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There is a typhoon rolling over the northwestern Pacific and Grace is convinced that he is going to die.
It’s a storm quite unlike anything Grace has ever experienced and it’s becoming rapidly clear that whatever Stratt vat was designed for, it was not this. They should have docked in Indonesia to wait it out, but the weather warning came twelve hours too late.
A gust of wind hits the port of the ship with enough force to tilt it to its side. Grace estimates at least fifteen degrees, but he’s just a molecular biologist with a bad eyesight, what does he know?
How much does it take to topple an aircraft carrier turned into the world's most dangerous mobile lab? He has no idea. Stratt would probably know, Grace thinks, for reasons he refuses to unpack.
“Carl!” he yells to the man on the other side of the corridor. “Have you seen Stratt?!”
“She’s in Lab Two!” Carl yells back, and Grace’s blood runs cold.
Lab Two is, on a good day, a walking death trap filled with sharp scalpels and all kinds of glass beakers. In a storm such as this, it becomes stuff of nightmares.
(Lab Three is the one where they store astrophages. If this one is damaged, the whole ship and maybe several island countries will evaporate.)
“We need to find her!” Grace shouts.
Carl nods and makes a step towards him. In the next second, a pipe bursts maybe half a meter away from him, and several other metal parts fall on top of it.
“Jesus, Carl, are you alright?!”
“Yes!” Carl shouts back. “But I’m cut off! You go and I’ll check her office!”
Ryland gives him a thumbs up, which Carl obviously can’t see, and then he makes his way up a shaky flight of stairs. The lights flicker on and off as he moves forward, and the ship is bouncing so hard on the waves that he is thrown from one wall to another. When he reaches Lab Two, his heart sinks; it’s half dark, with long shadows stretching over the walls, but even in the faint light coming from the still functioning freezers he can see that the floor is covered with shreds of glass.
There is also a very alarming smudge of blood on the wall.
“Stratt?” he yells. Behind him, the door lets out a foreboding creak and Grace jumps away at the last second before it snaps shut with enough force to break a bone. “You there?”
“Doctor Grace?”
He spins on his heel and sure enough, there she is, curled up on the floor under one of the desks. She looks frazzled, with her eyes wide and hair in disarray, but physically unharmed, which gives Grace a disproportionate sense of relief. He slowly makes his way towards her, navigating between the broken glass, and prays that the sway of the ship won’t push him face-first to the floor.
Eventually he sinks to his knees and squeezes next to her. The remaining desk lamps flicker threateningly. A beaker flies through the room and crashes against the door.
“What are you doing here?” Stratt asks.
Grace, thank whatever deity is listening, doesn’t say “I came to rescue you”. Instead, he goes for,
“I was trying to find you!”
Judging by the look on Stratt’s face, this is not a better answer, but before she can say something, a cabinet breaks away from the wall and topples to the floor centimeters away from her feet, and she lets out a startled yelp. On instinct, Grace wraps his arm around her to pull her closer, and she falls into his chest, burying her nose in his neck.
Which, okay, is a surprise, but not an unwelcome one. Would be miles more pleasant if he could put aside the risk of imminent death.
It lasts only a second and then she takes hold of herself and pulls back, clearly considering an apology before deciding against it.
Grace takes a look at the fallen cabinet and realizes that they are trapped. On the other hand, it probably means some protection against loose lab equipment.
He’s just about to tell Stratt that when a pipe bursts above them, releasing a puff of steam.
They both jump, turning towards each other, their fingers entwined, and this time they don’t pull away. Ryland’s hands move to her back, her neck, her face, and he shudders when she tangles her fingers in his hair. Her breath is warm on his cheeks, his nose, his lips, and it takes him a while to notice that she’s stopped shivering.
Then it takes them both an even longer while to notice that the ship has stopped shaking altogether and that the banging they hear is Carl trying to get past the door.
They spend the next awkward fifteen minutes trying to not look too closely at each other, and as soon as Carl wrenches the door open, Stratt bolts from the room, barking orders at everyone.
She avoids him for the rest of the day, which wouldn’t be that surprising in itself, she’s a very busy woman, but Grace can’t help but watch her closer than usual when she appears in the mess at dinner. She’s weirdly jumpy and unfocused, and if it was anyone else, he’d say that she’s in shock. He seems to be the only one who notices that there is something off about Stratt, though, and when she returns her tray and leaves the mess, there is a strange impulse that tells him to follow her to their quarters.
“A long day, huh?” he asks, falling into step with her, and Stratt glances at him out of the corner of her eye.
“Yes,” she says, tightly.
“But the ship isn’t in the worst shape, right?” Ryland continues, aware that he’s rambling to fill the silence. “I mean, it could be worse.”
“Yes, it could have exploded,” Stratt says, still not looking at him.
“Wait, Stratt,” he says, and actually skips a few steps to purposefully stand in her way. She turns to him, her whole body radiating exasperation. He waits a beat. “Are you okay?”
Something strange flashes across her face; a raw, fleeting look that Grace doesn’t have time to analyze before it’s gone. Then she schools her features into a mask he knows so well and fixes her gaze somewhere above his shoulder as she replies,
“Yes, of course.”
Grace doesn’t know what possesses him to gently wrap his hand around her elbow, but the effect is immediate; she looks at him, sharply, and almost reflexively extends her hand, her fingertips hovering a few millimeters above his chest. Her eyes are wide, but she doesn’t seem so aloof anymore.
He has no idea who moves next; he’s only aware of the contact, lips touching lips, and then they’re in her room and he’s pulling her closer, hands sneaking to her hips and waist, and she curls her hand in the material of his T-shirt, holding him in place, and then… then it’s just lips and hands and warm skin and warm breath all over their bodies as they come undone, and beneath it all, a steady thrumming in his veins, a chant of alive, alive, alive.
*
This changes everything and nothing.
(It changes some things.)
*
(April; they dock in Indonesia for two weeks of extensive repair and Grace has never in his life appreciated the privacy of a hotel room more. Dr Rasmussen highlights an issue with the o-rings construction in the astrophage tank. Grace, Stratt and Dr Tanaka fly to Japan for an investor meeting and Tanaka shows them a member-only cocktail bar in one of Tokyo’s skyscrapers. Then she disappears after twenty minutes, citing a headache, and leaves Eva and Ryland in a small, secluded booth overlooking the neon lights of Shibuya skyline. He kisses her, feeling like he’s fifteen again, and she sighs into his mouth and kisses him back, hard enough to leave a bruise.)
(May; Ryland discovers that Eva is allergic to raspberries when a new shower gel gives her a weird rash. Dr Rasmussen brings over a material engineer from Denmark to run extensive tests on the improved o-rings. The testing fails. Eva asks why Ryland hardly ever calls his parents. He says that they’ve both just retired and embarked on a cross-country road trip in a RV they bought specifically for this purpose, and that they communicate via e-mail. He asks about her parents; she says that it’s only her mother and that she’s in a nursing home in Germany with early onset Alzheimer’s. Her voice doesn’t shake when she tells him this, but her eyes become unfocused, and she is not surprised when the same evening he wraps his arms around her and doesn’t let go until she falls asleep.)
(June; Ryland and Dr Lokken are flown to remote Alaska to participate in preliminary engine testing using astrophage fuel; they spend two weeks in the wilderness, evading bears and trying not to get into shouting matches in front of everyone. Rasmussen installs the improved and approved o-rings. Ryland discovers that he misses falling asleep with Eva in his bed. The first round of testing is successful; the night he returns to the ship, he and Eva fuck three times and end up talking instead of sleeping, anyway. She tells him that she missed him. He thinks that he might love her.)
(In July they nuke Antarctica. It’s hard to top that one.)
*
Sometime later, Grace and Shapiro start a vegetable patch.
(The idea comes to them one evening in the lab when Shapiro says,
“One thing I would miss in space is vegetation. I already miss nature here, on the ship.”
And Grace, because he needs some Small Science to distract him from the Big, Possibly Catastrophic Science, says,
“I wonder if we could grow something in these conditions.”)
Once they’ve sketched out the construction and content of three vegetable patches, Shapiro turns to him and propositions him for sex (or, as she puts it, “stress relief”). Grace remembers that DuBois is at a conference in Sydney.
