Chapter Text
The man before her sighs deeply, pinching the bridge of his nose. She senses that he is almost steeling himself against the words he has to say. Peculiar, she thinks, for an apparent scientist to be so reluctant to admit the truth.
“You want Doctor Grace,” he mutters. “Ryland Grace.”
He sounds miserable, like pronouncing the name alone causes him physical pain.
She raises an eyebrow, making a note of the name on her tablet without glancing at the screen.. “Why wasn’t his name on your original shortlist?”
The biologist, his gaze almost heavy, meets her eyes at last. If she didn’t know better, she would call his look despairing. But despair would be ridiculous, given the circumstances, and completely unwarranted. He’d called her at five in the morning to ask for this meeting, insisting on its urgency in light of the Petrova sample’s arrival.
“You didn’t-” he starts, then reconsiders. “When I made you that list, I had no reason to believe the Petrova line was actually alive. That was months ago. Circumstances have changed.”
“So you can tell they’re alive? Just from the publicly-released footage?”
The professor sighs again. She can’t tell whether he’s more annoyed with himself for sharing Dr. Grace’s name, or with her for rushing him into the entire through-line of inquiry in the field of astrobiology. “Of course not. Not definitively. There will be tests to run. But from that footage alone -- the way they’re moving, where they’re coming from…” He rubs a hand over his face, almost burying his head in it, then apparently thinking better of the reaction. “If there’s even a chance that those things are alive and surviving on the surface of the sun, you will want Dr. Grace to be the one to handle them first.”
“Why not put him on the shortlist to begin with, then?” she presses. He’s burying the lead. “You’ve wasted time calling me back here; we could’ve already had him on site, ready before those samples splashed down-”
“He called me, and I quote, ‘a staggering waste of carbon’ at the UNESCO conference in Denmark, back in 2018.” Ah. “The paper he presented there was virtually a smear campaign. It was personal. There must have been seven others he called out by name in ten minutes. He lost his position at Berkeley shortly thereafter.”
Now she ventures a glance at the search engine results for his name. A LinkedIn page. A middle school website. A few images from a local paper, apparently from an article about a STEM discovery summer camp. But his dissertation title she has to dig for. Evidently, he is not proud of it, nor even of his doctorate degree if his LinkedIn is any indication. When it eventually surfaces, blinking up at her from the annals of the Berkley molecular biology department website, the words themselves cut the fog of artificial mediocrity like a knife. An Analysis of Water-Based Assumptions and Recalibrations of Expectations for Evolutionary Models.
“So he…doesn’t believe water is required for life?”
“No, he does not.”
“And you fired him for it?” She hopes her tone conceals her irritation. This is not the first time a man’s bruised ego has cheated her out of a shortcut. None of them understand, not really, not yet, how the clock in her mind never stops ticking. She supposes she should stop faulting them for it at some point. There was a reason the world had made her shoulders the soft landing place for its burdens, and not those of this biologist, or that politician, or that other engineer.
“No, his ideas were -- not orthodox, certainly, but not outlandish either. We dismissed him for the…incident at the UNESCO conference in Denmark.”
She blinks at him and hits the download link for Ryland Grace’s dissertation. Doctor Ryland Grace. Has there ever been a more American name? In all her studies of history, she can’t recall one. “You’d think he started a brawl, from how you’ve described it.”
The file finishes loading, and she stands. The clock in her mind ticks ceaselessly. “Thank you for your help, Doctor. I’m sure we’ll be in touch again.”
He almost cringes, but salvages a nod instead. “Director Stratt. I hope…”
She glances back, momentarily pausing before she hits send on the message she’s writing to Carl and her team outside: Please print and bind this document in the library ASAP, and give the front office at Grover Cleveland Middle School a call. Address attached.
“I hope he’s able to find what you’re looking for. For all of our sakes, I mean.”
She twists her mouth in a facsimile of a smile and nods by way of reply, already chasing the echoes of the ticking clock in her mind out the door of the office, across the bay to Grover Cleveland Middle School, across the stars to Venus.
