Chapter Text
Eva Stratt had always assumed prison would be loud.
Not riot-loud. Not screaming-loud. Just… human-loud. The sound of hundreds of people trapped together with nothing to do but wait. She had imagined noise as a kind of punishment in itself. Instead, it was quiet. Not silence, exactly. There was always a low mechanical hum—ventilation, distant doors, faraway footsteps. But the kind of quiet that lived between those sounds was worse. The deathly stillness. That, she decided, was the real sentence.
When the guard stopped outside her door and said, “You’ve got a visitor,” she felt a flicker of curiosity for the first time in weeks. Lawyers she expected. Politicians she expected. Academics wanting to pick over the corpse of her reputation like vultures, maybe. But curiosity was rare now. Most days she was content to let time blur.
“Who?” she asked.
The guard hesitated. That was new.
“Salvatore Hall.”
Eva smiled thinly. “Then I suppose this is not a social call.”
The interview room was aggressively Dutch. Gray table, gray walls, but chairs in bright yellows and blues. As if this would simulate freedom in some insipid fashion.
Salvatore Hall, Esquire, stood as she entered. He looked older than he had at the trial—thinner, grayer, like his own victory had hollowed him out. He carried only a slim briefcase, from which he withdrew a tablet.
“No cuffs?” she asked, glancing at her wrists as she sat.
“You’re not a flight risk anymore,” he said.
“Pity,” she replied “I didn’t realize I was one before.”
He did not smile. They studied each other for a moment. Eva finally leaned back in her chair.
“You already jailed me for life, Mr. Hall. What more could you possibly want from me?”
Hall placed the tablet on the table but did not turn it on. His hands rested on either side of it, fingers splayed as though grounding himself.
“A final transmission arrived from the Hail Mary,” he said.
Eva’s posture changed at once—not visibly to an untrained eye, but hallmarks of attention sharpened in her face.
“That was impossible,” she said. “Communication lag at interstellar distances—”
“I know,” Hall interrupted. “This wasn’t a live message. It was cached. A delayed broadcast executed automatically as the ship crossed the heliopause.”
Eva’s fingers twitched once against the tabletop. “A status update,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And?”
Hall activated the tablet and turned it toward her. Lines of technical jargon filled the screen. Eva barely glanced at them. She was already reading between his silences.
“‘Crew status,’” Hall read aloud. “‘Ryland Grace: alive and in command. Yáo Li-Jie: deceased. Ilyukhina, Olesya: deceased.’”
Eva stared at the tablet for a long time. Her face did not crumple or blanch. But something in her eyes evacuated, as though a structure she had built internally had just collapsed.
“How?” she asked.
“A cascade failure,” Hall said. “Medical. Compounded by neurological complications. Reviewed by three independent astrophysiology teams. Earthside simulation matched the flight data.”
Another silence stretched between them, thick and aching.
Finally, Eva exhaled slowly through her nose.
“Commander Grace was barely functional when they launched. If something went wrong medically, that is probably—”
Hall leaned forward.
“The amnesia drugs,” he said. “The ones you ordered administered without consent. The altered formulation. The dosage schedule you personally authorized.”
Eva’s eyes lifted at last.
“The investigations show that the neurochemical destabilization did not stop with Grace,” Hall continued. “It altered the metabolic handling of several drugs in the ship’s medical bay. Over time, that contamination built up. Yáo was the first to crash. Ilyukhina followed eleven weeks later.”
“You’re saying,” Eva spoke slowly, “that my drug killed them.”
Hall did not soften it. “Yes.”
Eva laughed.
It startled even her.
A raw, bark-like sound tore out of her chest, echoing unpleasantly off the concrete walls. She clamped a hand over her mouth, but it had already escaped.
“How very efficient of me,” she said hoarsely. For a while she sat, the bark-like laughter barely contained in her chest, until it started heaving with sobs.
Hall waited her out. He had no reason to hurry.
When she had composed herself, he said, “The District Attorney has authorized amended charges. Two counts of murder. Not manslaughter. Not negligence. Murder.”
Her cheeks streaked with tears, Eva tilted her head.
“You will be hard-pressed to establish intent.”
“You ordered a neurological poison administered to an unwilling subject to manipulate mission performance,” Hall said. “The downstream effects were—”
“Unforeseen,” Eva snapped.
“—statistically inevitable,” Hall finished.
They locked eyes.
For a long moment, neither spoke.
Finally, Eva leaned forward. “Tell me about their deaths.”
Hall stiffened. “Why?”
“Because they were under my command,” she said. “Because I owe them that much. And because you did not come here merely to read charges at me.”