He gently turns her down and she doesn’t seem bothered in the slightest, telling him that she’ll draft the requisition forms for whatever tools and seeds they need in the morning.
Grace doesn’t know how, but the word about both the vegetable project and the sex offer gets out to Stratt, and when she opens the door to her room that night, it’s quite obvious that she’s feeling Some Way about it. It becomes crystal clear when instead of greeting him, she gives him a ten minute speech about how he’s not taking his work seriously enough if he still has the time to play around in the dirt. He feels offended, at first, until her speech drags on and he notices the blush creeping along her neck, just above the hemline of her shirt.
“Wait a minute,” he says when she’s finished. “Is this about the vegetable patch? Or what Shapiro offered?”
She glares at him. Her blush intensifies.
“It’s about the distraction–”
“Are you jealous?” he laughs, and she just scowls at him.
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course not.”
Grace doesn’t believe her for a second, and something warm and vaguely primal blossoms in his chest. Emboldened, he takes a step closer.
“I am just thinking about the mission,” Stratt reinforces, tipping her chin forward.
“I don’t doubt it,” Grace agrees easily, his eyes sparkling.
“If you have an abundance of spare time, I could find you additional things to do,” Stratt threatens.
“I know, Madam Director,” he says, again moving towards her, and her retreating back hits the wall. Her gaze almost imperceptibly flickers to his lips. “You love bossing me around.”
“Only because you need to be bossed,” she replies, a bit breathlessly, and, oh, she’s going to kill him one day. His dick agrees.
“Do I?” he muses, brushing his hips against hers, very attuned to the soft gasp she lets out at the contact. He lets a short pause fall over the room as he dips his mouth to her collarbone. “Maybe I do.”
Her hands are rough when she grabs at his neck to kiss him, lips hungry and insistent. She bites his lip and he groans into her mouth as he picks her up to press her fully against the wall, his dick pressing against her center, his hands kneading the firm curve of her ass. When they finally move to bed, it’s quick and dirty and almost animalistic, their whole world contracted to two bodies desperate for release. Ryland thinks it might’ve been the best sex of his life.
Later, when they lay naked in a warm cocoon of their sheets, Stratt props herself on the elbow to look him in the eye. She even finds his glasses and gently slides them upwards until they rest securely on the bridge of his nose.
“But, seriously, Grace,” she starts, her index finger tracing idly along his collarbone. “It cannot be a distraction.”
“It won’t make my work suffer,” Grace promises, his hand drawing circles on her lower back. “But I think we need a distraction like that.”
She tilts her head and furrows her brow, wordlessly demanding an explanation.
“We all understand the importance of Hail Mary,” Grace says. “It’s top priority, always. But sometimes, when you stop to think about it, the magnitude of the work is terrifying.”
“So it’s like… convincing yourself that there’s a back up plan?” Eva asks in disbelief.
Grace shrugs.
“I don't believe that there is one,” he admits. “But I think I’m beginning to realize that when we launch Mary, we’ll still need something besides hope.”
Silence falls over them, suddenly too cold and too heavy, and Grace quickly adds,
“Plus, what a cute story I will tell my kids! One time I grew potatoes on an aircraft carrier…”
“You won’t be able to tell them this,” Stratt interrupts flatly. “You are well aware that all of this is highly, highly classified.”
Ryland lets out a huff of laughter.
“Spoilsport,” he says and gathers her closer to his chest, dropping a kiss into her hair.
The vegetable patch doesn’t last long, anyway. It turns out it’s very easy, actually, to freeze and kill tomatoes.
One more point for Mary, Grace thinks.
*
Five months before the launch, Ilyukhina is allowed to fly to Russia for her father’s birthday. She comes back with a crate of vodka that she somehow managed to sneak into the ship, and Ryland would never say it out loud, but he can tell that Stratt is secretly impressed. This is perhaps why she allows them to throw an impromptu party in the middle of the week.
Ryland hasn’t had vodka in years, probably, and he’s three drinks in when he realizes his mistake. He’s not alone in this predicament, however; right next to him, Leclerc is sitting with his arm slung around Lokken’s shoulders, staring at her lips as she asks,
“Have you ever thought about what you’re going to do once the project is over?”
Leclerc leans down to whisper something in her ear and she bites her lip and turns a weird shade of pink. Ryland promptly turns the other way, his thoughts drifting to Eva, and he nearly jolts in surprise when he sees her standing in the doorway, her arms crossed across her chest. He waves at her, and the corner of her lips lifts.
“Director Stratt!” Ilyukhina shouts out, and a drunken cheer rolls through the room. “Will you join us?”
“No, thank you,” Stratt says, and remains unmoved when Ilyukhina makes an exaggerated pout. “I have an early meeting. I just came to say goodnight.”
She does not typically do that, but everyone is too tipsy to notice. She glances around the room as people return to their previous activities, and her gaze lingers when she reaches Grace. She lifts one brow, then turns on her heel and leaves.
Grace gets the hint.
“I think I have the same morning meeting,” he says, too loud and to no one in particular.
Lokken and Leclerc are paying attention only to each other, Ilyukhina, Yao, DuBois and Shapiro are playing poker, and the remaining crew is scattered in small groups all around the room. No one seems to pay attention as Grace slips from the room and disappears in the long and dark corridor leading to their quarters.
He knocks on Eva’s door two times and she answers almost immediately. She clearly stifles a laugh when she sees him leaning against the doorway in his best attempt at a seductive nonchalance.
“Hey,” he says. “Do you come here often?”
At that, she lets out a small giggle and drags him inside.
“I see that you’ve been having fun,” she comments lightly, watching in amusement as Grace goes straight to her bed and flops on it with a content sigh.
He doesn’t reply, just hums an upbeat song under his breath, staring at the ceiling.
“Did you know that Leclerc has a thing for Lokken?” he asks suddenly, propping himself from the mattress into an upright position. It’s only then that he notices that she’s already in the process of undressing, and that momentarily distracts him. Her sweater is off, and so are her socks. By now he knows her well enough to remember that her socks are always the first article of clothing to be removed after a long day.
Eva blinks at him, her fingers hovering by the second button of a dark navy blouse. The first one is already unbuttoned and Ryland’s eyes dart to the uncovered patch of ivory skin and a few centimeters of a black bra strap.
“Lokken and Leclerc?” She repeats, and Ryland realizes that he honest to God forgot his own question. “I did not see that coming.”
Ryland hums, his eyes transfixed on the movement of her long, pale fingers fiddling with the next button. With this one, he can see the dip between her breasts, the three pale freckles above her sternum.
“Mhm,” he says absentmindedly. “They were having some deep conversations, too.”
“Oh, yeah?” Stratt asks conversationally. Another button goes, revealing both cups (black lace, and there is no way she wore this all day without this moment in mind, because she knows it drives Grace insane and he knows that it itches. Still spectacular, though).
His pants are beginning to feel tight, but before he gives in fully to the desire, one last conscious thought hits him. Eva looks at him curiously when she notices the large, dopey smile that suddenly lights up his face.
“When this is over, I will build you a house,” Grace says dreamily, his eyes still locked on her chest.
Then he looks up to take hold of her hands and guide her towards him, until she’s standing between his legs and her arms are looped around his neck. Her red hair is messy and falling around her face like a skew halo of a very busy angel. One of the main ones. Possibly Michael.
“Will you now?” Stratt says wryly, and the smirk on her face tells him that she’s not taking him seriously.
“Yes,” he replies, with slightly more conviction, and his hands go to her hips, his thumbs sneaking under her shirt and caressing the delicate skin above her hipbones. “You will have an office, for all your running-the-world meetings, and I’ll have a greenhouse, so I can prepare us for the upcoming ice age, but I won’t have to try very hard, because the Hail Mary will be a great success, obviously, and we’ll have a dog named Sylvester, after Sylvester Stallone, a cream golden retriever that will demand walkies first thing in the morning.”
