Chapter Text
Grace was glued to his laptop working through some calculations in the cafeteria when the newest delegation of scientists on loan came into the room clearly on a tour of the ship. He glanced at them for a second before getting back to the numbers. He’d been up all night trying to get the energy to balance out and was coming up empty, in both results and mental focus.
He reached for his coffee to find that he’d drained that too. With a big sigh, he stood up and meandered over to the coffee pot, not really paying attention to the fact that the gaggle of scientists were loitering nearby it while they waited for their tour guide to come back and direct them.
Grace was focused on filling his cup with the nectar of the gods when some voices filtered through the general noises of the cafeteria.
“I think that’s him.”
“Who?”
“That guy getting coffee, that’s Stratt’s, what’s the phrase, ‘lap dog’.”
“I hear he does anything she says.”
“He doesn’t look that interesting. He also doesn’t look that smart. Maybe he’s just a pushover?”
“Or just a good lay?”
The giggles that followed made Grace’s face flush in embarrassment. He kept his back turned to them and continued to stir his coffee to avoid having to reveal he heard them.
I can’t believe it’s literally their first day onboard and they’re already in on the rumors about me and Stratt? How does everyone even hear about that? He thought petulantly. Since Stratt had already confirmed that she didn’t care about the rumors that continued to spread across the ship Grace had found it difficult to do anything to stop them.
At this point most of the people he worked with just joked about it without any real bite. But that wasn’t to say everyone felt that way. He’d already had his fair share of people trying to convince him to leverage his “relationship” to help them out. Those were always awkward but also frustrating conversations.
He was lucky this time in that their appointed tour guide came back and led them out of the cafeteria and Grace could lick his wounds in peace as he tried to get back to work and not think on their comments.
Another cup of coffee and successful calculation later, he’d all but forgotten about the new group of scientists. On his way to a meeting, he managed to get in step with Dimitri.
“Hey Dimitri!” Grace greeted him warmly.
“Ah Grace, have you met the new scientists yet? They should be in this meeting with Stratt,” the older man replied.
“I only saw them briefly in the cafeteria earlier. They seem pretty young.” And gossipy he added on mentally.
“Yes, it feels like every day there’s a new young scientist on this ship. Are they getting younger or are we getting older? Ha!” Dimitri laughed and clapped Grace on the back and they entered the conference room before moving to their seats.
Grace’s was always close to Stratt’s, even if all the seats near her were taken, she’d make someone move seats and bam, he was right by Stratt. Grace wanted to interpret it as thoughtful, but he knew better. It was most likely so she could keep an eye on him and make sure he wasn’t nodding off in important meetings that he was going to have to do administrative things for later (he’d only nodded off once thank you very much!)
Sure enough, the seat on Stratt’s right side was open and Grace made a beeline for it.
“Dr. Grace,” she greeted without looking up from her papers.
“Stratt.”
“I need you to note any inventory changes that come up in this meeting and get those communicated to each of the science teams. We can’t have them overusing any resources if we’re about to be low on them. We won’t be getting a new shipment on many of these chemicals until two weeks.”
“Sir, yes sir,” he mimed saluting her, only to get a mild glare in response. But he would swear he saw the edges of her mouth twitch, so he’d consider it a victory.
What he didn’t expect to see was the knowing glances the new group of scientists gave one another from their seats across the room. The meeting was about to start, so Grace let it be, but it was getting on his nerves. He didn’t need Stratt getting mad at him for being distracted.
The meeting began like usual and droned on for an hour on inventory, projections, and next steps. When it finally wrapped up leaving him with a laundry list of messages and coordination efforts with the teams, he hoped to scurry out and get on communicating everything with the right people before he forgot, but no such luck.
“Dr. Grace, I’d like you to introduce the new scientists to the different teams. They’ll be working with each team to train them on a few new techniques that might help with some of the astrophage farming and efficient energy usage,” Stratt ordered on her way out of the room, giving the scientists a curt smile before walking off to go conquer some other challenge (or part of the world).
