Chapter Text
When Eva Stratt hears that the Hail Mary has been observed in the Earth’s orbit, her blood runs cold. She overhears it in a low whisper from two scientists behind her on a subway in Berlin. She lowers her face further behind her cap.
When the Beatles arrived two years prior, she had assumed that she would never hear another word from the Hail Mary or the man aboard. The shame that had come with sending those three to Tau-Ceti had never settled, simmering deep in her chest, close to her throat, but she found satisfaction in knowing that the world would eventually be saved.
She found comfort in knowing that Dr. Grace was not alone in space, very little comfort, but comfort nonetheless. Grace had discovered a non-human species in outer space, which he would have never done if she hadn’t sent him. The thought didn’t allow for pride.
Rocky, he had explained in the tapes that came back from the Beatles. Not the character, of course, though the resemblance was striking.
Eva was confronted with the decision Grace had had to make, as she watched his tapes. Go back to Earth, or save Rocky. Eva had already known of course what he had chosen by the time the Beatles arrived. Eva would have known either way, there was a reason she forced him up to space.
She allowed herself to think of what had happened in space after scientists had started cultivating the ‘taumoeba’, after her efforts and her crimes were truly proven not to have been in vain. She allowed herself to think of the man that was Ryland Grace.
Doctor Captain Ryland Grace, Saviour of the sun, and thus the earth.
Selfishly, she was both relieved and disappointed that he had chosen to save the friend he made in space, instead of return to his home.
Some nights, she would wake in terror at the thought of having to face him after all these years, her mouth full of cotton and her head pounding. The same man that she had sent lightyears away, not a grey hair on his head.
She had atoned for her crimes, she believed. She would atone for years to come, even after death, and the thought brought her a painful comfort, like a bruise she pressed on. The tattoo that marked her throat would make sure to remind her of her crimes, of her fate as an inevitable scapegoat.
Yet, she did not think she could ever fully atone in the eyes of Ryland Grace. And she would not blame him. She tells herself she does not need his forgiveness.
There were a few days, very difficult days, where she drank and she lost herself to whatever she wanted to wallow in, where she imagined burying every reminder she had of Ryland Grace. Destroy the little xenonite figure that she had kept all to herself, cut up the few photos she has of him, shatter whatever was left of him.
Obviously, she never acted on it.
She is able to pick up a few more snatches of their conversation as she coincidentally follows the scientists through the busy streets of Berlin. She makes sure to keep her distance and her hair tucked into her scarf.
For a moment, she has forgotten herself, until she realises she has followed the scientists well beyond her destination. Reluctantly, she turns.
She has found herself in Berlin four times in the last two weeks which, according to her, is three times too often. Alas, it can’t be helped if she wants to keep her free travel in and out of Germany.
Inside one of the numerous tall buildings, the receptionist lets her through, shooting her the same dirty glare as the last three times and Eva refrains from rolling her eyes.
You nuke Antarctica one time, and suddenly you’re a villain.
She’s sure the receptionist was a kid too, when Eva was sentenced to life. It’s the German mentality, she tells herself.
The elevator ride up to the top floor gives her the same chills every time. Over the speakers she hears a news station talk about the Hail Mary and about the saved sun. She brings her mitten-covered hands over her ears as the elevator keeps moving. Images of the Hail Mary flash in front of her eyes, and she can’t breathe properly. She bites her tongue.
When she steps out of the elevator, she rushes by the men standing in the stuffy hallways, their deep laughter echoing behind her. She is still almost completely covered in her dark winter clothes, and she tries to ignore the wet feeling on her back. She knows why she keeps herself covered, still she thinks she could just dye her hair and get botox. She files the thought away for later.
Only when she stands before the big wooden door that she has seen one too many times now, does she take off her mittens, her scarf, and her big, woollen coat. She keeps the cap on.
She glances sideways at a window, barely turning her head, and she watches her own reflection over the view of Berlin. She doesn’t think much has changed, she’s not even fully grey yet. She pouts at herself in the window, scrunching up her nose.
Ah well, what are you gonna do about it.
She hears the deep voice of the Bundeskanzler ring out from behind the doors and she returns her attention to the task at hand.
The Bundeskanzler has sought her out more frequently because of a crisis. A crisis he has trouble managing. For while they were all so quick to sentence Eva the life sentence, they still need her from time to time. She refuses to be petty about that.
The chancellor never asks her about her trip, or where she has spent the days between her visits for him, and it is something she can appreciate. German mentality has its perks after all, which she finds makes it easier to allow the chancellor her advice. Give it to having grown up in their neighbouring country.
And the chancellor enjoys her easy German, given how accommodating she is.
‘’At least she is not French.’’, the chancellor had muttered when he was not yet chancellor, but federal minister of Research, Technology, and Space. Back when she had first been appointed head of the Petrova Task Force.