Eva lets out a weird noise, like something got stuck in her throat, and Ryland moves his hands higher so that his palms are flat against her back as he continues,
“We’d have a kitchen with a gigantic wooden table and a very soft couch in the living room, because I despise hard furniture and after this ship I don’t want to sit on anything that is made of metal or plastic ever again, and it will be a colorful house, Eva, none of this minimalist Scandinavian japandi crap…”
He trails off when she puts her hand on both sides of his face. Her eyes are very shiny and very wide.
“Would you like that?” he asks, awkwardly, aiming for suave and landing miles away from it.
“Yes,” she breathes and leans down to kiss him, hot and urgent and, weirdly, desperate. “Yes, honey, build me a house.”
And then she straddles him and her mouth moves to plant wet kisses along his jaw, and Ryland temporarily loses the ability to think.
*
(October; one night, Stratt turns to him and asks, “But really, what will you do when the project is over?” and Ryland replies “I dunno, what will you do?”, and she gives him a Look and says, “Ryland. I will probably go to prison”. This gives him nightmares. It gets so bad that she has to take it back, tell him that in reality she’ll probably get fired and will have to pivot to a low paying customer service job. He forces himself to believe it, ridiculous as it sounds. “In that case, I could get you a teaching job at my school,” he offers, pulling her closer. When she hesitates before saying, “sure, that would be lovely”, his world starts cracking at the edges.)
(November; Stratt’s mother dies and there is no way she can take a day off, even for the funeral. Grace isn’t sure if anyone besides him even knows. She keeps a straight face in meetings and only cries in the shower when she thinks that the stream of water will drown out her sobs. Both the primary and secondary crews are sent to Houston for training on Mary’s main module, and Grace has to figure out a very unexpected problem with keeping a constant energy output on one of the engines. In the evenings, he tries to force some food into Stratt, and sometimes she relents and eats a few slices of pizza/a hamburger/a weird German comfort food that he googled, though never with much pleasure. Then she holds him, often without a word, but Grace deludes himself into thinking that he can hear the unspoken.)
*
Three months before the launch of Hail Mary, everyone shifts into an even higher gear to make sure that everything is ready on time. This is the one thing they are sure of; the launch cannot be moved. They have a window that is very small and the next chance will be — well, it will be too late. Grace is running on fumes, as does, he is sure of it, the rest of the crew. He drinks six coffees a day. Lokken pops ibuprofen pills like they are candy, which, coincidentally, she also practically inhales. Shapiro and DuBois engage in loud sexual congress several times a day to relieve stress, not caring who catches them and where. Ilyukhina and Yao start a running club. Stratt practically stops sleeping and pays no attention to anyone, and especially Grace, who tries to persuade her to take a break.
One cloudy Tuesday, in a six pm meeting, the atmosphere in the room can at best be described as glum. Stratt is standing at the head of the large conference table, looking even paler than usual, and Grace wonders if it’s the contrast to her black sweater or the hospital quality of light in the room. Probably both. And also her exhaustion. Probably especially the exhaustion.
“Commander Yao,” she says, glancing at her notes. “The crew training is on track, correct?”
“Correct, Director,” Yao confirms. “The modules at NASA were completed as expected. Next week we have a training session at Roskosmos to fine tune the QRCs for common software issues.”
“Right,” Stratt says and rubs her forehead. Something about this movement seems off, Grace vaguely observes. “Okay, in that case I think…”
She trails off mid-sentence, her voice cracking on the last word, and then suddenly, but somehow in slow motion, her knees bend and she starts sinking towards the polished ash of the table, her hair falling around her face like a curtain.
Yao, who is sitting right next to her, is the quickest to react, and he manages to leap to his feet and grab her by the shoulders before her face hits the table. Then he and Shapiro gently lower Stratt’s unconscious form to the floor.
Grace is just barely aware of his movements as he jumps from his seat and falls to his knees by her side. He misses several bewildered looks from his coworkers as he pushes her hair away from her face and cups her cheek with his hand. She’s breathing, which is good, but she’s gone practically white in the face and there is a thin layer of sweat covering her temples.
“Eva,” he says, urgently, before correcting himself. “Stratt, hello, can you hear me?”
He isn’t sure if he breathes in the next few seconds that it takes for her eyelids to flutter. She lets out a low groan before mumbling,
“Grace?”
Air leaves his lungs in one swift whoosh.
“Welcome back,” he says, his thumb caressing her cheek, which he probably should stop doing in front of everyone.
“Back?” Stratt croaks and opens her eyes, only to immediately close them when she sees the bright light. “What happened?”
“Okay, let’s take her to med bay,” Yao says behind Grace’s arm.
Eva’s eyes snap open again and she fixes her accusatory glance on Grace.
“You just fainted,” he says, defensively, and pulls away from her to stand. The industrial carpeting scratches at his skin when he pushes himself off the floor. Then he, Yao and Shapiro help Stratt into an upright position, and she is very adamant that she can do it herself until they let her stand unsupported and she nearly falls over again.
Yao and Grace escort her to the medical wing, where Dr Lamai takes over and shoos them out of the room. They remain in the waiting area (break room) for a while, awkwardly shuffling from one foot to another (Grace; Yao stands perfectly still, staring into space). The air smells of strong antiseptic.
Eventually Yao breaks the silence.
“I will go and finish the meeting,” he says, and taps Grace on his arm. “You stay here.”
Grace thinks that Stratt would be furious if she learned that he squandered his second-in-command duties in favour of waiting on her in the empty med bay, but all he does is nod at Yao in thanks.
It takes thirty five minutes of sitting alone with his thoughts before Dr Lamai pokes her head into the room. She is not in the least surprised to find Grace there.
“She wants to see you,” is all she says, jerking her head towards Eva’s room, and Grace scrambles to his feet.
Stratt is laying on the bed with an IV hooked to her hand and a compress on her forehead. She’s still in her own clothes, though, which Grace takes for a good sign. They would surely make her change if this was an emergency requiring an overnight stay, right?
“Stratt,” he says, feeling a bit relieved, and sinks onto a stool next to her bed. “How are you doing?”
Color has somehow returned to her cheeks, he notices, but she’s still pale. Her hands are steady, though, when she reaches to remove the compress from her face, and her gaze is… well, sharper than it was an hour ago, but she seems vaguely shocked, for some reason.
“I’m better now,” she says in a flat tone that Grace can’t quite read. “It seems I was just extremely tired.”
“No wonder,” Grace says doubtfully. “Is that all? You don’t have, like, an iron deficiency?”
“It would be unfortunate,” Stratt deadpans. “I don’t know. Dr Lamai took a blood sample; I should have the results in the morning.”
She averts her gaze when she says that, and Grace’s eyes narrow in concern. He gently bumps her ankle with his knee.
“Is that all she said?” he says, with forced lightness. “That you can go rest for now and wait for the test results?”
A shadow passes across her face; brief, and maybe almost invisible to an untrained eye. But not to Grace.
“Eva?”
“There is one more thing,” Eva reluctantly admits, lifting her eyes to meet his. “I think I’m pregnant.”
*
When Grace got drunk on Russian vodka and imagined their small house, there were several details that he didn’t think about at the time as they didn’t seem important. The house would be in Germany, somewhere within a walking distance to a small lake. They will get the golden retriever from an ethical breeder, but still feel bad about it, so they’ll adopt another dog from a local shelter. The greenhouse will be insulated and heated, and he has a friend named Sheila who is a civil engineer specializing in that kind of thing. Behind the greenhouse, there will be a sandbox and a swing and in his fantasy, he thought that the sandbox would be for the dogs, but he couldn’t figure out the purpose of a small, plastic swing. A child with Eva’s hair and his eyes slots into the blank spot seamlessly, like a puzzle piece fitting in place, and Grace has never been more terrified in his life.
*
Two days later he finally asks,
“Do you want to keep it?”
They are sitting in her quarters at the edge of the bed, the test results and the first ultrasound laying on the covers between them. Grace keeps his voice carefully neutral, his heart beating so fast it feels like it’s going to jump out of his chest.
Eva looks at him and her face crumples.
“I want to keep it so bad it hurts,” she confesses, pushing the words past her throat with visible effort. “But I can’t.”
“Why not?” Ryland asks in a whisper, his fingers tightening around hers.
“I’m going to go to prison,” she insists. “I can’t… It would be morally wrong to bring a child into a situation like that.”