Grace didn’t even have a chance to respond, or try to get out of it.
Holding in the deep sigh he really wanted to release, Grace collected his laptop and notes into his bag and stood up, glancing sheepishly at the newbies.
“Hi, I’m Dr. Ryland Grace, but most people just call me Grace.” He paused for a moment to make sure they were all paying attention. “I’ll be showing you around the different science teams. Some of our teams are working on the spin drive and astrophage farming, some are working on the centrifuge adaptations for the ship, and some are working on the AI that will be uploaded into the medical robot, so it’ll be interesting to speak with each group.”
“I bet, since they’re the ones actually doing the work,” one of the men mumbled to two of the people next to him with a smirk.
“What’s that?” Grace asked, knowing full well they could tell he heard every word.
“Nothing,” they replied, at least having the decency to lie rather than say it straight to his face. Was that decency? At this point, Grace wasn’t sure.
“Alright, well follow me. Hopefully we’ll get through this quickly and you all can take a break. I’m sure you’ve been on the move since you got here.” He was doing that thing he does where he tries to be even nicer to people who clearly don’t like him, thinking that he has a chance at winning them over. Their annoyed expressions were not giving him any hope.
He led them over to where Dimitri and his team were currently putting their heads together on the spin drive, some limitations coming up that they were working out. Usually Grace would be in there too, but clearly his time was better spent showing the new people around.
“Hey guys, here’s the new scientists, I don’t actually know any of their names so they can introduce themselves. Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to state a fun fact about yourselves,” he ended with a nervous chuckle.
He learned that the five scientists, who were from various countries, were named Alysha, Lila, Viktor, Nadeen, and Ibrahim. While they probably all wanted to be referred to as Dr. Last Name, Grace was feeling petty and was choosing to only address them by their first names.
Things were awkward (and Grace hoped it wasn’t because of him), but once they got through introductions things mellowed out. Most of that was because Dimitri pulled them in to look at the spin drive, peppering them with questions on if they had any ideas to help with their current issue. Grace kept himself apart from the interaction, instead moving over to talk to a guy on the team named Jacob who took his notes on the inventory changes.
Being able to check one team off his list made him feel a little better. After about half an hour though it was time to corral the new scientists and cart them off to the next team.
“Okay everyone, there will be plenty of time to work with Dimitri later, we need to go see Dr. Lokken and Dr. Lamai before I can cut you loose, so let’s get to it,” Grace announced. He was doing his best to not talk like he did to his middle schoolers, but he could tell some of his “teacher voice” was leaking in.
But, everyone seemed cool with it and they all shuffled out of the lab following behind Grace to the next lab over where Dr. Lokken was working on demo’ing the centrifuge in a virtual model before they were to begin manufacturing the unique design. She’d been working on it all week with much success according to her. They’d done a ton of research with smaller models to plan out the actual size and orientation, they now were moving onto applying it to the spaceship model as well as delving into material science.
While she still absolutely loathed Grace, he still tried to listen as much as he could to her talk about the effort they were putting into the centrifuge since it was absolutely fascinating. She at least didn’t harass him too much when he just sat and listened, but god forbid he suggest anything!
Leading his group of ducklings through the maze of halls to get to Lokken’s lab, Grace held himself back from falling into small talk with the group. It hadn’t worked before and it wouldn’t work now…. But he had to try to win them over.
“Dimitri’s team is the best one here, if I do say so myself.” Certainly not just because I work with his team a lot, he added mentally.
“He’s clearly very knowledgeable and excited to work on the project,” someone chimed in, which made Grace smile. He enjoyed hearing that his friend’s intelligence and passion were so obvious even to new people.
“Oh he is, his innovations with the spin drive are pivotal in making this mission possible,” Grace added.
“We’ll need an enormous amount of astrophage for it to work. Who’s handling the astrophage farming?” Viktor asked.
Grace grinned and gestured to himself. “That’s my team, or rather, it’s mostly me and some of Dimitri’s team’s work.”
