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When the Beetles crash-landed on Earth, twenty-six years after the launch of the Hail Mary, they carried 5 terabytes of video storage, enough Taumeoba to save the Earth twenty times over, and an encrypted file titled only for Eva.
When they saw it—they being, of course, the remaining experts in spacecraft and the Petrova problem and all that was left of the world's space agencies—they didn't know it was for her. Of course not. She'd been Commander Stratt before the launch and only Stratt after, given name stripped away once the people decided her purpose was better served as a scapegoat than a savior. Eva, soft and comfortable and unaware of the lengths she would go to save humanity, had died nearly thirty years ago in her apartment with the announcement of a secret United Nations summit.
She only found out about the file from one of her spies. Trapped under house arrest as she was—which was greater than she deserved, she knew, greater than she should have been given—there were still a handful who were loyal to her, from before the project or after, who saw her as a savior or a means to an end or just a woman who would always do the necessary thing, because doing the good thing was often impossible.
The Beetles, he said, a pencil of a man who's voice cracked over the phone, they've returned, he said, he did it, he said, before the media coverage or the press releases or humanity's realization that they were saved, and that they weren't alone.
She wasn't surprised. Stratt had always known Grace could do it regardless of what he thought about himself. This is me believing in you.
That was good, she thought, with a near-emotionless efficiency that was too easy to fall back into and was the only reason she'd survived as long as she had. Beneath that, she was proud of him, and selfishly glad that he'd been the one out of the three to survive.
But her agent hadn't been done, spindly voice shaking under the weight of and. And was never a good thing to hear; it meant extraneous information, something that was—not surprising, but unexpected, a confounding variable found in an otherwise perfect experiment.
And, he'd said, he left you a message.
The encryption key was something they'd come up with in a moment of weakness.
She'd been training Grace in things he didn't need to know—spacewalks and the EVA suits and the basics of hull repair—because even then, she'd known, she'd known that he had the gene and that he understood Astrophage better than anyone else and that sometimes things happened and extraneous variables were introduced; because Stratt knew the only reason she was chosen to lead was because she understood that sometimes it was necessary to give up the things you wanted when you were saving the world, because she understood that duty waits for no one and trying to keep the things you care for is a surefire way of losing them.
And still, those moments of weakness. He'd been learning computer science—nothing too complicated, of course, because there wasn't time—from one of the many computer engineers on the project. She doesn't remember where, exactly, it had happened: on the boat or on solid ground, if the candidates for the mission had already been chosen or if there had still been a buffer between the two of them and the explosion that forced her hand, but she knows that she'd been standing just over his shoulder while he worked. She knows there was an open thermos of coffee on his desk, two-thirds empty, that he'd slid towards her as she walked in, and that the scent had permeated the room. Her hands had been warm. His eyes had been knife-sharp like they always were when he sunk his teeth into a problem he didn't yet understand, and his shoulders had slumped in the way they always did when she walked into a room.
(When did she start noticing that? It had to have been after the coma technology, and the gene testing—after she'd realized the depth of his usefulness to her. Had to have been after she was too far gone to let softness compromise the project.)
He'd called it practice, a way to refine his skills, which is the only reason she stuck around. The two of them debating data corruption and file storage and how to create a key no one aside from the two of them would guess. She'd seen it, then—in the manic press of his fingers to the keyboard and the livewire of his laugh—how things might have been, if the world weren't ending.
"You can use it, if you want, he said afterwards, brow pinched in a way that she knew meant he was pretending something didn't bother him. "Send it to the other engineers. For the Mary, I mean."
"I will," she'd said, but she hadn't and now she was here, nearly thirty years later, pretending she didn't remember the key.
A dead man's face stares out of her laptop screen. Eva closes her eyes. She'd watched the video logs, of course she had. Despite her crimes, the leader of the project was owed certain thanks.
And still. And still.
He was alive—or had been, when he recorded the logs. Wasn't, now, which might have saddened someone else but Eva Stratt had known that Grace was dead for a long time. She'd been the one to kill him, after all, and had spent those last days before the launch watching over him as he slept, pale as a body.