-
It is well after dismissal time when they arrive at the middle school, but she’s already been assured by the office staff that Dr. Grace -- they keep calling him “Mr. Grace,” a detail she immediately notices and chalks up to no one in the building even knowing about his sordid, tragic past in molecular astrobiology -- will be around grading papers for at least another half hour, in room 119. The drive over afforded her enough time to thumb through his ill-fated dissertation. It didn’t take more than a glance, really, even for a historian sorely lacking the technical chops to understand the biology of it all, to realize just the sort of person she would be dealing with. The literature review of the dissertation was titled, without preamble, “Everyone is Wrong about Life in the Universe,” followed by the even more colorful first section of his work, page thirty-one: “The Goldilocks Zone is for Idiots: Why Everyone is Wrong about Life.” Frankly, his headings all suggested that he was writing clickbait for middle school readers, so much so that she kept double-checking his LinkedIn to make sure that he had, in fact, started teaching middle school long after he defended this particular piece of writing.
She stops in front of room 119, the slender window affording her just enough of an aperture to both observe Dr. Grace and keep herself hidden for a moment before she opens the door. She’s obviously seen him before, in the newspaper photographs and the sparse available pictures of him from other sources online; has intelligence officers already running a full background check and personality profile to be delivered to her inbox no later than 6pm this evening, but she was put to this task on account of her own judgement, and she will not be caught leaping before she looks. So she looks.
Dr. Grace is staring at his classroom ceiling, itself laden with colorful labeled models of cells and comets and what looks like the solar system. Without question it is a labor of love, plastered with handwritten didactics and finished off with a slapdash Petrova line made of electrical tape. His glasses are too far down his nose for him to see comfortably, she thinks, and his hair looks like unkempt straw. In jeans at work on a Tuesday.
No preamble, then. “Knock, knock.”
She expects him to look at her, of course, but does not expect the openness in his gaze. Who studies a stranger with laughing eyes?
“Who’s there?”
“Not good at jokes.”
“Not good at jokes, who?” He still hasn’t adjusted his glasses, glancing at her from over the frames rather than simply pushing them two centimeters back to where they belong. It bothers her unreasonably. She opens her hands, half shrug, half self-introduction, and settles herself in front of his desk.
“Doctor Grace.”
The title steals the laughter right out of his eyes. She watches it vanish.
“Maybe.”
“Eva Stratt. I’m with the Petrova Taskforce. I need your help.”
Doctor Grace spends the next several minutes in a valiant endeavor to avoid her. Or rather, to avoid her implication that his skills could be anything other than pedestrian, or relevant to anything more consequential than teaching at Grover Cleveland Middle.
She spends the next several minutes cataloguing his every move. Attempting to catalogue. She finds his classroom exceedingly distracting, almost loud. The windows that cast rainbows across the whiteboard. The basket of odd little beanbags on his desk (made of “lava”). The makeshift Petrova line. It’s almost a relief when he rushes out and forces her to follow him. She feels better outside, more like the ground and the mercifully empty sky are her turf, unmarked and impersonal. Forces of nature, not labors of love.
“I think you do care,” she says. No one with a classroom like that, who looks at an unannounced stranger the way you looked at me, is capable of apathy. “You’re just running away because you’re scared.”
He picks up the pace, almost running across the wet asphalt. “No, I’m not.”
“Do you still believe water is unnecessary for life to evolve?” Why are his glasses still so askew? How is he going to ride a bike like that?
He is answering her, but he can barely meet her eyes. Nervous. Still. Like a cornered animal. She finds herself wishing he would. She felt better somehow about taking him away from that room she could tell was indelibly his, from his labors of love, when he looked at her with the ghost of a laugh in his eyes.
When he does look at her again, a gaze finally long enough for her to hold, he is already busy drawing up another litany of excuses. He wears them like armor. It frustrates her. She knows he cannot hear the clock, the countdown in her mind (not yet), but she wants so badly to force his hand, to take the laughter or the American kindness or whatever it was out of his open-book face and replace it with revelation, with the weight of knowing what comes next --
“I need you to come with us,” she says. It’s the best she can do.
It’s all that it takes, in the end.
-
Once he’s soundly defeated his own theory with nothing more than a room full of argon, a needle, and a centrifuge, she leaves. Doctor Grace is one of three hundred and forty-seven equally skilled, equally valuable biologists tasked with learning everything there is to know about astrophage. He had named it, but could lay no claim to the knowledge beyond the moniker.
Leaving him to his dots and his lab equipment lifts a weight from her, though given the sheer magnitude of everything else -- the calls, the meetings, the late-night negotiations in secret, in five languages, the daily knitting together of a world that had spent so long tearing itself asunder -- she hardly notices. He was the last and most controversial of the scientists on her shortlist, the only one she’d had to convince to his face, and the only one who nearly refused. It was a relief to have him on board, his ego in tatters and his theories on water-based life with it.