“You must be joking. You’re leading the farming?” Alysha blurted out from behind VIktor with a large dose of skepticism.
“Yes, is that so shocking?” He frowned as he glanced back, slowing his walking some to make it easier to gauge their responses.
“It just makes it very clear why we’ve been brought on to help, that’s all,” Lila commented, doing a very poor job of defusing the blatant insult to Grace’s ability to do work here.
“I’m sure it does,” he said through gritted teeth, slamming his mouth shut to stop himself from saying more than he intended. They’d just come upon Lokken’s lab and honestly the last thing Grace wanted to do was go from this conversation into an argument with her in front of these scientists, so he did what he always does and ran away.
“I actually forgot to tell Dimitri about some inventory figures, so I’ll let you all go in and see Dr. Lokken on your own. I’ll be back shortly.” And with that he did not run away, he just walked briskly back down the hall hoping it didn’t look as cowardly as he was sure it did.
He did actually go back to Dimitri’s lab and talk over the figures with him directly just in case there was any confusion, but Dimitri could tell he was a little on edge.
“Is everything okay?” The older man asked with a frown.
Grace waited a few seconds to mull over his answer to make it not sound so petulant. “Yeah, those new scientists have some vocal opinions that are a bit grating.”
“Ah, have they already heard the rumors about you and Stratt?”
“Yes! And how did they hear so quickly? They’ve not even been here a day!” Grace said animatedly
“I think it’s been included in their orientation packet,” Dimitri joked in response.
“No it’s not,” Grace laughed out, giving Dimitri a playful shove.
Dimitri gave him a hard look, like he was trying to figure something out. “It can’t be just that. We’ve been bothering you for weeks about the rumors and you’ve not seemed upset like you are right now.”
Grace sighed. “No, it’s not just that… I think they think I’m just here for show? Like Stratt keeps me around to be her boy-toy and that’s it.”
“Well that’s not true, we have a ton of astrophage that proves that’s not true,” Dimitri immediately stated, face serious.
“Yeah well it doesn’t feel very good to have them say that to me,” Grace muttered, knowing this sounded childish, but also knowing that his feelings were real and valid.
“Next time, you should just challenge them to something you’re good at and beat them,” Dimitri suggested. “That would put them in their place.”
“That’s a great plan if I was good at anything,” Grace groaned. “I’m just going to ignore them.”
“I thought school teachers were supposed to be good at dealing with bullies? Or was that just something they did in a lot of films?” Dimitri asked, looking thoughtful as if he was really considering all the American films he’d seen that highlighted school bullying.
“A common misconception, we’re told to tell the kids to ignore them and they’ll go away. It’s a total lie, but it makes the school board happy so it’s what we have to say,” Grace explained, trying not to linger on just how many times his hands had been tied during instances of bullying among his students.
“Well, I’m sure ignoring the problem will fix the problem. Now don’t you need to go collect those very wayward scientists?” Dimitri bumped him towards the door.
“Urgggh yes. I’ll see you later, are we still on for team dinner tonight?” Grace shouted behind him as he began walking to the door.
“Of course! I hope you’re ready to drink!”
“After dealing with this group I might be.”
“That’s the spirit!” Dimitri yelled with glee.
Grace waved goodbye before speedwalking to Lokken’s lab, hoping that the scientists had been entertained long enough and hadn’t been waiting around for him to come back.
At least he was in luck for this part, no one even noticed him slipping into the room. They were all too focused on the current model Lokken was running on the big flat screen television, showing the proposed deployment of the centrifuge on the Hail Mary.
“We’re currently determining the best materials for each segment. Once we select a combination that we think will work well, we plug those materials’ components into the program and run the model using them to see how they compare to our other simulations. With each new test we get closer to the final materials and design that will get fitted on the Hail Mary.” Lokken spoke with such confidence and pride in her work, as she should. The centrifuge, much like the spin drive, was essential to the mission.
Lokken’s eyes locked onto Grace’s hunched figure in the back of the room.
