain doesn’t budge—not even a millimeter. But that was expected. There’s just no way human muscle could move something that heavy.

I hook the winch to the anchor plate. The casing of the winch is xenonite, so the xenonite-to-xenonite connection should have plenty of strength for what comes next.

I smack the winch a couple of times just to make sure it’s properly seated. It is.

Then I press the activation button.

A gear pops out from the center of the winch, one cog catching a chain link through the center. The gear turns and drags the chain into the internal workings of the winch. Inside, it rotates the link 180 degrees, then slides it across its neighbor to release it.

When we made the chain, we did it with “trap” links that can connect without us having to seal each one. It’s extremely unlikely that random movement would separate the links. But the winch is deliberately designed to do just that.

Once the link is freed, the winch ejects it out the side and repeats the process for the next link.

“The winch works,” I say through my radio.

“Happy,” comes Rocky’s voice.

It’s simple, straightforward, elegant, and solves all the problems. The winch is powerful enough to lift the chain. It separates the links and lets them fall into the planet below. Having a long length of chain dangling down next to the one we’re pulling up would be a disaster. Imagine earbud wires getting tangled, then multiply that by 10 kilometers.

No, each link will take its own path to oblivion below and the rising chain will be unaffected.

“When winch get to link two hundred sixteen, you increase speed.”

“Yes.”

I have no idea how many links it’s done so far. But it’s plugging along nicely. Probably about two links per second. A safe, slow beginning. I watch for two minutes. That’s probably about right. “All good. At least two hundred sixteen links now.”

“Increase speed.”

Two links per second may seem like a good clip, but it would take about thirty hours to raise the chain at that rate. I don’t want to be out here that long and we definitely don’t want to stay in this risky constant-thrust situation for that long. I press the control lever forward. The winch speeds up. Everything seems fine, so I put it in the final position.

Now the links fly out of the winch faster than I can count and the chain rises at a brisk pace.

“The winch is at maximum speed. All is good.”

“Happy.”

I keep my hand on the control lever and my eyes on the chain. If that sampler gets to the winch, everything will go south. The sample container will be torn apart, all the samples will die, and we’d have to make another chain.

I don’t want to do that. Lord, I cannot express how much I don’t want to do that.

I squint into the distance, ever vigilant. Boredom is a real problem here. I know it will take quite a while to pull up this whole chain, but I have to be ready for the sampler.

“Sample device radio signal strong,” Rocky says. “Getting closer. Be ready.”

“I’m ready.”

“Be very ready.”

“I am very ready. Be calm.”

“Am calm. You be calm.”

“No, you be cal—wait. I see the sampler!”

The end of the chain, with the sampler attached, rushes up toward me from the planet below. I grab the control lever and slow the winch. The sampler climbs slower and slower until it’s at a crawl. All but the last few links of the chain fall to their doom and the sampler is finally within reach. I stop the winch.

Rather than risk stupidly dropping the big orb, I grab the top remaining link of the chain and unhitch it from the winch. Now I have a ball and chain. I hang on to the chain for dear life and clip it to my belt. I still don’t let go. I’m not taking any chances with this.

“Status, question?”

“I have the sampler. Returning.”

“Amaze! Happy happy happy!”

“Don’t be happy until I’m inside!”

“Understand.”

I take two steps and the ship shudders. I fall to the hull and grab two handrails.

“What the heck was that?!”

“I not know. Ship move. Sudden.”

The ship shudders again, this time it’s a steady pull. “We’re thrusting the wrong direction!”

“Get inside fast fast fast!”

The horizon rises in my view. The Hail Mary isn’t maintaining her angle anymore. She’s tilting forward. That is absolutely not supposed to be happening.

I clamber from handhold to handhold. I don’t have time to attach the tether each step. I just have to hope I don’t fall.

Another sudden jerk and the hull slips sideways under my feet. I fall on my back but I keep my death grip on the sampler chain. What is going on?! No time to think. I have to get inside before the ship capsizes and kills me.

