Sampling Chain Construction

Faced with the impossibility of reaching the Astrophage breeding grounds ten kilometers inside Adrian's atmosphere, Ryland Grace and Rocky devised an audacious plan: build a ten-kilometer chain, attach a sampling device to its end, and drag it through the breeding zone while the Hail Mary maintained a precarious angled thrust to stay aloft. The chain would be made of xenonite, the near-indestructible material Rocky had brought from his ship, and the sampler would be a steel sphere designed to seal itself at the correct altitude. The plan was simple in concept but staggering in execution, requiring two hundred thousand individual links, each five centimeters long, to be fabricated and assembled over two weeks of relentless labor.

Design and Fabrication

Grace used the ship's mill to create aluminum molds for the chain links, while Rocky mixed xenonite liquids to cast the links in batches. The process followed a geometric progression: every new mold Grace made allowed Rocky to produce one more link per batch. They worked eight hours a day for two weeks, connecting links by hand or claw, until they had ten kilometers of chain. Grace stored the chain on large spools mounted to the Hail Mary's hull during a series of EVAs, each spool holding five hundred meters. The final assembly required him to connect all twenty spools while wearing his EVA suit, using a manipulator device originally designed for microbiology work. Rocky fabricated the sampler probe: a twenty-centimeter steel sphere with perforations along its equator leading to a hollow inner chamber, a pressure sensor to detect the breeding altitude, an actuator to seal the chamber, and a thermometer and heater to maintain the captured air's temperature. A small radio transmitter broadcast the sampler's status to Rocky's receiver.

The Descent Maneuver

Grace calculated that the Hail Mary would need to slow its orbital velocity from 12.6 kilometers per second to just over 100 meters per second, then tilt to a 60-degree angle from horizontal while thrusting constantly away from the planet to avoid falling into the atmosphere. The spin drives could not be used in the atmosphere itself—the IR blast would create a fireball—so the chain would dangle straight down while the ship's engines fired at an angle, keeping the chain clear of the exhaust. Grace piloted the ship manually, making constant adjustments as the planet's gravity pulled at the vessel. The atmosphere behind the engines glowed red-hot as the IR light ionized the air, and the ship's hull temperature rose dangerously. The Life Support panel flashed warnings as the reflected heat bounced back at the Hail Mary, but the Astrophage coolant lines running along the hull absorbed the excess energy.

Deployment and Recovery

Rocky released the spools one at a time, each dropping and unwinding before the next was ejected. The sampler descended through the atmosphere, its radio signal confirming increasing air density. When it reached the breeding zone—0.02 atmospheres of pressure at 91.2 kilometers altitude—the actuator sealed the chamber, trapping the local air and any life within it. Grace then had to retrieve the sampler while the ship remained in its precarious hovering state. He suited up for an EVA in 1.4 g's of gravity, a condition no part of the suit or training had been designed for, and walked across the hull to the chain anchor point. Rocky had built a winch that could separate the chain links one by one, letting them fall into the planet below while the sampler rose. Grace operated the winch from the hull, watching the chain rise for over thirty minutes until the sampler appeared. He grabbed it and scrambled back to the airlock just as the ship began to shudder and tilt, its hull damaged by the reflected heat from the atmosphere. The chain and sampler were safely aboard, and the Hail Mary escaped Adrian's gravity well, though not without sustaining critical damage to its fuel tanks and nearly killing both crew members.