Each arm’s three-fingered “hand” is holding… something. A curved bar with a flat plate attached on the ends. Like a coffee-mug handle. Three of the arms reach the Hail Mary and stick the flat parts of their devices to the hull. Shortly after, the other two arms do the same. Then, all five retract, pulling the Hail Mary toward the tunnel.

Okay. So those flat things are handles. How are they attached? Good question! My hull is smooth and made of nonmagnetic aluminum (why do I remember that all of a sudden?). The handles certainly aren’t connected by any mechanical means. Must be an adhesive.

And it all starts to make sense.

Of course they aren’t going to work out how the docking mechanism works. They’re going to glue one end of the tunnel to my ship. Why not? Much simpler.

My ship groans. It’s a 100,000-kilogram piece of equipment that was definitely not designed to be pulled along by its airlock. Will the hull put up with this?

I double-check the seals on my EVA suit.

The control room moves around me. It’s not fast—just a few centimeters per second. Hey, for small spaceship velocities I think in metric! Much better than “cubits per fortnight” or whatever.

I let the wall catch up to me. At some lizard-brain level, I like being a little farther from the airlock. Some scary stuff is going on over there.

Clunk.

The Eridian tunnel has hit the hull. Clicks and scrapes follow. I watch the hull camera feeds.

The mouth of the tunnel, now firmly held to the airlock aperture, is larger than the entire airlock door. I guess that’s that. Presuming the glue will hold pressure. They don’t even know what my atmospheric pressure is. What’s the glue made of? So many questions.

I can’t operate the control-room panels with my EVA suit gloves. I wish I could zoom in or something. I squint at one of the feeds showing the tunnel. It sure looks tight against the hull to me. There’s some curvature to the hull around that spot. Kind of a complicated shape to make, but the Eridians duplicated it perfectly.

After another minute, the robot arms let go of their handles, leaving them on the hull.

A muffled sound comes from the airlock. It’s a whooshing sound. Is that airflow? They’re pressurizing the tunnel!

My heart races. Can my hull handle this? What if their air dissolves aluminum? What if aluminum is highly toxic to Eridians and one whiff of it kills them instantly? This is a terrible idea!

The whooshing stops.

I gulp.

They’re done. Nothing dissolved yet. I float over to the airlock for a look-see.

I had both airlock doors sealed, of course. More protection in case of a breach. I open the inner door and float inside. I peek out the porthole window.