“You don’t know that,” Ryland points out. “Nothing about your version of the future has been decided yet.”
Stratt looks at him with something akin to pity.
“It’s how the story always goes,” she says quietly. “The crowds will want a whipping boy.”
“And they do not have to get it,” Ryland replies, his throat suddenly tight. “We’ll get you an army of lawyers. Surely you cannot go to prison for trying to save the world.”
Stratt smiles, sadly, and he sees that she doesn’t believe him.
“And what do you want?” she asks, tilting her head to one side and watching him expectantly. Grace feels the skin on the back of his neck crawl.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” he quickly evades, wiping his sweaty palms on his pants. “It’s your decision; I will support you whatever you choose.”
Stratt narrows her eyes at him.
“I know it’s my decision,” she says stiffly. “But I am asking you what you want. It’s your baby, too, Ryland. You’re allowed to have a say in this.”
By the time she’s finished, something has changed in her face; now she’s looking at him with an open, vulnerable expression, her pale blue eyes even more blue than usual, and Grace realises that this is Eva Stratt’s version of begging. It makes him a bit nauseous.
The silence stretches between them, getting heavier and heavier until it feels as if it’s pressing against Grace’s chest, crushing his ribs with the weight of expectations hanging in the air. He realizes several things in rapid succession; one, that in this precise moment, he has the power to steer her choices, and that almost makes him physically recoil. He’s never wanted that kind of influence over another person. (There’s a voice in his head that tells him, this is perhaps why you’ve fallen head over heels for a woman who likes to boss you around and always gets her way). Two, that there is a big, panic-driven part of him that wants to cop out of this, take the easy way, pretend that he views this development as a distraction and it would be logical and prudent to go ahead with the termination and that after, they could pretend that this never even happened. Three, that he’s never going to be able to pretend that this never happened, and judging by the rapidly dimming light in Eva’s eyes, neither is she.
Eva, who’s by now looking wary and slightly disappointed, opens her mouth to speak, and Grace’s brain finally kicks into action. He squeezes her wrists and she pauses, her mouth hanging slightly open.
Grace takes a deep breath. Then, not sure if what he’s doing is very brave or very stupid, he tells her the truth.
*
Ryland Grace’s search history:
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is peppa pig bad for childs neurodevelopment
*
It feels like they’ve started living on borrowed time. Eva takes to sleeping wrapped around him like poison ivy, and Ryland has trouble falling asleep at all. He brings her coffee (200 mg of caffeine allowed per day, then decaf) and it’s a lottery if the smell won’t make her gag today. He follows her around even more, to the bewilderment of the crew, and feels uneasy when he’s alone in the lab, without her in sight.
It gets worse when the word gets out and people very clearly shift into panic mode seeing him, not sure if congratulations are in order. He overhears a mechanic telling someone that Stratt ‘baby-trapped’ him, and he fights off an uncharacteristic impulse to throw a punch. (He does, however, ‘accidentally’ create a foul chemical reaction in one of the shared bathrooms that takes the mechanic two days to fix).
The gossip subsides when they move from Stratt vat to Kazakhstan and it’s only the core team left. Ilyukhina pats him on the back really hard and says, cheerfully, “I did not think you had it in you!” (which — what does that even mean?). Yao arrives at a meeting one day with a gigantic package of ginger candy and drops it right next to Eva’s coffee with an excuse about his kids sending him the wrong flavour. Carl, somehow, manages to monitor her protein intake.
Grace isn’t sure if the gossip bothers Stratt as much as it bothers him; he thinks that she’s too busy seeing the launch through and worrying about her impending incarceration to care. She does not want to talk about the whole prison thing, though, cutting off his every attempt with a sharp “let’s make sure to launch Mary first”.
At night, when she snores softly with her arms around him, Grace sometimes sneaks one hand to her growing stomach. It’s still flat enough that she hides it under the shirts and sweaters and, on occasion, his rain jackets, but there is a slight curve there, a firmness that he can feel under his palm. It’s hard to describe the emotions that threaten to overcome him in those moments. There is happiness and dread and rage and possibly a few other things, all mixed together in a neat cocktail that won’t let him sleep.
He realizes, now, that he has two jobs; saving the world from destruction and keeping the mother of his child from prison. Easy-peasy. Nothing could possibly go wrong with either.
*
Two weeks before the launch, he manages to tear Eva away from her desk for a quick coffee break. It’s cold and rainy and not at all pleasant, but they still take a walk and sip from their paper cups. Eva’s hand darts to her stomach, which is now a noticeable bulge even under the sweaters, and she rubs it in small circles, looking at the vast fields of grass around them. That’s when he tells her that he’s begun working on a plan.
“I love you,” he says firmly, reaching for her hand, as they stand on a muddy patch of grass at Baikonur, “and we will figure this out.”
And Eva takes his hand and looks at him, and for the first time in weeks the hope in her eyes seems real.
*
And then a whole goddamn building explodes.
*
(The scream that Eva lets out is nothing short of feral.
“No, God, please, not this, please, no, no, nononono…”
Her panic feels almost disproportionate, Ryland thinks, but he won’t remember that thought until much later.)
*
DuBois and the Russian mechanic from the backup crew, Irina Kuznetsova, are dead. A measuring error killed two people and blew up a whole building. It would have killed three, but Shapiro had to step out for an urgent phone call from her mother.
“It’s a terrible tragedy,” Stratt says somberly, as they all gather in the main conference room. “But, however it may sound, this is the reason we have secondary crews. We will launch on time.”
Yao, Ilyukhina and Shapiro nod. Shapiro’s eyes are red, but her voice doesn’t shake when she excuses herself from the room to pack her things. Sixteen hours later, the three of them are strapped into a Soyuz and shot from Earth to the International Space Station, where Hail Mary is docked and ready for them.
The launch is successful. Ryland cries.
*
Ryland has been to Germany only once, at a boring conference in Berlin. The lectures were mind-numbing and the language unpronounceable, but the weather was nice and the beer was good and flowing freely, so all in all, not the worst experience of his PhD student’s life.
This time, it’s very different.
Two days after the launch, they fly to Paris on the last flight of the private jet, which the French government now wants back. Then, without leaving the airport, they hop on the Eurostar to Rotterdam, change to a Sprinter, and half an hour later disembark in Hague Central, where they are meant to meet with Eva’s lawyer, a freakishly tall Dutch man with a name that starts with van. Eva greets him in fluent Dutch, of course, and Grace has to squeeze in an awkward, “sorry, I just speak English”.
He wouldn't call it a productive working session, and it’s not even the lawyer’s fault, honestly – Eva ties their hands when the first thing she references is a long list of crimes and transgressions that she’s confessing to. Her main concern seems to be securing Ryland’s custody of their child once they’re born, which, everyone agrees, is important, but maybe the first step should be trying to stop her from going to jail altogether? (At some point, the lawyer – Jorien – says, “There are different strategies we could try… Serving the sentence in a country known for its humanitarian approach, think the Nordics, or perhaps Switzerland, keeping you away from anywhere that could aim for the death penalty…” and Ryland straight up blacks out after that.)
As a result, the following two-day trip to Germany is kind of tense. The lawyer, at Eva’s request, buys a car in her name – nothing fancy, but they need a mode of transport more reliable than Deutsche Bahn. Ryland doesn’t get the joke, but Eva and Jorien exchange meaningful glances when he says that. The gas is cheap right now, anyway, the oil executives thrilled with the notion that the increase of global production is actually beneficial to the climate right now, who would have thought?
Eva drives, because Ryland has not yet mastered the art of shift stick, and he spends most of the time admiring the countryside. At some point, he makes the mistake of looking at the meter and discovers that they are speeding almost 180 kilometers per hour, which sounds like a high number and remains high even after he converts it to miles, and Eva makes a face and says that she’d gladly go faster, but not in this Kia Sportage.
Ryland can’t help but notice that they never properly discussed why Germany of all places, and if there’s any reason behind it except for Eva wanting to see her childhood home for what she surely feels will be the last time in her life. She says that it’s just something she has to do, and Ryland decides to believe her, at least for the time being.
