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The training room smelled like burnt plastic and stale coffee, which Yáo supposed was appropriate considering the cup of stale coffee sitting in front of him and the burnt chunk of plastic casing in the front of the room that three of the base's technicians were crouched around.
Yáo had been watching the crew passing various melted pieces of what had been a functional training computer at the beginning of the day back and forth between them for the past forty minutes. He had drunk two cups of terrible coffee and had started on his third. At some point Ilyukhina had sat down on the floor with her back against the wall and closed her eyes, her fingers drumming a slow, irregular rhythm against her thigh.
The intended purpose of this hastily scheduled time in this classroom was for them to be instructed in the basics - beyond the required basics they already knew, of course - of the Science Specialist's role aboard the Hail Mary.
It turned out that the sudden and tragic loss of DuBois and Shapiro had reminded those in the upper leadership of the Project that there was a very real risk that any one of them could die before the Hail Mary reached Tau Ceti, and that a crew who could not cover each other's fundamental competencies was a crew that could doom the mission - and Earth - through attrition alone.
Of course, it was impossible to teach them anything close to the level of what DuBois or Shapiro - or potentially Dr. Grace, depending on what his answer to Stratt would be - knew, but it had been decided that they should at least be given the framework. Hence: a crash course in the Science Specialist's role for a pilot and engineer who had more than enough of their own knowledge to maintain.
Until the computer that contained all the science training modules had decided to combust.
Typical.
Yáo took a sip of his coffee, holding back a grimace at the bitterness.
Their instructor finally looked up at the ceiling, then over at the maintenance crew, and then down at his watch. He sighed.
"Come back tomorrow. I will email Stratt about the schedule change." He looked at them with the expression of a man who wanted to be anywhere else. "You're free to go."
Yáo set down his stale coffee. Ilyukhina opened her eyes.
It was two hours into what had been scheduled as a full day of training.
Yáo and Ilyukhina walked back across the base in the flat grey afternoon light, the sky the specific colorless white of an overcast day that could not decide whether it intended to rain or not, a rainbow just barely visible in the distance. Yáo had his jacket zipped to the collar. Ilyukhina walked with her hands in her pockets, her expression uncharacteristically serious as she glanced at the time.
"...it has been three hours," she said. "What do you think Dr. Grace answered?"
Three hours since their meeting with Dr. Grace - a meeting that had felt, to Yáo, like catching a glimpse at someone in the middle of a fall. The man had been visibly frightened at the idea of joining the crew, wearing the expression without any particular attempt at concealment. Three hours since they had parted ways and Grace had gone to think it over, or to find the words for what he had already decided.
"I... must admit I do not find it very likely." Yáo said, and did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. They were both thinking it: Dr. Grace had refused, as any reasonable person suddenly faced with a three-hour warning of a one-way ticket to the edge of the solar system might. They would have to delay the launch. Find a replacement candidate. It was unfortunate, but manageable. The mission would still proceed on a slightly adjusted schedule, with a crew all one hundred percent committed to the mission.
The path Yáo and Ilyukhina were taking angled toward the cluster of low administrative buildings on the east edge of the base - Stratt's office among them. Their destination. It would be an unplanned visit, due to their schedule changing unexpectedly, but they had many things to discuss that couldn't wait: contingency plans, timeline adjustments, the question of who would replace DuBois and Shapiro as the mission's Science Specialist.
As they reached the building, Yáo moved ahead to open the door, stepping back to let Ilyukhina through.
"Well," Ilyukhina said, pausing in the threshold with a half-smile, glancing toward where the rainbow sat against the grey sky, "it's a shame we will be forced to delay, but I won't turn down a bit more time before we-"
She stopped.
The smile fell from her face, being replaced by an expression of confusion. Her gaze had gone past Yáo's shoulder to something behind him, and he turned to see what had captured her eye.
Yáo registered the yellow first.
Bright yellow, the color of a hazard sign - it was Dr. Grace's familiar raincoat, unmistakable even at distance, the man wearing it moving fast across the open ground that separated the administrative buildings from the interior fence line.
Grace was running. Not jogging or hurrying like he was late to a meeting - he was running, with everything he had, with the kind of total commitment that left no attention for anything around him except the next meter of ground.
And he wasn't alone.
Behind him, in a loose and rapidly closing formation, there were two soldiers, a man in a white coat that Yáo couldn't recognize across the distance, and the familiar silhouette of Carl.
"Is that-" Ilyukhina said, and then louder, stepping fully out of the doorway, raising her hands to cup them around her mouth: "Dr. Grace!"
Grace did not turn. Yáo did not think he could hear her.