She hadn't realized until now how much she missed the sight of it. Him, alive. She'd kept his raincoat until her arrest, and then it had been taken like everything else but even that short amount of time was enough for it to lose the chemical-sharp scent of his soap, and rain, and crushed grass.
It was four days before she watched the video. She was busy, with her coffee and her books and the antique record player she'd been left as a small comfort. With mail and board meetings she was re-invited to and press releases and the world doing it's best to ignore the harm it had done her, now that her work had gotten results.
There was no time, she told herself, for the last words of a dead man. Ryland Grace had died at her hands long ago, and she had made peace with it, and she had not mourned because she knew that killing him would save thousands.
Still, she kept her laptop open at all times. She startled herself, sometimes, his eyes like T.J. Eckleburg's staring out at her as she paced the halls of her prison and her home at three in the morning.
She should watch the video, she knew, but it was a waste of time, because Grace had already said everything that would save the world, and once she watched it he would be dead—more than he was, anyway—because there would be no more waiting for him, no more hoping for a sign or a message or the heaven-sent sign of his voice; only the knowledge that he was gone.
It was on the fourth day—or maybe the fifth, those early hours of the night-morning were always strange. Eva would blame the project for her ruined sleep but it had always been like that. She'd been angry—at herself or the world or Grace, for daring to come back, or at everyone who hadn't been strong enough to be saved. On the project, she'd been known for her objectivity, for never letting emotion cloud her judgment but the truth was that she was angry all the time and still is, at the world for daring to end and at the people who put her in charge of saving it.
Back, and forth, feet cold against the hardwood floor. The laptop sat on her dining room table, unassuming, damning, inert. Back, and forth. The sky outside was dark, a thousand stars visible. Out here in the countryside, light pollution was minimal. Her eyes caught on the light and drifted, as they always did, to Tau Ceti. Back, and forth. What kind of fool would waste precious data—precious, Earth-saving data—on, what, a message in a bottle? What kind of coward, after all that, wouldn't even open it? Back, and—
She whirled. "I am not a coward," she hissed, chest heaving, facing nothing but the air and the blue light of the laptop. She wasn't afraid. He had been the one who'd cried, who'd begged, who ran; don't make this harder than it has to be—
She strode over to the laptop and pressed play.
He looked different. Tired. The light in the video was harsh. He held the camera closer than he had in the other logs. He was seated on the floor. His eyes were sharp and sad, like the day he ran into her lab and told her that he had to work on the Astrophage for his children.
She noted all of this with the clinical detachment of a mortician performing an autopsy on a childhood friend.
'You know, for a while I didn't even consider the fact that you could have died.' The audio quality is terrible, though she doesn't know if that's the fault of her laptop speakers or the decryption process. It barely sounds like him.
He chuckles, low and sad. 'I mean, all those deaths that you predicted—the odds aren't really in your favor, Eva, even with Antarctica.'
He looks down, picks at a loose thread on his shirt. He always was bad at making eye contact. 'When I first remembered you, I thought, well, she'd be strong enough to survive it all. Look at her. Then I thought… I don't know. That I'd know if something happened to you.'
He laughs again, face red with embarrassment. 'I know that's silly. And has no scientific basis… and that, with everything that happened, I mean…"
He rubs the back of his neck. When he looks back at her—the camera—his brows are pinched, mouth downturned. Even while they were working, she had never liked seeing him sad.
'You probably won't be surprised to know that I remembered what you did. Honestly, Eva, jeez—no, you know what, no. What the fuck, Eva. Holy violation of civil rights, Batman.'
He looks angry, which is—good. One of them should see things as they were, through more than a thousand justifications.
He looks back at the ground, rubs at the thick ropes of scar on his arm. She wants, with a startling sharpness, to know what happened to him. When he speaks again, his voice is a whisper—she has to turn her computer's volume to the maximum output in order to hear.
'I have nightmares about it, sometimes. They're worse with Rocky gone—' ah, yes, the little alien, the second-greatest discovery of the century, the friend to Ryland Grace that she could never be, '—but I mean, they weren't ever good.'