She grew up in Greifswald, which, unsurprisingly, is a town Ryland has never heard about, but which upon arrival he finds charming, in an unassuming sort of way. The house she inherited from her mother is a beige townhouse in a row of identical small houses with trimmed yards and hydrangeas at the front. Eva tells him that for all these years, a maintenance company was coming around bi-weekly to keep the house in order, but when she opens the front door the air still smells of dust and abandonment.
It’s a dark house, kept in shades of brown and brick, and Ryland is sure that many people would call it vintage, but he finds it a bit too depressing. He watches Eva as she unzips her coat and stands in the middle of the living room, cradling her stomach as she looks around and takes in the leather couch and lacquered coffee table, and bookshelves filled with what Ryland assumes are cheap romance novels (judging by the cover, obviously). She’s wearing an odd expression on her face, as if she can’t recognize what she is looking at, the reality so far removed from the memories in her mind. Eventually she wipes at her eyes with a knuckle of her right hand and clears her throat.
Ryland comes over and rubs between her shoulderblades.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go get something to eat. Do you know it’s been years since I’ve had a proper kebab?”
*
The next few weeks are pure emotional torture. Every time a shadow passes over the window, Grace thinks that it’s the secret police coming to arrest Eva and put her to jail for life. They talk to Jorien almost daily now, and they know that criminal charges have already been pressed by several countries, and further warrants are just a matter of time. To distract themselves, they go on a lot of walks. They drive to the beach and take a stroll along the coastline, the rapidly cooling Baltic sea swooshing at their feet. Ryland is fascinated by their neighborhood Aldi (he even follows the coupons) and perceives it as obviously superior to their local Edeka, and for some reason this makes Eva laugh harder than all the jokes he tries to come up with to lighten the mood.
Eva goes to the cemetery to visit her mother, saying it’s something she’d like to do on her own, and as Ryland watches her climb into the car and pull from the driveway, he is overcome by the sudden need to call his parents. They have a lot to catch up on, and he cannot decipher the look on their faces when he tells them about Eva, about the baby and about the different reasons why he followed her to Germany. But then his father gives him a long, appraising look, and says, “Something has changed about you, son. You’ve grown up”. And you know what? Ryland decides to take it as a win.
One evening, Eva and Ryland are sitting in the claustrophobically brown living room, he pretending to read a book and she ignoring the ZDF program playing in the background, when her phone rings. An unsaved number. They exchange glances and Eva gingerly picks up the phone, and swipes her thumb across the screen, straightening her back as if she was bracing herself for impact.
“Stratt.”
“Guten Abend, Frau Stratt," comes from the other side of the line. “Bundeskanzler Peter Heinbach hier. Am I interrupting?”
(Or at least that’s what Ryland assumes. His German is still, regrettably, limited to Duolingo lessons.)
Eva’s face freezes in surprise, but she quickly recovers and picks up the conversation. Ryland watches on carefully, the book falling forgotten to his lap, as Eva stands from the couch and starts pacing around the coffee table, pressing the phone to her ear, brow furrowed in deep concentration. Her expression is unreadable, but she lets out a lot of “ja”, “natürlich”, and “ich verstehe”. Then, at some point, she stops and looks straight at him, her pupils getting wider and wider as the Chancellor produces a steady flow of rapid German.
“Thank you,” she says eventually, and lets the hand holding the phone drop and rest above her chest. “Good night.”
She continues to stare at him like he’s a creature from space that she can’t figure out.
“Ryland,” she says. Her tone is flat, but her eyes are wide and bluer than usual. “What did you do?”
(This is how Ryland Grace cheerfully renounces his freedom and his American citizenship, and becomes Germany’s leading expert on astrophages: he writes a lot of emails. And, yes, he does need to break into Eva’s phone and download her contact list, but he tells himself it isn’t snooping if done for a good cause. Most people don’t write back. Some governments laugh in his face. But the Germans are, it seems, nothing if not pragmatic – if Grace offers them his work and his brain and his loyalty, in exchange for Stratt’s protection, then it’s a tempting deal. They didn’t necessarily want to imprison her, anyway; she’s much more valuable to them mobile, with unlimited access to her phone and email.
Eva’s Dutch lawyer helps him hash out the details to make the deal iron clad. Germany will not charge her with any crimes related to or occurred during the duration of project Hail Mary, and will not agree to extradite her to any other country, even within the European Union, that decides to prosecute her. As long as she doesn’t step foot outside of the German border, she will be free, although it’s pretty transparent that she’ll soon become a contractor to whatever government agency that requires her services.
In exchange, Dr Ryland Grace, molecular biologist, Earth’s top expert on astrophages and accidental climatologist, will continue his research, within German academic communities. His main areas of focus will be: harnessing astrophage’s power to build gigantic food farms that would stop the country from starvation, and later exploring its potential applications in business, to prevent the total collapse of the economy. (Again, no biggie.)
The terms of the deal clearly prove that the time of global cooperation is over, but Ryland is too invested to mourn the death of collectivism.)
And now, he offers her a nervous smile and says,
“Well, you may not know this, but I am not half bad at poker.”
She stares at him for a long minute, still pressing her phone to her chest, and then, when he’s beginning to worry that he’s given her a stroke, she crosses the distance to the couch in five large steps and squeezes herself into his lap.
“Thank you,” she whispers into his neck, her breath hot and ragged.
“Are you kidding me,” he asks softly, pulling back to look into her face. He sweeps away a loose strand of hair away from her forehead. “You don’t need to thank me. We’re in this together.”
She looks at him for a long moment, seemingly on the verge of saying something, but then starts crying instead. He hears her whisper something that sounds like a curse. He pulls her back in, wrapping his arms as tight around her as he can manage, and feels the wetness seeping through his T-shirt.
“It’s the hormones,” she says defensively, and his chest shakes with laughter. For the first time in months, he feels that he can breathe again.
“I know, honey,” he replies, rubbing the back of her head. “Your emotional walls are still high and impenetrable.”
“Exactly,” she mumbles, and presses a kiss to his neck.
This woman. She’s going to be the death of him one day.
Later that night, as they prepare for bed, she tells him,
“You know, I always knew you had potential, but I don’t think I realized just how big it was.”
She’s clearly trying to say a nice thing, but Ryland, still riding the high of “my wife is not going to jail”, only wiggles his eyebrows meaningfully.
“Baby, my potential was big enough to get you pregnant in your forties.”
At which she throws a pillow at his face, but she also allows herself a small, genuine smile, and Grace thinks that yes, they’re going to be okay.
*
In the end, Eva has to sell her childhood house so that they can buy something else in the suburbs of Munich, where Grace is hired to lead a research project at their technical university. Their new home is not big; she shrugs and tells him that real property is more expensive in former West Germany, and especially around a large town like this. But Ryland doesn’t mind – there is a garden, and a kitchen with large windows, and a small wood stove in the living room. It has two bedrooms, an attic and a utility closet that at some point will be converted into Eva’s office.
The house is well-kept, and the decor is inoffensive enough that they don’t feel like a large renovation is in order. This is very fortunate, because they absolutely do not have either time or strength for one; all they do in between doctor’s appointments, filling in paperwork, check-ins with the lawyers and eventually Ryland’s work, is paint the walls in the living room and set up the nursery.
Carl does him a huge favor and has most of his San Francisco apartment packed and delivered to Germany, and yes, it costs Grace a fortune, but he likes having his stuff back. He hasn’t seen some of it in so long that it almost feels new.
He unpacks it with childlike glee, with Eva watching him from the couch, where she’s sitting cross-legged, balancing a bowl of pasta on her now very large stomach. Apparently, he’s better entertainment than Netflix.
“Now, how about this,” he says, pulling out a shirt from one of the boxes with a flourish.
“Hideous,” Eva replies immediately, wrapping pasta around her fork.
Ryland pouts.
“I’ll have you know, I received many a compliment from fellow students when I turned up to parties in this.”
Eva just snorts.
“I’m sure. Were your fellow students visually impaired, perhaps?”
Ryland shakes his head and puts the shirt away.
“I swear, sometimes it feels like you have no taste.”
She swallows a bite of pasta and gives him a wicked smile.
“I picked you, do you still want to debate my lack of taste?”
“Good point,” Ryland admits, getting back to sifting through the box. “Next item: this… mysterious box. What the heck is it, anyway?”
