Chapter Text
The Eridians, ceremoniously, had dropped a ship in what I had set to calling the Human Rehabilitation Unit, but I guess now it was the room for aliens. Non-native life, at least.
Rocky had dragged me out far too early, chirping away about something new, and God, if that wasn't something to get your heart pumping.
It, the alien ship, was perfectly smooth, almost polished, a dark red-bronze color that reminded me of old pennies. No markings, no lights, no handholds. Just... a sealed tube. "Reading a steady 363 degrees Kelvin on the surface, but there's a hot spot at one end - around 423. Something's active in there. Maybe the propulsion system? Except there's no propulsion system..."
"Life support," Rocky trilled, his voice dipping into what I recognized as his 'thinking' range. "Eridian 🎵🎶🎶🎵🎵 no doors. Too dangerous. Maybe same. Pressure inside high high high. Door not open until pressure outside matches."
That made a disturbing amount of sense. "So this thing is designed to open in a high-pressure environment. Like deep underwater? But it was in space. That's the opposite of high pressure."
Rocky clacked his carapace. "Yes. In space, no open. Must keep sealed. But why in space? Maybe thrown?"
"Ejected," I corrected automatically, then stopped. "Wait. You think someone launched this from a planet? Like a message in a bottle?"
Rocky ignored the question. Wow. I'd return to that idea later. "Pressure inside 8-hundred atmospheres. Erid pressure 29. Earth pressure 1."
I stared at the sealed bronze cylinder, trying to will a door into existence through sheer stubbornness. It didn't work. The surface remained stubbornly smooth, without so much as a seam or a rivet. "Eight hundred atmospheres," I muttered, running the math. "That's like... eight kilometers under the ocean on Earth. Whatever's in there evolved in a pressure cooker."
His carapace tilted toward me. "Explain, question?"
"Sorry," I said, shifting my weight against Erid's crushing gravity. "A pressure cooker is a container where we increase pressure to cook food faster, but I'm talking about deep ocean - places on Earth where the water is so heavy it squishes everything. Eight kilometers down, the pressure would crush a submarine if it wasn't specially designed. This ship is built like a submarine, but for creatures who live in that pressure."
Rocky clicked thoughtfully, his five legs shifting in that precise hexagonal pattern. "Rocky understand. Deep. Very deep."
"Exactly." I wiped sweat from my eyes. The ammonia atmosphere here was always thick, always hot, but standing next to the alien cylinder made it worse. The thing radiated heat like a furnace, even (especially, probably) in the climate controlled room. "So how do we open it? We can't just pump Erid's atmosphere up to 800 atmospheres. That would liquefy the ammonia and kill a bunch of Eridians, and even if it didn't, we'd need a tank rated for that pressure."
I watched Rocky's legs. When he got excited, they moved faster. When he was worried, they clustered closer to his carapace. Right now, they were doing something I hadn't seen before, a slow, spreading pattern, like he was trying to make himself larger without actually moving.
"Rocky has idea," he said. "Not good idea. But only idea."
"Let's hear it."
Rocky's legs contracted back into their neutral position. "Build chamber. Small. Very strong. Fill with Erid air. Increase pressure slowly. Alien ship opens when pressure matches?"
"That's..." I thought about it, running through the engineering in my head. "That's actually not terrible. We wouldn't need to pressurize a whole room. Just a small access chamber around the ship... but 800 atmospheres, Rocky. That's massive. A failure at that pressure would be like a bomb going off."
"Yes. Very dangerous. Eridians build for pressure." He clicked his claws together, that strange Eridian gesture that meant we can do this or I have already done this and it worked or about ten other things. "Rocky design. Strong. Safe. Many fail-safes."
The chamber took seventeen Erid days to construct. I watched Rocky's designs take shape, marveling at how naturally Eridian engineering adapted to extremes that would have seemed suicidal on Earth.
They built it in sections, each one tested separately before integration. The walls were a xenonite composite I didn't fully understand.
I spent those days in the observation room, watching through reinforced windows as the cylinder sat motionless in the growing structure around it. Sometimes I talked to it. Stupid, I know, but I'd been alone in space once, talking to myself, and that had worked out. Sort of. At least until Rocky appeared.
The pressure chamber was a marvel of Eridian engineering, but watching it fill with ammonia-helium mixture at 29 atmospheres was like watching paint dry. Then 50. Then 100. Each step took hours of careful monitoring, Rocky's claws dancing across control surfaces I could barely operate.
"Current pressure 247 atmospheres," he announced, his voice holding steady in the upper registers. Not worried yet. "Structure integrity 98.2 percent. Holding."
I sat on my specially designed chair and tried not to fidget. "How high can we push the xenonite before it starts to deform?"
"Limit 1,400 atmospheres, statement," Rocky said, his voice clicking in that precise way he used when reciting specifications. "Safety 1,100. This 950 maximum. We stop at 800, statement."
"Yes," I said, though I wasn't sure if I was agreeing or just saying something to fill the silence. "We stop at 800."
The pressure climbed. 300. 400. 500.
