Chapter Text
<GRAVITY ANOMALY DETECTED.>
<GRAVITY ANOMALY DETECTED.>
“Friend Grace! Friend Grace! Wake up!”
Grace shot up in his cot and immediately bashed his forehead into the xenonite panels of Rocky’s enclosure. The overhead panel was a newer addition, allowing Rocky to sit right above him, similarly to their original sleeping situation in the Blip A – Hail Mary tunnel. The downside was currently making itself known in the pounding of Rocky’s legs right next to his ear. “Cheese and crackers, Rock!” Grace grabbed his head in pain. “What’s going on?!”
“Not know! Mary navigation system malfunctioning!” Rocky fidgeted anxiously, tapping his claws together and dancing around on three of his five legs. His voice creaked on a much higher octave than normal.
Grace fumbled his glasses onto his face and squinted down the hall towards the cockpit, where the ship’s smooth automated voice was repeating the same phrase while a small red light blared through the open doorway.
<GRAVITY ANOMALY DETECTED.>
“Shoot.” Grace shoved his blankets past his knees and extracted himself from the cot, Rocky following along in his tunnels towards the cockpit. “How do you know the navigation system is malfunctioning, Rocky?”
"Should be direct line to Erid. Plotted course many many times. Always exact calculations, no understand what caused change!" Rocky trotted past him, moving much more efficiently through the tunnels than Grace’s half-awake stumbling.
“I- Rocky! What changed with the navigation course?!” Grace stopped in the doorway to the cockpit, placing his hands on his hips in exasperation as Rocky paused above him.
"Where was straight line on navigation screen, now is curve of 0.025 degrees downward pitch."
Grace squinted at him. “...Right. Are you sure you didn’t accidentally nudge anything while you were rattling around in here the other day?”
Rocky stamped two of his legs in anger. Oh boy. “Rocky very careful in cockpit! Is Grace who is ‘rattling around’ in every room!” Rocky punctuated the last half of his sentence with air quotes, which was something Grace had taught him during one of their “cultural exchange” discussions. It had seemed funny at the time, but now Grace regretted giving a pentapedal rock alien that much power. Five air quotes at once… Grace shivered at the potential levels of sarcasm that would allow. "Even if nudge happened, Mary should correct path straight to Erid. Angle change too constant, Rocky only notice minutes before ship alarm!"
<GRAVITY ANOMALY DETECTED.>
The ship’s voice calmly interrupted them again. Grace took a moment to consider what the ship was actually saying. To be fair, he had woken up thirty seconds ago and had been using most of his available brain power to translate Rocky’s speech. Learning Eridian had been a painful work in progress, but after nearly four years of interstellar travel he’d had a great many opportunities to practice. And then his stomach dropped through his feet.
“Gravity anomaly?!” Grace scrambled into the pilot’s seat, the lights and screens of the cockpit coming alive as it recognized the butt of a human sitting down. He started frantically flipping through the screens, desperately trying to find the star chart. Rocky skittered the rest of the way in after him.
“What mean, question? What change navigation path?”
Grace chewed on his lip as he hurriedly flipped through each screen until he found the one he was looking for. Bringing the navigation window to take up half of the screen he was currently looking at, Grace compared the two before sitting back with his hands buried in his hair, tugging at the strands.
“What, question?!”
“I don’t know! There’s literally nothing! There shouldn’t be anything here that would cause our ship to change trajectory! The only thing I can think of is impossible, because there are no recorded black holes anywhere in the nearby vicinity of Erid’s solar system, much less in the nearby vicinity of us!”
Rocky immediately brought all of his legs together to curl into a defensive position. “Black hole bad bad bad bad bad bad-”
Grace cut him off. “I know! I don’t know what else could cause this much of a steering discrepancy, but there really shouldn’t be anything anywhere near us…” He trailed off. “Unless… there’s something near our ship that Earth hadn’t discovered or been able to place on our map by the time Mary was launched.”
<GRAVITY ANOMALY DETECTED.>
“Yes, thank you, Mary! We got it!” Grace looked back to the navigation screen. He sucked in a breath. In the past few minutes something had failed to capture his attention.
“What wrong, question? Something change, question?”
“Uh… What was the original angle to our adjusted course?”
“0.025 degrees.”
