Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Eva shook her head slightly, trying to shake away the dull ache that permeated her skull—not even wanting to try to open her eyes yet. The movement, small as it was, brought a wave of dizziness and nausea over her and she gasped slightly. She bit her tongue and—with mechanical precision, even as her eyes remained shut—she tried to assess where she was.

She was lying on her side on something hard and cold—not really a surprise; even with their best efforts, most of the world was what Grace often referred to as “nippy”. Her hands were behind her back, and she could feel a rough rope tied tightly—cruelly so—around her wrists. She couldn’t feel her fingers, but wasn’t sure if it was from the chill of the room she was in or the tightness of the rope. An experimental kick proved her ankles were tied similarly tightly. She was no longer wearing her warm knit sweater—the comfortable garment had been replaced with a loose sleeveless shirt, and her shoes had been removed. There would be no reprieve from the icy air around her. Her throbbing head indicated that she was almost certainly concussed.

“Where am I?”

She didn’t bother wondering how she got there—she had known for a long time that she would either face imprisonment, assassination, or kidnapping. She had known for a long time she would eventually end up somewhere like this. The sudden pain of something crashing into her skull as she had been walking alone down the hallway to her office, followed immediately by darkness, had not been unexpected. Whether it had happened because of betrayal, bad luck, or karma didn’t matter—it was always going to happen.

But where she was—that was important to know. It would tell her what her chances were of escaping; it would tell her if she had a chance to survive long enough for the Hail Mary’s crew to send back the humanity-saving information. It would tell her if she would survive long enough to help bring about Earth’s salvation.

After a moment she forced her heavy eyelids open—she had assessed everything she could with them closed—feeling dried blood pulling at her skin even at so small of a movement.

She needn’t have bothered—the room was as dark with her eyes open as with them closed. There was nothing to give her a clue as to where she was. She closed her eyes again, trying to convince herself it helped alleviate the pain of her throbbing head, and tried to shift into a slightly more comfortable position.

All she could do was wait.

“Nature’s first green is gold,” she murmured softly to herself.

She wasn’t sure why she had instinctively turned to the poetry of Robert Frost—didn’t really want to consider the implications of why she chose that particular poem—but found herself quietly whispering the rest of it to herself.

It strengthened her, in a strange, painful way. Maybe it was because of the transient quality of life, a fact history could not damn her for; something that had existed long before her and would exist long after her. A fact that had been romanticized and grieved for millennia across every culture. Maybe it’s because she was always going to lose what… lose who… she valued.

And reciting it passed the time.

She began reciting more poetry to herself—Frost, Goethe, Dickinson, Vondel, Shakespeare, Schiller—finding comfort in the familiar words; allowing the throbbing ache in her head to set a tempo for them; turning her pain into music.

The cold began seeping deep within her as the hours went slowly by. Eventually she began to shiver; feeling a vague annoyance that the shaking of her body didn’t match the tempo of the throbbing in her head.

“Zoveel soorten van verdriet, ik noem ze niet. Maar één, het afstand doen en scheiden,” ¹ she began, when she finally heard a door creak open. She forced her eyes open, refusing to meet what was coming next with them closed, and winced as the light—too bright after the complete darkness she had been enveloped in for hours—seemed to stab directly into her brain.

Two figures emerged from the blinding, agonizing light—black silhouettes advancing towards her, like demons here to deliver retribution. One of them held a long rod in his hands.

“En zo begint het,” ² she thought, trying to ignore the dread that filled her. She had always known this was a possibility when she chose to become Earth’s scapegoat. Better her than all of humanity. She would have preferred it would go easier for her, but she was a pragmatist—she didn’t waste time in hopes for herself. All her hopes had blasted off from Earth five years earlier, accompanying the people she had condemned to death.

With a barely concealed wince, she forced her shivering body into a sitting position. She would have preferred to stand, but she knew her numb legs would not hold her.

“So,” she called out in English. “You’re here at last.”

She had no power here, all she could really do was endure whatever punishment humanity deemed necessary for the crimes committed for their salvation—but she could make them think she was more in control than she actually was.

The two figures paused in their approach. “Good,” she thought. “They are at least a little bit afraid of me.”

“Let’s get this over with,” she added, forcing her voice to remain steady.

The two people hesitated for a moment longer before coming closer. She studied their faces as they approached, her eyes beginning to adjust to the light. One was a tall, thin, large-boned woman. The man with her was shorter, but muscularly built. She didn’t recognize either of them, but that didn’t mean anything. Even if she had, she could not count on recognition to work in her favor.

The woman—the one not carrying the rod—pulled a pocket knife out and flipped it open. Eva looked her steadily in the eyes, refusing to back down even as she knelt in front of her. The man walked behind Eva, but she did not take her eyes off the woman in front of her. There was nothing she could do about the man behind her, but she could always unnerve whomever she was facing.