“Ah Dr. Grace, how good of you to join us. Next time you want to abandon some scientists with me, at least give me a heads up.” She admonished but in her typical tone that Grace liked to interpret as teasing.
“Sorry Dr. Lokken, I needed to talk with Dimitri for a moment. I’ve got your inventory values here so I’ll leave them for you to review. If you’ve got any questions you know where to find me.”
“Probably with Stratt I’m sure,” Lokken crooned, earning the laughter of the scientists and the reddening of Grace’s face in embarrassment for the second time today.
“Right, well let’s get going. One more stop then you can go find your rooms and get everything settled,” Grace said a little breathlessly, as if he was getting a little anxious about all of it.
You are a good scientist, you deserve to be here. They’re only going to be here for a month right? You can handle this for a month. Grace self pep talked as he silently led the group to Dr. Lamai’s lab. He didn’t even address the scientists as he showed them in, instead only focusing on Dr. Lamai.
“Hi Dr. Lamai, sorry to drop in, I’ve got the new scientists here to get a quick rundown from you on your section of the project,” Grace explained as they entered the room.
“Hi Dr. Grace, and hello new people. My name is Dr. Sunisa Lamai, I’m the expert on all things medical related to the Hail Mary. You’ve caught me and my team here working on the plans for the robot that will handle medical issues on the Hail Mary such as waking our astronauts from their comas. I don’t have much to show you at the moment, we’re very much in the planning phase for some of this, but I’m glad to meet you.”
Dr. Lamai had such a welcoming way about her that seemed to put everyone at ease. She answered some questions and even showed them some of the gene mapping they had for the coma genes. But Grace could tell she was busy and the rest of the team was waiting on her to get back to work, so he shuffled his group out of there quickly.
“Alrighty, well those are the main teams. There are several others that are not on the ship with us as they aren’t dealing with any astrophage related elements nor are they handling any top secret confidential information, so they can work in their country’s labs.” Grace kept walking as he talked, not looking back at his followers once. He wanted to get this done with.
“So yeah, if you have any questions or need anything let me know, otherwise you can probably ask anyone here and they can help you. But definitely don’t bother Stratt with anything less than the highest level of work-related importance.” Grace paused and thought about that for a second.
“Actually, don’t ask Stratt anything. Ask me first, and I’ll determine if it’s a Stratt level question.”
He heard a snicker behind him but ignored it because that’s what he was going to do. Ignore them, and eventually they’d stop. Grace finally got to drop them off at their line of bunks and left them on their own.
All he wanted to do was go and take a long nap, or cry. But he didn’t have the time, he’d already wasted a good portion of his afternoon carting them around.
Astrophage waits for no man, he thought to himself as he made his way back to the astrophage breeding area to check the current volume and update their expected output with their current very distant potential launch window. So far everything had been good, but it could always take a turn, so he liked to be diligent.
And maybe he was focusing back on his work because he felt like he had something to prove. But nobody could prove that.
A few days go by.
“I’m telling you Dimitri, I think they have it out for me. That’s the second time they’ve tried to make me look like a fool in front of Stratt or an important visiting military official. What am I doing wrong?” Grace’s hands were running through his already unkempt hair, making it curl in random directions and giving him the look of a madman. The bloodshot eyes and unshaven face only added to the vibe.
“Initially I thought you were being a little sensitive, but I do agree, they don’t seem to like you,” Dimitri acknowledged somewhat unhappily as he munched his breakfast. The older man didn’t like the idea of their fellow scientists not being team players.
“It just means they have good enough taste to know a fake when they see one,” Ada Lokken’s voice piped up from next to them, just sliding in to sit at their table.
“Don’t you have anywhere else to be?” Grace asked, hands still grasping his hair.
“Nope,” she answered with a grin, popping one of her hashbrowns in her mouth.
“Now Ada, you have to admit they’ve been a bit combative? I saw that you were having to yell at one of them earlier.” Dimitri, the gossip, intoned.