I cling to the handholds for dear life and crawl to the airlock. Thank God it’s still facing more or less up. I hold the sampler to my chest and fall inside. I land headfirst. Good for me the Orlan helmet is so sturdy.

I squirm to my feet as best I can in the clunky spacesuit. I reach up, grab the outer hatch, and slam it closed. I cycle the airlock and get out of the suit as fast as I can. I’ll leave the sampler in the airlock for now. I need to know what the heck is wrong with the ship.

I half climb, half fall into the control room. Rocky is in his bulb.

“Screens flash many colors!” he yells over the din. He points his camera here and there, watching the feed on his textured screen.

A metallic groan screams from somewhere down below. Something is bending and doesn’t want to. I think it’s the hull.

I get in the control seat. No time to strap in. “Where’s that noise coming from?”

“All around,” he says. “But loudest at starboard dormitory wall segment. It bending inward.”

“Something’s tearing the ship apart! Got to be the gravity.”

“Agree.”

But that bothers me in the back of my mind. This ship was made for acceleration. It endured four years at 1.5 g’s. Surely it can handle this similar force? Something doesn’t add up.

Rocky grabs several of his handholds for support. “We have sampler. We leave now.”

“Yeah, let’s get out of here!” I throw the spin-drive controls to full. The ship can pull up to 2 g when push comes to shove. And I think push has definitely come to shove.

The ship lurches forward. This is not a graceful, well-executed burn. This is nothing short of panicked flight.

The efficient way to leave a gravity well is laterally, to take advantage of the Oberth effect. I try to keep us more or less level to the ground below. I’m not trying to get away from Adrian. I just want to get into a stable orbit that doesn’t need engines to maintain. I need velocity, not distance.

I need to keep the drives at full power for ten minutes. That should get us the 12 kilometers per second we need to stay in orbit. I just need to point a little above the horizon and thrust.

At least, that’s what I want. But it’s not happening. The ship keeps yawing forward and drifting laterally. What is going on?!

“Something wrong,” I say. “She’s fighting me.”

Rocky has no trouble hanging on. He has many multiples of my strength. “Engine damage, question? Much heat from Adrian.”

“Maybe.” I check the Nav console. We’re gaining velocity. That’s something, at least.

“Hull bending in big room below dormitory,” Rocky says.

“What? There’s no room below—oh.” He can sense the whole ship with his echolocation. Not just the habitable area. So when he says “big room below the dormitory,” he means the fuel tanks.

Oh dear.

“Turn off engines, question?”

“We’re going too slow. We’ll fall into the atmosphere.”

“Understand. Hope.”

“Hope.” Yes, hope. That’s all we have at this point. Hope that the ship doesn’t wreck itself before we get into a stable orbit.

The next several minutes are the tensest of my life. And, if I may say so, I’ve had some pretty tense moments these past few weeks. The hull continues to make horrible noises, but we’re not dead, so I guess it didn’t breach. Finally, after what seems like a whole lot more than ten minutes, our velocity is enough to stay in orbit.

“Velocity good. Stopping engines.” I slide the spin-drive power sliders to zero. I let my head fall back to the headrest in relief. Now we can take our time and figure out what went wrong. No need to use the engines to…

Wait.

My head fell back into the headrest. It fell back into the headrest.

I hold my arms out in front of me, then relax them. They fall down and to the left.

“Uh…”

“Gravity still here,” says Rocky, echoing my own observations.

I check the Nav console. Our velocity is good. We’re in a stable orbit around Adrian. Well, actually it’s ugly as heck—the apogee is 2,000 kilometers farther from the planet than perigee. But it’s an orbit, darn it. And it’s stable.

I check the Spin Drive panel again. All three drives are at zero. No thrust at all. I delve into the diagnostics screen and confirm that each of the 1,009 revolver triangles spread throughout the three drives is stationary. They are.

I let my arm fall again. It does the same strange movement. Down and to the left.

Rocky does a similar motion with one of his arms. “Adrian gravity, question?”

“No. We’re in orbit.” I scratch my head.

“Spin drive, question?”

“No. It’s offline. There’s zero thrust.”