Grace had always said she was good at that.

She felt the man behind her loop her bound arms over the rod, and couldn’t hold back a pained whimper as he wrenched them up—forcing her body painfully forward.

The message was clear: Do anything, and regret it.

It’s not like she could do anything anyway, but she knew she had a reputation that did not quite match reality. And these two were clearly taking no chances.

After a moment, the woman leaned forward and cut through the ropes around her ankles—nicking her in the process—before flipping her knife closed and putting it back in her pocket.

Eva chose to focus on the tiny trickle of blood on her left ankle as the woman stood up and walked behind her. The blood almost seemed unbearably hot against her chilled flesh. She had never before spent any time wondering what that might feel like. Now she knew.

“Stand up, Stratt.”

She nodded grimly. There was no way she could. Between legs numbed from hours of cold and poor circulation, and the painful angle her arms were being forced at, there was no way she could obey the instructions.

It was going to be their first excuse to rationalize whatever came next. That’s what all of this was about, of course: rationalization. It’s what she had done every time she had ordered Earth’s destruction, bit by bit, in a desperate attempt to save everything. They would rationalize their actions away, say she deserved whatever came next; that the death, destruction, and disease that were slowly eroding away humanity’s dwindling hopes were all her fault.

This little maneuver was just one more moment of rationalization: “If she had only listened, we wouldn’t have done this to her. So really, it’s her fault—not ours.”

“I said,” the man repeated, “Stand!” At the last word the rod was pulled out from under her arms, and in the same fluid motion slammed bruisingly into her side.

She gasped, trying to catch her breath, and struggled to get her numb, shaking legs beneath her. The tiny trickle of blood from her ankle smeared across the floor.

The second blow came as she finally managed to get to her knees—this time it was an elbow to her still-aching head. The blow knocked her to the ground once again as a fresh wave of dizziness came over her and black spots danced at the edge of her vision. She felt a fresh trickle of blood drip slowly from her temple and down her cheek as she lay there. A distant part of her wondered if it would fall on the floor next to where the blood from her ankle had smeared.

Before the blinding dizziness had subsided, she felt her two kidnappers lift her by her arms—allowing her full weight to rest on her shoulders. She whimpered softly at the strain on her joints, but the pain helped her head to clear. By the time they got to the door and out into the blisteringly cold wind, she at least was able to get her own two feet—numb as they still were—beneath her, and keep stumbling pace with her captors.

“Thank God I was able to maintain that much dignity,” she thought grimly as she looked out at the crowd of people waiting for her. It was a small crowd, perhaps 20-30 people, but their anger was still palpable.

She glanced around, ignoring the jeers, ignoring the rocks many of them were holding in their hands—doubtlessly waiting for the people who had retrieved her to move out of the way before throwing them—trying to assess where she was.

She was being dragged out of a nondescript warehouse with nothing to indicate where it might be. For all she knew, she had been unconscious for days and was now in an entirely different country than she had been the last time she was conscious. It wasn’t likely, she admitted—her concussion was clearly still recent enough that a secondary blow to her head was able to make her bleed again. The probability of them having time to take her to a different country was slim.

She looked out over the angry crowd as she was dragged over to an old flagpole near the center of the Industrial Outdoor Storage space. There were no weapons, no military stances—just angry people standing together filling a section of the IOS space, jeering as the woman they all hated was dragged out. Even the flagpole was notable. A large eye hook—dangling about three or four feet above the ground—was jury-rigged onto the halyard where a simple snap hook typically would be.

Everything about what she could see felt unplanned and disorganized. Realization struck her with a cold chill that rivaled the icy air around her: this wasn’t a military sting or a government operation. It was a local mob—a mass of angry, desperate, starving people, who had gotten their hands on her. If she was fortunate, it was through sheer luck and help would be coming. But the higher probability was that her security turned a blind eye and let the kidnapping happen—the hatred for her from every quarter had been growing over the past five years. Her heart sank. She would rather have faced anything else over an angry mob.

No wonder she had spent so long alone in that empty warehouse. They had probably been arguing among themselves what to do to her. And she was about to find out exactly what their decision was.

The crowd cheered as she was slammed harshly against the flagpole and the hook slipped through the rope tied around her wrists. She knew what they were hoping for; and depending on what they did next, she wasn’t sure how long she could stop herself from giving the reaction they wanted.

Without a word shared between them, the man and woman began hoisting the halyard, wrenching her tied hands higher and higher onto the pole. She bit her lip as her shoulders began screaming in agony, and still they hoisted her higher. Only when her toes were barely on the ground—her body bent painfully forward, her screaming shoulders pulled nearly straight up behind her—did they finally stop.

