Chapter Text
Static crackled to life.
“…message repeat:
Mayday,
This is the space vessel Hail Mary, require immediate assistance.
Message repeat:
Mayday,
This is the space vessel Hail Mary, require immediate assistance.
Message repeat:
Mayday,
This is the…”
“How long has it been like this?”
The standby CAPCOM—Bat James, their uniform stated—shrugged. They were a stiff-postured person, with their charcoal-black hair pinned back in a perfect, tight bun. Eva hardly remembered anymore what it was like, to brush her hair into that hairstyle on the daily, even if she recognised the impassive set of their mouth from her own mirror.
“When did you first catch it?”
“Yesterday. You were contacted immediately.”
She stared at the radio. The message replayed again and again.
“…Hail Mary, require immediate assistance…”
Her fingers fidgeted with the mouse plush attached to her key ring, and the motion of her wrist sent her bracelet sliding along the skin, a comforting reminder of its presence. She heard Dr. Harper take a breath beside her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him pull out his phone and type. Perhaps he was going to have Lokken hover around her again; at some point, he’d started acting like Eva was his insubordinate grandmother, and then never really stopped.
She could sense Ryland’s influence in him, in everything he did, down to the joy with which he approached any public engagement stunt which involved children, even if only in passing.
“And you are certain this isn’t a joke?”
“If it is, they’re damn good.” They shuffled around with a notepad, flipped three pages backwards to scan a few lines of text, then hailed a different person—a nervous-looking woman that was perhaps in her late twenties—with the wave of a hand and pressed the now ripped-out sheet into her hands. No instruction was given, and yet the woman hurried away with it, disappeared from view in seconds.
Eva didn’t ask about it. She pushed her little finger into Dr. Harper’s arm before he could, either.
She kept staring at the radio.
“Have you responded?”
The CAPCOM seemed close to laughing. They pursed their lips to compensate, but the corners of their eyes still wrinkled.
“We received an order to wait for you.”
“…require immediate assistance…”
“Respond.” She spoke over the recording, fast and direct words, her voice more strained than she cared for. “Now.”
She stared at the radio, unmoving.
It couldn’t have been him. Ryland Grace was gone; he either died in deep space or met his end on an alien planet when he starved to death after saving his best friend from remaining derelict in space and dying of radiation poisoning. Dr. Ryland Grace had had a state funeral over fourteen years ago. Dr. Ryland Grace had a world holiday in his name on January 25th, and then also another for the whole Hail Mary crew on November 15th, the day the Beetles had returned.
Dr. Ryland Grace had been Eva’s closest friend, her manneke, her Rylie. He was a ghost in Eva’s life like she had never known, a person she was proud to have called a friend.
“This is the space vessel Hail Mary…”
She felt Dr. Harper nudge her shoulder. She looked at him, his eyes narrowed with a question but the rest of his face soft, gentle, careful. She frowned.
“Do you think he’s on there?” he said.
“Dr. Grace is dead.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
It took longer than anticipated to establish contact. It was just the four of them huddled around the CAPCOM desk, at that point— the MCC-H director, Eva Stratt and Dr. Harper, who was only allowed to stay after Eva stared the director down firmly. They all pressed around Bat James, hawks watching prey.
Bat James set the frequency and engaged the microphone. They’d been repeating the same message every half an hour.
“Hello Hail Mary, this is Houston, do you copy? Repeat: this is Houston, do you copy?”
They remained crowded around the computer, breath baited. It would take a moment for the Hail Mary to receive the message, once whoever had sent the previous looped transmission was back at the radio. ISS had already been informed of the exchange and were on standby, and the rest of mission control was scouring satellite data for any knowledge about the Hail Mary’s position. The last it was spotted was passing near a base on Mars—that particular piece of information had not been reported back to her until just recently. They hadn’t identified the ship, then, only detected the foreign object on its trajectory towards Earth, collected telemetry that had not been properly analysed at that moment.
She would make sure she had all the information, now.
The radio crackled to life.
“This is Hail Mary. Copy. Require immediate assistance. Houston, question?”
Bat James raised their hand to keep anybody from interrupting and engaged their microphone.
“Houston, Hail Mary, copy. Dr. Ryland Grace status update? What assistance is required?”
Eva had to force herself to keep breathing. She felt Dr. Harper try to nudge her into a chair.
“Status is bad bad bad. Hail Mary need to dock at I-S-S. Grace need food. Transmitting video logs. Please hold.”
“Holding, affirmative.”
Bat James turned to the director.
“Should I notify ISS?”
He shook his head.
“Not until we can verify them better. Whatever video logs they’re sending down, they better be informative.”
Eva considered him carefully. He was an old man, older than Eva, and had been in his position for decades, now, since his predecessor had died some years after the launch of the Hail Mary. Most everybody who had communicated with the spaceship during launch no longer worked at the centre, but the director—and she could faintly recall his name as something like Gregor, now—was a member of the centre even then. Most missions had since switched from radio to optical communications; Bat James had been working there for long enough to be very familiar with both, and while certain missions still came equipped with laser and radiocomms, even for orbital spacecrafts the transmission of choice was now IR. It was why it had taken them a moment to catch this message, or so it had been explained to her.
“Clearly, it’s a spacecraft. Data from the Ares III base confirmed so.” She retorted. “What more proof do you need?”
“We need to make certain that Dr. Ryland Grace is on board.”
She knew what he was trying to imply. That perhaps Dr. Grace’s alien companion had hijacked his ship and was now planning to invade Earth, using Ryland as a ruse, a lure. Imbecile.
“We’ve got quite a lot of data coming. Plenty is a repeat from the Beetles, judging by the names, but there’s a series of new video diaries.” Bat James muttered more under their breath, inaudible to Eva. They engaged the microphone again.
“Logs being received. Requesting identification.”
“Ship identification: Hail Mary.”
Eva pressed her lips tight to stop her smile. She heard Dr. Harper snort into his fist. Gregor rolled his eyes.
“Requesting speaker identification.”
It took longer than any delay could account for. They were thinking their answer over.
“Speaker identification: Engineer Rocky Eridian.”
Gregor pushed Bat James away, dropped his heavy body into their chair with a sigh and pulled the headset on.
“Where is Dr. Ryland Grace?”
The reply was almost immediate.