Ada grimaced and threw Dimitri a look of betrayal. “Fine, yes they’re combative and not very mature. They also don’t know when to shut up. I mean Grace, you don’t know when to shut up, but there’s only one of you. There’s FIVE of them. I can’t even begin to concentrate when they’re in the room.”
“Thank you!” Grace said, throwing his hands in the air in mock celebration. Many people in the room turned to see what he was shouting at, but once they saw who shouted they lost interest. It wouldn’t be the first time Grace shouted for no good reason.
“Don’t get too excited, I still think they’re right about you,” Ada pointed her fork at Grace menacingly.
“I’ll take it,” Grace replied, taking a sip from his definitely now cold coffee.
“Grace, you are a smart man. Have you considered that your current approach to this, uh, problem is flawed?” Dimitri phrased the question very carefully, like he was trying to not give away the answer. Like there was a correct answer.
“What’s flawed about it? I ignore them and the problem goes away. It’s a perfect strategy.” Grace stared into his coffee as he said it, not really giving the vision of confidence.
“What Dimitri’s attempting to lead you into saying is that you should just stand up for yourself,” Ada cut in. “Yell at them like I did and problem solved. They’ll leave you alone.”
“I’m not going to do that,” Grace mumbled.
“Then stop fucking complaining so much about it. It’s a solvable situation, you just need to solve it.” Ada was fed up with this entire thing.
“I’m handling it.” Grace grit out, still really only looking at his coffee.
“Sure you are. Don’t complain about it near me again until you’ve tried to do something more than ‘ignore the problem’.” She accentuated her response with finger quotes, which Grace didn’t think he’d ever seen her do before, and for some reason that made him at least consider what she was saying.
A few more days go by.
So Grace took Lokken’s advice. And by “took her advice” he did the opposite and kept ignoring the new scientist's comments at him. It just seemed like he’d waited too long and now it’d be weird if he said anything. Maybe it was just their dynamic now?
His inaction pissed off Lokken, amused Dubois and Shapiro, bothered Dimitri, and probably just irritated everyone else he’d complained about it to. Which at this point was everyone sans Stratt and the scientists themselves.
Dimitri was trying to be helpful at least and run interference a few times a week to get them away from Grace. He’d tried to recruit Lokken to the cause, but she said if he made her babysit them so Grace could go cry in a corner somewhere she was only going to give them more ammunition about Grace and Dimitri.
She really knew how to make people fall in line.
Grace couldn’t avoid them forever and he internally groaned as he entered into another conference room for their first big inter-team collaborative discussion since the new scientists joined. This discussion was done bi-monthly to keep everyone aware of any set backs other teams were having, if there were any changes to designs that might affect other parts of the project, and if they needed anything to help them do their jobs more efficiently.
Grace ran these meetings most times since Stratt stopped coming to them, deeming them not worth her time if she can just get a summary from Grace on the topics. It was mainly due to the fact that nothing urgent came up in these meetings. Urgent things were addressed the day they were discovered, sometimes within a few hours.
These discussions were more for medium urgency and lower items. Highly administrative at times and sometimes just devolved into complaints about the latest batch of coffee that the ship was supplied with.
Grace got his main discussion points ready and set up the slide deck on the projector in the room. He idled at the podium while people filed in, some early while others were clearly rushing to try to make it on time. Whatever the case, when the main team leads were all present, Grace started the meeting.
He gave a summary of how these meetings go for the benefit of the new scientists before diving into the latest figures for the astrophages as well as any other administrative stuff that Stratt had passed on to him to announce (usually the unfavorable things fell to him to break to the teams).
Everything was going smoothly. He was able to get through the announcements and get any key information from the leads. Things were looking good.
“Thanks for all the summaries guys, I’ll let Stratt know about the needed GPUs Dr. Lokken in an hour over lunch.” Grace assured, wanting Ada to know her request was going to be communicated quickly.
“I bet they have lots to discuss over lunch,” Nadeen stage whispered to Ibrahim, gaining some laughs from their little group and some uncomfortable coughs from others.
