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The ship that fell from the sky wasn't from Earth.
Stratt watched the going-ons of it all, of the various government officials running out to the strange, blood soaked ship. They had already equipped a fence to field anyone from the ship, since the radiation levels were off the charts. The perpetual snow had gone down since the arrival of the beatles, but there was enough of a snow-covering that the bloodied ship stood out like a wound on the landscape.
The blood was disconcerting as well. Stratt privately thought that if she cared less about any possible sign from the Hail Mary, she would've simply called the ship cursed and let someone else handle it. That would be the sensible thing to do with a blood soaked, alien ship that was completely radioactive. And despite the radiation, had signs of life forms moving around inside.
Stratt walked forward to the edge of the fence. "Have you found the entry point yet?"
A harried scientist sighed and ruffled his hair, in a way that previously made Stratt think about someone else. She ignored this. He turned to look at the ship down there and watched the other workers, all suited up against the radiation, working on the ship. "Most of the doors are welded shut. The windows, too. We tried getting through the metal with a blowtorch, but someone on the other end reinforced the wall and hit a radiation camera several times."
"Morse code?" Stratt took a sip of her third coffee of the day. She could see where the ship had crashed through several pine trees, splintering the thousand year trunks. "Have you tried tapping on the surface with it, I mean?"
"Tried. No response. The make isn't familiar, but the blood is..." He trailed off. "Well, it's human. So. We're all having a good time here."
"Human?"
"We could try a DNA analysis of the blood." the scientist suggested, which was actually a decent suggestion. Stratt supposed she would have to learn the scientist's name at one point.
"It's excessive amounts." Stratt felt her coffee cooling in her hand. The cardboard cup wasn't good enough against the cold. "But if you can find if it's more than one person, demographics...that could be useful."
A worker shouted out loud and jumped back. The ship rattled in the distance.
Stratt leaned forward, up against the fence. She set her coffee down on a pillar, and watched with narrowed eyes as the ship shook.
A panel popped off from the ship. A woman stumbled out. She was, like the ship, coated in blood. One of her eyes was scared, the skin twisted angrily around her eye. She had a gun unlike any that Stratt was familar with in her hand.
The workers shouted and ran back. Stratt didn't step away from the fence, instead letting her eyes track the workers fleeing and the woman standing in the snow.
She was staring at the trees as if she hadn't seen one before.
And then the woman wasn't standing anymore, as she crumpled into the snow.
Stratt took another sip of her coffee. "Go get a medical team."
They made a guess at the woman's name based on a scrap of her uniform. Ava. As in, no last name; the letters were hand embroidered in her sleeve. Stranger than the name was the fact that she didn't have an ounce of radiation poisoning.
Stratt found herself in the medical bay, watching as Ava and the other humans from the ship slept. This was an intriguing distraction from the usual dredge of her job looking through all of Grace's disjointed video logs for information on the Erirdians.
"It's mostly all malnutrition and exhaustion." The doctor said. "We've got them all on IV drips and fluid restrictions for now. And we've kept them sedated for now."
"Good." Stratt said, her fingers itching for yet another coffee. "Really no radiation effects?"
The doctor shook their head. "No. The ship, the guns....those are all dosed with more radiation than Marie Curie's notebooks." They paused. "The humans are fine. Which is very weird."
"Astrophage?"
The doctor sighed and placed their pen back in their coat pocket. "We can look for traces of that, but that's outside of my expertise. I can say that they look human, seem human, and are just exhausted. We'll probably get more information if we talk to them"
Stratt nodded at Ava. "Start with her.."
The doctor hesitated, but knew better than to argue with Stratt.
Stratt walked into the infirmary, which earned her a stare from a few of the nurses, and a quick glance away when they saw her face.
Ava stirred slowly as the doctor adjusted the sedative levels. Stratt noted how Ava's hand first went to her side where the gun was, even before she was fully awake. Ava's eyes fluttered for a moment, the one with the scaring twisting in discomfort, before she went fully still with her eyes open.