“Dr. Ryland Grace physical health status: critical condition. Lack of consciousness. Open wounds. SpO2 92%. Heart rate: 115 bpm. Blood pressure: 85/53 mmHg. Significant blood loss. Body mass below recommended range—insufficient data. Bone density—insufficient data. Bloodwork—last reading: 3 months ago. Haematology: RBC: 4.2 million per microlitre; low. Hgb: 13 gram per dekalitre; low. Hct: 40%; low. MCV: 76 femtolitre per cell; low. MCH: 23 picograms per cell; low. MCHC: 30 grams per dekalitre; low. RDW-SD: 48 femtolitres; high. RDW-CV: 15.5%; high. Plt: 140 thousand per microlitre; low. PDW: 18…”
It seemed Rocky had good access to Hail Mary’s medical system.
Eva blinked, let her eyes remain closed for longer than strictly necessary. She would not think of the fact that that reading was from three months ago. She wasn’t a scientist, but the fact that high or low were spoken after each value, combined with the way she could hear the rubber of a nearby chair squeak as Dr. Harper crushed it in his palm spoke volumes, and she couldn’t afford to let that distract her. Even if it meant death, she had known she was killing him when she gave him that sedative.
If he died, it would be the long overdue end to this stretched-out play.
The chair Dr. Harper had been squeezing screeched on the floor, and her science consultant fell forward a few inches but steadied himself on the desk. His knuckles were white, arms shaking.
She looked at Gregor. He was staring at the screen in front of him. Bat James had leaned over and was typing something on the keyboard from a seat beside him, their arms extended on the diagonal.
“Call ISS now.”
He swallowed. He did not turn to look at her.
“Yes, Ma’am.” He nodded at Bat James, got up and left, hurried steps and hands shoved into his pockets—she knew they were shaking despite his futile effort to obscure that fact.
“…PCT: 0,8%; high. WBC: 3 thousand per microlitre; low. Neutrophiles: 1,6 thousand per microlitre; low. Lymphocytes: 0,86 thousand per microlitre; low. Monocytes: 0,07 thousand per microlitre; low…”
Dr. Harper had his arm on hers.
“There are more productive uses of your time, Director Stratt,” he pulled her backward, slightly. She moved her arm away, out of his grip, but he was unphased. “Leave the numbers for the doctors.”
She forced herself to clear her head. It had been a long time, since she was quite so shaken; since she’s had to force herself to remain on task so desperately. Not that it was unexpected—Ryland was always good at dragging her emotions to the surface. She pushed them down firmly, motions rusty but still the same as thirty years ago. She nodded.
“I want updates if anything more happens and access to the video logs.”
Bat James was tapping a pen on the desk rhythmically with one hand, making sure the listed values were saved with another. Even despite that, they nodded at her words and turned their head slightly to look at her with one eye.
“I’ve sent the diaries over already.” And then, after a few seconds, they smiled at her, wrinkling their nose. “You’re lucky this came now, with Project Hail Mary still relevant; two years in the future and Gregor would be withholding information like his life depended on it.”
“Two years in the future they’d have put me in prison. Again.”
Dr. Harper laughed, a stark and loud sound, unfitting at all. Last time she heard it was when one of the people at the meeting began to inquire if he thought her continuous decision to chip away at Antarctica was a good one. He placed his hand on her shoulder again and tugged her back insistently. She ignored him, still looking at Bat James. They kept smiling.
“I never thought you deserved that. Those old pricks don’t know what they’re doing.”
Eva shrugged. She used to hold the belief that she had deserved it, at least somewhat. Not so much anymore.
“I appreciate the sentiment.”
Bat James looked as if they wanted to say something else but weren’t sure how to. Their mouth remained open, tongue darting out to lick at their lips intermittently. They kept on tapping the pen and saving the logs, not looking at their keyboard at all. A professional multitasker. Eva’s mind flashed to an image of Ryland, a red piece of liquorice—Twizzler, if she recalled the name right from the copious amount of the candy she ended up ordering—in his mouth and a laptop open in one hand, fingers of his other flashing on the keyboard as she could only watch the lines of equations fill the screen, the fan whirring with the work of Wolfram Mathematica on one side of the display and MS Excel on the other, all while he attempted to explain to her the recent discovery in terms of Astrophage neutrino storage.
Bat James turned away. Eva let Dr. Harper walk her out of the room.
Ryland’s face stared at her through the video screen.
She had never forgotten how he looked. She couldn’t have, if she wanted to—his likeness was everywhere, in coursebooks, in the news, old pictures that she had helped select all those years ago when she knew it would end like this, knew he would succeed deep in her heart. She saw iterations of him in kids’ cartoons, sometimes looked through art of him online, during her evenings when it was just her, the apartment and her lukewarm tea. Dr. Singh questioned how healthy it was, but Eva quite frankly found that arguing with Dr. Singh was half the reason she continued therapy. The art was always beautiful; she found solace, in seeing him appreciated, in the sanctifying, ethereal paintings that showed him floating among the stars, or handing the Astrophage to the Sun as Prometheus.
It was different, to see him like this.
He had changed. His face was thinner, eyes sunken, a patchy stubble of a beard unshaved on his face and his hair longer; the pixelated recording did not allow for much detail, but even despite that the exhaustion of him, the unhealthy redness of his face and neck, was evident through the screen.
“I’m dying.” He began.
Age had softened her, in many ways. Eva was no longer simply a vessel for determination (you’ve never been only that, but I can see how it may look that way now—but Dr. Singh did not need to interrupt this train of thought). She had spent too many years of her life pushing herself to the brink to bring humanity to salvation. Long gone were the days where she refused to ever cry. The older she got, the more she appreciated the fact that she still could; growing old did not make her weak, nor did it make her any less stern, but it did give her a new, different appreciation for her own life she had perhaps lacked, once.
She still did not cry often.
A tear fell down her face now, warm like spring rain—or like she had remembered it to be. The sun had already returned to full luminosity, but it would take longer to repair the damage that the cold had left Earth with. More dripped down her cheeks, and she recalled with as much clarity as ever, the night in her mobile home. She knew the memory had to be distorted by time; she remembered herself more vulnerable, sometimes crueller than she had been, remembered him softer, too naïve, too willing to give his all to her. She cherished any recollection of it she had. Human remembrance was too fragile not to.
It was supposed to be their last night. Last night with her beloved friend, before she had killed him.
“We’re heading to Earth. If you’re getting this message, then you probably know that already. I’m probably also in a really sorry state by now, in that case. I have about… a year left of coma slurry, and then the remaining three or four months—sorry, Rocky’s better at math and my brain is… not fully there, these days—it’s just going to be me and the amoeba. If you have a nutritionist there, I suggest you get them a chair; and if you don’t have one then, well… If I’m alive by the time we dock at the ISS, I’d like to keep doing that, so. Maybe get one.”
He had been living solely off the Taumoeba for months.