She expects to forget everything about him except his name, and possibly his classroom ceiling.
When an unknown number lights up her phone, less than a week after she settles in on the aircraft carrier that will become the home of Project Hail Mary, she expects (statistically speaking) a call from one of the three hundred and forty-seven other biologists, or the two hundred and thirty-five physicists, or one of the countless engineers, or a particularly bold career diplomat.
“Stratt.”
“Carl and I made a baby.”
In the silence after his declaration, interrupted only by the sound of his breathing several thousand miles away, Stratt registers two truths at the exact same time.
One: the laughter lives in his voice as well as his eyes.
“What?”
“We figured out how astrophage breeds.”
Two: she will never be rid of him now.
-
He makes himself comfortable. That’s what she tells herself, to absolve herself of it. The reality is that it’s almost impossible for anyone on the ship — save one Dr. Caldwell, the “staggering waste of carbon” he’d come after in Denmark six years ago, and his colleague Dr. Lokken — to dislike Doctor Grace. The impending apocalypse simply vanishes when he strides into the growing lab in Hangar One, clad in the most hideous T-shirt the world has ever seen, accessorized with a Twizzler behind his ear. There is only the work, the breakthroughs, and the infuriating way he makes puns out of every third sentence and laughs with his eyes.
After several weeks on the aircraft carrier, she still cannot make up her mind about him. He is undeniably brilliant and exceptionally kind. He has managed to transform from auxiliary to indispensable in a matter of weeks by sheer willpower and scientific acumen; not a soul on board her vessel holds a candle to his knowledge of the inner workings of astrophage, and he spends his days training his ad hoc lab team to think the way he does and bouncing ideas off anyone on the ship who will listen.
She already finds herself anticipating his presence in almost every conference call, every meeting, every debrief. There is a silence in the shape of a smile when he’s absent, and she’s starting to think that her colleagues notice it. Stratt pays the price for all the Godlike powers vested in her by sweeping into every room accompanied by a deep sense of contagious unease. Dr. Lokken calls it her “unique sense of urgency,” but she prefers to call it what it is. She makes people uncomfortable. It’s her job to make people uncomfortable, to stoke a fire underneath them and force them to act.
Dr. Grace undercuts her urgency. He quiets the ticking of the clock in her head and puts her allies at ease. But when she looks at him too long, the lightness in his shoulders only makes the weight on hers feel heavier, his brightness forcing her shadow to stretch longer and longer with every day.
She hasn’t realized she’s burning a hole in the back of his head in the commissary line until Dr. Dimitri Komorov’s face interrupts her field of vision.
“Dr. Komorov.”
“Dimitri, please,” he corrects, out of habit. She wonders why he bothers anymore; she had hoped her stubborn insistence on using his title would have dissuaded him by this point. He turns his head, tracking her gaze to the back of Dr. Grace’s head.
“Your scientist is delightful,” he says, inclining his head in Dr. Grace’s direction. “Good for morale. And he has absolutely no idea.”
Stratt blinks and furrows her brow. “You mean Dr. Grace?”
Komorov mimics her confused expression, and she nearly dismisses him on the spot for disrespect when he answers, “Yes, I said your scientist. He has been present for every major strategic meeting in the last month. Which other scientist can say the same?”
“You, for one,” she replies, matter-of-factly.
“No, I am an engineer. Not like Grace. I am good for propulsion ideas, but not so much for morale.”
Stratt scoffs. “You talk about him like he’s a therapy dog.”
Komorov guffaws. “This is a very American concept. Therapy dog.”
“He’s a very American scientist.” She shrugs, almost rolling her eyes. Almost. “Find me a more American name than Ryland Grace, I dare you.”
The engineer can’t seem to wipe the smirk off his face. “Look at this. Two weeks aboard and he’s already turning the mighty Director Stratt into a smartass.”
She bristles a little at the implication -- almost imperceptibly, shoulders coming up, back straightening, recentering herself under the weight of saving the world. Dr. Grace has not turned me into anything. He’s just making the bitter pill of this project easier to swallow for the rest of them. “I’m glad he’s settling in. I was concerned for a moment about that, when he got here.”
“He adjusts well. Has come a long way since vomiting into your traffic cone. Why do you avoid him?”
