Chapter Text
May 4, 2021, 2:21:47 AM AQTT - Six Hours Before Launch
Out of all the former Soviet compounds I’ve had the chance to break into, this one was relatively easy. It was an old airbase, so getting there unseen was the main issue. Wide open spaces always made my life difficult. But, as with any military structure, there’s always a need for water—and I could always count on the Soviets to make really good pipes.
I had never seen a project set up like this one. Then again, there had never been a project like this one. NASA and ESA had more official names for it, but everyone knew it as Project Hail Mary. The project team had taken charge of this old Kazakhstani airbase, renovating its three hangars to contain lab equipment that I had no hope of understanding. The Hail Mary herself stood in the center of the compound, a dark silhouette against the stars. I found myself surprised at how small I felt in her shadow.
Of the three hangars, only two remained standing. Ryland had called me in a panic after the explosion, and now I understood why. In the half moon’s light, I saw the dark crater it left behind—the tattered remains of the hangar, the broken pieces of runway asphalt, and the ashen halo encircling it.
On the opposite side of the airstrip and the Hail Mary were rows of bunkhouses: some doubles, some singles. Simple plywood boxes. A slight upgrade from camping. It didn’t take long for me to locate the one I was looking for, and it didn’t take long for me to dispose of the two guards outside either. They were definitely rookies, probably hired last minute. For an intergovernmental project, security was pretty lax at this place. Then again, there weren’t many people crazy enough to bust into a Soviet airbase in Kazakhstan in the middle of the night. I just so happened to be one of those people.
Now, as I stood in the shadow beside the closet, I had nothing but time to kill. I started replaying the footage in my head again, just like I had for the past two days. Ryland running. Ryland screaming. His stupid yellow raincoat. The two guards throwing him to the ground. The injections. The gurney. The woman watching him—silent, expressionless.
The woman slept across from me now, right in my crosshairs. Eva Anneliese Stratt, age forty-four, born to Dutch and German parents in East Germany. Studied history and astronomy at Oxford. Served as head of ESA’s propulsion mechanics department, then as its director, and now the appointed leader of Project Hail Mary.
She was smaller than I thought she’d be. I could only make out her general shape as she slept, but I figured she only stood at about five-foot-six. Colt talked her up to be this imposing dictator of a woman; he said Ryland was always at her beck and call like some kind of lapdog. All of Project Hail Mary, regardless of nationality or allegiance, always listened to Stratt before anyone else. Ryland had been effectively kidnapped from his job as part of her recruitment process because Stratt wasn’t the kind of woman to mess around. What she said went. When she gave the word, things started happening.
The quilt rustled, and she breathed deeply. She was awake—that didn’t take long.
Stratt sat up in bed, and for the first time, I was able to get a good look at her. In the soft moonlight from her window, she looked far too pale. She had strawberry blonde hair, and it fell in gentle waves below her shoulders. Her eyes were still sleepy, but they were sad in a way I couldn’t place. She wore a blue nightgown with little white flowers.
“Hello, Courtland,” she murmured—her accent was more German than Dutch. “I had a feeling you might visit.”
I bristled at the sound of my real name. I didn’t like hearing it in her accent, and I especially didn’t like hearing it from her mouth. Ryland and Colt were the only ones who got to use it. I kept her in my sights and didn’t move.
Stratt rubbed her face and tucked her hair behind her ears. She sighed. “You can put the gun down. You and I both know that if you really wanted me dead, I would be dead already.”
She had a point. I hadn’t pulled the trigger because she was sleeping. Vulnerable, defenseless. If I had to take a life, I would take it with dignity, and that meant giving her a chance to face it head on—while awake. I did really want her dead, but I wanted us on even ground before that. I didn’t move the gun.
Stratt stood, and I let her. She quietly smoothed the covers and remade her bed. “How do you take your tea?”
In all my years in the Sierra program, no target had ever bothered to ask me that, especially not while I was aiming at their forehead. Ryland and Colt were right about Stratt—she was different.