I let my arm fall again. This time it hits the armrest of the seat.

“Ow!” I shake my hand. That really hurt.

I let it fall again as an experiment. It fell faster this time. That’s why it hurt.

Rocky pulls several tools from his jumpsuit bandolier and drops them one at a time. “Gravity increasing.”

“This doesn’t make any sense!” I say.

I check the Nav panel again. Our speed has increased considerably since I last looked. “Our velocity is increasing!”

“Engines on. Only explanation.”

“Can’t be. The spin drives are off. There’s nothing to accelerate us!”

“Force increasing,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. I’m having trouble breathing now. Whatever we’re at, it’s much higher than a g or two. Things are getting out of hand.

With all my strength, I reach to the screen and cycle through panels. Navigation, Petrovascope, External View, Life Support…each one seems completely normal. Until I reach “Structure.”

I’d never paid a lot of attention to the Structure panel. It’s just a gray outline of the ship. But now, for the first time, it has something to say.

There’s an irregular red blotch on the port fuel tank. Is that a hull breach? It could be. The fuel tanks are outside the pressure vessel. They could have a huge hole in them and we wouldn’t lose air.

“There’s a hole in the ship…” I say. I struggle to switch back to the external cameras.

Rocky watches my screen with his camera and texture pad. He’s doing fine—no problems at all from the tremendous forces.

I angle the cameras around to look at the affected hull.

And there it is. A massive hole in the port side of the ship. It must be 20 meters long and half as wide. The edges of the hole tell the tale—the hull melted.

It was the blowback from Adrian’s atmosphere. Not a physical explosion, but pure, unadulterated infrared light reflected off the air. The ship tried to warn me that the hull got too hot. I should have listened.

I thought the hull couldn’t melt. It was cooled by Astrophage! But of course it can melt. Even if Astrophage is a perfect heat absorber (and it may be), the heat has to conduct through the metal before it can be absorbed. If the outer layer of the hull reaches its melting point faster than the heat can transmit through the thickness of the hull, the Astrophage can’t do anything about it.

“Confirmed. Hull breach. Port fuel tank.”

“Why thrust, question?”

It all comes together. “Oh crap! The Astrophage in the fuel bay! It’s exposed to space! That means it can see Adrian! My fuel is migrating to Adrian to breed!”

“Bad bad bad!”

That’s where the thrust is from. Trillions and trillions of horny little Astrophages, all ready to breed. And then, all at once, they see Adrian. Not just a source of carbon dioxide, but their ancestral homeland. The planet they evolved over billions of years to seek out.

As each new sheet of Astrophage rushes out of the ship and toward Adrian, the next layer of Astrophage gets exposed. The ship is being pushed along by the IR thrust from the departing Astrophage. Fortunately, the rest of the Astrophage behind them are present to absorb the energy. But in absorbing that energy they absorb the momentum.

It’s far from a perfect system. It’s a chaotic, sputtering explosion. Any second now, this could degenerate into a much larger and less directed plume of IR and we’ll be vaporized. I have to make this stop.

I can jettison fuel bays! I saw that feature on my first day in the control room! Where the heck was it…?

It takes all the strength I have to lift my arm to the screen, but I manage to bring up the Astrophage panel. It shows a map of the ship and the fuel-bay area is broken up into nine rectangles. I don’t have time to cross-reference these rectangles to the part of the bad hull. I grunt, force my arm forward, and tap one that I think is in the right place.

“Throwing…away…bad…fuel bay…” I say through clenched teeth.

“Yes yes yes!” Rocky says, cheering me on.

The Fuel Pod screen pops up: ASTROPHAGE 112.079 KG. Next to that, a button labeled “Jettison.” I punch it. A confirmation dialog pops up. I confirm.

A sudden jerk of acceleration hurls me to the side. Even Rocky is unable to hold position. He slams into the side of his bulb but quickly rights himself and clamps onto his handholds with all five hands.

The hull groans louder than before. The acceleration has not stopped and my vision grows foggy. The pilot’s seat begins to bend. I’m about to black out, so we’re probably at 6 g or more.