"What the fuck is going on?" Ilyukhina said, stunned, looking to Yáo. "Where is he going?"
"I do not know." Yáo was already moving, his hand falling from the door he'd been holding open. "But I think we should find out."
They both broke out into a run.
Yáo was not, by any measure, slow. He kept himself in good condition; he always had, first from habit, from the particular relationship he had developed with the daily discipline of it, and then from the requirements of his service.
But he was starting from a standing position and he had a lot of ground to make up. The group ahead was already well into the open space between buildings. Ilyukhina kept pace with him, but she, too, couldn't catch up with the group ahead of them.
Yáo ran and watched and tried to understand what he was seeing.
The yellow coat made the man painfully easy to track across the open ground, bright as a marker flag against the grey afternoon. Grace had covered more ground than Yáo would have predicted, especially for a man who was not necessarily aligned with military fitness standards - he was a civilian, a scientist, a teacher. But there was a quality to his movement that belonged to someone running on adrenaline rather than training - not efficient, but relentless, feeding on something that had gotten past the body's usual ability.
Adrenaline could do that. Terror could do that.
Something, sometime over the last three hours, had made the man frightened enough to try to escape a military base on foot.
Yáo didn't know what Grace's plan was for when he reached the fence. Watching him, he suspected there was no plan beyond the fence - that Grace had not gotten that far, that he was operating on something simpler and more immediate than planning.
Away. Away. Away.
A third soldier ran into sight from the right of Grace, coming from along the fence line instead of from the direction the group chasing Grace, as well as Yáo and Ilyukhina, were coming from.
Yáo realized what was about to happen a half second before it did.
The tackle hit Grace just below the shoulder. He went down hard, a blur of yellow, both of them hitting the ground in a tangle of momentum, and for a moment there was only the distant sound of the impact and Grace's voice going up sharply in shock.
The other soldiers caught up and dropped to their knees beside them, and Grace's muffled voice resolved into words as Yáo and Ilyukhina closed the remaining distance.
"No-no- Carl!" Distinct, each panicked syllable separate. "I can't do it-"
The soldiers had him on his front. The yellow coat was twisted around him, his feet digging a shallow rut into the ground as he tried to wrestle himself free.
Carl and the doctor had slowed from a run to a walk. The doctor was moving toward Grace with something in his hand.
Grace's voice went up another register. "Don't do it, don't do it, don't-"
The doctor crouched behind him. Positioned what he was holding in his hand - a needle, Yáo realized - against Grace's thigh with a fast, practiced motion.
Grace's pleas broke off into a long, ragged wheeze. Then silence. His hands continued moving even after his words stopped, shaking fingers clawing weakly at the wet grass as the sedative overtook him.
Yáo and Ilyukhina arrived.
Carl was standing over Grace, speaking to him in a low voice. In the last moments before the sedative pulled him fully under, Grace's gaze moved - drifted past Carl's face, past the space between them - and found Yáo's.
Yáo did not look away.
He had seen frightened men before - soldiers, civilians, people caught in disasters - but this was different.
Yáo had never seen fear look like this, because what was in Grace's face was not simply fear, not undifferentiated panic - the man being held down to the ground looked less like a man and more like an animal that had realized too late that it had been cornered and the trap had already closed behind it. And now something in Grace's expression told Yáo that the man recognized him specifically, and was trying to determine what that recognition meant. Whether Yáo was safe. He could see it moving through Grace's expression - the same recalculation he suspected Grace had already been forced to make once today, regarding Carl, regarding what a familiar and trusted face was actually worth.
Grace's mouth moved, or tried to, but then his eyes slid shut, and his body went still, and whatever he had been trying to say went with him into the stillness.
Carl turned.
He saw Yáo and Ilyukhina standing there, and his face turned ashen.
"Shit," he said. The word sounded less shocked than defeated.
"What is this?" Yáo asked. His voice came out very quiet.
"What have you done to him?" Ilyukhina's voice was not quiet. She was already moving toward the prone figure on the ground, toward Grace lying face-down in the grass and dirt with his yellow coat twisted around him. "Is he-"
The soldiers moved. The movement was fast and coordinated, and in a single breath Yáo found his arms taken and held firmly, and Ilyukhina found the same happening to her, and they were stopped where they stood.
"I'm sorry for this," Carl said, his tone guilty. "Yáo, Ilyukhina - I want you to understand that I'm sorry for this. I wish it didn't have to-"
Yáo pulled against the grip holding him. The soldier did not yield.
