Chapter 18

Chapter 18 — "Saving Rocky"

TL;DR: Grace stabilizes the Hail Mary's spin, saves the precious Adrian sample, and improvises a ammonia-flush procedure to clear oxygen from Rocky's vents — bringing his alien friend back from the edge of death.

Summary: Grace fights through nausea and fading vision to nurse the centrifuge back into balance. With the ship no longer killing him, he turns to Rocky. Eridian respiration runs through carapace vents, and oxygen has effectively cauterized them shut. Working from notes Rocky drew earlier, Grace flushes the vents with high-pressure ammonia, scrubs the sphere of contamination, re-seals the crack with epoxy and a xenonite patch, and waits. It takes hours. Rocky stirs. Grace also, almost as an afterthought, secures the Adrian sample bucket — the chain held, the contents are intact. They have what they came for: a planet's worth of air that may contain the predator that eats Astrophage.

Key scenes:

• Grace alone, panel by panel, talking the centrifuge back into trim
• A tense ammonia-flush procedure — Grace in a partial pressure suit, hands inside Rocky's cracked sphere
• Rocky's first twitch of motion as a leg flexes
• The Adrian sample bucket secured in the lab — a small dark cylinder full of ochre dust

Characters present: Ryland Grace, Rocky

Locations / settings:

• The Hail Mary main compartment in post-disaster cleanup — scorch marks, hand-welded patches
• The cracked-and-now-patched xenonite sphere
• The lab, with the Adrian sample contained

Visual motifs: Grace as a small white-suited figure leaning into a faintly-glowing alien sphere, a single canister of ochre dust rendered as a hard isolated subject, gestural ammonia-vapor swirls echoing the cover's gold streaks but in cool amber-white, scorch marks like brushstrokes

Emotional tone: exhausted, tender, relieved, grimly competent

Confidence: high — the ammonia-flush save and the secured Adrian sample are well-attested.