“Grace likes peppermint tea,” she said, moving toward her desk. An electric kettle sat waiting for her, and she fired it up. “He always drinks peppermint tea when he works. Says it helps him think.”
I watched her brew two mugs of peppermint tea through my scope. Her hands and knees didn’t shake, and her breath never faltered. It was like I wasn’t even there.
It suddenly made much more sense to me that this was the woman sending my little brother to die.
While waiting for the tea to steep, Stratt pulled her bathrobe from the closet. She calmly put it on and stared at me the whole time. I returned the favor.
“You want to know why.” Her sad eyes were blue, like Ryland’s and Colt’s. “You want to know why I’m sending him.”
What a lucky guess. However, what I really wanted to know was how she slept so soundly. How could she sleep at all after putting my brother in a coma and preparing to send him on a suicide mission? How could she sleep after killing him? Death didn’t let you sleep. Personally, I hadn’t had anything better than a nap in at least ten years, but I took what I could get.
She added a spoonful of honey to each mug. “You can believe me or not, but I don’t want to send him. He is a coward—I told him as much. There are thousands of braver people I could send, but I don’t need brave people. I need smart people. I need a scientist, and Grace is the best scientist I have.”
“I saw the footage,” I rumbled, tightening my grip. “You drugged him.”
“He threatened to sabotage the mission. The Hail Mary cannot afford a mutiny. We gave him just enough to make him forget he ever said that.”
Ryland leading a mutiny? Please. I’d just as soon hop on the Hail Mary myself than see Ryland start a mutiny. He was too chicken for that. Colt and I got all the “brave” genes in the family, meaning that we had enough self-preservation instincts to operate in our respective professions. But Ryland had always been the softer one. Colt and I jumped off of buildings onto moving vehicles, and Ryland taught middle schoolers. We were different. Ryland may have been a black sheep, but he wasn’t a conspirator—at least, not for Project Hail Mary. He would never do that.
“Tea?” Stratt held a mug out to me, undaunted by the barrel of my gun.
I kept still, my finger near the trigger and my eyes locked on her.
She blinked deliberately, her expression as unreadable as mine. Stratt took a sip of her own tea, then she took one out of my mug. Not poison.
“Courtland, if you are going to kill me, I would prefer you to do it quickly and quietly.” She turned to sit on her bed, holding both steaming mugs of peppermint tea. “If you are not going to kill me, then let us speak like the adults we are. Come. Sit.”
I gritted my teeth at the sound of my name, but I suppressed the urge to say anything. Unfortunately, the woman had a point. I had come here to kill her—against Fitz’s best wishes—but I wanted to know her reasons first. If she was dead, I got no reasons.
I lowered my weapon and slung it over my back. I could kill her at any time whether I was armed or not, so it didn’t really matter. I would hear her out and then put an end to it.
“Thank you. I am far past the point of playing games.”
I sat beside her at the foot of the bed, and she handed me my mug of tea. Ryland had made me try peppermint tea when he was in undergrad, and it wasn’t half bad. He even got Colt to like it, which was an accomplishment—if he weren’t dating that director, he’d be married to coffee.
Stratt cupped her tea with both hands. “He’s our only chance at this,” she said softly. “If I didn’t have to send him, I wouldn’t.”
The image was so clear I could taste it: Ryland was clutching at the grass as if it could save him from the needle—from Stratt.
“Then don’t send him,” I told her. I could feel my blood boiling just thinking about Ryland’s raw, animal scream when they threw him to the ground.
“I have to.” She shook her head. “Courtland, we—“
I pulled out my knife and pressed it against her arm. A reflex. She was not going to use my name again.
She didn’t flinch—she just looked up at me with those sad eyes. “I have to call you something.”
“Six.”
“Six? The number six?”
I pressed the knife a bit harder for emphasis.
“Understood. You may remove your knife.”
I would remove my knife whenever I damn well pleased, but I sheathed it anyway. She had gotten the message.