"Oh, let them go." Yáo and Ilyukhina turned their heads to see Stratt walking toward them with her hands folded behind her back, the same way she always walked, with the same quality of unhurried certainty, as though she had arrived at precisely the moment she intended and saw no reason to adjust her pace. She looked at the soldiers. "Where are they going to go?"
The soldiers shared a glance, and after a moment released them and stepped back.
Ilyukhina took a single step toward Grace. One of the soldiers shifted, not grabbing her, just positioning himself between her and the man on the ground, and Ilyukhina stopped.
"What is this?" Yáo said. "Stratt. What are they doing?"
The doctor and a second person - someone Yáo hadn't noticed arrive, perhaps from the flatbed truck that had driven up while his attention was elsewhere - were crouched beside Grace. The doctor pressed two fingers to Grace's throat. Then he opened his bag and began removing equipment: monitoring pads, a small oxygen mask, a pulse oximeter. His movements were efficient and practiced, the movements of someone doing exactly what they had planned to do.
"They are preparing Dr. Grace for the launch," Stratt said. "His coma will be induced here, rather than aboard the Hail Mary. It was a matter of-" she paused, very briefly, "-logistics."
"What?"
"Dr. Grace refused to accept the mission." Stratt said it as though she were reporting the weather. "I was forced to take matters into my own hands."
Yáo looked at her.
"I told you," Yáo said, and he was aware of his voice tightening, his shoulders tensing, "that I would not have anyone on my crew who had not willingly chosen to be there."
Stratt met his gaze. She did not flinch. "Yes."
"Then-"
"Commander Yáo," Stratt glanced past him at the activity around Grace, then back. "I think it would be better to have this conversation in my office. This should not be discussed in the open." A beat. "I would also like to take this opportunity to inform you that your cooperation will be significantly more comfortable for you than the alternative."
Yáo looked at Ilyukhina. She looked back at him, her jaw set. Then her gaze moved to the soldier standing three feet away, to the rifle in his hands, and back to Yáo.
They walked.
The flatbed truck passed them before they had covered twenty meters. Grace was in the back, lying on a gurney that had been secured to the truck bed, one of the medics crouched beside him monitoring the equipment. The oxygen mask obscured the lower half of Grace's face, reducing him to closed eyes and pale skin. His yellow coat had been pulled off one shoulder to allow access for an IV line in his arm. It was still bright. It caught the light.
Yáo watched the truck until it turned a corner and was gone.
Stratt's office was in disarray.
The bookshelf along the back wall had been cleared of half the books on it, a trail of displaced objects on the floor leading from the far wall to somewhere near the door. One of the books on the floor had a footprint across its cover. A coffee cup lay on its side near the corner; it had been empty when it fell, from the lack of stain. Several folders had been knocked to the floor and come open. One of the chairs that should have been tucked under the table had been pushed back at a sharp angle and not returned.
Grace had been in this room. Had run from this room.
Stratt sat at her desk on the other side of the room from the mess. She did not invite either of them to sit. There was only one chair on the other side of her desk, and Yáo could guess who had sat in it last.
Yáo found himself wondering how long Dr. Grace had stayed seated in that very chair before he ran. How long he had tried to negotiate like a civilized man before animal instinct finally overwhelmed whatever composure he had tried to maintain.
As Yáo and Ilyukhina stood on the other side of the desk, Stratt looked at them both with a clear, level expression that held something in it that Yáo found difficult to name.
"Tell us what happened," Yáo said.
"Dr. Grace is being prepared for his coma to be induced," Stratt spoke, as if Yáo hadn't spoken at all. "Once aboard the Hail Mary, you and Ilyukhina will-"
"Tell us what happened, Stratt." Yáo demanded.
He became aware, suddenly and distantly, that he had clenched his jaw hard enough to give himself a headache.
Stratt held his gaze for a moment. "Dr. Grace was presented with the mission, and the facts of what would happen if he refused. He refused. He was informed that that was not an option." she glanced at the bookshelf, just briefly, then back to Yáo. "He did not react well."
"I told you," Yáo said, "that I would not have anyone on my crew who did not willingly and freely choose to be there. You told me-"
"I know what I told you."
"So then you lied-"
"Yes." Simply. The word fell and lay there in the space between them. "I told you what you needed to hear to cooperate with the mission. I required your cooperation. And I require it now, along with Dr. Grace's, however that cooperation is obtained." She folded her hands on the desk in front of her. "I'm going to be direct with you, Commander. You are intelligent enough to understand the position that we are in. And I am in a position where I must weigh the worth of three lives to the lives of billions. I am not willing to let one man's cowardice, however understandable, determine the outcome for everyone else on this planet."
