So yeah. Rocky is in a hurry.

It takes him just two hours to disassemble Paul and understand most of how he works. This was no easy task—before we passed Paul into Rocky’s area of the ship, we had to make a special “cooling box.” The beetles have plastic parts inside that would melt in Rocky’s air. A big lump of Astrophage took care of that. Astrophage may be too hot for humans to touch, but it’s cool enough that plastic won’t melt, and of course it has no problem absorbing the extra heat and keeping things at 96 degrees Celsius.

Paul has a lot of electronics and circuitry inside. Rocky doesn’t follow that too well—Eridian electronics isn’t nearly so advanced as Earth’s. They haven’t invented the transistor yet, let alone IC chips. Working with Rocky is like having the world’s best engineer from 1950 on the ship with me.

Seems odd that a species could invent interstellar travel before inventing the transistor, but hey, Earth invented nuclear power, television, and even did several space launches before the transistor.

An hour later, he’s bypassed all the computer controls. He doesn’t need to understand them to bypass them—it’s just a matter of knowing what wires to directly apply voltage to. He jerry-rigged the spin drive to be activated by an audio-driven remote control. Pretty much everywhere humans use radio for short-range digital communication, Eridians use sound.

He repeats the process for Ringo and John. This time it’s much faster, because there’s no research effort. That leaves George unmodified. The little beetles don’t have much thrust, so the more of them we use the better, but I have to draw a line somewhere. I want to keep one safely in reserve, unmodified, ready to fulfill its original mission.

Thanks to Rocky, I might just survive this suicide mission, but there are no guarantees. The Hail Mary is in bad shape, to say the least. Several fuel tanks are gone, there’s damage and leaks all over the place. There are Taumoeba sneaking around waiting to eat whatever replacement fuel Rocky gives me. I can count at least a hundred ways the trip home might fail. So, before I set out, I’m going to send George on his way with all my findings and some Taumoeba aboard. I would much rather have kept two in reserve, but we need three beetles to be able to vector the thrust so we can angle the ship whatever direction we need.

Rocky passes the three modified beetles through the dormitory airlock to my side.

“You mount on hull,” he says. “Aim forty-five degrees out away from centerline of ship.”

“Understand.” I sigh. Another EVA on a spinning ship. Yay.

But what else can I do? We can’t zero the rotation without thrust.

I do the EVA. The only hard part is getting to the right place. The airlock is near the nose, and I need to mount the beetles on the rear section. And the ship is currently divided into two halves connected by nothing but five cables. But the designers of the Hail Mary thought of this. There are loops all along the cables that you can attach a tether to.