Ava looked directly at Stratt, ignoring the doctors around her. "You're the one in charge."
"Correct." Stratt replied. "So are you, presumably."
The medical staff all looked nervously around, and a few of them made themselves scarece. Stratt took the chance to grab a rolling chair that the previous occupant had abandoned, and sat down. "Care to explain how you got to Earth?"
Ava's face shifted for a moment, somewhere in between confusion and relief. "Earth?" Stratt saw a quick moment where Ava's eyes darted to the window, illuminated with evening sunlight.
"You're human and speak English." Stratt clarified, both for Ava and to try and sort things out in her own mind. "Though it seems you haven't been here in quite some time."
Ava was quiet, her expression furrowed in confusion. "Earth isn't supposed to be around anymore." She stretched out her palm, looking at the back of her hand stuck with an IV. "This isn't another of that creatures--no. This can't be." Ava took a break and refocused her gaze on Stratt. "I was born on Mars."
Stratt raised an eyebrow, then glanced at the others. "Are we likely to get a similar story from the others here?"
"I think--" Ava looked around the room again, examining each object quickly before looking back at Stratt. "Have the stars started going out?"
"Ah." Stratt started to piece together a few ideas about what was going on. "The sun was dimming for a while. We've got a handle on it now, though. Are you talking about the Petrova line."
Ava's face once again twisted into something terrible, and she dropped her head in her hands. "Oh. It did work,"
They determined after eighteen more hours of discussion, timelines drawn on whiteboards, and a lot of math that would've been interesting to a certain type of person until they came to a conclusion. The sun had set and started to rise in the time it took to figure everything out.
The crew of the Consolidation of Iron ship was from five hundred years in the future. Specifically, a future that somehow (hopefully) the current timeline would avoid. The COI passengers knew about the Astrophage, but were absolutely terrified of it and called it the Quiet Rapture. Stratt thought this was a much more interesting name, but that was the perils of letting scientists rather than soldiers name things.
The seven surviving human passengers thought they were the only humans left in the galaxy.
At least, until they crash-landed on a past Earth.
Ava was standing now, examining the whiteboard. "You're certain that you've solved this...Astrophage problem?"
"Fairly." Stratt replied. "This also explains why you and the rest of your crew didn't die from the radiation poisoning. Dr. Grace sent back information on Astrophage blocking radiation effects, to a point. You all still got pretty damn lucky."
Ava nodded, but didn't look pleased about it. "Lucky. You wouldn't say that if you knew what we did to the others."
Stratt took a step back from the whiteboard, examining the full picture, which included several screaming stick figures a scientist had drawn. "Ah, you earned it, then?"
Ava gave her a disgusted look. "I sent a man to the bottom of the ocean in a submarine that was welded shut."
Stratt looked at one of the drawings, which indeed had a submarine drawing of a sad-looking stick figure. "Did it work?"
"...Yes."
Stratt walked over to the coat rack and took a random jacket from a hook. "Here. We're going on a walk outside." She tossed the coat to Ava, who caught it with one hand and stared at it for a minute, before putting it on.
They walked out into the slowly melting snow, as the morning sun emerged over the trees. Right outside the military base, a small purple flower bloomed underneath a snowmelt.
Stratt bent down, careful of her aging knees, and pushed aside some of the snow. Ava watched all the while, her hands stiff by her side. She had put on the coat, but wore it like she was scared of getting the sides dirty by putting her hands down.
"This is a winter crocus." Stratt gently brushed off more of the snow. "They bloom right when the weather starts to get warm after snowfall. We've started seeing a lot of them since figuring out the Astrophage problem."
Ava eyed the flower suspiciously. "This doesn't seem real." She squinted up at the snow, her eyes not used to the brightness of the sun. "There's supposed to be karma, you know? For everything I've done."