"He was frightened," Ilyukhina said. Her voice had a quality in it that Yáo recognized, low and controlled in the way that preceded something far less controlled. "Of course he was just frightened, anyone would be. You could have given him time to come to terms with it, you could have-"
"There was no time," Stratt said, and for the first time something sharpened in her expression, her tone gaining an edge. "There is no time. There was no time left when we started this project and there is even less now. Do you understand what I am doing? This is not what I want to do. Not what I would choose to do in a world with better options. But I do not have better options. I have this one. Every day the sun gets dimmer. Every day that Dr. Grace would spend not deciding, what is left of the margin would disappear. I made a decision for the betterment of our planet, our entire species. And I stand by it."
The room was quiet.
"What is stopping us," Ilyukhina said carefully, "from walking out of this building right now and telling every journalist we can find?"
Stratt looked at Ilyukhina, her expression flat. "Every communication you make from this base is monitored. Emails, calls, messages. Any attempt to contact outside parties with information about Dr. Grace's situation will not reach its destination." She paused. "I am going to give you the opportunity to say goodbye to your loved ones. Both of you. I want you to have that. I would have wanted Dr. Grace to have that, in better circumstances. But I want to be transparent with you about what it means: those conversations will be monitored, and any attempt to pass information outside of what you are permitted to share will result in consequences for the people you're speaking with."
The silence that followed that was a very different quality of silence.
"You would hold our families hostage," Ilyukhina said. There was something almost disbelieving in her voice. "Is that what you are saying?"
"I would hold every single person on this planet hostage, if it would ensure the success of this mission," Stratt said. "That is, in a sense, what we are all doing. That is what the Hail Mary has always been. Three people, held against the alternative." She looked between them. "I take no pleasure in this. I have spent years making decisions I take no pleasure in. I will continue to do so for however long the mission requires it."
She held Yáo's gaze. He held hers.
He thought about his wife. About the specific quality of her voice on the phone, the way she said his name. He thought about the last time he had seen her in person - months ago now - and the way she had looked at him when he said goodbye.
He thought about three lives for billions and he thought about the fact that Stratt was right.
That was the unbearable thing. Not that she was monstrous, but that she was right, and he knew it, and he had known it before she said it, and she had known he would know it, which was why she was sitting there so levelly and letting him arrive at that conclusion on his own. He did not have to be comfortable with what she had done to recognize that he could not argue his way to a different conclusion.
Ilyukhina was looking at him. He could feel it, even without turning. They had worked alongside each other long enough to have developed something that functioned like peripheral vision for each other's emotional states. He knew what she was looking for in his expression: not permission, she was not someone who waited for permission, but confirmation. The knowledge that she was not alone in whatever she was about to agree to.
Yáo looked at her.
She was holding herself very still, her arms crossed. Her jaw was set. Her eyes, when they met his, were clear and unhappy and resolute in the way of someone who has already grieved the version of events that didn't go this way.
Yáo looked away.
"We will cooperate," he finally said. He kept his gaze on the wall above Stratt's shoulder. "But understand that we are not doing this for you. We are not doing this because we agree with what you have done here." He lowered his gaze to hers. "And I hope - I sincerely hope - that you will face the consequences of it. Someday. When there is a time for such consequences."
Stratt looked at him with that same level, tired expression. "Then we are in agreement, Commander Yáo."
After a moment, she turned to her computer screen. They had been dismissed.
A soldier that had been waiting outside Stratt's office walked them back to their housing. He did not speak. Yáo did not resent him for it.
The base was quiet in the late afternoon. Quieter than usual. Yáo did not know if that was circumstance or arrangement - activities redirected, personnel rerouted, the area kept clear for what had happened and what had been planned to happen. He suspected the latter. He suspected a great deal had been arranged, that the logistics of this afternoon had been planned in more detail than they would ever know.
Ilyukhina walked beside him and said nothing. Yáo walked beside her and said nothing.
There was nothing left to say.
The first drops of rain arrived as they reached their building - small, separate, landing on Yáo's jacket with small, individual and distinct sounds before accumulating into the general sound of rainfall.
Yáo stopped.
He looked up at the clouds that had gathered while they had been in Stratt's office. The sun was somewhere behind them. He could not see it. But he knew, without being able to see it, that it was dimming - as it had been dimming, as it would continue to dim.
The timeline did not adjust for grief.
Somewhere on the base, preparations for launch continued with mechanical precision. Perhaps Dr. Grace's room was already being taken apart and packed by people he had never permitted inside it, strangers deciding which parts of his life were worth bringing aboard.
Yáo lowered his head, and went inside.