Chapter 22
Chapter 22 — "Power Loss"
TL;DR: A second Taumoeba breach contaminates the Hail Mary's primary fuel and triggers a near-fatal power crisis — Grace and Rocky scramble to identify the leak, contain it, and start designing nitrogen-resistant Taumoeba strains.
Summary: The lights go out. Power across the Hail Mary drops to emergency levels: more Taumoeba have escaped containment and infested the spin-drive's main fuel reserves, and they are eating Astrophage as fast as the ship can pump it. Grace and Rocky split the work: Rocky inside his sphere using his manipulator arms on the generator stack, Grace through the hull crawlspaces with a flashlight. They isolate the contaminated tank, vent it, and re-route fuel from a secondary reservoir. With the ship stable they pivot back to science: how do you build a Taumoeba that can survive in nitrogen? Rocky proposes selective breeding — start with the most nitrogen-tolerant survivors of each round, breed those, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Key scenes:
- The lights cutting out and red emergency strips kicking on along corridors
- Grace in a hull crawlspace with a flashlight, tracing a fuel-line for a leak
- Rocky's sphere illuminated by a generator's interior glow, his manipulator arms working precisely
- A new whiteboard: "Round 1: 0.1% N₂. Survivors → Round 2." A roadmap for an evolutionary climb
Characters present: Ryland Grace, Rocky
Locations / settings:
- Hail Mary corridors and crawlspaces under emergency-only lighting
- The generator room
- The lab, post-stabilization, with new selective-breeding plan on the whiteboard
Visual motifs: red emergency strip-lighting cutting across black corridors, a flashlight cone illuminating fuel-lines, Rocky's lit sphere as a warm orange node in a dark machine bay, the gold-on-black palette pushed into red-on-black momentarily before resolving back
Emotional tone: urgent, technical, grimly partnered, strategic
Confidence: high — the Taumoeba fuel contamination and the start of selective-breeding work are well-attested.