It’s a snowball, with the Statue of Liberty inside. Ryland vaguely remembers that it was a gift from Cara (pre-Mark). He doesn’t remember why he kept it.
“Well,” Eva says, shrugging. “Does it matter? It’s nice to look at, even if the snow seems a little ominous now.”
In the end, Ryland throws it out. The last thing he needs now is extra baggage.
*
Olivia Grace (52 cm, 3560 g) is born during a summer thunderstorm. Ryland thinks it’s oddly fitting. Eva thinks that in terms of humanity’s greatest invention, Hail Mary still loses to an epidural.
Olivia has ten fingers and ten toes, and Grace is probably biased, but he thinks that she’s the most perfect thing that he’s ever seen. He reckons it’s a terrible cliche, but he truly didn’t know how much you can love someone before her, and judging by the frankly dopey smile on Eva’s face as she holds Olivia to her bare chest, neither did she.
Life is good, he thinks, high on endorphins, adrenaline and no sleep. And it will only get better. It has to.
*
Olivia is five months old when two sad men in black appear at their doorstep for the first time. Ryland, who by a stroke of luck is working from home that day, nearly gets a heart attack when he opens the door, and his empty hand flexes, searching for the phone.
Eva appears behind his arm, Olivia’s spit blanket still hanging over her left shoulder. She just managed to put her down for a nap, and Ryland has to admit, his daughter is one fussy baby, especially when it comes to sleeping. Eva looks a bit shell-shocked, and for a good minute she and the suits are engaged in a silent staring contest.
Eventually, one of the men moves and reaches inside his coat, and Ryland panics and throws himself to block the entrance with his whole body, convinced that he’s reaching for a gun. The second man gives him a strange look, especially as the object retrieved turns out to be a regular cellphone.
“Ms. Stratt, I have the Minister of Energy for you,” Sad Man One says. “You will come with us.”
Ryland’s pretty sure that the upward inflection on his last sentence meant to carry a suggestion of a question, but was, in fact, an order. Judging by the expression on Eva’s face, so is she. She steps around Ryland to pick up the phone from the man’s outstretched hand and exchanges a few words that are spoken too fast for Ryland to understand, especially since he’s running on three and a half hours of sleep. When she’s finished, she deposits the phone back and fixes the Sad Men with a look that used to stop generals in their tracks.
“I need fifteen minutes to change,” she says, in a tone that doesn’t accept any chance of negotiation.
They exchange glances, but eventually nod and take a step back.
“We’ll wait in the car,” Sad Man Two says. “Fifteen minutes.”
Ryland slams the door behind them and follows Eva up the stairs to their bedroom, where she tiptoes around Olivia’s crib to get to their closet. She pulls out a pair of dark slacks, a shirt, and a blazer – very formal for her, possibly a relic from her ESA days. Ryland watches her wordlessly, trying to not panic.
They move to the bathroom, where Eva tries to brush her hair and her teeth at the same time and gestures at him to bring her a pair of fresh socks.
“What do you think this is about?” Ryland asks, tossing her the balled socks.
“I’m not sure,” Eva admits. “He told me very few details. I think it’s about the urgent reopening of nuclear power plants.”
Ryland’s eyebrows rise high on his forehead. Five minutes are up already.
“I will handle it,” she says, in a tone that was very convincing for the first year of their acquaintance, but not anymore. “You just need to hold the fort while I’m gone.”
“Do you know how long it’s going to take?”
“Sure,” Eva says sarcastically, rummaging through a drawer under the sink. “They gave me the complete agenda and then we gossiped about our children.”
Fair enough, Ryland admits.
“In case I’m not back for her feeding, you need to make do with the formula,” she says, locking her eyes with him in the mirror as she applies concealer to her under-eye area. “There is a tube of it in the cupboard.”
“I know,” Ryland replies, in what he hopes is a calming tone. “Don’t worry about us. Olivia’s going to have a fun day with dad.”
Eva gives him a magnificently offensive side eye, but Ryland lets it slide. She throws the concealer back into the drawer and slams it shut with her knee. Then she takes a deep breath and turns to face him.
“In case anything happens,” she says in a tight voice. “You know where the documents are. Jorin has hard copies of everything, the certificates, the contract for the sale of the house, my will…”
“We will not need it,” Ryland interrupts her, possibly too sharply. “Nothing is going to happen, except maybe for you shouting at a minister or two.”
A shadow of a smile passes through her face and she leans in to give him a quick kiss, her hand leaving a trace of heat on his jaw as she moves away.
On the way downstairs, they pause by Olivia’s crib, and Eva kisses her fingers and presses them to Olivia’s forehead.
“Bye, Spätzchen,” she whispers. “I’ll try to be fast. You won’t even notice that I was gone.”
Ryland tries very hard to stop himself from crying.
“Text me,” he says, urgently, as Eva pulls on her thick boots and a puff jacket. “I mean it. Two hours without a message and I’ll call your lawyer.”
She squeezes his hand, hard, and gives him a nod as she leaves. Ryland stares as the three of them get into a silver Mercedes and drive away in the falling snow. Then, willing himself to keep it together, he turns on the electronic nanny and gets back to his laptop to join a Teams meeting.
Eva comes back twelve hours later, in the middle of the night. Ryland is up waiting for her, anyway, burping Olivia after her first nightly feed. (It was a long day. Olivia absolutely noticed the strange absence of her mother, and she did not appreciate it. The first bottle feed was a battle, too, Ryland on the verge of panic that she’ll starve before Eva’s return. But he is not going to mention any of that.)
The first thing Eva does after kicking off her shoes is to gently pry Olivia out of his arms and hold her close, inhaling the smell of her head. Then she turns and gives him a relieved kiss.
The circles under her eyes are even more pronounced, despite the concealer and all, and when she shrugs off her blazer, Ryland notices the milk stains on her shirt.
“How was it?” he dares to ask, and Eva sighs and tilts her head.
“Could be worse,” she says honestly. “It’s going to be a whole project.”
“And they couldn’t have told you this over the phone?” Ryland says, furrowing his brow, at which she gives him a wry look that seems to say, exactly.
“They could have, but then they wouldn’t be able to get off on their little power play,” she says, dropping her gaze to Olivia, who’s trying to grab her nose with her tiny hand. “But perhaps that’s not wholly accurate. It was a productive meeting, once everyone learned of its purpose.”
Grace lets out a doubtful hum, and she pats his cheek. Then she yawns so hard that even Olivia looks startled, and they drop the subject as they settle to sleep.
When the sad men reappear a few weeks later, she slips a breast pump into her bag and wears one of her regular turtlenecks instead of the blazer.
*
On the first anniversary of Hail Mary’s launch, every major TV channel does a special program about it, focusing (mostly) on the construction of the ship, the portraits of the heroic crew, and really hammering the message of how crucial the whole mission is for the world’s survival. Eva doesn’t want to pay attention to it, but Ryland is somewhat curious how they spin it, so he leaves the BBC playing in the background as they eat lunch. It’s Saturday, on a typical peaceful weekend where the biggest event is the weekly trip to Lidl for groceries, and he figures that he might as well go down the memory lane.
“See, that’s Yao,” he says to Olivia, who’s currently sitting in his lap and refusing to eat the steamed carrot that they prepared for her today (the whole baby-led weaning is not going so well). “You’d like Yao. He had a very zen energy about him.”
Eva, who is ostensibly Not Listening and focused on her salad, lets out a quiet snort.
Olivia twists in his arms to look up at him, not a conscious thought behind those strikingly blue eyes. The carrot falls to the floor with a soft “plop”.
“Don’t mind your mother, she agrees,” Ryland declares, and pulls the plate with remaining carrots closer. Olivia only makes a face and stares at Eva somehow pleadingly. Eva looks back at her with sympathy.
“Ich weiß, mein Schatz,” she says, “but carrots first, milk later.”
Olivia continues to look at her uncomprehendingly, but her one small hand reaches for another carrot. Then she licks it and decidedly throws it away.
Ryland sighs.