Stratt, unbothered, took a meditative sip of her tea and began again. “Six, we have thirty years at best. That’s if we share food and pool resources—which we won’t. Realistically, we have twenty-eight. It will get colder. We will lose our plants. We will lose our animals. At the end of it all, we will lose millions—billions of people. It is not a question of if. It is when.”
Thirty years. I’d be in my seventies. That is, if I made it that far—which was highly unlikely. I was just happy I’d made it to forty. Colt could be a father if he played his cards right. Claire would have graduated college. Oxford, probably. Like Stratt. But that was only if they had enough to eat.
“Grace has been my first choice only in research,” she pivoted, taking another sip of tea. “He has no experience in zero gravity and no interest in space travel. But he is a good man and a good scientist. He is our best chance.”
“So you chased him down, drugged him, and are putting him on a spaceship against his will?” Now I took a sip of tea. Good. Minty.
Stratt stared into her mug, and her hair fell in front of her face. In her younger days, she may have been beautiful, but it was hard to see that now behind the persistent melancholy in her eyes and the sternness in her voice.
“I don’t want him to go,” she murmured, “but it’s not about what I want or what he wants. I cannot risk billions of lives on the wishes of one individual. We do not have that luxury.”
Ryland’s screams still echoed in my ears. I pictured his crooked glasses, his messy hair, his playful smile. I took another swallow of tea to push back the ache swirling in my gut.
“You couldn’t find someone else?” I suggested. “He’s not the only scientist at your disposal. You can find another.”
“Not another like him.” She looked up at me again. She had too many lines on her face to be just forty-four. Too little light in her eyes.
“Why not?” I challenged.
“Six, I am currently being sued by multiple corporations for copyright violations. I am giving the Hail Mary crew every possible resource I can, and that means stepping on toes. I need reliability, and I do not have the time or energy to waste with lawyers and legalities. Surely you understand that.”
I did understand, and probably more than she knew, but why was she telling me about copyright lawsuits right now? A diversion?
She set her mug of tea on the nightstand and turned to completely face me. “If I have one shot at this, I am making it the best shot I can.” Her voice was low but firm—deadly. Like Fitz’s. “He is my best shot. He is our best shot. Grace was the first person I recruited to test astrophage, and he has been our expert. He was teaching DuBois and Shapiro everything he knew. He knows astrophage, and he knows this mission. He’s coma resistant, he gets along well with Yao and Ilyukhina, and he can always think outside the box. He is our science officer.”
Stratt had been testing him this whole time. She’d been monitoring how effective his research was, how quickly he could think, how well he played with others.
She was going to send him all along, wasn’t she?
That thought hit me pretty hard. Sierra had given me a high pain tolerance, but not for that. Not for Ryland. He’d spent months working for her, pouring himself into research on an alien organism, preparing astronauts to save us all. He’d given up his classroom, his students, his weekly dinners with Marissa, his FaceTime calls with Colt, and his monthly call with me. And for what? To die?
“You wanted to send him the whole time.” My throat felt tight.
Stratt took a breath before answering me. “I prepared him for the possibility, yes. I do my best to prepare for all possibilities.”
“Did you prepare for DuBois and Shapiro?”
For the first time since I’d arrived in her cabin, she was quiet. I watched her sit there for a moment. Still. Thinking.
“No,” she finally whispered. “No one did.”
It occurred to me that Stratt was being perfectly honest. Not that she had been lying to me—which I knew she wasn’t—but at this moment, she had let her guard completely down. I was seeing Stratt as she truly was: a woman wise beyond her years, forced to make hard choices and forced to grieve them for the rest of her life. A child made to grow up before she was ready.
She wiped her face, but I could still see a lingering tear when she looked back at me. “You of all people should know that sometimes we do things simply because we must. That is why Grace is going. I am sending him because I must—because without a scientist, we have no mission, and with no mission, we die.
“Life is always about give and take, Six.” Her stoicism was returning. “If I want to give it to the eight billion souls of planet Earth, I must take it from three others. Please know that it is not something I take lightly.”
I searched her face. Her expression was robotically neutral, but her blue eyes were an ocean—deep, dark, tempestuous. I knew that look.
