Chapter Text
“What’s so urgent?” Ilyukhina asked, bright and curious despite being freshly assigned to a suicide mission farther away than any human being had ever ventured from Earth. “Thought we would get time to settle in. You know, make a home of our new home.”
“No, we needed to do this as soon as possible,” Stratt said. Both the primary and secondary crews were in the room together, but she’d had them seated as far apart from the other trio as possible. She hated to even brief them together like this, but having them hear about it secondhand instead of seeing it themselves would be wildly less effective.
And if anything that was about to happen was true, it needed to be effective.
“We are very busy,” Komorov objected, the third time he’d tried to be excused, and then saw the guard coming back in who Stratt had dispatched to fetch the case. “Oh. This is one of those times?”
“What times?” Dr. Lamai asked, while Dr. Lokken frowned in confusion. Stratt also hated having so many of her department heads, as they were, in the same place, but the risk was worth it.
If he was right.
“This case has been locked, and locked in my personal quarters, during the last three years,” Stratt said. She keyed in her code, then her thumbprint, then her ear print to the security panel on the case, and it beeped approval and opened. The one she wanted was on top; she could make out the unsteady, rushed handwriting and the two years till launch? where a date would have gone on a letterhead, or a postage stamp’s spot.
Grace, about halfway down the table from her, said “You don’t even have to rifle through it a little for the right one?”
“I put them in order when I packed them,” Stratt said. She took out the top envelope, which had spent the last three years, like the others, sandwiched between squares of bulletproof glass sealed together with the flat paper in a tiny gap in between. And she handed it to Yáo, at her left. “Commander, if you would please read what that says, and then pass it around the table for the others to see.”
As the guard who’d brought the case in left to retrieve the necessary tools, Yáo frowned down at the unusual object. “It’s an envelope with writing in English. ‘Two years till launch’, with a question mark...” He paused for the briefest moment. “‘Open when primary and secondary crews are picked’.”
“Thank you.” Stratt closed and locked the case, with the rest of the envelopes still inside.
“What is this?” Dr. Lokken asked as the envelope in its prison was passed off to the next person. Ilyukhina leaned over DuBois’ shoulder. “Do we really have time for whatever ritual this is—”
“It is not a ritual,” Stratt said. “What is about to happen is something I find baffling, inexplicable, and completely absurd. You are the best scientific minds we could bring to this project, so I am presenting you all with the evidence. I do not want to hear anything about forgery or tricks when we finish in this room; what we really don’t have is time for any of you to fight me on this.”
Dr. Lokken subsided unhappily. Stratt withdrew her attention away from the room and the whispered side conversations to catch up on her email and her work; but she was still listening to some of the louder comments.
“You’re not going to look at it, Dr. Grace?” Hatch asked as, presumably, Grace passed it onto the next person without stopping.
“Don’t have to,” Grace said. “I wrote it. I know what’s in it.”
There was a general silence. “Continue, please,” Stratt said testily. “We are short on time, people.” A brief shuffle said the envelope’s travel had resumed.
“And you’ve seen this situation before, Dimitri?” Hatch asked, swiveling his focus.
“I have heard about it,” Komorov said. “And seen secondhand. Apparently we have opened many of these throughout the Project. It...Stratt is correct. Hard to explain without seeing for yourself.”
“And Dr. Grace wrote this one,” Dr. Lokken said slowly, “why, exactly?”
“I wrote all of them,” Grace said. “A couple of days after ArcLight landed and Stratt gave me the Astrophage. We sat down and I wrote all of it in front of her, under like thirty different camera angles, labeled ‘em, and told her to keep the whole bag somewhere nobody could get to it or alter what they said.”
“This is certainly one way to do that,” Dr. Lamai said in an undertone.
The envelope came back to Stratt. The guard had returned with the appropriate diamond-bladed saw.
“As a note,” Stratt said, as she backed up her chair to give the man room to work, pitching her voice over the sound of sawing, “there are only three saws of this caliber aboard the ship. All of them are embedded with a tracker to make sure they never leave the engineering workshop without proper authorization. I am the only one with authorization.”
“Meaning that you’re the only one who can get this open without the whole engineering bay noticing,” Shapiro said, from the far end of the table. “I understand, Ms. Stratt, but I think what we don’t understand is why we need to read a letter Dr. Grace wrote for you years ago?”