Puzzled, she glances at Komorov sideways. “Avoid him? He’s been at every major meeting we’ve had since the minute he got here. He leads all of the astrophage roundtables.”
Komorov nods in the conciliatory way that tells her he isn’t really listening. “Yes, I know this. But you leave every meeting so quickly. Never take a meal with him. He chases you like a therapy dog just to give updates.”
“Therapy dogs don’t even --” she starts, then thinks better of it. “Dr. Komorov, I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of how pressing the project is. There is little time to entertain socialization.”
It comes out easier than the truth, which is of course that she cannot stand to be in the same room as Dr. Grace more than is absolutely necessary, because if she does she will start to think of the classroom he left behind, of all the evidence she’s collected of how fiercely he loves his life and his students, and will be consumed by guilt, maybe the only force fierce enough to slow her down. And the clock ticks on in her mind. She cannot afford it.
“Yet here you are. You socialize with me, with Dr. Lokken, with the captain of the ship --”
“We’re discussing personnel. Not socializing.”
“Ah, so now we are ‘discussing personnel?’” He makes air quotes with his hands, rather obnoxiously. “And here I thought we were gossiping.”
She sighs. “Did Dr. Grace put you up to this?” It was almost absurdly childish, but she wouldn’t put it past him. “He’s perfectly capable --”
Komorov tuts disapprovingly. “Of course not. This is more like a…” He searches for the words. “Recommendation. To a friend who could maybe use another.”
The engineer smiles. Komorov has always been warm with her. Not like Dr. Grace -- that would be like comparing the sun to a heat lamp -- but as a colleague who, in some small way, can witness and respect the loneliness of the mountain she climbs without trying to change it.
She glances back at Grace, now wearing his glasses under his chin while deep in animated conversation with one of the junior scientists. “I’ll take it under advisement.”
-
She starts to count backwards from thirty in her head after closing out their team meetings the next day. Just to see if Komorov was right. Scientific method. It feels like a small enough adjustment for someone who perpetually counts backwards from infinity towards the end of the world. She’s not slowing down, she’s just naming the ticks on the clock. For the sake of morale.
Much to her chagrin, Komorov’s theory proves itself in under a day. Grace takes to her pointed shuffling for half a minute after a conference like astrophage to sunlight. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he enjoyed her company. Within twenty-four hours, he’s walking beside her instead of behind her and has figured out exactly how she prefers her coffee. For her part, she learns about approximately six different candidates for admixture in the fuel slurry for Komorov’s spin drives before he does, and preempts the supply chain nightmare his chatter alluded to with urgent emails to the energy and mines ministers of some wealthier Gulf states.
All this from ten, twenty, thirty seconds of stillness with him every few hours. At Dimitri Komorov’s recommendation. It was almost concerning.
It goes on like this for weeks, Stratt somehow pushing the project along even faster on account of her new habit of waiting for Grace. She doesn’t ever take Komorov up on his suggestion that she take meals with them. In truth, she rarely eats with anyone. She can’t even remember the last time she ate sitting down. It was probably with Carl, watching the ArcLight samples splash down at the university offices in California, but she can’t recall if she’d even touched the takeout the professor had ordered for them.
So she counts to thirty at the end of every meeting. And a few weeks into this new habit of hers, Grace arrives at her office carrying a banana muffin in one hand, a coffee in the other, ten full minutes before they’re slated to talk to a team of microbiologists in Germany. He’s done a poor job wrapping it -- a trail of crumbs follows him across her office floor to her desk.
“I hope you treat our astrophage more carefully than you treat our food, Dr. Grace.”
He looks almost sheepish when he notices the mess in his wake. “Jeez. Sorry, I was in a hurry. I thought you could use it. The muffins really aren’t bad. Not Twizzlers, for sure, but not bad.”
She raises an eyebrow. “I, uh, would know. I ordered them.”
He shifts his weight in the chair, defensive. “Sure, yeah. Of course.” He nods and pushes the muffin towards her. “Did you read the brief I sent you?”
“I did, but take me through it again. We have a couple of minutes. I wasn’t sure what you were getting at about the light interaction with the cell membrane on page 4, here.” She pushes the paper in question across her desk, oddly fixated on how he pushes the muffin closer to her without even looking up as he takes the page from her hands.