“The project hung in the balance,” the reporter says, “when two weeks before the planned launch date, an accident at Baikonur Cosmodrome killed two members of the crew, including the scientist Martin DuBois…”
“Man, it was really a miracle that Shapiro’s mother called at that precise moment,” Ryland remarks, absentmindedly wiping spit from Olivia’s chin. Time to give up on the carrots, he figures. “Otherwise, can you imagine? We wouldn’t be able to launch in time.”
He’s met with complete silence. After a moment, he looks around, to see if she heard him, and finds Eva staring at him with an odd look on her face.
“What?” he asks, bouncing Olivia on his knee. “Don’t tell me you had a super secret third crew on call.”
“No,” she replies flatly. Then, with a wince, she adds, “Just the one scientist.”
Ryland stares at her.
“Really?” he asks, incredulously, and Olivia giggles in his arms. “Who?”
Again, she doesn’t reply, just tilts her head to the side and looks at him as if the answer was obvious.
Ryland’s insides twist when it hits him.
“You wouldn’t,” he says in a low voice.
Eva shifts uncomfortably in her seat, splaying her left hand on the table. The ring he gave her sparkles in the faint light of a winter afternoon.
“You were the last, and only, option,” she says with infuriating calm. “You know that there was no way to delay it. We didn’t have the time.”
He narrows his eyes at her, tightening his grip around Olivia. Eva glances at her, looking for a sign of distress, then lifts her eyes back up to meet his.
“You’d rather kill me instead?” he asks sharply, and she nearly recoils.
“If you didn’t go,” she replies, with evident strain to keep her voice even, “The entire world would die.”
“I would die, too!”
“You would die either way!”
Olivia lets out a wail, which soon escalates to a full-blown cry. Eva lifts her hands to hold her, but Ryland stands from the chair and moves away from the table, curling Olivia to his chest as he starts making soothing noises in her ear. He glares at Eva over the faint wisps of hair on their daughter’s head, and she sinks back into her chair, dejected.
“You were pregnant with my child,” he whispers, accusingly. “And still you would have asked me to go?”
Eva takes a few seconds to reply.
“I would have put you on that ship and it would have killed me,” she replies in a hoarse voice, balling her hands into fists. “But I would do it even today, if it meant a chance for Olivia’s future.”
Ryland immediately decides to skip over the whole “even today”, and instead asks,
“And if I said no?”
Eva looks at him with something resembling pity.
“There was no option for you to say no.”
When the words land, he realizes that he didn’t expect anything else. It still stings.
He looks away from her and concentrates on bouncing Olivia, but she only starts to cry harder. Can she sense how angry he is? How hard is he trying to contain it? Nothing to worry about here, kid, it’s only that your mother just dropped a nuclear bomb on my head and…
“Ryland,” Eva says, sharply. Years of training kick in and his eyes snap to hers. “Ryland, you’re shaking her too hard.”
He immediately freezes and glances down, but Olivia doesn’t seem like she’s hurt. Her wailing is just, probably, a sign of her extreme dissatisfaction with the tension in the room. Still, he loosens his grasp and deposits her in Eva’s outstretched arms, and when he pulls away, he notices that his hands are trembling.
Eva switches Olivia to her arm and starts rubbing her back in small circles, whispering to her in German. Ryland watches them for a second, weirdly focused on Olivia’s small hand fisted into the thick material of Eva’s white turtleneck.
“I’m going for a walk,” he announces. Eva looks at him like she isn’t surprised.
He makes a big show of bundling himself up and fishing for the handwarmers in a cluttered kitchen drawer. He stomps around in his thick winter boots for good measure, but Eva doesn’t say a word to him, although she watches his every move.
Outside is cold, and he very nearly reconsiders his dramatic exit, but by then it’s too late to turn back, so he closes the door behind him with more force than strictly necessary and continues with his walk.
He doesn’t think about where he’s going, exactly, but it isn’t surprising when his feet, almost of their own volition, make him turn into Waagstraße, then Garchingerstraße, and then straight ahead to the lake. Lost in his thoughts, he barely notices the frozen landscape around him, but it’s still there; heaps of snow that go up to his knees, bare tree crowns covered in white, and ice-bound fields. It’s gotten like that only in the last few years, a coworker from university told him. They never used to get temperatures below minus fifteen centigrade.
The winters do seem to be getting longer and longer. And their utility bill is already outrageous.
Coming back to the subject… Ryland is for sure experiencing A Big Emotion, but he’s a little unclear about the specifics. Anger, for sure. A feeling of… betrayal? Is that even a feeling, he wonders, before deciding that it doesn’t matter much, because he is feeling it.
He can’t believe that she would do that to him. Except… except that, yes, he can. She absolutely would, and that’s one of the reasons he fell for her in the first place. He can even understand her reasoning, darn it.
So why does it hurt so much?
His thoughts drift to Olivia; to her toothless smile, her laugh, the warmth of her tiny body curling against his chest. His breath hitches when he realizes that he would never have met her; he’d live and die in space without ever holding his daughter, without even seeing her. The thought is so unbearable that it manifests with a physical ache in his chest, and his eyes swim with tears.
A particularly sharp gust of wind blows in his face and cuts at his cheeks. Ryland stops to turn away from the wind and looks back at the village.
He’d like to think that he would sacrifice himself, anyway. That he would do whatever it takes, including death, to give Olivia a chance at survival. But he probably wouldn’t, he realizes, his chest burning again, this time with shame. He is not brave. He wouldn’t volunteer. Eva would have to be the one to force him, and he would hate her for it. There is a part of him that hates her already, and she may very well be the love of his life.
The tears flow this time, hot against his cheeks, and he presses both gloved hands to his face and doesn’t try to stop them.
*
He comes back, because of course he does, what else can he do? He forgives Eva, eventually, even as he continues to debate if forgiveness for something she ultimately didn’t do is even appropriate. They move on from this fairly quickly, swept up in the hectic rhythm of a life with a toddler and two demanding, potentially life-saving careers.
Two years after the launch of Hail Mary: Grace and a team of bioengineers are working on heavily GMO’d crops that could withstand the harsher and harsher conditions outside. Stratt is setting up enormous food farms all across Germany. Olivia’s first word is “mama”, followed by “snow”. Grace builds his greenhouse at the back of their house, and tests some of the crops they developed in home conditions. People start to migrate from northern Canada, Scandinavia and Russia to warmer regions. A freaky snowstorm wipes out several cities in Finland. Someone sets up a website with an estimated death toll of the apocalypse.
Four years: Grace has a particularly high yield of his homegrown vegetables, and spends a week dutifully canning them for winter. Eva is enlisted to help, and due to her culinary talents, or lack thereof, she mostly sterilises jars, peels the vegetables and stacks everything in neat rows in their basement, and it’s a draining job, but once it’s done, Grace eats her out on the kitchen table as a reward. First food farms are built, but projections clearly state that it will not be enough, not with the added strain of migration. Similar solutions begin to pop up in other countries, and some governments very unofficially ask for Stratt’s help with their roadmaps and blueprints. Olivia starts preschool, which means that she is sick on and off for half a year, and Ryland and Eva can observe first hand the slow collapse of the global supply chain when the pharmacies start running out of medications.
Five years: the winter in Germany now lasts eight months. Ryland’s cans and jars get them through it when empty shelves and random deliveries become commonplace in local supermarkets. Lokken tracks him down and adds him to a Hail Mary discussion server, where twenty people exchange everything from nihilistic memes to detailed chemical equations. This is how they learn that China and Russia are buying or forcibly colonizing parts of the Middle East and Africa where the climate is supposed to stay stable or, indeed, become more profitable for vegetation, and disposing of native populations, either via forced relocation or straight up ethnic cleanses. The United States nukes Antarctica again, and seizes Greenland, which has by now become a frozen wasteland.
Six years: the German government starts rationing food, and riots regularly break out in large cities. Olivia starts school, and when she brings home her drawing assignments, Eva is disturbed to discover that she draws the sun mostly in shades of gray, or sometimes in pink. The temperatures regularly drop below minus twenty degrees, and people freeze in the streets. All agriculture has shifted to indoor food farms, and the economy will soon be in a free fall. One day, Ryland receives a call that his parents passed away; the officer is not sure, but it seems as if his father stripped down and walked straight into a raging snowstorm, which killed him almost instantly, and his mother either joined him or tried to save him. Ryland goes to bed and lays there for two whole days without speaking a word. When the forty-eight hours are up, he gets up and rejoins his family in the land of the living, but he’s never quite the same after that.