'I know that this—that you saved the world. I know that you're probably down on Earth just itching to say I told you so. I know you were only ever doing what you had to do, that you gave yourself up for the project, too. But gosh, Eva, you were the only thing I had that was comparable to a friend and you murdered me!'
She closes her eyes at that, but only briefly. They had—well. They'd been close. Others on the project talked. He'd told her about the rumors in a rush one morning, ears red, as if she didn't already know. It hadn't been like that, she was busy and he was uninterested, but they'd been... something. Two people trying not to die, a general and her right-hand man. He's wrong; they weren't friends, but she often thought about—thinks about—how they could have been.
When she opens her eyes, he's wiping his face with the backs of his hands. He cried often, about anything. She doesn't miss it, but she does sometimes find herself tucking those little plasitc-wrapped packs of tissues into the pockets of her cardigan before remembering there's been no one to need them for twenty-six years.
'I'm never going to forgive what you did to me. I mean, you gave me amnesia and PTSD and trust issues that I'm probably never going to fully recover from. But I—I mean, it hit me, while I was finishing the Beetles, that you might not have made it, and I—' He places a hand, palm flat, fingers spread, against the side of the camera, before jerking it back as if burned. 'Sorry,' he says, awkward laughter caught in his throat, 'sorry. Eridian thing. Or… you know.'
Her hands twitch in her lap.
'I've already found the Taumeoba leak. It's xenonite-resistant, and Rocky's entire ship is—well. I have to go save him. He's my best friend, I can't just let him die.' The words aren't accusatory, which makes them worse.
'I don't have enough food to make it to Erid. I'm going to die on the journey, and I'll never get to go home, but—but its worth it to save him.'
He wipes at his face again. When he looks back at the camera, his eyes are soft, and blue, and awful. It hits her, how many years sit between them now. She's looking at the man who saved the world—and all she can think is that he looks hopelessly young.
'Can you check in on my students for me? See which of them made it. Find out how they're doing. I know you don't do anything you don't want to, and that even if you wasted a probe on this it would never get here in time, but—we could pretend.'
He twines his fingers together, picks at his skin. 'I know this is silly. If you were here, you'd yell at me for being inefficient.' He chuckles. 'You and Rocky would probably like each other.'
He breathes. The sound crackles through the laptop's speakers, evidence of human life reduced to nothing but static.
'I'm never going to forgive you, Stratt.' A pause. 'Eva. And I know that you're probably never going to be handed a lick of power ever again. But I hope that you're alive. And I hope they let you at least help with the Taumeoba project. After all—' his face twists into something funny, not quite a smile, '—there's no one else I would trust to save Earth.'
He reaches up to the camera again. The screen freezes. It takes her a moment to realize that this isn't an issue with her laptop buffering—it's just over. His final words, only a few minutes long.
Stratt sits, in her dark house that is also a prison, in front of a laptop that holds a dead hero's last words to Earth, and lets herself cry.
Only for a hundred and twenty seconds. She has always detested her own outward displays of emotion, and there are more efficient things to do than cry. Ryland Grace has been dead for years. There was a memorial on the date the crew was predicted to run out of food. Stratt, knowing when she's not welcome, didn't go.
Wiping her face with the back of her sleeve, she stands and goes to the kitchen. She prepares two cups of coffee. One is for her, and the other is—also for her, later. There's no one else,
She sits back down, placing one mug next to her laptop, letting her hand brush the casing. If her fingers go gently over the place where Grace's thumb blocks part of the lens as he sits, frozen, forever in that moment of turning off the camera—well. There's no one left to judge her, save herself.
Judgment can come later. For now, she has names—hundreds of them, over the years—to look into. Her spy network will help, of course, but she missed having a project. And she's never been unwilling to repay a debt.
She doesn't know what she'll tell them—the truth, probably, because that's what he would want. It will ruin any respect she has managed to gain back but that's okay. She doesn't care much about any of that. She's old, now, and knows there's nothing the world could do to her that would be worse than anything she's done.
Punishment can come later. For now, Eva Stratt cracks her knuckles and begins the search for what remains of Ryland Grace's students.
For her friend, it's the least she can do.