“Oh, sure thing. I mean, what it boils down to is that something in or around the membrane of the astrophage is absorbing all light that touches it. We don’t know what, but we can tell it’s happening. What you highlighted here is just the mathematical proof. I can take over if they ask about that.” He glances up from the page, over the rim of his glasses. She wants to push them up his face and tape them there at this point. It’s patently ridiculous. “Why do you print everything out to read it?”
It strikes her as oddly personal. His questions have a way of making her feel exposed even when they’re simple.
“Redundancy,” she answers straightforwardly.
“But you only annotate the paper copies.”
“Old habit, I guess. I always preferred paper books, too. Ever since I was young.”
He nods, looking almost impressed. “It’s very…historian of you. But not very efficient.”
Her eyes go wide. The audaciousness of Americans could never be lost on her. “Well. I did study history, back before all this.”
“Really? You didn’t tell me that --”
“And I’m sorry, I won’t be taking commentary on my efficiency from an American who only bothers to wear his glasses correctly twenty percent of the time.”
Grace seems like he has a hard time looking at her most of the time. Were he anyone else, she would attribute this to the power difference and never give it a second thought. But it strikes her as odd that she feels like she’s constantly chasing the gaze of someone so evidently beloved by the entire ship, so famously “delightful” in Komorov’s words. She searches his face for a split second before he glances up, eyes veritably sparking when she finally catches them. He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Twenty-five. Give or take.”
She shoots him an unimpressed look. “Please fix it.”
He mimics her expression, but on his features it looks more fond than condescending. “Please eat the muffin.”
Something inside her short-circuits, but she has had years of perfecting her facial neutrality and she knows it betrays nothing. “We have a call, Dr. Grace.”
Hours (and hours) later, the stacks of paper on her desk have expanded precipitously. Grace has migrated to the floor, a Twizzler hanging out of his mouth like a cigarette, laser-focused on a whiteboard crammed with a truly ridiculous math problem that incorporates at least eight Greek letters, by Stratt’s count. The glasses are in his hair. Always with the godforsaken glasses, Stratt. Can we find something else to focus on?
She glances at his shirt and notices a fat cartoon tabby perched on the Golden Gate Bridge. God, he dresses like the president of a middle school robotics club. If she tries to make sense of it for much longer, he’ll catch her staring. Back to the glasses it is then. The glasses, then the emails, then the briefings on her desk that keep multiplying, then the uneaten muffin. She lingers on that one for a moment every time before cycling back to the glasses. It’s almost mocking her.
Back to Grace’s head again, then. “Wouldn’t this be easier for you in the lab, Dr. Grace?” Thirty seconds after a meeting was one thing, but it’s been much longer than that, and her instinct to hold the therapy dog at arm’s length kicks in.
He snaps his head up to look at her, the Twizzler cigarette flopping ridiculously as he does so. “Not really. It’s kind of just math.” He gestures towards the muffin on her desk. “And you haven’t really finished breakfast, so I figured I’d wait for you.” The half-eaten candy muffles his words a bit, but not enough to give her plausible deniability.
“I don’t usually eat breakfast. I appreciate it, though. You should get back to your team--”
“Wait, are you serious? It’s the most important meal of the day!” he chirps, cutting her off.
Baffling. “Personal preference.”
“You can’t be --” She feels the gravity of the conversation shift. He finishes the Twizzler in two bites. “You wake up at four thirty in the morning and you don’t even think to have breakfast?”
“I do not.”
“Christmas Eve.” God. She hates the fake swearing. This cannot be how all middle school teachers talk in the States. “Stratt, it’s been four hours. Eat the dang--” Cringe. “--muffin.”
Grace pauses. He looks at her first this time; a rarity that doesn’t escape her. “Please.”
Stratt looks at the pastry, then at Grace, whose expression is so unadulteratedly earnest that she realizes with a sinking feeling in her gut, that she is possibly the most powerful person currently alive. That she has no obligation to anyone, to anything, beyond the project. And all this being said, she is about to choke down a banana muffin, with walnuts, on the off chance that doing so will both get Grace out of her office now and hold him in her orbit for a while longer.
She hates bananas. The smell of them alone sickens her. Grace has no way of knowing this, of course, and he never will -- she will make sure of that now -- but there was no sense snuffing out the light in his eyes at this moment over something so trivial. And there will be far harder pills to swallow than this one by the time our work is done.
She unwraps the napkin and nods at Grace. Tries not to breathe through her nose. Buries her nose in a file every few moments as she struggles down every bite of the muffin. She thinks of crew morale. She thinks of the blue of his eyes, the kindness of them. She thinks of the glasses.
