Chapter Text
With every passing moment, the Hail Mary brings her crew closer to their destination. The scientists who programmed her path could only work with the limited information available to them from trillions of miles away. As such, she’d been set to bring her crew to orbit at a safe and comfortable 150 million kilometers away from Tau Ceti.
Multiple systems run in parallel so she can keep her sleeping crew on the right path. She calculates the parallax of reference stars. She collects a constant stream of accelerometer and gyroscope data. She tracks the change in angular width and apparent magnitude of their target star. She compares the calculations against each other, all while keeping watch for obstacles that may threaten to collide with her.
After nearly four years, she’s arrived.
“Welcome to the Tau Ceti solar system.” A warm feminine voice echoes over the speakers of the Hail Mary. “Deceleration is in progress. The Hail Mary will finish primary transit in five days, twenty hours, and thirty nine minutes.”
Her motion activated lights wait for movement, but the rooms remain dark.
✦☉✦
Mary listens with the microphones spaced throughout the ship, waiting for verbal commands, but there’s nothing apart from her own mechanical hum as her systems continue to run. She heats and cools as necessary to maintain a constant 21.1 degrees Celsius. She cycles the air and keeps the pressure topped up at 40 kilopascals.
Meanwhile, the Hail Mary continues to slow down. 3840 kps. 2569 kps. 1297 kps. She continues her daily checks. Potable water levels are full. CO2 traces are negligible. Oxygen is plentiful. Meals wait to be distributed. She’s ready to take care of her crew’s physical needs, once they wake.
So she continues to wait. And wait. And wait.
✦☉✦
“Thirty seconds until orbit.” She counts down the seconds out loud. Once she hits zero, she cuts the engines and she’s coasting at 26.3 kilometers per second. She’s officially in orbit. She updates the navigation screen in the control room. Alongside their current velocity, she prints: primary transit complete. Her crew can begin their mission in earnest.
“Petrovascope is now available,” she announces to the control room.
She registers no change to the control inputs. No buttons pressed, no switches flipped. The Petrovascope goes untouched.
With no new commands to follow, the Hail Mary maintains orbit.
✦☉✦
The Hail Mary’s radar registers an object. She pulls up the display for it on one of the central screens in the control room. The object is much too small to be a planet, but it’s not of insignificant size. She gives it the label “Blip-A.”
She continues to track it, refreshing the display as it gets closer and closer. She calculates its trajectory and compares it to her own course. They’re not going to collide, but she projects that the distance between them will cross her acceptable threshold. She begins to sound an alarm and flash the lights in all the rooms.
“Attention needed in control room. Blip-A approaching.”
She repeats the message once more and continues to flash the warning lights. Still, her motion detectors register nothing. No one comes.
Regardless, the radar continues to display the shrinking distance between her and Blip-A. 1000 meters. 750, 500, until it comes to a rest 217 meters away.
Hours pass like that. The two of them hang in space, orbiting Tau Ceti while Blip-A stays fixed relative to her.
A new object registers on the radar. Blip-B is much smaller and slower, and this one, according to her calculations, is going to collide with her. The proximity alarm is already going off, but she runs further checks. The low velocity combined with its small size is unlikely to cause any damage to her, no further action on her part is required.
50 meters, 20, 10. The radar reels off the distance as it closes in. At zero, it makes contact with her hull and bounces off. 10, 20, 50 meters. It continues to retreat while Blip-A remains at 217 meters.
More time passes. Blip-C appears, approaching slower this time, but like before, it simply bounces off her hull.
The intervals grow shorter as more objects come from Blip-A towards the Hail Mary. Blip-D is aimed at the empty space just beside her, passing without ever coming into contact. Blip-E comes into contact with the exterior side of the airlock. The cameras outside the door are triggered by the motion, capturing a brief video recording as a capsule hits and bounces away. Blip-F approaches faster than the previous ones, hitting her hard enough to trigger a warning message.
“Attention needed,” she tells her crew, “Disturbance to hull at frame seven.”
The radar display is crowded with labels now. The smaller objects continue to drift further and further away. Blip-A remains at 217 meters.
With no external or internal changes, she loops through her normal processes. Life support runs to keep herself habitable. Navigation and spin drives operate in tandem to keep her in orbit. Astrophage feeds her generator to power her computer and sensors. All systems normal.
✦☉✦
In the control room, she creates a notification in the communications display. Abnormal signal activity detected in the X, C bands. Beginning signal analysis. She runs through a preset checklist of tests, looking for indicators that the signal is more than random noise. Soon enough, she’s done. She updates the notification on screen: Analysis complete. Likelihood of random signal: <5%. Beginning recording.
Silently, she records the incoming signals to her memory. If human ears were to listen, it would sound like music.