Page 52 of Project Hail Mary

The flash becomes a solid light source. It’s just…“on” now. Nonstop.

I peer at the screen. “What…what’s going on here?…”

The light source becomes brighter. Not instantly. Just gradually over time. I watch for a minute. It seems to get brighter faster now.

Is it an object headed toward me?

An instant hypothesis pops into my mind: Maybe Astrophage are somehow attracted to other Astrophage? Maybe some subset of them saw the flare from my engines, which would be the wavelength they use, and they headed toward me. Maybe this is how they find the main migration group? So this could be a clump of Astrophage headed my way, thinking I can lead them to the planet with the carbon dioxide?

Interesting theory. Nothing to back it up, though.

The steady light grows brighter, brighter, brighter, and then finally disappears.

“Huh,” I say. I wait a few minutes, but the light does not return.

“Hmm….” I make a mental note of the anomaly. But for now there’s nothing I can do about it. Whatever it was, it’s gone now.

Back to the Petrova line. The first thing I want to do is find out which planet the line leads to. I guess I’ll have to work out how to navigate the ship, but that’s another challenge.

I pan back to look at the Petrova line. Something’s wrong now. Half of it is just…gone.

It’s coming out of Tau Ceti, just like it was a few minutes ago, but then it stops abruptly at a seemingly arbitrary point in space.

“What is going on?”

Did I mess up their migration pattern, maybe? If it’s that easy, wouldn’t we have worked that out when theHail Marywas wandering around our own solar system?

I zoom in on the cutoff point. It’s just a straight line. Like someone took an X-Acto knife to the whole Petrova line and threw away the scrap.

A giant line of migrating Astrophage doesn’t just disappear. I have a simpler explanation: There’s something on the camera lens. Some blob of debris. Maybe a wad of overexcitable Astrophage. That would be nice. I’d have a sample to look at right away!

Maybe a visible-light view will give me a better idea of what’s going on. I press the toggle button.

And that’s when I see it.

There is an object blocking my view of the Petrova line. It’s right next to my ship. Maybe a few hundred meters away. It’s roughly triangle-shaped and it has gable-like protrusions along its hull.

Yes. I said hull. It’s not an asteroid—the lines are too smooth; too straight. This object was made. Fabricated. Constructed. Shapes like that don’t occur in nature.

It’s a ship.

Another ship.

There’s another ship in this system with me. Those flashes of light—those were its engines. It’s Astrophage-powered. Just like theHail Mary. But the design, the shape—it’s nothing like any spacecraft I’ve ever seen. The whole thing is made of huge, flat surfaces—the worst possible way to make a pressure vessel. No one in their right mind would make a ship that shape.

No one on Earth would, anyway.

I blink a few times at what I’m seeing. I gulp.

This…this is an alien spacecraft. Made by aliens. Aliens intelligent enough to make a spacecraft.

Humanity isn’t alone in the universe. And I’ve just met our neighbors.

“Holy fucking shit!”

A flood of thoughts hit me all at the same time: We’re not alone. This is an alien. That ship is weird, how does the engineering of that work? Do they live here? Is this their star? Am I starting an interplanetary incident by wandering into alien territory?!

“Breathe,” I tell myself.