She heard more than saw a rock whistling through the icy air before it hit her just under her eye with an agonizing crack. She flinched, but didn’t make a sound. A second rock flew through the air, and the crowd booed when it missed her entirely.

Eva closed her eyes as the floodgates opened—rock after rock thrown at her by the increasingly angry crowd, cheers assaulting her ears each time one found its mark. She wouldn’t die from this. It hurt, as it was clearly intended to, but they didn’t want her dead yet. None of the rocks they threw were big enough to do that kind of damage. Her retribution had only just begun.

Knowing all along it was coming did not make the pain of the moment any easier.

“Maar tussen de aderen van het lijden niets meer om u mee te verblijden,” ³ she began murmuring to herself, trying to lose herself in poetry once again.

Another rock found its mark, and the cheer of the crowd threatened to sweep her poetry away from her as the rhythm of the familiar words was interrupted by the harsh blows against her body. “Mazen van uw afwezigheid, bijeengehouden door wat pijn en groter wordend met de tijd.” ⁴

The words brought no comfort, no distraction, no relief. Not in the face of humanity at its worst.

She switched gears. Poetry had worked to help time pass in the warehouse, but no lament, no call to a higher power, no lyric could defeat the harsh reality of these humiliating minutes as they crept slowly by.

So instead, she simply counted. Not the passage of time as she hung there from burning shoulders while an icy wind whipped around her, not the people in the angry mob before her, not the number of rocks that struck her, not even the ones that missed her. Instead she counted the days since Hail Mary’s launch—calculated how much time had passed for the crew.

For Earth, five years, two months, and eleven days had passed since launch.

Another rock hit her in the face, breaking her concentration. She could feel blood dripping down from a fresh cut on her forehead, could feel the fog she was fighting back start to overwhelm her mind.

She fought through it.

In that same amount of time, from their perspective, the Hail Mary crew would have arrived and hopefully found the solution. They were probably discussing when they would end their own lives. Ilyukhina would probably insist they keep traveling through space while their food lasted—she would want to see more of the universe in the time she had left.

Her arms were screaming in pain—every involuntary flinch when she was hit put more pressure on already strained joints. If this went on too much longer there was a high chance she would dislocate her shoulders.

She put the thought aside.

Yao would be furious when Grace regained his memories and told him what happened—furious that a member of his crew was there against his will, furious with her for what she had done.

Their aim was getting better. Either that or in their fury they were throwing more rocks, and faster. She forced her thoughts back to the Hail Mary crew, demanding her sluggish brain to respond to her wishes.

Grace would probably forgive her, damn him. He would despise her forever for what she had done, but he would understand.

She could no longer hold back the tears, or the cries of pain as she was struck again and again. But it didn’t matter.

She refused to focus on that.

The Beetles would be on the way back to Earth, carrying their precious burden of information; of salvation. Her team here on Earth was good—even without her, they would be waiting for that information. They would make sure none of this was in vain.

“Eva Stratt!” A megaphone broke through the angry yelling of the crowd, and they fell silent. The ensuing wave of anticipation was palpable.

Eva opened her eyes, blinking back the blood that streamed from the cut on her forehead, forcing herself to focus through the fog of pain. She looked towards the speaker, grateful for the reprieve, even though she knew it wouldn’t last. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved that she didn’t know him, other than recognizing him as the man who had dragged her from the warehouse.

“You have brought nothing but ruin and devastation,” the man continued.

“No,” Eva argued silently. “That was the inevitable outcome, no matter what I did—never the intent.”

“You abused your powers, destroyed our planet, and did nothing but fool us with the notion of false hope.”

“It’s not a false hope,” she thought grimly. “Just a desperate one.”

“Even now, when so many of us are facing starvation, disease, and death, you flaunt your power. You insist on rationing out supplies, refusing to provide what is needed even if it will save a life!”

“Only the strong can survive,” she answered internally. “If humanity is to survive, we have to adhere to the strictest rules of natural selection.”

“Murderer!” Someone in the crowd shouted, and Eva flinched as another rock flew through the air and hit her.

“Our government did nothing. Our military only supported you. It is now up to us—up to the people—to punish you for your crimes.”

The speech had clearly been rehearsed in the hours since her kidnapping. Another carefully curated moment of rationalization. It was exactly how she knew it would play out—how history always played out.

He paused, and she knew he was waiting for her to say something—waiting for an act of bravado, or perhaps even for her to start begging.

She did neither.

Instead she looked intently at him, putting all the disdain she felt in the gaze. History would vindicate him in the same way it would condemn her, but history was wrong; and her disdain would be recorded more clearly through her lack of response than through words that would be twisted or maliciously forgotten.