Grace gulped. “It’s now 0.027 degrees. The ship’s angle is actively increasing.”
Rocky froze before letting out a screech and tumbling into his ball in the other chair of the cockpit. “Adjust angle now now now! Angle increase mean we move toward gravity anomaly! Move away now now now!”
Grace buckled himself in, not caring that he was in his pajamas instead of the typical flight suit before grabbing the steering stick. “You don’t have to tell me twice! Mary, engage manual flight mode!”
<PILOT DETECTED. ENGAGING MANUAL FLIGHT MODE.>
As he adjusted their angle to be consistent with the original flight path to Erid, now only a few months away, Grace paused. “Wait, how do we know we won’t accidentally fly into whatever is tugging us off course? If this thing isn’t on the star chart, we have no way of knowing where it is!”
Rocky shivered and trilled, the vents in his carapace moving wildly. "What do, question? Grace Rocky so close to Erid, why something go wrong now?!"
Grace leaned his head back against the chair, trying to think. Many of his memories had returned after waking up from his coma, but not all. Unfortunately, there were still some concepts which he had known about extensively before Project Hail Mary that he still struggled to grasp. It never ceased to frustrate him when he was talking with Rocky about something and couldn’t correctly explain it because he didn’t remember all of the important details. He rubbed the lump steadily forming on his forehead and closed his eyes, trying to remember anything important about black holes. He knew that once you crossed the event horizon, it was game over. No return from the infinite time spent never quite reaching the singularity, not even to mention the eventual spaghettifying. However, the fact that they could still adjust their flight path was a good sign, meaning they were far away enough to at least try to avoid it. There was something some famous physicist had discovered about black holes that he just couldn’t put his finger on…
With a small burst of pain the information suddenly snapped into existence in his mind. “Ah hah!” Grace triumphantly shot up and clapped his hands together. “Hawking radiation!”
A moment passed before Rocky spoke. “This different radiation than what killed Eridians on Blip A, question?”
Grace turned to look at Rocky. His friend was curled up in his xenonite hamster ball, tapping two of his claws together anxiously. Grace put a hand near Rocky’s carapace. “Yes. It is different. What killed your crew was galactic cosmic rays, or really high speed hydrogen and helium particles left over from the creation of the universe. Hawking radiation is a theoretical blackbody radiation that only black holes emit. It shouldn’t harm us, especially if we’re just looking at it through a telescope, and double-especially since Mary is still shielded by the astrophage in the ship’s lining.” Grace didn’t say out loud that the radiation wouldn’t be what killed them if they were actually approaching a black hole, but he didn’t want to say that to Rocky. “The only issue with trying to find Hawking radiation is that no human instrument was able to detect it, at least not while I was on Earth.” Grace drummed his fingers along Rocky’s ball. “Although… If I had to guess, I would bet that Mary has some capability to compute and predict what might be Hawking radiation.” Stratt did say she put all of humanity’s knowledge on board the Hail Mary. Time to test that.
“Mary, are you able to detect Hawking radiation within a radius of five astronomical units of the ship?”
<ANALYZING REQUEST.>
Grace waited. Rocky twiddled his claws together. Grace’s foot began to tap against the floor of the cockpit.
<POSITIVE MATCH. BEGINNING SCANNING SEQUENCE.>
Grace breathed out. Turning to Rocky, he tried to comfort his friend by saying, “Listen. We don’t know what exactly is causing this gravity anomaly. It could be an unidentified black hole, or a data error, or literally anything else! Who knows if there’s even any Hawking radiation nearby? I’m not sure how long it’ll take for Mary to scan, so all we can do is try to relax and–”
<SOURCE OF HAWKING RADIATION IDENTIFIED. LOCATED 1.34 ASTRONOMICAL UNITS IN FRONT OF THE HAIL MARY, AT A DECLINATION ANGLE EQUAL TO 70 DEGREES RELATIVE TO PROGRAMMED FLIGHT PATH.>
The cockpit was silent for a moment. Grace stared at the small blip now showing up on the star chart, so far away but so close in the cosmic scale. He felt the blood drain from his face. He slowly turned to Rocky, who had sat up, the crystal device allowing him to hear screens in one of his hands, shaking slightly as his carapace began to rattle.
“Shit!” Grace squeaked.