Eight years; Carl’s husband dies in a fishing accident in Missouri and instead of moving to Cuba or Mexico, or even Florida, he decides to visit them in ice-bound Germany and soon moves in with them permanently. Grace has to admit that it’s nice having him around. Eva thinks Carl is suicidal; Ryland thinks “who isn’t?” and it’s only when he sees the devastated look on her face that he realizes he said it out loud. The state of the world is depressing; their country is still functioning, barely, hanging on by a thread, in no small part thanks to Eva, who years ago forced some ministers to implement solutions designed for Canadian wilderness. But across the world, people are dying by the million. There are wars and famine and drought and it’s not enough, the three of them agree as they huddle by the stove in the living room, Olivia passed out in a heap of blankets at their feet. This is no way to live.
Ten years; the reason they still have enough food on the table is that a) Carl hunts for wild animals with astounding rate of success and b) Ryland steals the food from one of the farms he helped set up. He knows that he’s not the only one; his whole former team from TUM is doing the same. Carl is extremely resourceful in general; he somehow gets them a quad and goes for regular trips to the nearby parks and forests for firewood. One day, Olivia comes home from her still-functioning school shell-shocked and tells them that her class shrank by two people overnight; two whole families of her classmates took their lives the day before. The silence that falls over the kitchen is deafening.
Later that night, after Olivia goes to sleep in her cold bedroom, Eva retrieves a bottle of the good whisky that was supposed to be saved as hard currency in an emergency (the Euro collapsed some time ago). She, Ryland and Carl sit around the fire, passing the bottle back and forth, not caring about glasses, and Eva says,
“Enough is enough.”
Her voice is hoarse and tears are streaming down her face. Ryland puts his arm around her; Carl lays a hand on her knee.
“This cannot go on like this. I cannot go on like this,” she continues. “I think this is the time we start doing things our own way.”
Eleven years after the launch of Hail Mary, they return to a ship.
*
What they have, essentially, is an army of rebels.
It turns out that once you’ve participated in a project aimed to save the world, it’s hard to sit back and watch as the world turns on itself. Most people from the original crew join them, all carrying some kind of wounds. Lokken and Leclerc arrive together, with their daughter Marielle, but the state of their relationship is complicated. Ryland learns it’s because they had two daughters, but the younger one, Stella, had diabetes and didn’t survive the collapse of global insulin production. Lamai’s whole family starved to death when they got separated by a weather phenomenon she refuses to talk about. Rasmussen sold everything he owned to move his wife and children to Brazil, but was forced to leave his elderly parents behind in Denmark, which at that point no longer exists.
They are more determined, but less disciplined than they used to be. The living/sleeping situation is a conundrum that no one, and especially not Eva, even tries to solve. They all have good days and bad days, and the bad days are infinitely worse now than in the old times.
Technically, they are fugitives (particularly Eva), but to Ryland’s surprise, no one seems to be coming after them. Six months into their haphazard operation, which, so far, has consisted mostly of blowing up icebergs and building water streams, a US Navy ship approaches them and Ryland thinks that this will be the end of everything. But all they say is, “Eva Stratt? No, the Congress doesn’t care anymore. We’ll just take whatever help we can get”.
That doesn’t mean that their actions are sanctioned, but the common consensus seems to be “well, you can’t make it any worse. Now, what was that about Sahara again?”.
*
(Even in the darkest of times, there is light.
There is the coffee (a rare treat, courtesy of Rasmussen’s Brazilian friends) that Ryland and Eva drink on freezing mornings out on the deck, listening to the crunch of ice giving in to the force of their ship.
There is the familiar warmth of Eva’s body as they sink into each other in the stolen moments when Olivia is spending time with one of her friends.
There is the makeshift classroom where they take turns to teach the kids onboard everything they think the next generation should know. Ryland loves being able to teach again, and Olivia looks at him in awe and says that he got his spark back.
There are movie nights, an old projector and a regular white sheet hung out in the mess, and sometimes Eva falls asleep with her head on Carl’s shoulder, and sometimes teenage Olivia and Marielle sit very close together and Ryland pretends to not see their joined hands (not until she tells him herself).
There are nights when someone has a nightmare and the four of them cuddle in Eva and Ryland’s large bed, talking about everything and nothing. Carl usually is Ryland’s big spoon.
There is the day when Lokken and Leclerc find their way back to each other, their smiles brighter than the pre-Petrova line sun, and Eva is thrown off balance when she realizes that she’ll be responsible for officiating their second wedding.)
*
And then, twenty-six years post-launch, sixteen years into their vigilante mission, the beetles come back.
*
“Hello, Earth!” Ilyukhina says, waving to the camera. Behind her, Shapiro is floating in zero gravity. “We hope this message gets to you in time. Otherwise, no offence, but it would be a bummer, since help is on the way…”
The room erupts in cheer. Ryland has, for the umpteenth time, no idea how Stratt got hold of these logs, but he wouldn’t be too surprised if NASA sent them to her directly. He looks at her with tears in his eyes, and she looks back, beaming, and wraps an arm around his waist. They are old now, with grey in their hair and joints that hurt on a particularly windy day, and Lamai keeps shoving Vitamin D into their throats, but they are still hanging on. Olivia is twenty-five now, and on track to complete an online degree in geography and environmental science. She has Eva’s hair and his eyes (including the bad eyesight, unfortunately), and she’s the most stubborn, infuriating and brilliant person he knows. (Which also means that when she was going through her teenage rebellion phase, the fights between her and Eva were frequent, loud and often ended with one or both of them threatening to jump off the ship.) She and Marielle seem to be going steady, although Grace sometimes wonders if it’s healthy to latch on to the first person you’ve met on a ship that became your home. But, well. He doesn’t have a leg to stand on here.
Shapiro tells them that Yao sadly didn’t make the trip. There was something wrong with the pump mechanism, they think, and he passed away long before they reached Tau Ceti. Then they say a lot of nice and completely true things about him, and Grace hopes that at least this fragment will make its way to Yao’s surviving family. After that, Shapiro explains that they discovered a new life form that seems to be a natural predator to astrophage, and its existence seems to explain why Tau Ceti isn’t dying. They call it cetieuglena, and they’ve sent a solid supply of it to Earth.
“Also, you’ll never guess,” Ilyukhina says, all giddy, and Shapiro rolls her eyes at her good-naturedly. “But it turns out that we had some help!”
“You’ll understand everything as you go back in the vlogs,” Shapiro interrupts. Then she smiles. “But let it be known that humanity wasn’t alone in its attempts to save their world.”
Ryland’s mouth hangs open. She can’t be saying what he thinks she’s saying, right? Olivia squeezes his elbow so hard he almost hisses and he looks down at her just to see that her face is mirroring his own.
“Earth,” Shapiro says proudly, “Meet Rock, of 40 Eridani.”
*
The cetieuglena works. It all works.
Thirty years after the discovery of the Petrova line, Earth gets its sun back.
It doesn’t erase all the death and suffering that occurred, and some areas of the world might never recover from the destruction they went through. Entire populations are left grappling with massive survivor’s guilt, and people still get up in the morning and rebuild their communities piece by piece.
But the glaciers begin to melt. Rivers flow. Lands become fertile again.
When Olivia gets the first (and hopefully last) sunburn of her life, Eva cries.
“We did it, baby,” Ryland says, wrapping his arms around her as they stand on the stern of their ship and admire the orange-pink skies stretching over the shimmering ocean. “Now what?”
Eva hums and leans back, sinking into his arms. Next to them, Carl is smoking a pipe, which is a newly acquired habit that both Eva and Olivia heavily frown upon.
“Now,” she says, “we can finally get some sleep.”
*
Post-Glacial Reclamation of Agricultural Land: The Case of Illinois Corn Belt
by
Olivia Grace, M. Sc.
A Dissertation Submitted to the
Division of Biology and Biological Engineering
of the
California Institute of Technology
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Pasadena, California
To Mom, Dad, and Uncle Carl
For my whole life