If the watch captain has any questions about why she instructs him in short order to pull all banana muffins from the breakfast rotation, he has the good sense not to ask them.
That night, before she sleeps, she signs off on the next week’s food shipments. If anyone notices that she’s quietly struck “banana muffins” from the order form, they might wonder why. But the weight of the world has its privileges, and one of them -- small comfort though it may be -- is that they do not ask, and she never has to admit that she did it for the small, selfish hope that Grace would take breakfast with her again, some indeterminate time in the future, before the end of the world.
If she sleeps better with that knowledge, surely no one will notice enough to wonder why.
-
“This is…” She’s not at a loss for words, not exactly. At this exact moment, several in German and Dutch are flooding her mind, none of them diplomatic enough for her present position. She’s not at a loss for words. She just chooses them carefully. “...a disappointment.”
Horseshit, she wants to say. This is utter horseshit, and you know it. “And frankly, just beneath you.”
Grace blinks. He never wears a neutral expression, but what had started as an almost bashful unwillingness to meet her eyes has rapidly devolved into sheer desperation. “Beneath me? Stratt, it’s two weeks' notice.”
What am I, fucking HR? Two weeks notice? Like this is a goddamn office job. “I can read, thank you.”
This could’ve been an email. She wishes he’d just sent her the notice in an email. Then she remembers that he’s spent enough late nights and early mornings with her to know she prefers to hold the pages in her hands, feel the weight of them, as she signs off on the end of the world. He probably saw this as a kindness, printing the letter out and signing it himself and handing it to her alongside a cup of coffee. Very historian, but not very efficient.
“Astrophage production is well ahead of schedule. You’ve got…teams of scientists way smarter than me…”
Oh, fuck off. She takes a deep breath, swallowing the insult. Bitter pill. Always a bitter pill in this business. “I don’t like it when you’re humble. It’s off-putting.”
“You don’t need me anymore.”
A weaker woman would have rolled her eyes. Instead, Stratt schools her mouth into a thin line and hopes she doesn’t sound too much like she’s spitting at him as she chokes out, “So you build something that works, and now you’re quitting?”
“I want to go home.”
The first image that pops into her mind is, almost cruelly, the moment he arrived on this ship and had described the reaction of an interstellar microorganism to the spectral signature of carbon dioxide with “whoop, there it is” to a room full of preeminent scientists. Whoop, there it is. Don’t we all, Dr. Grace?
There is a meanness to her gaze now, she’s sure of it. She wasted months of time trying to build this idiot genius of a man into a second-in-command the project could be proud of. She had dragged him to the table when he wouldn’t sit there himself, and now that he was leading them, he wanted to quit. Because he was -- what? Homesick?
It disgusts her. The smallest, pettiest, loneliest voice in her mind whispers insistently: if I can’t quit, you don’t get to, either. But even that she brings to heel, almost instantaneously. We will launch with or without him. There is no real reason for him to have the kind of power you’ve given him, aside from his particular brand of unassuming charm and his intellect. And we have intellect in spades.
Grace’s mouth is still moving, but she’s stopped listening completely. She thinks if she hears him complain about creature comforts or try to pull some line about the good of his students, she’ll lose her composure entirely. Almost predictably, she focuses on his glasses instead. They’ve fallen just far enough down the bridge of his nose to bother her again. She lets the familiarity of the frustration ground her. He’s talking about baseball and ice cream. I’m going to lose my mind.
A sharp sigh from him breaks her concentration, and he mercifully pushes the glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “You aren’t listening to me.”
I am not. If I listen to you, I will lose my mind.
“You’ve somehow talked yourself into believing your sacrifices are heavier than the rest of ours,” she says, with as little inflection as she can muster.
Grace responds like she’s slapped him. He actually steps backward, reeling, dragging a hand across his face. “I -- what?”
“You’re a brilliant scientist, Dr. Grace,” she plows ahead. “Your systems are sound; your breeder equipment works beautifully; it’s scalable.”
He sputters. “Stratt. You can’t -- I don’t want you to think that I’m doing this because I’m --”
“Oh, absolutely not.” Anger scratches at her throat, insistent, threatening the steadiness of her tone. “No. You don’t get to walk away and then lecture me about what you do or don’t want me to think of you for it.”