“Thrust continues,” Rocky quavers.

I can’t reply. I can’t get any sound out at all.

I know the fuel bay I jettisoned was in the affected area. There must be more than one breached bay. No time for subtlety. In a few seconds the force will be too strong for me to reach the screen at all. If there’s a second breached bay, it’ll be adjacent to the bay I just ditched. But there are two adjacent bays. I pick one at random. Fifty-fifty shot. With herculean effort, I tap its icon, the Jettison button, and confirm.

A jolt rocks the ship and I’m thrown around like a rag doll. In my ever-darkening peripheral vision I see Rocky curled up into a ball, bouncing against the walls, leaving silver blood splatters wherever he hits.

If anything, the force is worse than before. But wait…now it’s the other direction.

Instead of being pulled back into my seat, I’m now being pulled away from it, my body pressing into the restraints.

The Centrifuge screen, of all things, comes to the foreground. EXCESSIVE CENTRIFUGAL FORCE WARNING, it blinks.

“Nnnng,” I say. I meant to say Oh God, but I can’t breathe anymore.

All that fuel blasting out into space…it didn’t politely leave along the ship’s long axis. It blew out at an angle, spinning us like a top. And the exploding fuel bays probably made things even worse.

Well, I stopped the fuel leak, at least. There are no new thrust vectors acting on the ship. Now I just have to deal with the spin. I manage to get a breath in. The centrifugal force is less than the uncontrolled thrust force, but it’s still monumental. But hey, at least it pulls my arms toward the screen instead of away from it.

If I can get the spin drives back online, maybe I can cancel the—

My seat finally gives out. I hear the pops as the anchor points shear off. I fall forward, into the screen, still strapped to the metal seat, which crushes me from behind.

The chair probably doesn’t weigh much in normal gravity. Maybe 20 kilograms. But with this much centripetal force, it’s like having a cement block on my back. I can’t breathe.

This is it. The weight of the chair is so much I can’t inflate my lungs. I get dizzy.

Mechanical suffocation, it’s called. It’s how boa constrictors kill their prey. What an odd thing to think as my last thought.

Sorry, Earth, I think. There. Much better last thought.

My lungs, now full of carbon dioxide, panic. But the adrenaline rush doesn’t give me the strength I need to escape. It just keeps me awake so I can experience death in more detail.

Thanks, adrenal glands.

The groaning of the ship has stopped. I guess anything that was going to break has broken and all that’s left is stuff that can handle the stress.

My eyes water. They sting. Why? Am I crying? I have personally failed my entire species and they’re all going to die because of it. It’s a good reason to cry. But this isn’t emotional. It’s pain. My nose hurts too. And not from physical pressure or anything. Something burns at my nasal passages from the inside.

Something probably broke open in the lab. Some nasty chemical. Just as well I can’t breathe. I probably wouldn’t like the smell.

Then, out of nowhere, I can breathe again! I don’t know how or why, but I gasp and wheeze in my newfound freedom. I immediately fall into a violent coughing fit. Ammonia. Ammonia everywhere. It’s overpowering. My lungs scream and my eyes water over. Then there’s a new smell.

Fire.

I roll around to see Rocky hovering over me. Not in his compartment. He’s in the control room!

He has slashed my restraints and pulled the chair free. He shoves it to the side.

He stands over me, wobbling. I can feel the heat radiating from his body just inches away. Smoke billows out of the radiator slits atop his carapace.

His knees buckle and he collapses onto the screen next to me, destroying it. The LCD unit blacks out and the plastic bezel melts.

I see a trail of smoke leading up the tunnel to the lab and beyond.

“Rocky! What have you done!”

The crazy bastard must have used the large airlock in the dormitory! He came into my partition to save me. And he’ll die because of it!

He shivers and folds his legs under himself.

“Save…Earth…Save…Erid…” he quavers. Then he slumps down.

“Rocky!” I grab his carapace without thinking. It’s like putting my hands on a burner. I jerk away. “Rocky…no…”

But he is motionless.