Stupid, self-sacrificing, you were never a coward, and even when you were it was—
She wasn’t the only person with access to the recordings. They had been transmitted to the ISS as soon as Bat James had gotten their hands on them. But they had left her alone in a conference room with them and a projector; even Dr. Harper had agreed to leave her side. She was free to witness him fall apart alone.
It wasn’t truly her fault, not this. She would never regret it, would never take back her choice. She understood her guilt, understood her love, understood that her impossible decision was the very thing that had saved the Earth. How could she not feel uneasy at the sight, how could she not think about the fact that had it not been for her, he would have never known what it felt like to starve—except that was a lie, and if it hadn’t been for her, he would have found that out on Earth. If it had not been for her, there would be no chance to save him.
Nothing could ever be simple, could it?
The recordings continued, each one short, maybe 6 minutes at most. She watched Ryland deteriorate on a screen in front of her. His hair would thin, slowly fall out, the eyebags would deepen until they became permanent bruises. In the latter recordings, there were often tiny, pinprick bleeding wounds somewhere on his face, like he had found a new pass time in laying on a bed of needles, until at last every transmission came from his bed, with Rocky often by his side, helping him along. He clearly understood the alien well, because when Rocky hummed, Ryland responded in English, tired but fond.
He was always so eager to live, when she knew him. He was comfortable in his small corner of the world, sure, in his stable job and the children he taught and infused with passion, but in everything he did there was always the inseparable energy of somebody who was happy to be alive. He wouldn’t have ran from her as hard as he did, if that hadn’t been the case. Even when he admitted, previously, that he was going to starve, there was still a spark in him, something that said I will die, but at least it will have been worth it. Something that still had hope.
That light vanished in real time, right before her eyes.
How do you look the man you murdered in the eye? How do you look a friend you betrayed in the face, after all these years?
Eva hoped, as the last recording came to an end, as the image of Ryland with his mouth missing a tooth and his eyes absent, not there, froze on the screen, that she would need to figure out the answer to that question.
Lokken cried when Eva told her.
It was over the phone, because she was holding down fort in front of the EU while Eva managed this issue; she’d gotten the news while they were about to enter discussions regarding future Project Hail Mary funding, Eva’s demands that the EU enter a financial alliance with South Africa already (they’re dancing around each other like two horny teenagers at a school party, Lokken had remarked once), maintenance of the world seed bank and progress in the battle against world hunger. That, and about 3 different impending wars that had been hanging over their heads for the past 20 years, it felt like, and a myriad of other minor issues. There was always a fire burning somewhere, regardless how much time had elapsed.
Lokken hadn’t been too happy to be left alone, there. She got that look on her face, lips twisted and her eyes never on Eva’s face, no matter that she typically bore into her own with unsettling intensity, and she nodded once, short, as if they had returned to being director and subordinate and weren’t almost-equals.
Lokken cursed her out over the phone, now, when she stopped cutting herself off with poorly concealed sobbing. Eva listened, her eyes never leaving Dr. Harper as he winced every third swearword, whenever Lokken became loud enough to be understood from where he sat. He was clutching his phone in one hand, hard enough that the screen had been showing the turn device off? panel for the past 5 minutes, and his leg was tapping at the floor like he was fighting the urge to run away.
“You saw the recordings,” he said. She didn’t answer; it didn’t warrant a response. He shook his head, blinked a few times with his eyebrows furrowed tight. “He’s there. He’s really… that’s Mr. Grace that’s on that spaceship. He’s just… back. Just like that.”
She took a deep breath. Lokken was slowly falling quiet, but she had yet to find her way to speaking English again; Eva did not have the energy to translate the curt Norwegian in her head, and she knew whatever she was being told was the effect of an old wound opening again. They’d buried it between them when Lokken became her First Officer, when they formed this tentative alliance that only worked because emotion was secondary to them both, if they could help it; but it had to resurface now. Lokken had never forgiven her, never understood, and Eva would never change her mind.
Dr. Harper laughed, once, twice, and then he bit his lip, clenched his fist tighter yet. His leg stilled, then came back to racing with newfound vigour.
“You may go in, Dr. Harper,” she told him, covering the speaker of her phone with one hand. “You don’t need to keep me company.”
Dr. Harper shook his head. He exhaled, his breath trembling.
“No, I—I can’t. No, mhm, nope, I can’t.” He took another wavering inhale. “I’m his age now. I’m like… am I older than him? I’m not. I’m older than he was when he left. What the fuck. I—”
She kicked him, hard, and his eyes snapped over to his shin for a second. A beat passed.
His death hold on his phone relaxed, ever so slightly and he heaved, a man starved of oxygen. He opened his eyes wide, swallowed air in big gasps. Lokken’s sharp Norwegian began to include a few English words, but all Eva caught was bitch and heartless and demon. She bit the inside of her cheek.
“I can’t go in there yet, I have to finish discussions with Dr. Lokken,” discussions was an unsuitable word, and Dr. Harper knew so, but he didn’t call her out on it. “Go. Report back to me later. That’s an order.”
Dr. Harper nodded. He got up swiftly, with his hands steadier, as if an order was exactly what he needed to recentre himself—it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, all things considered. There was a reason he remained by her side for the better part of the past 10 years.
She watched the door close behind him, the faint glimpse she got into the current chaos of mission control soon again locked away. She thought she had heard Bat James yell something, that she had caught sight of the Navigations officer shaking her head vigorously.
Lokken had fallen quiet. Eva sighed.
“Are you finished?” she asked into the receiver. She watched her hand, the bracelet that had lost almost all of its colour and at least one bead as the plastic had broken off at some point. The letters E, V, A still stared at her from the square beads at the centre, flanked by two moons. “He might still die.”
Lokken was silent. Eva took a breath.
“I don’t know what I will do if he doesn’t.”
“You want him to die?”
“No.” There was no discussion to be had there. She swallowed. “I will have to handle it all. The medical, the re-assimilation to society, the alien—it’s all Project Hail Mary jurisdiction, and it will stay that way.”
Lokken barked a quick laugh.
“You’re afraid he hates you? He should.”
She shook her head. She was old and tired, and she knew better, now, than to rise to every challenge, especially one issued by Lokken. She grabbed at the fabric of her pants, twisted it in her fingers, considering.
“I don’t want to distress him more,” she blinked, shook her head. A shiver ran down her spine, but she suppressed the instinctive shudder. Somebody raced past her, into mission control, papers overflowing in their arms. “Well, better him distressed than dead. And if those imbeciles that the US calls a government get their hands on them, then Rocky is as good as deceased.”
Lokken hummed. Eva heard her mouth work, the wet sounds of her tongue as she tsked and swallowed.
