“Oh, right,” I say. I forgot that’s how it got its name.

I’m 4,000 kilometers away—the very edge of radar range. I bring up the telescope view, but I can’t see anything, even at the highest magnification. The telescope was made for finding celestial bodies hundreds or thousands of kilometers across, not a spaceship a few hundred meters long.

I creep closer. The object’s velocity with respect to Tau Ceti is about right for Rocky’s ship. Roughly the speed he would have gotten to around the time his engines died.

I could take a bunch of readings and do math to work out its course, but I have an easier plan.

I thrust for a few minutes here, a few minutes there, slowing down and speeding up until I match the object’s velocity. It’s still 4,000 kilometers away, but now the relative velocity to me is almost zero. Why do this? Because the Hail Mary is very good at telling me about its own course.

I bring up the Nav console and tell it to calculate my current orbit. After some stargazing and calculation, the computer tells me exactly what I wanted to hear: The Hail Mary is on a hyperbolic trajectory. That means I’m not in orbit at all. I’m on an escape vector, leaving Tau Ceti’s gravity influence entirely.

And that means the object I’m tracking is also on an escape vector. You know what objects in a solar system don’t do? They don’t escape the star’s gravity. Anything going fast enough to escape did so billions of years ago. Whatever this is, it’s no normal asteroid.

“Yes yes yes yes…” I say. I kick the spin drives on and head toward the contact. “I’m comin’, buddy. Hold tight.”

When I’m within 500 kilometers, I finally get some resolution on the object. All I see is a highly pixelated triangle. It’s four times as long as it is wide. It’s not much information, but it’s enough. It’s the Blip-A. I know the profile well.

I have a bag of Ilyukhina’s vodka handy for just such an occasion. I take a sip from the zip-straw. I cough and wheeze. Dang, she liked her liquor rough.

Rocky’s ship sits 50 meters off my starboard side. I came up really carefully—I don’t want to cross an entire solar system just to accidentally vaporize him with my engines. I’ve matched velocities to within a few centimeters per second.

It’s been almost three months since we parted. From the outside, the Blip-A looks the same as it always has. But something is definitely wrong.

I’ve tried everything to communicate. Radio. Flashes of spin-drive light. Nothing gets a response.

I get a sinking feeling. What if Rocky’s dead? He was all alone in there. What if all heck broke loose while he was in a sleep cycle? Eridians don’t wake up until their bodies are ready. What if the life-support system went offline while he was asleep and he just… never woke up?

What if he died of radiation sickness? All that Astrophage that was protecting him from radiation turned into methane and Taumoeba. Eridians are very susceptible to radiation. It might have happened so fast he didn’t have a chance to react.