I did three hours of thrust to get us going, and I’ll do another three when we get to Tau Ceti e to slow down. Right now, we’re cruising along at 162 kilometers per second. It’s just ridiculous. If you left Earth at that speed, you’d get to the moon in forty minutes.

This entire maneuver, including the burn I’ll have to do to slow down at the end, will consume 130 kilograms of fuel.

Astrophage. Crazy stuff.

Rocky stands in a bulb of clear xenonite in the floor of the control room.

“Boring name,” Rocky says.

“What? What name is boring?” I ask.

He’d spent days building up the Eridian Zone throughout the ship. He even installed his own new tunnels from deck to deck. It’s like having giant hamster Habitrails running everywhere.

He shifts his weight from one handhold to another. “Tau Ceti e. Boring name.”

“Then give it a name.”

“Me name? No. You name.”

“You were here first.” I unclip my seatbelts and stretch out. “You identified it. You plotted its orbit and location. You name it.”

“This is you ship. You name.”

I shake my head. “Earth-culture rule. If you’re at a place first, you get to name everything you discover there.”

He thinks it over.

Xenonite is truly amazing. Just a centimeter of transparent material separates my one-fifth atmosphere of oxygen pressure from Rocky’s 29 atmospheres of ammonia. Not to mention my 20 degrees Celsius from Rocky’s 210 degrees Celsius.

He’s taken over more of some rooms than others. The dormitory is almost entirely his domain now. I insisted he move all his crap into his compartment, so we agreed he could have most of the space in there.

He also put a large airlock in the dormitory. He based it on the size of the Hail Mary’s airlock on the assumption that anything important in the ship would likely be small enough to fit through that. I can’t ever go into his zone. My EVA suit would never stand up to his environment. I’d get squished like a grape. The airlock is really so we can pass items back and forth.

The lab is mostly mine. He has a tunnel leading up the side and another teeing off to run along the ceiling and ultimately through the ceiling into the control room. He can observe any of the scientific stuff I do. But in the end, Earth equipment wouldn’t work in his environment, so it has to be in mine.

As for the control room… it’s tight. Rocky put the xenonite bulb in the floor next to the hatchway. He really did try to keep the intrusion to a minimum. He assures me the holes he added to my bulkheads won’t affect the ship’s structural integrity.

“Okay,” he finally says. “Name is ♫♩♪♫.”