“Last time he was distressed and dead,” she said. No longer spitting, but still bitter to the core. “Perhaps I should handle him in person, you can manage from the sidelines.”
“As if you weren’t there when I signed his death sentence. He thinks you’re just as guilty as I am.”
“At least I feel bad about it.”
Eva shook her head.
“Set a meeting, we’ll discuss everything when any sort of plan is in place for getting him stable. Goodbye, Dr. Lokken.”
“Director.”
The call disconnected.
Eva stared at the door for a few seconds more before she came in.
Bat James stood beside her at the head of the table. Gregor MacAuley—his full name was now spelled out on the plaque before him—was to their left, and along the table after him were the NASA administrator, Roscosmos director, presidents of US, Canada, a few from South America, five from Africa, the French man who served as the current EU president and the Russian woman who was at the head of the European-Middle East Coalition. On her laptop and projected onto the screen were Dr. Lokken, JAXA, CNSA and three different East Asian leaders—Vietnam, Korea and China, as well as the president of India. All of them were exhausted beyond belief; instead of water, the meeting room table was covered with JPL coffee mugs and energy drink cans—any pretence of appearing professional had been abandoned the moment they heard that Earth’s hero had returned to her. Eva had not slept for two days, maybe more, and her angina was rearing its ugly head with pangs in her chest.
MacAuley was the first to speak, after Bat James finished detailing their communications with the Hail Mary, up to the most recent developments; they were acting as the interim Flight Director in the chaos of it all, until MacAuley finally got himself together and appointed somebody else for either that job or CAPCOM.
“We’re not telling the public anything.”
Eva crossed her arms, regarded him coldly as the room erupted in yelling. Bat James shook their head, and Eva was almost certain she heard them whisper old prick beneath their breath.
She cleared her throat, slammed her hand on the table. The frantic discussion came to a halt, and she took an ostentatious breath before talking, eyes still firmly locked on MacAuley.
“We must keep the public updated.”
“Are you out of your mind?” he pressed a hand to his face, shaking his head. “You want to, what, tell those people that their hero has returned before we can even be sure if he’s gonna live? I mean, sure, be my guest, it’s gonna be you who gets blamed when he dies on our watch—”
“I’m not stupid, Director MacAuley,” she interrupted. “But you keep all this under wraps and the moment you release information, it’s all about how we’re manipulating the public, we hid him away and the aliens had replaced him.”
She used to not care about this public relations side of it all—but then the most immediately pressing solution, the one that had a ticking time clock on it, had been dispatched, and it all of a sudden mattered, whether or not people considered her trustworthy. She continued to disregard governmental opinions, continued to make decisions that rose eyebrows, but transparency was something she readily offered. It had worked, for the past 30 years. Society was easy. Eva could break their trust again and again in the name of saving the Earth—which she was, this wasn’t her playing dictator for the fun of it—but as long as she laid her cards out on the table each time, they only screamed at her and never did anything more proactive.
There was nobody in the room typing away on a laptop, no muttering of numbers and values; it felt incomplete, as such, but she ignored it. She would have preferred if Dr. Harper were there, but he had been needed elsewhere, still in mission control so he could collect information about the progress and then give it to her in digestible format—she’d gotten better at comprehending certain things, but it was always easier when they were laid out simply.
“What if the aliens did replace him?” President Muñoz-Bagnell, the voice of the US, regarded Eva with a tired gaze. Her wrinkled, tan hands were holding onto the edge of the table, manicured nails digging sharply into the surface. “I’m not asking to be conspiratorial, but this is beyond anything we could have anticipated. I mean—ha, isn’t it a little convenient for you, that just as the case against you was opened again suddenly this transmission comes up?”
“Put me in jail if you wish to, I don’t have time for your what-ifs; either do it or not. I didn’t resist last time, have no reason to this time,” she could hear Lokken spew outraged words and questions into her ear—they had a direct line of communication in case anything confidential needed to be immediately stated—but she ignored her. Lokken was still relentlessly bad at political games like this one, at the careful exchange of curated lies with the aim of signifying something utterly different. “And so what, if the aliens replaced him?”
The yelling stared up again.
“You cannot honestly approach it like this—” President Rivoire, the EU.
“What about general risk to Earth?” Godunova, the EAC.
“—the resources alone that we would waste—” President Byamukama, Uganda.
“It only matters if Dr. Grace is on ship, otherwise—” President Triệu, Vietnam.
And more, voices overlapping. Roscosmos was quiet, and she caught them sending a glance towards NASA. MacAuley was pointedly talking over the table to South Africa; China and Japan were both trying to speak over one another, Namibia and Angola crossed his arms with his lips pursed, glaring towards Venezuela who appeared to be losing a battle with himself against throwing something towards Mexico.
There had been a situation, once, when the scientific discussion had devolved out of her control. Ryland had been sat next to her, typing away into Wolfram as he most usually was, his glasses askew on his face and his unceasing muttering only a little grating on her nerves. The yelling had pulled him out of it, out of that depth of focus he entered in which he thought mostly in the numbers and strings of letters on his screen, and he looked to her with his brows furrowed, then turned his head to stare at the room from over his laptop screen. He yawned, wrinkled his nose. Out of his pocket, he pulled out that Earth crochet ball and he tossed it up in front of him with the air of somebody expecting that his surroundings reorder themselves to his convenience. Eva opened her mouth to try and reign the academics and politicians in, but before she could have spoken, Ryland dropped the ball, clapped his hands and exclaimed “One two three, eyes on me!” into the room of fully grown adults. He grew red, immediately, the adults grew quiet, and for a long two minutes there was only awkward silence until one of the politicians coughed and began his line of questioning again, albeit much more calmly.
Bat James hit their microphone on their wrist three times and then placed it, turned off, on the table when the feedback whined deafeningly.
“Are you all children?” Eva asked the room. She righted her tablet in her hands. “We cannot risk assuming that Dr. Grace isn’t on board.”
“You shouldn’t be the one to decide that,” Rivoire tapped the end of a pen into the table. “You have got the… personal agenda in this.”
“Earth has a personal agenda in this. Last I checked, this is still my project.”
“Not for long if we can help it…” she ignored his remark.
“This meeting is a favour, not a discussion. I was courteous to invite you all, because at the end of the day, this is information to be managed by Project Hail Mary and NASA. Stop acting like utter idiots,” she heard Lokken laugh in her ear. “Fight over me all you want, but we don’t have time. If Dr. Grace is on board, he is actively dying. And the public needs to know that we have spotted the Hail Mary. We can tell them whether Dr. Grace is there or not when—if he survives.”
She saw Gregor MacAuley scowl in her direction but nevertheless nod his head slowly in agreement.