The worst thing about Stratt wasn’t her tragic beauty or her commandeering presence. It wasn’t even her choice in sending Ryland. It was the fact that she was right. About everything. Everything she had said was absolutely correct. And I hated that about her.
Something stirred in my chest. It was a strange feeling: sickeningly warm and painful all at once. Knowing there was a bleeding wound, but being unable to stop it. I understand. I know. I get it.
I don’t know what made me do it, but I held my arm out to her and rolled up my sleeve. I stared down at the tattoo on my forearm, and she did too.
Σίσυφος. Sisyphus.
I understood all too well the give and take of life. That was the job Sierra had given me. I had taken life from my father and given it to my brothers. I had taken it from more people than I could keep track of now, but I had given it to those who needed it. I would push the boulder of choice up a hill for the rest of my life. It had already robbed me of sleep. Soon it would rob me of my appetite, and then it would kill me. Eventually.
Sisyphus and I had someone else climbing the hill with us now.
Stratt’s gaze lingered on my tattoo, but I rolled my sleeve back down to hide the Greek lettering.
“Sometimes we have no choice,” I admitted, more to myself than to her. I added my mug of tea to the nightstand. “Sometimes we do things just because we have to.”
Stratt looked me up and down—she had that microscopic look, studying me like a Petri dish. Ryland wore that look quite often. I knew she was assessing me. I had taken a risk with the tattoo, and I was about to see the results of my experiment.
Her expression shifted entirely. The raging seas in her eyes stilled. The lines in her face were a little more pronounced, and her shoulders fell with the heaviness she’d been trying so hard to hide from me. She didn’t have to hide it; I already knew it was there. The heaviness came with the territory, and I had long since grown accustomed to it.
I wasn’t seeing Stratt anymore—stoic, stern, brute-force-until-we-make-it Stratt. This was Eva. This was the little girl I’d caught a glimpse of earlier, the wide-eyed dreamer who loved to stargaze and imagine things. She had tried to outrun it in her bright yellow raincoat, but life had chased her. Tackled her. Drugged her. Hauled her away. And unlike Ryland, she had gone quietly. Because that was her job.
For a moment, I was fifteen again with a hot pistol in my hands and blood spattered on my face. Seven-year-old Ryland clutched his broken arm, and Colt lay unconscious—concussed—where our father had thrown him like a ragdoll. I could smell the stench of leftover beer. I could hear the broken glass crunching under my shoes. I could feel Ryland’s tears soaking through my shirt as I carried him and Colt to the front porch away from it all. I knew there would be no saving me, but I had saved them from him that night—and maybe that counted for something.
It was then that I realized there were tears rolling down her cheeks. Then I felt one rolling down mine.
I flicked it away, but the damage was already done. How long had it been since I’d let that happen?
“Thank you for letting me speak.” Stratt propped her elbows on her knees and stared at the floor. “You have a job to do, so go ahead and do it. I will not take it personally.”
My breath rattled on the way in. There was a new tremor in my hand, and not because the nerves in my fingers were already shot. Why was there so much emotion here? This was not how Sierra operated. We lived in the gray—we did not have emotions, and we did not have personal lives, family ties, outside contacts, or even medical records. We were nameless, faceless.
But Stratt had found the one thing that threw my Sierra training out the window, and now my hands and feet were unable to move. She had gotten Ryland. Her sacrificial lamb. And he was being sent to die for the rest of us. For her. For me.
She inhaled deeply and sat up. “I would prefer to meet death on my feet, in my boots, but I suppose my bathrobe will do. But if I might ask one last favor of you, I beg you to let him go.”
I swallowed. Hard.
“You may do whatever you wish with me, as I’m sure you will, Six. My death is of no consequence to the mission.” Stratt turned to face me again, her jaw tightened and resolute. “But you must let Ryland go. Please. The Hail Mary must launch as scheduled. She must arrive at Tau Ceti, figure out the Petrova problem, and send back her findings. There is no alternative. You must let him go.”
