The Astrophage coils in the mini-farms will protect the Taumoeba from radiation, and I did thorough tests to make sure both the farms and the life inside could handle the massive acceleration that beetles use. They’ll be back at Earth in a couple of years from their point of view. About thirteen years, from Earth’s time frame.

I bring the spin drives back online and continue on course.

Finding a spaceship “somewhere just outside the Tau Ceti system” is no small task. Imagine being given a rowboat and told to find a toothpick “somewhere in the ocean.” It’s like that, but nowhere near as easy.

I know his course and I know he followed it. But I don’t know when his engines conked out. I only checked up on him once a day. Right now, I’m smack-dab in the center of my “best guess” for his position and I’ve matched my best guess on his velocity. But that’s only the beginning. I have a heck of a search ahead of me.

I wish I had tracked him more often. Because I don’t know the exact time his engines died, the margin of error on my guess is about 20 million kilometers. That’s about one-eighth the distance between the Earth and the sun. It’s a distance so large it takes light a full minute to traverse it. That’s the best I can do with the information I have.

Frankly, I’m lucky the error margin is so small. If the Taumoeba had escaped a month later, it would have been exponentially worse. And all this is going on at the edge of the Tau Ceti system. Barely the beginning of the trip. The distance between Tau Ceti and Earth is over four thousand times the width of the entire Tau Ceti system.

Space is big. It’s… so, so big.

So yeah. I’m extremely lucky to have only 20 million kilometers to search.

“Hmm,” I mumble.

This far away from Tau Ceti, his ship won’t be reflecting much Taulight. There’s no chance I’d spot the Blip-A with my telescope.

Side note: I’m going to die.

“Stop,” I say. Whenever I think about my impending death, I think about Rocky instead. He must have a sense of hopelessness right now. I’m coming, buddy.

“Wait…”

I’m sure he’s sad, but he’s also not one to mope for long. He’ll be working on a solution. What would he do? His whole species is on the line and he doesn’t know I’m coming. He wouldn’t just kill himself, right? He’d do anything he could think of, even if it would have only a tiny percent chance of success.