“That still leaves issue of alien,” Godunova said. “Who gets to take it?”
“You’re forgetting it could still be volatile,” came from President Steyler of South Africa. Eva looked to him, fighting against the growing annoyance. She got more likely to snap, the less sleep she got. Her heart panged. She missed the more powerful self-control she used to possess, when she had first been put in charge of the project.
“The alien will stay where Dr. Grace goes. Consult any psychologist, they will agree with me.” said Administrator Wakeling. She leaned back in her chair, considered the others in the room with a bored stare. “And beyond that, Dr. Grace is the only person who speaks the Eridian language, save for the few that have been working to establish more of it under Project Hail Mary and JPL Special Projects—that I know of, of course, I don’t doubt our Russian and Chinese friends are hot on our heels—but you cannot get his consent and be sure of it without Dr. Grace’s input.”
“You only say that because you want to propose NASA as the landing base from ISS.”
“Actually,” Administrator Wakeling smiled, her thin lips almost disappearing with the motion. “I was going to suggest Roscosmos.”
She motioned to the man sitting opposite her. He nodded towards the room, face serious and his body stiff, professionally unmoving.
“Roscosmos is most mission ready. Have been preparing to receive recent mission from Ares III for months,” Director Raskolnikov spoke stiffly and with his accent heavy. His hands lay before him on the table, open for anyone to see. A strategic display of honesty.
“So it is settled. Roscosmos will build the necessary enclosure for the alien and welcome Dr. Grace back onto Earth until he is healthy enough to make his own decisions.”
“Nothing is settled! Who gets the alien after, why Roscosmos—JAXA has the best physicians, and nobody has actually agreed that they should be allowed to dock at ISS just yet—”
Eva picked up the microphone Bat James had left next to her, turned it on and hit it hard on the table again.
“For the sake of having any plan, Roscosmos will take on Engineer Rocky and Dr. Grace, once he is stable enough for re-entry. NASA gets the first press release about the Hail Mary, nobody mentions anything about who is on board. Project Hail Mary will manage itself. You are all free to argue amongst yourselves, but I, for one, don’t have that kind of time to waste.”
She left, before they could try to stop her. She hoped nobody noticed the trembling of her hands, the death grip she had on her bracelet.
In contrast to when they had successfully established communications, the mission control centre was now full of people, all concentrated on the task that most suited their specialisation. Nobody was yelling, and there was no running, but the room had the same air of focus she could only compare to a university exam hall, or perhaps an academic library.
Eva sat on her chair beside Bat James, staring over their shoulder at the three monitors before them, the binder that they had open and the package of chewing gum, mostly empty, hanging on for dear life on the edge of their desk. They weren’t chewing any, now. Their eyes were locked on the monitor, and their hand held onto their headset.
They’d been communicating with Rocky for a week, now. Laughably little time to establish a docking procedure, collect and brief a mission team and for MacAuley to finally appoint a Flight Director so that Bat James could comfortably return to their CAPCOM position; they were clearly happier for it, though like everybody else their face was marred by a bruised purple of eyebags. They stifled a yawn, squeezing their eyelids shut.
Rocky had been variably helpful—that was the best way she could put it. They received updated logs on Ryland’s health—no more blood readings, still, because as Rocky had explained, Ryland’s veins were too fragile to safely do a needle insertion without a human present—but there was updated heartrate, blood pressure and blood oxygen content. Only that last value had been improving, since the Hail Mary’s medical robot had given Ryland an oxygen mask. Eva listened to the numbers, despite Dr. Harper’s protests; he left each time they were read out. Rocky communicated eagerly about the docking, let them explain the procedure and detailed his own limitations—not too many, now, since he’d upgraded from the previously seen “hamster ball” to a form-fitting suit made of xenonite. He even answered some questions about the material, because progress on it was still rather slow; scientists were able to analyse the composition of both reactive liquids that were utilised in its creation, but they were still short on figuring out the actual reaction mechanism. Rocky had nothing much to offer in addition, stating that he simply used the material and wasn’t involved or educated on its synthesis, but he’d listened and responded, nonetheless.
Whenever the subject leached into his atmospheric requirements, into anything that dealt in no way with the immediate process of getting Ryland medical attention, Rocky went quiet. They never disappeared, but the messages would shorten, until eventually, once, they tapered off again into that haunting, repeating mayday, this is the space vessel...
Bat James had taken it all in stride. They’d served on a mission once in their lifetime, they told Eva unprompted in between one wave of communications and the next a few days earlier, and since then they’d been serving as CAPCOM; it had been almost 6 years now, different missions but same function.
“Houston on the big loop, ISS?” they nodded to themselves, and Eva heard the resounding yes from the astronaut in the cupola monitoring the docking procedure. “ISS is go.”
They hummed something under their breath. Eva knew it was a favour to her that she was allowed to be there. She had a suspicion it had been Bat James who arranged for that to happen.
“Houston on the big loop, Hail Mary? Affirmative. Hail Mary is functional and approaching. We are planning to hold a little at way point two. Engineer Rocky, suit on? Dr. Grace EVA suit engaged, visor down? Confirm, we got you at 200 metres away and approaching.”
She could hear the Flight Director rattle off focused questions. GC? Go, copy. Network? Good, copy, go. Navigations?
“Houston, Hail Mary, we got you too far left, adjust course.”
She could faintly hear Rocky’s response. Hail Mary, copy. And then a few seconds later Position adjusted, question?
Bat James tapped their pen on the desk as they always did, a constant, repetitive rhythm that leaned hypnotising to Eva’s tired mind. She swallowed hard, pretended to not feel her racing heart, tilted her head back and poured a few good mouthfuls of coffee down her throat.
She closed her eyes for a second. She shouldn’t have insisted to participate, really. There was nothing good she could do from this room, nothing she could offer. She’d done physical astronaut training some years ago, as had Lokken and a few other, more important members of Project Hail Mary—just in case, a contingency if there was a problem that only they could fix. Eva had made them, just as she had made Ryland take that genetic test all those years ago. Better prepared, better able to do something horrible, to send herself and a few others up to Venus to distribute the Taumoeba if the governments couldn’t arrive at a good conclusion and JAXA continued holding out on them—but it wasn’t necessary, and the knowledge was no good here. There were more productive routes she could have taken.
She had her tablet open. She was working, half-heartedly, a plan for what was to happen next. But she was there, because she had…
She thought that perhaps, after 30 years, she deserved a singular personal indulgence. She could not speed up Ryland’s arrival in any way. Couldn’t guarantee the docking would be success, neither from inside mission control nor from the outside, not with the power of her hands and an email and a Word document. For her own peace, and perhaps a little as a reparation to him, she was there. Staring at Bat James, at their hands on the keyboard, at the pack of gum that still hadn’t fallen off their desk.
