Chapter Text
1. Minkowski [Day 1 of the Hephaestus Mission]
Humming quietly to herself, Renee maneuvered around her cramped quarters on her new home-away-from-home.
“Home! Right,” she thought, looking mournfully at the strapped-down sleeping bag that she had in lieu of a bed, at the handholds spaced strategically around the room for ease of movement in the zero gravity environment. “Swimming” everywhere she went, bumping into corners as she got used to the situation...yeah, this was weirder than she’d thought it would be. Even the simulators didn’t really mentally prepare you for the reality of floating everywhere.
Renee sighed and continued stowing her gear. It was nothing she couldn’t handle. She was adaptable. She’d gotten used to more alien environments before this and, if she wanted to stay in this line of work, would probably end up in stranger still in the future.
“Besides,” she thought, a slight grin creeping onto her face, “zero g’s definitely got its perks.”
Pushing off from the nearest wall, she burst into song, enthusiasm more than making up for any deficit of skill.
“So if you care to find me,
look to the western sky!
As someone told me lately:
'Everyone deserves the chance to fly!'"
Letting herself go completely giddy for a few moments more, she propelled herself from wall to wall, laughing as she belted out the rest of the triumphant chorus.
“...bring me dooooooownnnn!”
“Look at h-her, she’s w-wicked - ” chimed in a slightly staticky voice from nowhere.
“AAUGH!” Renee crashed into the bulkhead. “Hera!”
“I’m s-sorry Commander Minkowski! I th-thought - never mind! I’m sorry I sc-scared you.”
Renee sighed, rubbing her head where it’d met the wall. “No, it’s okay. I’ve gotta get used to this.” She paused, her eyes suddenly wide. “Crap. You heard all of that, didn’t you.”
“Affirmative, Commander.”
“Crap,” she repeated.
“I-I won’t tell anyone. And I re-really am sorry I scared you. The song was in my d-database and I thought you’d-d need a second voice f-for the end. I w-won’t do it again, Commander.”
Renee chuckled, thinking just how weird her life had gotten lately that she was getting an apology from an A.I. for singing showtunes. “It’s okay, Hera. Just...warn me next time.” She paused, then added, “And never mention this in front of Officer Eiffel, do you hear me?”
“Yes sir, Commander Minkowski.”
“Good.” A beat of silence. “So...what other songs do you know, Hera?”
2. Hilbert [Day 496 of the Hephaestus Mission]
“This is the audio log of Doctor Alexander Hilbert. First experimental human trial of Project Decima now completed. Results are...”
(Promising? Exciting? A recurring nightmare back for another go?)
“...satisfactory. Returning now to theoretical framework, integrating new data into earlier results.”
(“Earlier results.” How euphemistic. Hui. Lambert. And now someday, Officer Eiffel would be “earlier results” himself.)
“Examining possibility of beginning secondary phase of human trials... Soon.”
He paused, thinking about what was to come. “Very soon.”
The endless cycle of sacrifices and betrayal was starting anew, the terrible, needful wheel was already turning, and, as Alexander (sometimes Elias, once Dmitri but no longer) stared out the window of the lab, he knew his resolve had not wavered. She was still more important than Hui, or Lambert, or ten Eiffels put together.
Olga mattered. No one else.
He sighed, turning from the window to straighten up the mess Officer Eiffel had left in his wake, thoughts of his lost sister weighing heavy on his mind as he did.
She was still with him as he prepared to go to bed. Strapped in, he stared tiredly into the darkness around him, but sleep wouldn’t overtake her face, crying in his memory. Nearly all of his memories of her involved her crying in pain, while the useless идиоты in charge let her suffer.
“The rabbit. Remember the rabbits,” he thought to himself. “Remember how Olya used to wrap them in towels and rock them like babies. Remember how she used to sing to them as they’d squirm and try to get out of her grasp. And she’d let them go and keep singing as she chased them, that dreadful song about the wolves...”
Slowly, the long-buried words rose up in his mind, shaking off over forty years of dust and pain and the false histories of his other selves, and his voice, clear and lovely in a way that would have shocked anyone who knew him, echoed quietly in the darkened quarters.
Баю - баюшки - баю, Не ложися на краю.
(hush little baby, don’t lie too close to the edge of the bed)
(Olga gently rocking the rabbit in her arms, nuzzling her cheek against the fuzzy top of its head.)
