Chapter Text
Something is hitting my bed.
Repeatedly.
It’s not a pleasant sensation. Breathing is difficult enough in this gravity, not to mention waking up.
I guess I’m getting grumpy in my old age.
“Grace? Grace, stop sleeping.”
It’s just Rocky.
Wait, what is Rocky doing in my enclosure?
He seldom gets suited up if he doesn’t need to.
I open my eyes.
There is Rocky, in his transparent Zenonite hamster-ball, running it repeatedly into the foot of my bed.
“Noisy spider go ‘way,” I say.
“Grace, #####.”
It takes me a second to recall the Eridian word for ‘wake up’, since I’m half asleep still, and it’s so seldom used.
“All right, all right,” I say, and push myself off the bed.
Rocky stops bumping into things, but his body language continues to ooze excitement.
“Petrova Light.”
“What?” I say.
“We’ve detected Petrova Light on the Sky Scanner.”
I know the system he’s talking about- heck, I helped build it.
Not that Erid didn’t have an ability to detect Astrophage-powered vessels before we arrived, but that system had been solely designed to pick up the returning Blip-A.
With Astrophage still spreading, however, and Erid visibly back to full intensity, it might not be too long before other sentient life came looking for the cure we obviously possessed.
Hence, the Sky Scanner network.
It consists of three sets of wide-field telescopes, two mounted on satellites at the Langrange points, and one on a Trojan asteroid trailing Erid. All of them are designed solely to search the sky for signs of a spin-drive powered starship moving in the system.
Theoretically, it can pick up and triangulate something the size of a beetle at the distance of about Four AU, or a larger vessel – such as the Hail Mary- almost at the edge of 40 Eridani’s Oort Cloud. The distances are about double if the ship in question has its drive pointed straight at us.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Excitement!”
I didn’t say anything, but the thought instantly crossed my mind-
Is it humans?
“How far out?” I asked, voice still cranky, as I pull on my shoes.
Shoes are important on Erid, as I’ve learned the hard way. The high gravity will do a number on your feet without proper support- a problem made all the more difficult by the fact that the Eridian leather-equivalent tends to catch fire in oxygen atmospheres.
It had taken a lot of work for them to figure out how to make a shoe that both worked for human feet and wasn’t flammable.
“They are still calculating.”
“Oh.”
“ETA?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Estimated time of arrival?”
“They are still calculating.”
“What on Earth did they need me for?”
“Us. I’m the only Eridian with experience in first contacts -”
“-and I’m the only alien.” I finished.
“And you are the only other being with such experience,” Rocky corrected me.
I wobbled to my feet, and grabbed my cane.
“Where are we going?”
“They are waiting for us at the orbital elevator.”
************************************
I’ve never been the bravest of souls.
Hence, why I’ve always found Erid’s orbital elevator terrifying. The thing is old- almost as old as Rocky- and it looks far too fragile for its incredible height.
It’s almost as big around as the Empire State Building, only it consists of hundreds of strands of zenoninte-reinforced carbon nanotube extending from a massive zeonite footing, with five slots on the five sides that each carry an individual cable car.
To make things worse, by some unhappy accident, the engineers picked clear zeoninte for the cars. I’ve never liked glass elevators on tall buildings, but this isn’t just a glass elevator. Illuminated by the dim helmet light in the pea-soup atmosphere, the whole thing is practically invisible, for the electronics of the drive mechanism- because, of course, they used a linear actuator system. A dozen electromagnets are the only things holding the elevator car to the elevator.
I drive my wheel-chair into the pod carefully, ignoring the massive butterflies taking up residence in my stomach.
Yes, I’m in a wheel-chair. Or perhaps I should call it a wheel-chair rover. The Eridians have tried for many years to make me a suit, but humans are just too flexible, and Erid’s atmosphere too crushingly heavy.
So when I do go out, it’s in a wheelchair-like pod made of clear zenonite, just big enough for me to sit down in comfortably, with its own air supply, motors, lights, and a synthesizer version of my proper communications system.
The small crowd of Erindians wait until Rocky has my wheelchair is safely locked in before they enter.
I recognize most of them, since they’re the same group of top scientists who I’ve worked with since I came to Erid.
Rocky sits next to me, still quivering in excitement.
The other seat is grabbed by an Eridian anthropologist who I refer to as ‘Shido’.
Why did I nickname him ‘Shido’?
Because he’s the first – and finest- example of an Eridian weeb.
Somehow, of all the materials on the Hail Mary’s databanks, he found- and got hooked on- anime. And not the good stuff like Cowboy Bebop. See if you can think of another nickname for him when you have to spend two days explaining human culture as related to reproduction - in the context of Date a Live and Strike the Blood.
