Chapter 19

Summary

• Rocky struggled with understanding relativity but accepted it after observing evidence related to his trip.
• The characters spent a significant amount of time making a chain for their project, producing ten kilometers of chain.
• The process of chain production and assembly was laborious and a dominant feature of their work, becoming a bit of an obsession.
• In space, they found assembling chain in zero gravity to be difficult and stored 500-meter chunks of it on spools mounted to the ship's hull.
• The character Rocky engineered a sampler probe to gather atmospheric samples with a design that seals the chamber when the correct altitude is reached and maintains the sample's temperature.
• The probe included a radio transmitter for data transmission, which the protagonist couldn't decode but Rocky could with his equipment.
• The pilot initiates a carefully controlled descent, using the ship's engines to slow their velocity and maintain the right altitude for releasing the probe.
• The ship left a trail of destruction in the atmosphere due to the intense heat from the engines, leading to concerns about the effects of the heat on the ship and crew.
• After successfully deploying the probe and retrieving an air sample from the target altitude, the protagonist now faced the challenge of collecting the probe in gravity while wearing a spacesuit.
• The protagonist had to manually winch the chain to retrieve the sample, designed to disconnect links to avoid tangles as the chain was pulled up.
• Rocky provided moral support and monitoring tasks as the protagonist performed the dangerous EVA to retrieve the probe.
• Rocking moments on the ship signaled an unexpected problem while the protagonist was outside retrieving the sample.
• Upon returning inside the ship with the sample, the protagonist found the ship was experiencing undue gravitational force, jeopardizing its structure and the crew.
• They discovered thrust was being generated by escaping Astrophage fuel, which reacted to the planet Adrian's presence, causing the ship to accelerate uncontrollably.
• The protagonist attempted to jettison the compromised fuel bays to stop the erratic thrust, but instead introduced a new, dangerous spin to the ship.
• With the ship's structural integrity in question, the situation became critical as the gravitational force pinned the protagonist to their seat.
• A hazardous chemical breach from the lab, likely ammonia, added to the chaos as a fire started from overheated components.
• In a desperate rescue effort, Rocky entered the protagonist's partition to save them from suffocation, sacrificing himself in the process.
• Rocky braved the damage in an attempt to save the protagonist and both of their planets, but collapsed, showing signs of severe thermal damage to his body.