“Houston, on the big loop, Hail Mary, we got you at 120 metres. Confirming a planned pause to stabilise and assess thrust at way point two. Soft capture ring extension complete as well. We’re gonna do approach prep two, in a few minutes, now.”
Out there, millions of people in the world could watch live from NASA’s YouTube channel as satellite images of the Hail Mary and ISS docking module were passed through. No cameras in mission control, only mics and voice recordings, only Bat James with their matter-of-fact, strong voice and Rocky’s computerised responses.
“O…okay, Hail Mary, Houston on the big loop, confirm for us that the spacecraft and crew are ready for approach two…mhm, affirmative, alignment is right currently.”
Navigation? Thank you. Telemetry update? Okay, thank you. GC? What’s that—
“Houston, Hail Mary, hold a second, we have a minor delay with the tracking system, GC is on it.”
Bat James tapped their leg on the ground once, twice. Eva felt her muscles seize up, slightly. Her eyes were on the monitors, no matter that she did not understand the numbers that flashed upon them.
GC? Okay, thank you. Confirming go. Navigations, again? Go.
“Houston, Hail Mary, on the big loop, ground is go and we’ll be enabling approach two shortly.”
She was playing with the bracelet. It had become just another part of her, somewhere along the years, another element of Director Eva Stratt. The tabloids and the news did not know what it meant, and though here and there they still brought it up, an argument towards her poor mental state so she could be called away, or otherwise a point towards too much eccentricity, sometimes tied in with the familiar misogyny that insinuated that she was too emotional to be in power—it was rare, and insignificant. They would never know what it meant to her.
But the person who did could very well still see her again.
“This is Houston on the big loop, Hail Mary is on final approach and go for docking. Please monitor per step 8, old docking manual 1.013.”
Station confirms monitoring step 8.
Navigations?
10 meters.
“Copy 10.”
She felt them nudge her with their hand, though they didn’t look in her direction. Eyes locked on the screen, headset engaged constantly, but they extended one hand in front of them with a thumbs up.
5 metres.
“Copy 5.”
“Hail Mary, as discussed, slowly disengage all thrust.”
Disengaged.
2 metres.
“Copy 2.”
Bat James reached over with their hand and placed it over Eva’s knee, the most easily accessible part of her body. She stared at it; she had half a mind to toss it off, but she understood the gesture, or so she thought. Final moments.
1 metre.
“Copy 1… Houston, on the big loop, confirm Hail Mary contact and soft capture complete.”
They leaned back in their chair. They met Eva’s eyes and smiled for a few seconds. They’re good, they mouthed.
Hail Mary contact and soft capture complete, statement.
Eva didn’t take her eyes off them, off the screen.
It was lucky, that they had needed to build the Hail Mary up on the ISS. It was always meant to be a suicide mission, so had the spaceship been constructed down on Earth, there would not have been a docking system in place; however, since the astronauts had entered the spacecraft from the ISS, there was always a docking element built in. It had been easier to keep it intact for all of the mission than make the segment detachable and lose it post-launch. The docking adapter on the Hail Mary was slightly outdated, but there was still a port that could attach to it on the ISS; it was a laughably lucky thing, that she hadn’t insisted on losing it 30 years ago.
“Houston, on the big loop, confirm Hail Mary hard capture complete… Got that! ISS, are you go to pressurise? ISS is go, Hail Mary—Hail Mary is go, EECOM is monitoring, no issues thus far.”
Eva could hardly breathe.
She had made peace with not seeing Ryland long ago. Then, she saw him on the video logs from the beetles, saw his beaming smile, the way that he had found somebody to steal the tension off him like she had once been trusted to, and she couldn’t help but be happy for him. Still knowing she’d never speak to him again but accepting of that fact. There was always more work to do, and she lost herself in it—perhaps not only figuratively, but honestly and truly lost part of who she had been, in the never-ending meeting rooms, in between flights. And yet a different, equally private, untainted, soft part of her was always hidden away, in her apartment that had once belonged to him, unassuming and in a building that had switched all tenants 2 times already since she moved in. After that initial period of nothing, after Dimitri and Hatch and Lokken had intervened, she returned to who she was for all the time of the project. And so, for the past three decades, she had been Project Hail Mary Director first, anything else second.
If she thought it had been hard to return to somebody else after three years of it, after the initial launch, she certainly couldn’t have prepared herself for this moment.
She abruptly realised she was going to cry. Right there, with all of those people around her, and she was almost 70 and was going to cry right next to Bat James. Ryland—
“Houston, Hail Mary, hold for leakage check.”
EECOM? Thank you.
“Houston on the big loop, Hail Mary, ISS, you’re good to open the hatchway.”
Good good good!
Bat James took off their headset, kicked their chair back and spun away with their fist pumping the air twice. They were smiling wide, off-white teeth bared in such a way that it could have been predatory if it wasn’t accompanied by the stifled shaking of their hands.
Somebody began to clap. Bat James tilted their head back with a laugh and then they followed suit, shaking their head with a smile.
“Most nerve-wracking docking in my entire career,” the way they were looking at Eva, all open wonder, lips parted—even that plum shade of their under-eyes couldn’t take away from how young they seemed. As if ten years had just been added to their lifespan.
They handed her a tissue from one of their pockets. She took it, and they shook her hand firmly once their fingers brushed.
“He’s almost home, Director Stratt. A pleasure to work with you.” They rattled off, as though she had done anything. They sagged in their chair, smiling into the ceiling with a breathy fuck. “I need to call my wife.”
Dr. Harper draped himself over her neck when she left mission control. He had his phone in his hand, the launch livestream still open even as any news had quieted. She let him hug her, then step away with his one hand still on her shoulder.
“We got him. We got him. We fucking got him,” he said. She only nodded. She feared what would happen if she tried to speak.
But oh, he was there. Not on Earth yet but already so close, almost in arms reach. If she only tried hard enough, she could touch him, through the clouds and the atmosphere up on the space station that she had first sent him to his death from. Hail Mary was back at her mother’s breast, back where she had once been put together, and she returned with one of her three children, and then another one, found in the desolate depths of space.
“Are you gonna go to him?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. Dr. Harper shrugged. He was idly flipping through his notebook.
“You’re Stratt, you’re launch-ready as much as a non-astronaut can, and as far as Johanna is concerned, she’d throw a party if you shot yourself up there,” he laughed, truly, for the first time in days.
“I have too much to do here.”
