Chapter 10

Chapter 10 — "First Sight of Rocky"

TL;DR: The aliens use sonar instead of light, and behind a sealed honeycomb wall Grace finally sees his counterpart — a five-legged, eyeless, carapaced engineer holding a tiny model of a human spaceman.

Summary: The tube is finished. It does not allow atmosphere to mix; instead it has a sealed transparent hex-wall at the midpoint — a honeycomb-patterned barrier engineered to test air compatibility chamber by chamber. Grace floats up to it. On the other side, lit dimly by warm orange-red light, is a creature: roughly the size of a Labrador but built like an armored, five-legged spider, its rocky-looking carapace gray-brown with subtle shifts, no visible eyes, mouthparts/manipulators clustered on the underside. It has placed against the glass a tiny scale-model figure that is unmistakably a human astronaut. It "sees" by passive sonar — clicks and a high-bandwidth echo response. Grace, in his head, names it Rocky. They are two engineers with no shared sound, no shared light, no shared air, and an enormous problem to solve together.

Key scenes:

• Grace drifting through the final airlock and into the docking-tube interior
• The first eye-level view of the hex-wall — a honeycomb of glass cells faintly glowing
• Rocky's silhouette resolving on the far side, lit by warm red glow
• The tiny model spaceman pressed against the glass — the first conscious gesture of "I see you"
• Grace pressing his own gloved hand to a different cell of the hex-wall

Characters present: Ryland Grace, Rocky (first appearance)

Locations / settings:

• The interior of the docking tube — pale walls, sealed hex-wall barrier at the midpoint
• The Eridian half of the tube — backlit in warm orange-red, dimmer, higher-pressure

Visual motifs: honeycomb-grid hex-wall as a strong geometric pattern, a pale white astronaut on one side / a small dark armored spider-shape on the other, Rocky's body as a black-against-amber silhouette echoing the cover's gold-on-black DNA, the tiny model spaceman as a hard white cutout

Emotional tone: awed, careful, profoundly lonely-in-company, hopeful

Confidence: high — Rocky's first appearance through the hex-wall, including the model-spaceman gesture, is consistent across all summaries.