“Okay, if there’s nothing else then we can end this meeting early and get to lunch a bit faster,” Grace said, not even letting his face twitch in response.
“He does sound really excited to get to lunch. It’s probably the only time Stratt gets any action. I bet she’s as frigid in bed as she is in person. She probably doesn’t even react when she orgasms, too busy with that stick up her ass,” Viktor joked, expecting to get some more chuckles than Nadeen’s comment did.
But he’d misjudged his audience. And most of all, he’d misjudged how much Grace would ignore.
See, Grace was willing to put up with the little comments here and there about him, because at the end of the day, only he was getting denigrated. But to denigrate Stratt who was taking on the lion’s share of wrangling the entire world to work together to save their sorry selves was unacceptable.
“That’s enough,” he snarled from the front of the room, gripping the podium tightly.
“Time and time again your group has demonstrated how unprofessional and immature you all are, and you’re lucky you’re here because you’re absolutely needed at this stage in the project, because a comment like that would definitely lead to you being terminated from this project.” The group squirmed under the heat of his words, clearly not prepared to have anyone actually call them out on their blatant disrespect and quite frankly extreme misogyny also.
“We are here working together to solve the same problem, but it seems you’re all incapable of taking any of this seriously. You’ve made comments about me, which I let slide because honestly I don’t really care what you have to say. I’m here to do a job and I do it well.
“But to say anything so misogynistic and disgusting about the person who is heading this entire project, who’s working tirelessly to save our planet, is incomprehensible.” Grace had started with an even tone and volume, but now had graduated to almost shouting at them.
“Unfortunately like I said, we do need you. However, if you say anything like that again about Stratt or any other person working on this project, so help me God I don’t care how helpful you are, I will make sure you’re off this project and additionally you will never be hired by any reputable lab on any continent. Do I make myself clear?” Grace’s final question was met with silence from the room. It took a few seconds for his words to settle and for the new scientists to meekly reply with a jumble of ‘yes sirs’.
Grace stared at them, meeting each of the five’s gazes for a moment before loosening his hold on the podium and recentering himself.
“Good. This meeting is over, go get some lunch,” he said to the whole room, afraid to look too long at anyone else since he was worried that he might’ve gone too far. However, instead of seeing disgust or disappointment on the faces of his fellow scientists, he saw smiles and pride.
The new scientists scurried out of the room as quickly as possible, but everyone else seemed to hang around, waiting to see what Grace did, or maybe just to eavesdrop on what anyone else had to say.
“Wow, the lap dog has a bark and a bite,” Lokken joked as she sauntered up to Grace with a Cheshire grin on her face, no doubt happy that her advice worked.
“Maybe we should start calling him Stratt’s guard dog instead?” Shapiro quipped as she also joined the growing gathering around Grace.
“Was it too much?” Grace asked as he fidgeted with his glasses.
“Honestly, I think you could’ve done more, but beggars can’t be choosers,” Lokken replied, punching Grace in the arm lightly. “I’ll let you know if I hear them saying anything though, we don’t need anyone making this project harder to work on than it already is.”
“You did a good job,” Dimitri agreed, having also been loitering around with them.
“Thanks - but no one tells Stratt I said any of that. I don’t think she’d appreciate it.” Grace ordered, pointing at each of them with a serious stare.
“But why keep it a secret? Won’t you get rewarded for defending her?” Lokken emphasized her innuendo with raised eyebrows and a cheeky smile.
“No!” Grace facepalmed. Those jokes were never going to end.
“We’ll keep your guard dogging a secret. Now don’t you need to get to lunch with her? She doesn’t like to be kept waiting,” Shapiro reminded him kindly.
“Oh crap, you’re right. I’ll see you guys later!” Grace gathered up his things haphazardly and jogged out the door. He could hear some good natured chuckles as he ran out. Hopefully Stratt wouldn’t find out that he stood up for her, he could only imagine how much she would hate that. The main unfortunate part was that it seemed the “lap dog” nickname wasn’t going away any time soon.
Fudge.