The readings crept upward with agonizing slowness. At 612 atmospheres, I found myself holding my breath, which was stupid given that I would pass out if I actually succeeded. At 678, Rocky's leg movements became sharper, more staccato. At 734, he stopped announcing the numbers entirely, just letting the displays - the ones made specifically for us, some kind of sand-based screen, dipping down where numbers were - speak for themselves.
Seven hundred ninety-six. Seven hundred ninety-seven.
"Almost there," I whispered. The chamber walls were making sounds now, low groans that vibrated through the floor and up into my chest. Xenonite was supposed to be near-perfect, but everything has a voice when pushed hard enough. Rocky would hear me anyway, I hoped.
Seven hundred ninety-eight. Seven hundred ninety-nine.
The groaning had become a constant, almost musical drone, like the Eridians themselves. I could feel it in my teeth, in the fluid of my inner ear, a subsonic vibration that made my vision want to blur at the edges. Rocky's legs had gone completely still, a posture of absolute, total concentration.
Eight hundred.
Eight hundred atmospheres.
I expected something dramatic. A hiss of equalizing pressure, a seam appearing in the smooth bronze surface, something worthy of first contact between three species across the vast emptiness of space. Instead, there was only the continued groan of the containment chamber and Rocky's steady clicking.
"Nothing," I said, unable to keep the disappointment from my voice. "Maybe the pressure needs to be higher? Or maybe we're wrong about the mechanism entirely?"
"Wait," Rocky trilled, his voice dropping to the lowest register I'd ever heard from him. "Sound. Very faint."
I strained my ears, but human hearing was never meant for Erid's atmosphere, and certainly not through layers of oxygen suit, xenonite and specialized shielding. "What kind of sound?"
Rocky reproduced something I couldn't parse, a rhythm without melody in my perception. "Like not Rocky. Different pattern. Faster."
"Faster how?" I asked, leaning forward in my chair. The reinforced kind-of-glass of the observation window seemed suddenly inadequate, a thin barrier between me and pressures that could crush me into paste.
Rocky's legs shifted - three legs planted firmly, two moving in small, precise arcs as he processed whatever his echolocation was telling him. "Heartbeat, question? Breathing? Not clear. Alive, statement. Inside. Waiting."
Waiting for what? Eight hundred atmospheres of pressure, and something inside that bronze cylinder was making rhythmic sounds. Alive(!!). Conscious, perhaps. Aware that its environment had finally, finally matched the conditions it needed to survive.
"Can you tell me more about the pattern?" I asked, trying to keep my voice level. It's not like we had any first contact protocols.
"3.4 times Grace heartbeat," he said, his voice clicking with precision. "Regular. Very regular."
A lot of Earth creatures had faster heartbeats than humans - hummingbirds, shrews, mice. Higher metabolism, shorter lifespans usually, more energy required, but this was pressure-adapted, and that changed everything. "The high pressure increases chemical reaction rates. If it- if they're maintaining Earth-like biochemistry at 800 atmospheres, they would need compensatory mechanisms. Or.."
I trailed off, running the chemistry in my head. High pressure meant faster kinetics. If this creature was using anything remotely like terrestrial biochemistry, every reaction would be accelerated, provided their enzymes and proteins and such were adapted - which, duh. The energy requirements would be enormous. The amount of proline required alone to stabilise an Earth-adjacent muscle in 800 atmospheres...
"Grace get to point," Rocky prompted.
"Or their metabolism is actually slow for their evolutionary context," I said. "The 3.4 times my rate might be their baseline. At one atmosphere, they'd barely function. Maybe not at all."
I kept watching the bronze cylinder, willing it to do something, anything. The rhythmic sounds Rocky detected continued, steady as a metronome, but the surface remained implacably smooth. "How long do we maintain pressure?" I asked.
Rocky's legs spread in imitation of a human shrug. "Unknown. Alien must choose to open. Cannot force. Too dangerous."
The waiting was the hardest part. I've said that before, about my time alone on the Hail Mary, but this was different. Then, I had been waiting for death or salvation, binary outcomes with nothing in between. Now I was waiting for a door to open, for a choice made by something I couldn't see or speak to or understand. (Yet).
We maintained 800 atmospheres for six Erid days. I slept in shifts with Rocky, one of us always watching the bronze cylinder, listening for changes in the rhythmic pattern Rocky had detected. It never varied. 3.4 times my heartbeat, steady as a, well, rock, as if whatever was inside had infinite patience.
On the seventh day, I was asleep when Rocky shook me awake with one of his legs, a gesture he'd learned I found alarming but effective. "Grace. Wake. Now."
I sat up too fast, momentarily dizzy in Erid's gravity, groping for my glasses. "What is it? Did something happen?"
"Sound changed," Rocky trilled, his frame tight. "Faster. Then slower. Then..." He paused, his carapace tilting toward the pressure chamber. "Then pattern I do not recognize."
I shoved my glasses on, blinking at the readouts. Pressure still holding at 800.0 atmospheres, xenonite integrity at 94.7 percent - lower than I liked, but within acceptable parameters. The bronze cylinder sat unchanged in the center of the chamber, still seamless, still inscrutable.
"Say it for me," I said. "As close as you can."