Now, she sits before him in his uncomfortable leather chair. The Petrova Task Force is gone and she is a fugitive. He looks at her with withered eyes and she knows he judges her for keeping her cap on.
It is a very typical economical crisis, resulting in a major rise of poverty over the last four months. A referendum has been held and the general consensus is that Germany needs to leave the EU. The chancellor reluctantly explains that he is at a loss.
She has dealt with crises like these too often to keep count of. In the beginning, when she had just been out of prison and a reclaimed fugitive, she found herself almost struck by the normalcy of a ‘crisis’ like this. She had been tasked with saving the sun and now they need her for such small matters. It had taken a long time for her to return to the idea of a normal earth.
She does what she always does, what she did with the French prime minister two months ago, or the Italian cabinet six months ago. She advises to act in favour of the majority, in favour of the long-term solution. She supposes she has always had a knack for utilitarianism.
The chancellor will challenge her from time-to-time.
‘’I cannot allow my people to live in poverty for months, Stratt.’’
After those months in prison and her ‘release’, she realised she had spent too long being the leading component. She had had to relearn how to stroke an ego, how to make a leader feel like a leader while eventually making them dance to your tune. She was out of practice. Now, she knows better.
‘’Stay in the EU for now. Use structural funds to subsidize housing and food for the hardest-hit regions. While you do that, restructure your domestic energy grid. Then in two years you can revisit the referendum.’’, she carves her nails into her palms as she says it.
Ultimately, she knows she does not make a real difference in a room like this. Not anymore.
They do not ask her to come because they cannot think of the utilitarian solution themselves, she must allow them more credit than that, but because they do not want to be the ones to make the decision. She has always acted as the final scapegoat, and they do not plan on allowing her to be freed of the title any time soon.
Sometimes, very rarely, she gives a piece of advice they could not think of themselves. It is usually the one advice discarded first.
The chancellor grumbles more objections and she refutes them, it’s not even a real debate, which makes it easy for her to round their meeting to an end. They both know what path the chancellor will choose, and that he can allow himself to sleep at night when they do all descend into poverty. Eva has already killed five people. What’s a couple thousand more?
Humanity has bounced back a little since the taumoeba arrived, not fully obviously, but a little. She finds it laughable that even with half of humanity wiped out, people still found ways to hoard. Still found ways to exclude. Still found ways to let their neighbours go hungry while they secured their own.
Eva knew that would happen though, she knew exactly what would happen and she had been right about everything she predicted. She lets herself feel spiteful about that once every while, just before she mourns the lives lost.
She is pulling on her mittens again, covering herself in her big, black scarf when the chancellor speaks up.
‘’It is coming home, no? The Hail Mary. You must be delighted.’’, he doesn’t even look at her when he says it, and yet she feels the world tilt on its hinges. She grips the back of her chair tightly as she watches his shimmering, bald head.
He glances up from his papers. ‘’We all finally get to welcome back the man who saved our solar system.’’
Eva nudges her chin deeper into her scarf and her words come out muffled when she speaks. ‘’We owe a great deal to him.’’
She is glad that she is known for her Irish-goodbyes in moments like these, for she turns on her heel and leaves the chancellor alone again. She doesn’t run through the stuffy corridors, but she opts for the stairs instead of the elevator, taking two at a time.
She tries not to think about the Hail Mary, tries not to think about Grace, and instead focuses on where she should go next. She has stayed too long in Germany to be under the radar, and she already spent two entire months in Beijing in the spring. She supposes she hasn’t been to Scandinavia in a while.
She might even be able to get on a flight tonight if she makes a few calls.
The outside winter air hits her right on her nose and makes her eyes tear up. She nuzzles deeper into her scarf and tucks a few loose strands of hair under her cap. She looks up at the dark clouds beginning to form. An annoying voice comments inside her head, low and snide, that she could be looking at the Hail Mary right now. She furrows her brows.
She walks in no apparent direction, the feeling of the sky coming down on her making her chest feel tight and her stomach upside down. She finds herself inside a fast-food restaurant, loud yells of orders being thrown around the space, people laughing, shrieking sometimes. She makes a bee-line to the toilets.
She locks herself in a dirty stall, and does not sit. She does not even touch a wall. She supposes the lack of sleep and hunger is catching up to her now, the nausea almost unbearable. She needs to get out of Berlin.
It only takes her three phone calls in the dingy bathroom before she has booked herself a ticket on a ship from Denmark to Norway in no less than seventeen hours. She does not worry about where she will stay in Norway yet, she has never needed to worry about that. She hopes she will not have to this time.
By the time she has taken two deep breaths, which did nothing to resolve the nausea, her scarf has started to itch uncomfortably. She ignores her hunger and orders two coffees down by the counter, before making her way back through the cold air and to her small, temporary apartment.