Also, he has the Eridian equivalent of asthma – an unusual thickening of the walls in his radiator organs- so he goes around with a set of what look like bellows strapped to his carapace, which he can turn on to help him breathe forcefully enough to regulate his temperature if he does too much physical activity.
But enough about him.
Once the elevator hatch is shut, we began our accent up the cable. It was slow at first, and completely dark because of the thick atmosphere. W
Since the car is only held on with magnets, the whole thing tends to sway gently from atmospheric turbulence, which is downright un-nerving.
Then, the first glimmers of sunlight appeared.
The one good thing about trips up the space elevator- you get to rise through Erid’s twilight zone and into the sunlight zone.
For a few seconds- really, kilometers of atmosphere- there is only a scattered glimmer of light, as we rise through a lower layer of water clouds and grey-green lower sky algae.
Then, suddenly, we’re through the lower clouds and racing through the sunlit zone. Huge clouds of blue-green and bright orange upper sky algae drift overhead, and everything comes alive.
Shoals of ‘popcorn jellyfish’ float through the air, held aloft by gas bags in their pentagonal main bodies, with five tentacles hanging down.
They were fascinating creatures, really, as much sky algae-eating-plant as animal. Their taxonomical name sounds kind of like the opening notes of the US Field Artillery March- which apparently means ‘small delicious floating thing’ in the Eridian Latin-equivalent.
Today, there was a dragon, wheeling about as it chased the shoals of ‘popcorn jellyfish’. The monsters are some of Erid’s largest flying creatures- snake-like creatures over twenty meters long, with five sets of wings along their length.
You would think that, in two gees, aerodynamic flight would be difficult, but the twenty-seven atmospheres of pressure seems to negate that pretty well, since these giants stay aloft for weeks on end, only visiting the surface to nest and rear their young.
Also, their name- which sounds like the Japanese march ‘Yuki no Shingun’ – literally means ‘huge angry flying creature’. I think ‘dragon’ is a pretty good translation.
If humans ever manage to make the trip between Earth and Erid in a reasonable amount of time, they’re going to build a resort city in these layers, I just know it.
Unfortunately, we were already going pretty fast, and accelerating as we went.
Soon, we were clear of the upper algae clouds, and there was nothing but yellowish sky in view for a long, long way.
Finally, the more-than two-gees started to let up as we got further from Erid, and the sky finally began to grow black as the stars came out.
Two hours after we started, the car finally turns over, and ‘Shido’ produced a terrified single-note squeal as ‘up’ vanished for a moment, and the car rotated one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, so that we were all hanging from our safety harnesses – or, in my case, safety harness and seat-belt.
Then the car begins decelerating, and ‘down’ is toward our feet again.
“Hey! The space blob didn’t make the noise this time!” Rocky said, jokingly.
“No, that was Shido,” someone else said.
“Shut it,” I said.
For all that I felt a little miffed by the jokes, it is true that the first time I experienced turn-over on the orbital elevator, I made a very undignified sound.
A further two hours later, we finally pull up to the counterweight station.
The hub of all Eridian orbital infrastructure, this place is massive- it reminds me a little of that station that the Whale Probe disabled in Star Trek IV. It consists of two disks, both designed to hold immense volumes of atmosphere at Eridian-livable pressures.
One of the three docking bays on the upper disk holds the Hail Mary, as well as whatever other ships the Eridians are building.
The whole area isn’t actually in microgravity- it sits a hair above geostationary orbit, so that centripetal force keeps tension on the elevator. As a result ‘down’ is the direction away from Erid, even though the ’gravity’ is barely a hundredth of a gee.
Also, the whole station it can actually extend or retract by several hundred meters in order to keep the elevator’s tension precisely calibrated. It’s a little bit scary to think that, if something failed, the whole station could be flung off into space.
As soon as we arrived- well, after a brief stop in the human-habitable rooms for the human who’d been stuck in a wheelchair for four hours- we were ushered into one of the conference rooms by the Sky Scanner control station.
It was a fairly large room, with sound-damping walls lined with the Eridian wood-equivalent- which sort of looks like fake plastic wood, since the trees on the surface are actually carnivorous mushrooms made mostly of poly-vinyl chloride- or, as we know it, PVC.
Aside from my wheelchair, there was a Zenonite table (yes, even Eridians use tables- they keep the ‘clean’ stuff above the things it’s appropriate to step on), and a large computer display. There are already a half-dozen Eridians here, including ‘Adama’ - who, so far as I can tell, is sort of the Eridian equivalent of Miss Stratt. For some reason, he always reminds me of an Eridian version of Lauren Green, hence the name.
He’s already brought up an image on the display, and is scratching names off a writing tablet.
“Good, you’re all here,” ‘Adama’ said.
“How big is this ship?” ‘Shido’ asked, excitedly. “How far away?”