Придет серенький волчок И ухватит за бочок
(or the grey wolf will come and grab you by the flank)
(The rabbit tries to flee and squirms free for a moment. But no sooner does it begin to bound through the grass than Olga joins in hot pursuit, shouting about wolves who’ll eat it. When the explosion rocks the countryside, however, the rabbit is forgotten as Olga and Dmitri run.)
Он ухватит за бочок
(seize you by the flank)
(Two terrified children clinging to each other and huddling under their bed as the cloud spreads and everything smells rotten.)
И потащит во лесок, Под ракитовый кусток.
(and drag you into the woods, under the willow root)
(Mama’s drawn and exhausted face, framed by sparse blonde locks, as she reads yet another useless letter saying that medicine should be arriving shortly but that supplies were limited.)
The song died away, leaving the room feeling even emptier, and he wondered at the fact that, no matter how far he’d run, there was still a Wolf waiting at the door.
Who would be the first to be dragged from their bed this time?
3. Eiffel [Day 100 of the Hephaestus mission]
“Alright, now this is the part you were made for, sweetheart! Take it away.”
A crackly, glitchy voice counts down from ten, then intones “lift off” as the second voice finishes the line.
“...check ignition and may god’s love be with you.”
The music pauses for a second and Doug laughs happily.
“Oh man, Hera, that was fantastic. You picked this up quick!”
“Well, you’re a good teacher, Officer Eiffel.”
Doug thinks that, if Hera had a human face, it would be blushing and the mental picture makes him grin. “Alrighty, for pretty much the rest of the song we’re singing the same words just on different notes. You ready, darlin’?”
“I th-think so, Officer Eiffel.”
The singing resumes. The pair is really getting into it when the hatch to the communications room opens.
“What exactly are you two doing?”
“Oh hey, Commander! I’m teaching Hera about the wonders of thematically-appropriate human music. And no offence to Mr. Ziggy Stardust, but I think our version is actually better than the original since, y’know, we’re floating in our very own tin can. You should hear Hera sing, too, she picked up the song super-fast.”
Minkowski remains drily unimpressed. “Gee Eiffel, how about that? The A.I. that keeps our station from crashing into the star learned song lyrics. Must have been quite a stretch for her.” A pause. “And anyway Hera, I thought you had that sort of thing already stored in your databases? I mean, you knew the - never mind.”
Hera sounds flustered when she answers. “I don’t know every ridiculous song you people ever created. Besides, Officer Eiffel wanted to teach me this one.”
A sigh’s worth of pause. “Oookay. Eiffel, have you checked the pressurized tanks down in engineering like I asked you to do two days ago, or have you been too busy flirting with our operating system?”
“Don’t worry, Minkowski. I think you’re pretty too.” Whistling nonchalantly, Eiffel floats past a spluttering Minkowski and heads in the direction of the engineering bay.
1. Day 672 of the Hephaestus Mission
They get the ship repaired, mostly. The bent panels get flattened and reattached. The instruments knocked off-kilter are reset to as close an approximation of accurate as they had before the blast. The damage from the fire in engineering that Lovelace had dealt with is assessed and patched up, and Hilbert is safely stowed on the observation deck once more.
But even after the repairs, the ship still seems irrevocably broken.
They all feel it, she knows, they all understand the cause of it, and so of course none of them discuss it.
None of them go into the communications room unless absolutely necessary. No one wants to see the floating clutter, the hand-written “World’s Okayest Astronaut” sign taped to the wall, the ridiculous little toy dinosaurs he'd stuck to his console with sticky-tac. If she closes her eyes, she can almost pretend he’s sitting there, making the toys walk all over his instrument panel talking about sudden but inevitable betrayals.
No one wants to see how empty the room is and think about how it’s probably going to stay that way.
And after the first night where she cried herself to sleep thinking about it, she refuses to consider the awful irony of her irrepressible communications officer, the man who never stopped talking, floating all alone among the silent stars.
They don’t talk about it, so Minkowski doesn’t know how Hera’s handling Doug’s absence. It has crossed her mind though that it’s probably harder on Hera than on anyone else since, by her very nature, she can’t ignore it. Can’t pretend there are four life-signs rather than the three that are left on board. Can’t pretend that things aren’t worse now than they’ve ever been.
Even after the repairs, the Hephaestus still has a gaping hole in it that they can’t fix, one that reminds them every day that their heart has been ripped out, to leave them silently drifting toward uncertainty.