She never unpacks her bags these days, not unless she knows she will be needed for a longer period of time. In Beijing, she was needed long enough to settle a little. In Norway, she hopes to settle for the entirety of the winter, if the circumstances allow it.
She opts to wait in Denmark for her ship, and takes the earliest train out of Berlin, the little belongings she has with her packed in a green suitcase.
She loses her scarf as she settles on the train, and she sees a couple of businessmen, older than she is, glance at her from the corners of their eyes. She pointedly turns her head away from them.
She tries to read a book that one of the scientists under her had written about the course of the Petrova Task Force and the months spent on the aircraft carrier that had housed all of them in the middle of the ocean. It’s auto-biographical. It even mentions her a few times. It mentions Grace too.
She debates whether she should call Carl. The last she heard of him, he had settled somewhere in France. She remembers them getting along well, Grace and Carl. She files it away for later.
She ends up falling into a restless sleep eventually, and she wakes just before Hamburg, by a group of teenagers yelling in excited German. She closes her eyes again.
The trip should take her somewhere around an entire day in total, given wait times. She is able to reach Lilleheden St. in less than twelve hours, which is a god-forsaken miracle to be fair, but by which she has to spend the remaining five hours in the terminal, waiting for her boat.
The months spent on aircraft carrier had done her fear of boats well, in the sense that she is able to fare freely now. She hasn’t gotten seasick in years, either. The thought somehow circles back to Grace again, and his heavy, constant vomiting on the boat. Everything seems to remind her of Dr. Grace today.
It’s everywhere she looks, every sound she hears. No one seems to get enough of the Hail Mary and the man they hope it’s carrying. She glances at the little tv-screen in the corner of the terminal. They have interviewed some of the kids he used to teach. She pretends not to understand the Danish-dubbed news fragment.
She knows exactly why they interview these now adults, who probably barely remember what he was like. She knows all too well that Ryland Grace never married, didn’t have kids, did not even have many friends. She is both cruel and wistful when she thinks that in the end, she might have been closest to him after those years spend together. Before she betrayed him, that is. Murdered him, in his own words.
She wonders how many others from the Petrova Task Force are watching the news segment, and how many others are thinking they knew him better than those being interviewed. She doesn’t think there’s many.
Even though she does not truly care enough to be bothered, she has spent a lot of time in the public eye today and the news of the Hail Mary is certainly not helping her stay low, so she covers her tattoo with a band-aid, bought in a way too expensive store.
She buys a pair of standard reading-glasses as well. She has been lucky not to have really needed them so far, even at her age, but they don’t hurt and she knows it makes her life a little easier. She must take every small win she can get.
As she watches herself in the terminal bathroom mirror, she thinks about cutting her hair again. She has kept it long these years, but she would not mind a haircut. Maybe she should go blonde. She pulls an eyebrow up at the thought. She shrugs as she returns the cap to her head and makes her way outside again.
Once outside, fully outside, she lights a cigarette. She doesn’t remember when she started again. She knows she used to smoke in college and that she picked it up again during the Petrova Task Force period, and she has a vague memory that she tried to quit just before the Beatles arrived. Right now, she doesn’t care.
Right now, she doesn’t care about anything at all.
It takes two more weeks for the Hail Mary to launch itself back on earth. She watches the landing from her small apartment in Bergen, red-nosed and covered in four woollen blankets.
News came early, right about four in the morning, that the Hail Mary would make its return to earth in the next twenty-four hours. She, like the rest of the earth, sat in front of the television, waiting for it to pierce the atmosphere.
A small part of her briefly panicked when she heard the news. She remembers that the more optimistic engineers had insisted on a return capsule, even if she had been reluctant. The Hail Mary was never meant for return, and they were already on such a tight schedule. She had obliged nonetheless. Now, she can’t even remember if they installed a proper heat shield on the thing.
The thought crosses her mind. The shuttle burning to a crisp anyway, and Ryland Grace dead. Once more. She prays fate isn’t that cruel. Then again, she wouldn’t have had to worry if she had taken the proper time to account for a heat shield back then.
She watches with bated breath as the marine ships sail to the shuttle. As men in hazmat suits carefully help Dr. Grace out. His eyes are open, and his chest rises. He blinks so fast behind his worn-down glasses that she has trouble figuring out whether he is seizing or not.
She is finally able to exhale when he grins widely, full teeth and squeezed eyes.
The Norwegian reporters break out in cheers and she shares their sentiment quietly. They call it a miracle. A Hail Mary. It’s cheesy enough to make her turn off the tv and wallow in whatever suppressed emotion she has trouble expressing.
She watches the xenonite figure sparkle under the lamp on her nightstand and wonders if she’ll ever get the chance to give it back.