“You really don’t,” she bore into him with her eyes, but Dr. Harper was annoyingly undisturbed by it. Immune. “Johanna’s always been better at the PR shit than you, and I can hold my own with the science. I’ve spent so long looking at the Eridian biology documents I think I can recite them in my sleep—don’t test me on that, though. And I know all the material estimates.”
“You’re my science consultant,” she told him dryly.
“You’re so sweet, Director Stratt,” he gave her arm a pat and then awkwardly let his hand drop to his side. He took a deep breath. “If I were him, I’d want somebody I trust to be the first human I see.”
She turned away from him. Ryland didn’t trust her, Dr. Harper was wrong about that. He’d probably be better off if it was Dr. Harper who joined his bedside, but the biophysicist was also right—anything she needed to do, she could complete at the ISS; perhaps then she’d avoid getting arrested when Muñoz-Bagnell tried to stick the FBI on her again; three times in three years, but she supposed some people were just irrevocably stupid. And Dr. Harper was always going to be the lead on preparing Earth for Rocky. She had a flight ready for him in the evening, was going to inform him of it in a while and then he would fly off to Roscosmos to join their scientists. He knew already, of course; he was eerily perceptive.
The following discussions weren’t easy—but when had anything been, and who would Eva Stratt be to back down from difficult? She held her ground, as she always did. MacAuley didn’t want to agree to her demands, even though he technically had no say in the matter, and they ended up in her temporary office, Administrator Wakeling looking between the two of them with a pensive countenance, the face of a wise old mage on a woman so young; she was two-thirds of Eva’s age at most. She met Eva’s eyes over the table with something like a strange understanding, moved her hand out to push a picture on her desk down, until whoever it was that stared at her daily—whoever was so dear that she had brought that picture with her when she flew to JPL—could not look anymore. She held a thin chain in between her hands, pulled out the pendant on it until a golden cross rested over her wine-red shirt, upon her breast. Eva bit down on the pad of her thumb, then schooled herself, pushed her hands into her lap.
Administrator Wakeling had agreed. She demanded a thorough physical examination, that Eva sign half a dozen papers stating she is aware of the risks—she expected it, accepted it all. This was a stupid decision, she knew it. It didn’t help the world, it could very well be of no benefit to Ryland’s health, even though Dr. Harper’s words still rang in her head with some strangled, foolish hope, but at the end of it all Eva wasn’t going to change her mind. She had given the world her everything, because nobody else would. She didn’t think she was special by way of personality, or education, or skill. She was one of many people of her disposition, but she had been at the right place, at the right age, at the right time. The only unique thing about her was that combination of circumstances, all accidental. It had never been fate that drew her to Ryland or to leading the Earth; it hadn’t been a divine interference, nor a vocation as she had been promised by her father’s church. She’d been in service to this planet, to humanity, for almost half her life, out of obligation but ultimately out of love and choice.
It was about time she allowed herself to be selfish.
They assigned her a pilot, astronaut Rheka Dhavalikar. They sorted through databases until they picked Dr. Horiguchi Masao, a JAXA astronaut with three different medical specialisations and yet still brisk, of health and 50 years old. They were to launch as soon as possible; as soon as Dr. Horiguchi had been flown in, as soon as Eva had been sufficiently evaluated.
There had been dreams, of space tourism, back before Astrophage had stagnated any scientific progress not related to fighting it. They’d still fought tooth and nail to continue space exploration—that was how the Ares III base on Mars had come to be; that was why the transmissions ran on IR, why the docking adapters had been upgraded in the interim. This was, in some odd way, the first tourist flight up to the ISS in decades. In any other circumstance, there would have been plenty of people overjoyed, excited about that.
She knew the public would want to eat her alive again. Here was Director Eva Stratt, taking a flight up to the ISS to meet her previously-assumed-dead boy toy. Wasting public resources, like she had for all of her time in power. A known, convicted criminal in space, but perhaps she should stay there, because how much damage can she really do when so far away? Let the Earth crash and burn for all they care, send the one person who had kept them afloat away—she would accept that treatment again. It was her unceasing sacrifice.
“Is there anything that you can do about that?”
She shrugged. The tea Dr. Singh had offered her had grown cold, and she took a sip of the too-weak jasmine green brew. She didn’t much enjoy green tea, but Dr. Singh rarely ever had any black.
“Have you considered that people might approve? That they’ll look at what you’re doing and call it an act of love, proof that you are caring?”
“I’m not.”
“This is a strange lot of worry for somebody who doesn’t care.”
Eva set the mug down again with a clink.
“I didn’t say I didn’t care. I said I’m not caring.”
Dr. Singh laughed.
“Do you think you’re making a bad choice?”
“No,” she sighed. “Or at the very least, I’m not changing my mind. You think I’m catastrophising.”
“Can you see why?”
“I’m still correct. I don’t care what they think, and I know you’re well aware of that. I care that they’re going to start that useless debate about funding again.”
“I know you don’t want to care. You’re still human, Eva. We’ve had this discussion ten times over—”
“And we never arrive at a conclusion.”
Dr. Singh sighed.
It was their last session in person, before Eva left to see Ryland again. He wouldn’t be conscious for a while yet. They had the few doctors on the ISS figuring out a treatment plan, but the truth was, they were missing equipment. The ship that would bring her, Dr. Horiguchi and astronaut Dhavalikar to the ISS would be carrying compact versions of everything that could be needed. The ISS had a defibrillator on board, but the call had come for a USG apparatus and a dialysis machine, last she heard. There were also vaccines needed, and a supply of antibiotics in the case that Ryland contracted anything from the humans around him.
Rocky had, as she anticipated, been stuck to Ryland’s bedside. He had reluctantly entered a sleep cycle once, coaxed into it by the CAPCOM and watched over by the same astronaut who was assigned to monitor Ryland at that time.
She had prepared herself mentally for it. She knew she wouldn’t be seeing the same man she’d sent away, and she knew that he would not be seeing her at all. But she hoped that when he did awake, he could at least have the comfort of yelling in her face about it. She owed him that much—owed him the luxury of confirming he hated her, before he died.
She didn’t know if did. Hatred wasn’t something she ever associated with Ryland, but he was a human like everybody else; he was well capable of the full range of emotion, including this one.
Eva considered herself, the bracelet on her wrist, soon to be covered by a mission suit. She had long stopped resenting him, and when she did it had been brief and weak, fuelled by desperation and the very private, human rage that she had been put in that situation. And she still loved him, no matter the years. They weren’t the same, but it was impossible to stop. He was her Isaac, and Earth had been her God, and when they called to her Stratt she had stated Here I am and when at that she had received the command take your friend, your only friend, who trusts you and whom you love—Ryland—and send him to Tau Ceti; sacrifice him there as an offering to bring salvation she took him where directed and she had done as they demanded.