His eyes are swimming. She can’t decide if she hates him or herself more, at this moment. She hates him for abandoning humanity when it so blatantly needs him. She hates herself for being too angry to let him go quietly, professionally, the way he deserves.
“Here is how this is going to go,” she begins, exhaling slowly, deliberately, bringing the rage to heel. “I will accept this. I will accept it because you cannot give this project what it needs. Not because you want to go home, or because you miss the baseball games. Those are pitiful excuses.”
He tries to interject again, his voice thick: “It’s not the specifics, Stratt, it’s…”
“The summation of experience.” And this time, she nearly spits in his face. “You miss life. But you don’t miss it enough to save it.”
Grace puts his face in his hands. She wonders, briefly, why this is so distressing for him. Surely he cannot have expected this to go any other way.
“I will let you walk away,” Stratt continues, more measured, “because you are weak, and selfish. And I have no use for cowards on this project.”
She stands, abandoning the coffee he’d brought with him to grow cold on her desk.
“I appreciate the two weeks’ notice, Dr. Grace, but I’ll have a jet ready for you this afternoon.”
Stratt leaves the office without a backward glance.
-
By the evening, she’s appointed Grace’s dissertation advisor head of astrophage breeding operations on the ship.
When the next week’s food order form crosses her desk, she doesn’t bother to strike banana muffins from it. No one will notice, and if they do, they won’t bother asking her why.
Three days after Grace leaves the carrier, the quartermaster of the breeding lab -- a perfectly competent man, quiet and methodical -- makes a rounding error. She signs off on it. Grace’s systems are sound, she tells herself. She doesn’t give it a second thought.
When Komorov mixes the astrophage into his latest spin drive fuel cocktail, he’s none the wiser. None the wiser when he feeds the slurry, hyper-enriched, into the fuel lines.
Stratt doesn’t even register the explosion that rocks the ship. The energy expulsion is so forceful, so instantaneous, that she thinks of nothing at all as the aircraft carrier vaporizes, taking everyone on it, all their fuel, every last trace of Project Hail Mary.
For an instant, Eva Stratt dreams of light, and then oblivion.
And then she wakes up.
-
The dawn filters weak and watery through her window, and the first thing she hears is rain.
The light doesn’t match. Not bright enough. Stratt squints at the window again. Something about it strikes her as wrong. There shouldn’t be a window here. No windows in your quarters.
She reaches blindly for her phone. She thinks to call Grace before she’s even fully conscious. And then she’s struck by a wave of rage so intense that it feels almost visceral. Almost physical.
I have no use for cowards.
She’s glad to be sitting down when the screen comes to life. She’s missed four calls already, and it’s not even six in the morning. Unlocking the phone, she sees a string of clipped text messages from a contact she’s marked as ‘Caldwell - Berkeley.’ He’s sent her two PDFs and two videos, timestamped at three in the morning, followed by four missed calls.
But it’s his most recent message -- 5:18am, 23 April 2022 -- that makes her blood run cold.
“Petrova line samples splashed down. Video attached. Need to amend shortlist urgently.”
The Eva Stratt of 5:18am on 23 April 2022 has no way of knowing, with the same absolute conviction with which she knows her own name, that Caldwell’s shortlist is missing an astrobiologist who wrote close to three hundred pages proposing and defending the existence of non-water-based life forms on other planets. The Eva Stratt of 5:18am on 23 April 2022 should not know, by any reasonable metric, that his name is Ryland Grace, that he teaches in room 119 at Grover Cleveland Middle School, that his classroom ceiling is crowded with paper mache models of each of their solar system’s planets, and that he’s added his own Petrova line with electrical tape. She should not know that he takes his coffee with cream and no sugar, that he keeps Twizzlers in his pockets and burns through them like cigarettes, a pack a day; that he wears a bright yellow raincoat. She should absolutely not know the sound of his voice when he laughs or the heaviness of it when he confesses that he is too scared to finish what he started.
But she knows it all with the certainty only hindsight can afford, and the dread of a woman condemned for something she can’t yet explain. She is a historian, before anything else; has spent years of her life staring down the past and trying to salvage the future. She knows the difference.
Eva Stratt sets down her phone and pulls back the curtain. She is greeted by a familiar overcast, a weeping sky, and the unmistakable outline of San Francisco Bay in the distance.
She knows this morning. 23 April 2022. Petrova line samples splashed down last night.
She’s lost eight months of time.