“Do we have pictures yet?” someone else asked.
“We don’t know that it is a ship yet,” Adama cautioned. “The pictures only reveal a very intense blip of Petrova light.”
He gestures toward the screen. It was a liquid-crystal display, so the Eridians could see it as a dramatic shift in density of the pixels, and reacted with various expressions of excitement.
I see… grey.
“I can’t see anything,” I play on the synthesizer.
“Apologies,” Adama said, and held up a sheet of polymer, which I can actually see the texture ink on. It’s - it’s basically a half-dozen pixels of black in the middle of the white, with a note in the corner stating the telescope, direction it was taken in, and time.
“How far away is it?” someone asks.
“We haven’t been able to resolve it yet,” Adama said. “The thrums are working on it, but they say that SkyScan simply doesn’t have a long enough base line.”
It was a predicted weakness. At its most basic, Sky Scanner is just a huge, and incredibly advanced, coincidence rangefinder, the same type they mounted on World War 2 battleships.
Even though the two sensors are almost 0.6 of an AU apart, the angle between those sensors can only be measured so well, and so it has a limited range.
Earth-based telescopes could measure things out to about three light-years, but Earth has a longer baseline and we could take more time – a LOT more time.
“We know it’s bright, and that it’s coming from the direction of Tau Ceti.” Adama said. “What can you tell me?”
“Well-” I started, “We know it’s coming toward us?”
“Grace?” Rocky asked.
“Look at the picture,” I said. “It’s perfectly symmetrical, even though it’s bright enough to be reflecting off the interstellar medium pretty strongly.”
“So?” Shido can be a bit of a derp.
“If their spin drive was pointed at an angle, the blip we see would be asymmetrical,” Adama says. “None of the thrums have reported that yet.”
“It helps that I have a sense that depends on light,” I grinned.
*******************
If you’re wondering how long it took to acquire an actual reading-
It took ten days.
A whole Forgotten Realms week.
Ten days of very tense, nervous wondering as we waited for it to get close enough for SkyScan to acquire it.
Fortunately, one of the things they have added to the counterweight station over the years was a large human-habitable space, in the (wildly optimistic) chance they might be playing host to more humans than just me, so I didn’t have to make a trip back to the surface.
I got a chance to tour both of the new Eridian ships, and visit Hail Mary again.
Hail Mary was pretty much exactly like I left it, and the Eridian caretaker team had it re-fueled and ready in case we needed to fly out, but they had found tiny cracks in the tank support structures.
Simply put, it was an old ship that had been wound up to light speed once more than it was ever intended to, and it would probably come apart if I tried to pull one-point-five gees ever again.
The two new ships were something else – as big as Blip-A, but with less fuel, more armor, and armed with astrophage-pumped lasers and torpedoes.
A naval history buff would probably call them coastal defense cruisers- defensive ships, based on the sad reality that we couldn’t count on other life being friendly.
Unfortunately, it was also a reality that even Erid’s industry couldn’t build and calibrate second-generation spin drives overnight. Neither ship would be ready to operate in time.
Or, in the immortal word of Captan Kirk- “Let me guess, Tuesday?”
**************************************
Finally, at the end of ten days, ‘Adama’ called us all to the conference room.
The reports were simple, and lined up to within the tolerances of the SkyScan system itself.
The ship was screaming in at V ℓ I + V ℓ ℓ ℓ ℓ ‘opening notes of the Dukes of Hazzard theme’ and decelerating at I + V ℓ ℓ ℓ ℓ ‘opening notes of the Dukes of Hazzard theme’ per Erid-second.
This meant that, in all likelihood, we had detected it mere minutes after it turned on its spin drive, since, assuming a constant rate of deceleration, it had been at ninety-nine percent of light-speed when we picked it up.
In interstellar terms, it was slamming on the brakes hard enough that it would be at a dead stop relative to Erid just 23.6 earth-days after it started.
I quickly used my laptop to convert it into metric units, since I had long ago set up a spreadsheet just for that purpose.
I sagged out of my wheel chair when I saw the results.
I know, it’s funny, but in extremely low gravity, going limp means your chair no longer wants to hold you, and you start to drift upwards.
This whole time, I had held out hope that our visitor- as big as it was, and coming from an odd angle- was a Human vessel that had somehow decided to stop at Tau Ceti and then continue on to 40 Eridani.
“Grace? Are you all right?” Rocky asks.
“It can’t be human,” I muttered.
In Earth terms, the ship was moving at .55 C, and decelerating at 147 meters per second squared, pulling fifteen gees in the process.
A stunt that would crush any Human- or Eridian – on board flat as a pancake.
There were only two options, then:
One- it was completely automated.
Two- it was manned by an unknown species that didn’t mind pulling fifteen gees for almost a month.