There wasn’t meant to come an angel to her, to tell her do not lay your hand on the boy, to inform her she had passed the test, that they were both free to return and be blessed, because it hadn’t been a test of faith that she was given; she had made a real choice, a real sacrifice, and yet then there was Bat James with their radio and how did Isaac ever look his father in the face, after that?
She could hardly remember anymore, the way that he looked when he trusted her with everything.
The launch had been uneventful. Lokken hadn’t seen them out, and neither had Dr. Harper; he was in Russia already, and she was busy with everything else. Eva had called her mother a few hours beforehand. She nodded along to commands given to her, for once not questioning much of anything as she was strapped into the spacefaring vessel, tight against Dr. Horiguchi. Their pilot steered them right, smooth and practiced—she didn’t talk, not before the launch and not during the flight, outside of communicating with ground control.
The sequence that led to docking was familiar, now. They had launched without delay, and so they were well aligned with the ISS—enough to take just close to 5 hours to attach their vessel to the station. Eva had put her visor down when instructed.
There was probably more to be remembered from that flight. She’d never been to space, this was important, or at least it should have been. But she could only think of how where she would arrive, Ryland was dying, still.
She was led to him immediately, when they were let out and when the ISS crew had assessed them as perfectly okay. Eva spotted their pilot chatting amicably with one of them, suddenly loose in the shoulders and emotive, not at all like she had been for all of the time that Eva had seen her.
Rocky wasn’t by Ryland’s side, when she entered the room. She had expected him to be there, but somebody rushed to inform her that the Eridian had taken his leave to eat, back on the Hail Mary where there was sufficient space for him to do so.
She was alone, then; the person keeping watch over Ryland remained behind a door for her convenience. She hadn’t asked for it, but it was appreciated.
Eva Stratt stared at Ryland Grace for the first time in decades.
He looked worse, than in the videos.
There was an IV cannula in his right wrist, and the insertion spot was an ugly purple, as though something horrible and tainted had mauled the skin there. His face was still host to that redness, and it was also on his hands. He was thin, skeletal, and his chest rose and fell in short, staggering breaths. He had an oxygen mask on him still. He looked fragile; differently so than any other time she’d seen him. She pushed her nails into her palms for a second, for she longed to simply lay beside him, in a display of vulnerability and affection that was not only unfamiliar to her, but also most likely unwanted. She wanted to run her hand through his hair; if she had, it would come out with clumps of it stuck between her fingers.
She came over, slowly. Walking felt strange, here, where gravity was almost that of Earth’s, but not exactly. She sat in a chair, feeling too light in body for what she was looking at.
“Ryland,” she said. Rylie. Isaac.
He didn’t respond.
She moved her hand, slowly, laid it on his chest. Her skin was wrinkled with age, and his matched, even though he was years younger.
She was reminded of sitting at her father’s bedside, as his heart stopped. Her father had died of old age, only suffered a little after a warning heart attack when the proper one had taken him. Both her and her mother were there, along with the few alive friends he still had, and it was peaceful and quiet. Even then, even in that bed, he was full of life, and he asked her if they’d go fishing someday again, even though her answer was always no.
He’d have agreed that she needed to be by Ryland’s side. He always believed in such things, that prayer and love and company could fix the world.
She smiled to herself.
His doctor came by, and they got around to setting up a dialysis machine. Him and two others gathered around, and they took his blood. Eva hadn’t been asked to leave—they all knew she would remain there, impassively watching.
“He’s on dialysis for now; he’s developed acute kidney injury, but it’s luck for everybody that happened recently. He’s on the parenteral feeding and also on the magnesium drip. We’ll need to do tooth extraction soon, but we have to stabilise kidney first. There’s still high chance he might need transplant. Heart looks okay, currently, as much as it can. He’s going to need an electrocardiogram later, but not priority. His wounds are slowly closing. We’ll switch him to the nasogastric tube later, to start getting his digestion system used to food again.”
She nodded. The doctor sighed heavily and left, evidently exhausted.
She’d need to sleep, eventually. It was stupid, but she would rather do it in her chair, right there, than in any quarters they could offer her.
So she did.
“Who is human, question?”
The inquiry woke her, not because it was harsh or insistent, but because it had come from incredibly close. Her eyes slowly fluttered open.
Rocky looked pointier, in real life. He stood only a few centimetres away, his limbs tapping on the ground, and the translator that was strapped to his forearm repeated the question again as he hummed a melody that was his own language.
She allowed herself a moment to regain consciousness. Her eyes flicked over to Ryland, where he lay on the bed, still unconscious. Still breathing.
“Are you Eva, question?”
So he knew about her. It was only logical. Ryland had never been a fan of secrets.
“Yes.”
Rocky hummed low. He gave no indication what he knew, how much Ryland had told him—and some part of her wanted to know, so she would be ready, for whatever happened when—if Ryland awoke. He didn’t have a front, really, nowhere that Eva would consider a face; so she simply looked at the part that was closest to her, at where his thorax changed into a limb.
“Grace is friend,” he said. “Grace bad bad bad. Better now, still bad.”
She nodded. She ought to have asked Rocky questions, about his intentions, his people, about the enclosure—though biodome was probably a better word for it, less like they were going to stick him in a zoo—but she stared at him. No face, and yet the low vibrating that Ryland had described in his recordings as mournful was there, a constant, quiet hum.
It could wait, for a moment. For once in her life, she could have time.
“You stay to watch Grace, question?”
“Yes.”
She saw, on one of his limbs, a bracelet, like her own. It didn’t move around as he did, and she could see small dark dots on the inside of the xenonite at the right angle; magnets, probably.
“Is there anybody else monitoring him?” she asked. She didn’t see anybody in the room with them at present.
“Yes. But no talk to Rocky,” Rocky hummed. He didn’t sound offended, but Eva supposed she didn’t know what offended looked like, in Eridians.
She was still tired. She couldn’t have slept more than 2 hours, when the alien woke her.
She stifled a yawn.
“You sleep, question?” he asked.
She had little interest in conversation. She was only there to make sure the doctors were giving Ryland their best; that he survived, and even if not, that at least he didn’t go unto his grave never getting to decide how to end whatever was between them. Closure for both of them. She was only there because down on Earth, the fight was no longer only hers, because the US president and the EU president and whoever else would only use her presence to fight her, to waste time—and because she was older, and she cared for this man even despite how long it had been.
Some part of her believed, still, that they deserved more than what they’d gotten.
She closed her eyes again.