The glass cracked open.
“It’s not a letter.” Stratt pried the envelope out of the opening. The saw had taken off a sliver of one short edge, which made it easy to slip the paper out of the envelope.
‘Open when primary and secondary crews are picked’.
Stratt unfolded the paper.
“Hm.”
“What does it say?” DuBois asked.
“It says,” Stratt said, “‘Primary crew: Li-Jie Yáo, commander, Olesya Ilyukhina, engineer, Martin DuBois, science specialist. Secondary crew: Annie Shapiro, science specialist, Michel Audy, commander, Kui Hiroto, engineer.’”
All six people just named took a moment to stare at each other, and be stared at. Slowly, the looks transferred to Grace.
“I get that a lot now,” Grace said.
“You could not have possibly known,” Lokken began, broke off in confusion, and was supplanted by Komorov saying,
“But we had barely even begun to design ship three years ago. No talk of selecting crew was anywhere before last year.” As he spoke Stratt handed the letter to Yáo, to begin passing that around as well.
“Yeah, I know,” Grace said. “I remember.” All three members of the primary crew were in a huddle around the list, in the seats next to his.
“So...how?!”
Grace looked at Stratt and found her already watching him.
“You very purposefully waited until I was the only one left, when we first brought back Astrophage,” Stratt said. It wasn’t a question.
“I didn’t know them,” Grace said. “Not a fan of parading myself around like that in front of a bunch of dress uniforms. But I knew you’d take me seriously.”
Him leaving the laboratory to use the bathroom hadn’t seemed like an excuse at first. Maybe it hadn’t been. But when Stratt had told him to sit down and explain everything he’d discovered so far—since he had barely so much as exclaimed in surprise since first being shoved in the isolation room with ArcLight—he’d stopped her before she could finish the question and said,
“Stratt, I know about Project Hail Mary.”
“We had exchanged maybe ten words so far,” Stratt said, in the present moment, the briefing room dead silent around her. “You’d met me for the first time two days before.”
She got a half-shrug and a brief flicker of an expression from him—movement at the corner of his mouth, like she’d said something funny.
“Dr. Grace, you’ve predicted almost every discovery we’ve made about Astrophage.” They’d gone through a dozen envelopes that way: open when Perth figures out the mitochondria, open when I show you how they breed (she hadn’t even had time to seal that one away), open when Nairobi tests non-argon environment, open when ISRO calculates Astrophage speed... “You knew that Dr. Lokken specifically was going to hassle me about gravity for the Hail Mary’s lab before she did.” (Dr. Lokken jumped). “You wrote me a small treatise on Dr. Komorov’s spin drives before I heard anything about them from him.”
“Did he?” Ilyukhina questioned.
“Was very impressive,” Komorov said. “Knew everything. Even I had not worked out some of those details yet.”
“The point is,” Stratt said, and the room went deathly still again. “Enough is enough. We need an explanation, now.”
Again, that half-smile. “I promise,” Grace said, “I really, really would like to explain. I’ve wanted to explain the whole time, it would’ve made everything...way, way better in the long run. But I promised myself I’d only explain everything when we were sure you’d believe me.”
‘We’. The Project team? Or just her, and him?
Grace took a deep breath. “And I actually need you to start believing me pretty darn soon, while we still have time.”
The way he said it echoed in the same way some of her thoughts ran, these days.
“You’re scheduled to give a briefing in this room in six minutes,” Stratt said. “Make that be enough time to prepare a full explanation. Who do you need here for it?”
Grace looked around. “Uh...pretty much everyone in this room. Maybe not Hatch—sorry Hatch, I swear it’s not personal—but an extra person can’t hurt, and you asked him to be here, so I’ll go with your gut.”
“You can have the primary or the secondary crew.”
“Primary,” Grace said without hesitation.
“Secondary crew, you’re dismissed,” Stratt told them. “If necessary, you’ll be briefed later, without the primary crew. As of right now I don’t want any of you in the same place as your counterpart unless absolutely necessary.”
They filed out reluctantly, disbelief still on their faces. “You guys should go, too,” Grace said, getting up from his seat. “Maybe bring something back to eat while we talk. This is probably going to take a while. I’m going to go find another whiteboard.”