Stratt stood up again, stepping back from the cluster of the flowers. "I'm going to let you in on something that's currently an ongoing investigation for ethical misconduct on my part." Stratt grimaced. "I'd appreciate if you keep it under wraps for now."
"The great savior of Earth, committing misconduct?" Ava stuck her hands in her pockets. "Why am I not surprised."
"They shouldn't call me that."
Ava shrugged, and looked expectantly at Stratt to continue.
Stratt walked up to the fence overlooking the crash. Blood stained the snow, still. "Ryland Grace didn't want to go either. He fought the whole way to the ship."
Ava looked in the distance, at the trees that had snapped from the spaceship. "And it worked?"
"That's the terrible thing." Stratt leaned against the fence. "I was right. I knew that it was the only way to save the Earth."
"How do you live with that now?" Ava tucked the jacket around her shoulders, then realizing that it had a zipper, zipped it up against the cold.
"Earth still needs me." Stratt scuffed some of the snow away with her boot so she could stand on more solid ground. "And it's easier if you stop thinking gof yourself as a good person in the first place."
"But you saved Earth." Ava kept staring at the trees, unblinking, as if she was scared they would disappear if she lost sight of them. "For generations, for centuries. That was because of you--"
"Because of Ryland Grace." Stratt corrected. "I was the one who scapegoated him. Look, Ava, you can never do no wrong. You just have to keep doing right. And you did. You saved seven people, when everything in that future timeline was fighting against you for it."
Ava finally looked away from the trees to look at Stratt. "Six people."
"Seven. You count too." Stratt smiled. "And the scientists have new fun research problems about those blood oceans. They love new research problems."
Ava rested her elbows on the fence and kept her eyes on Stratt, her good eye softening for the first time Stratt had seen. "What do we do now?"
Stratt laughed, a low gravely laugh from years of the stress of working on the Hail Mary mission. "I know a great bar closer to the city. Bit of a drive from here, but they've got karaoke too."
"Karaoke?"
"Oh, you'll like it." Stratt patted Ava's hand, which turned into Ava grabbing Stratt's hand instead. "You get drunk and then sing."
Ava seemed just as startled as Stratt did. "Sorry. It's--" She looked up at Stratt, a slight blush showing even through the scaring. "Karaoke sounds fun. Just the two of us?"
"Eh, the rest of the team here doesn't care for it, no matter my asking." Stratt gave Ava a smile as confirmation.
Ava hesitated only a moment more before kissing Stratt, which, despite Stratt's planning and strategy to get to this point, still surprised her. It was sweeter, more gentle than anything that could lead up to it.
The sunrise beamed down on the two of them. Scientists would document the day as warmer on record than the past five years, another landmark of the Hail Mary mission.
Epilogue
Grace looked up at Simon, who had woken up and was looking grumpy as usual. "So, with Ava, do you ever think she had a point? Like, that she was right about things, and you just have to live the fact that the person who sacrificed you was doing it for everyone else?"
"No." Simon said shortly as he grabbed a bio-engineered breakfast and started to scarf it down. "She was a bitch."
Grace grimaced at the curse and looked at Rocky, who was cheerfully rolling around in the geosphere. "Huh. I wonder what she's doing now?"
"Well, I hope the other side of the wormhole she fell through was extremely unpleasant."
"I wonder the same about Stratt." Grace looked at the beetle, which had arrived from Earth and that he was almost scared to open. Part of him was expecting the worst about Stratt, and also secretly hoped for and against this option. Simon sighed and stomped over to open it. He pressed a button, and it hissed open.
Inside was plenty of flash drives, a few snacks, all of which Grace expected. However, at the bottom, tucked away against a dried winter crocus, was a polaroid picture of Stratt and Ave on a beachside together.
Simon threw his hands up in the air and stalked away to a different part of the enclosure, while Grace picked it up to look at it. "Well, alright then."