I hated her. I really did. I hated those sad eyes, that quippy German accent, the broken dreams lying shattered at her feet. I hated what the world had done to her. I hated that she wanted to send my brother light years away from me—to die. And I hated that she was still right.
I clenched my fists. The last time I had let Ryland go was in the courtroom. I hadn’t been able to hug him or Colt because of the handcuffs, but I held their hands. I held their hands until it hurt. It was all I could do. The bailiff had to pry their hands out of mine.
“It has to be him?” I asked, even though I knew what her answer would be. I just needed to make sure.
She gave me a determined nod. “It has to be him.”
I closed my eyes and let out a breath, trying to bite back the bile in my throat and keep up my poker face. I was sick to my stomach. My chest was on fire. I could hardly take another breath.
Ryland was not an astronaut. He was a science teacher, and he was my littlest brother by four minutes. He never wore his glasses like he was supposed to. He loved to draw, he loved to sew, and he loved analyzing movies with Colt. He ate his popcorn with sour Skittles and put too much sugar in his coffee. He collected science pun t-shirts and silly socks. He wouldn’t even kill a spider in his apartment.
I was supposed to go first—not him. Not Ryland. Anyone but Ryland.
“How did you want to do this?” Stratt asked, rising to her feet and peering down at me. “Your rifle is quickest, but your knife is quietest.”
I had eliminated many targets in my life, but none had ever seemed this eager—and none of them had ever asked which method I preferred. Stratt didn’t really care about that.
I swallowed back the grief before it took hold of me. “I’m not using either, Stratt.”
I followed the sound of her bare feet walking to her window, where she stopped and let out a long, slow breath. “Lucky me,” she mumbled.
When I found the willpower to look up, Stratt was staring out the window at the night sky. She was just a silhouette—petite, delicate—but she was almost pretty. Her strawberry blonde hair was nearly glowing in the moonlight. Her bathrobe was a soft shade of blue; it matched her nightgown with its little white flowers.
She looked over her shoulder at me, the starlight glittering in her eyes. “Why?”
Why? Even I wasn’t sure. This was foreign territory for me—this was the first time I’d been this deep into a job and decided not to finish it. It was just a gut feeling, I suppose. She needed to stay. And with a sickening lurch, I had the same gut feeling that Ryland needed to stay, too.
“Because if I have to watch him go, so do you,” I said, getting to my feet. I couldn’t sit and wallow anymore. Mission complete—time for exfil.
“You are letting us both go?”
Hearing that lit a fire in me: hot, angry, unrestrained. It took all my effort to keep it from setting her cabin ablaze. I was back in the courtroom again, and the twins’ hands were being ripped out of mine. Screaming. Crying. Doors closing—no, doors slamming. They had slammed, and they had locked.
“Don’t make me regret that decision.” I stared daggers at her, channeling that fire into a rage that I hoped would keep her awake at night. You are sending my little brother to die. You will stay alive, and you will live with that.
I started towards the door. There was nothing here for me besides hatred, and I had plenty of that to go around. Stratt would receive justice—just not from me. She had to push her boulder, just like I had to push mine.
Behind me, a soft digital beeping stopped me in my tracks—a wristwatch alarm. Why was Stratt’s alarm going off at three in the morning? Surely this is not when she was planning on waking up for the day.
Stratt stopped the alarm and instantly made for her closet. “That makes sixty. Twelve-hour checkup number five.”
Immediately I knew it was Ryland. It had been sixty hours since he’d been drugged and put in his coma. They were monitoring him every twelve hours.
“Six. Do you mind?”
I turned to observe the tea mugs on her nightstand while she changed behind me. She was braver than I gave her credit for, changing clothes with an armed assassin in the room. But then again, all my cards were already on the table.
A zipper. One heavy footfall, two heavy footfalls—she’d put on her boots. Her footsteps echoed throughout the cabin as she walked toward the door.
Stratt had tied her hair back into a loose ponytail. She now wore solid black like me—black pants, black boots, black shirt. She was missing a kevlar vest, but she had reclaimed her signature “I told you so” look.
“Well? Are you coming?”