That last part landed.
Slowly, Hall activated the tablet again, and scrolled to the index marker in the log that he was looking for.
“Yao collapsed during routine maintenance,” he said. “Cardiac arrhythmia following a seizure. The tender attempted emergency protocols. Failed.”
Eva closed her eyes.
“Ilyukhina lasted longer,” Hall went on. “But the physiological impossibility of combating the interactions between that untested drug cocktail rendered her deceased in short order.”
Eva squeezed her eyes tighter.
“They died alone,” Hall concluded. “And Earth didn’t know until today.”
When she opened her eyes again, they were wet once more.
Hall hesitated, then spoke more softly. “The amended charges will not materially affect your sentence. You already have multiple life terms. But symbolically—”
“I am aware of the symbolism of murder,” Eva said.
He nodded. “I thought you’d want to know.”
She considered that. Then: “No. You wanted to see my face when I learned.”
He did not deny it.
“Am I correct, Mr. Hall?” Eva asked after a while. “You wanted me caged. You succeeded. Why come back with bones to throw at the bars?”
Hall looked down at his hands. For the first time, he seemed uncertain.
“Because,” he admitted, “if you hadn’t done what you did… the mission may have failed. Who knows how Grace will react when he awakens - but not remembering your betrayal will certainly give him less disincentive to complete his mission. If he didn’t have those drugs, perhaps humanity would be extinct within fifty years.”
Eva felt a small, cold satisfaction spark in her chest. “Correct.”
“But because you did,” Hall continued, “two people are dead who should not be.”
“Also correct.”
“I came because I wanted to see whether you would regret that.”
Eva studied him. Really studied him.
“You misunderstand me,” she said. “Regret is a luxury for people with alternatives. I had none.”
“You had many,” Hall replied bitterly.
“No,” she said, firmer now. “I had variables. Not options. The outcome space was narrow, and extinction sat at the center of it like a gravity well. Every move bent toward that mass.”
“And Yao and Ilyukhina?” Hall asked. “They were just… vectors?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her in quiet fury. “You didn’t even truly know their names.”
She did not flinch. “I knew their survival probabilities. That was my job.”
Silence returned. But it was a different kind of silence now—charged, unstable.
“He will bury his friends,” Hall snapped. “Alone. In deep space.”
Eva stood abruptly, the chair loudly voicing a protest as its plastic feet scraped against the tile floor.
“He would be burying strangers here, with the rest of us!” she said, voice rising. “He will reach another star. He will ensure Earth’s survival. And you stand here worrying about the feelings of one man instead of the lives of eight billion!”
“Two lives!” Hall shouted back. “Two real lives!”
Eva rounded the table. The guard outside shifted uneasily.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “And eight billion more. I balanced them. The system is closed. There are no external variables. I would do it again.”
They stared at each other, breathing hard.
Then Hall’s voice softened.
“Would you?”
Eva hesitated. Just for a fraction of a second.
“Tell me,” Hall said gently, “when you ordered the drugs altered… did you know there was a chance the crew would die?”
“No,” Eva admitted. “There were many uncertainties, but a cascading interaction with the drugs of the other crew was not within my decision-making tree.”
“And if you knew?”
She considered. “Given interaction uncertainties, I would still have done it. Grace would be a danger to the mission. I did what I had to do.”
“And you accepted that.”
“Yes.”
“Because Earth outweighed them.”
“Yes.”
Hall nodded slowly. “The burden of leadership. And yet, your math disagrees with your methods, Ms. Stratt.”
Eva’s hands trembled now. She curled them into fists.
“You think this is simpler than it is,” she said. “You imagine scales with neat pans and tidy numbers. You cannot imagine the terror of deciding what percentage of humanity you are willing to gamble on hope.”
“Hope killed them,” he said.
“Hope saved you,” she retorted.
He stood, the chair sliding back and clattering against the wall behind him.
“The amended charges will proceed,” he said. “You’ll receive formal notice.”
Eva remained seated.
The door clanged shut behind him, echoing into the long stillness.
After he left, Eva sat alone for a long time.
Two names echoed in her thoughts now, unbidden:
Yao.
Ilyukhina.
They joined the long procession of the dead she carried like ledger entries in her mind—losses she had once kept perfectly compartmentalized. But age, isolation, and now certainty had weakened her internal walls.
For the first time, she allowed herself to imagine them as people rather than probabilities. A hand on a console. A joke in Russian over static. A final moment of fear that never reached Earth. And one more yet to come.
Her breath hitched.
“God be with you, Grace” she whispered to the empty room, “God be with you.”