The man raised his megaphone again, the gesture harsh and angry.

“What do you think of your first punishment?” he demanded.

Eva didn’t even flinch at his emphasis on “first”. She had known this would not be it. The pain, the humiliation, the torture would all only escalate until she was either killed or rescued. If he meant to unnerve her by implying what she already knew, he was nothing but a fool.

She said nothing, instead holding his gaze with unbroken intensity until he was forced to turn away.

—

Dr. Amira Lokken leaned back in her chair with an exhausted sigh before checking the clock hanging on the wall. It was almost 3am. She hesitated for a moment, not sure if she should call it a night and head out for a few hours of sleep, or if she should get herself another coffee and keep working.

After the Hail Mary’s launch, Project Hail Mary’s team had expected to disband. Amira had suspected for a long time that Stratt anticipated being arrested immediately after the launch, but had not expected her to put so much effort into redirecting the team’s goal in the interim. She probably should have expected something like that from Stratt, but everybody had been so focused on the set goal of “launch the Hail Mary”, that it seemed only Stratt had given ample thought to what the plan was after that.

They hadn’t changed the name—”Project Hail Mary” was still the most appropriate one they could have, and after Grace had volunteered for the mission there was nobody who cared to insist on calling it something else—but now that the ship was launched the team turned their focus towards preserving cultural, historical, artistic, medical, and scientific data, working constantly to find new ways to keep the planet warmer for longer, a special sub-section dedicated to selectively breeding staple crops in a desperate attempt to create a strain that could survive the changing weather conditions, and a ruthless rationing process for food.

Amira couldn’t deny the effectiveness of Stratt’s plans. Five years into the apocalypse, and the death toll was not nearly as high as it should have been by now, and the plans for Stratt’s arrest and trial—which were an open secret from nearly every government on the planet—seemed to be indefinitely postponed.

They couldn’t argue against her success, even though the hatred for her was growing with each passing day. Stratt didn’t let that bother her—outwardly at least—and continued ruling her team of scientists with a fist of iron.

Which meant that Amira was still busy working at 3am as part of an attempt to utilize any and every skill she had to stave off the apocalypse. Between her background in climatology and Leclerc’s hesitancy any time they had to do another act of eco-terrorism she wasn’t really surprised that Stratt put her in charge of the climate research subsection.

She wasn’t particularly happy about it, but she wasn’t surprised by it.

Right now she was neck deep in an analysis of multiple biomes to determine when would be the optimal time to bomb Antarctica. Again.

Do it too late and the incoming ice age would come even faster, do it too soon and they were hastening their own demise by inviting in potential crop-destroying weather anomalies and shrinking land masses through the rising of the ocean, thus forcing mass immigration and complicating things even more than they already were. The Netherlands were already almost entirely underwater, and the entire population of Stratt’s home country displaced—a fact that she seemed dismissive of, but that Amira couldn’t imagine wasn’t painful to her in some way.

Maybe she should go to bed. Leclerc had left an hour earlier, so any follow-up discussion and decisions would have to wait for later either way.

She pulled up her email, still mulling over her options. She should probably go to bed, but right now she was past the point of exhaustion and didn’t think she would be able to sleep even if she did go to bed, but the risk of making mistakes if she got too tired was not something she wanted to deal with.

The top email was from Leclerc; it would just be his notes from this evening so she scrolled past it. She would read through it and the other two-dozen similar emails from other scientists contributing to climate research once she decided if she was going to keep working or not. An email from Stratt—sent at exactly midnight—caught her eye, and she stopped scrolling.

Eva Stratt                                                      URGENT: Project Hail Mary - Next Steps

She stared at the email for a moment before clicking on it, hoping whatever it was Stratt wanted wouldn’t take too long. It was an unspoken rule that any email from Stratt needed to be opened and read as soon as possible, so the fact it was marked “urgent” was definitely cause for alarm.

Dr. Lokken

This is a pre-scheduled email.

If you are receiving this, you may assume I have either been arrested by one of the many angry governments of the world, or am dead, and thus unable to cancel the email. Regardless of what happened, my absence cannot interfere with the work that we are doing.

Attached you will find documents with all relevant passwords, schedules, and other information that you will need to continue our work.

Do NOT let Leclerc get too sentimental. Every time we bomb another portion of Antarctica he loses a little bit more of his nerve, but we must continue if Earth is to survive. Let him loose in the botany labs when that happens.

Eva Stratt
Head of the Petrova Taskforce
Director of Project Hail Mary

Attached were dozens of word documents—all meticulously labeled, and no doubt extremely thorough.

Amira gaped for a moment before dashing out of her office and heading towards Stratt’s. This could not be happening! On top of everything else that she had to worry about, if some idiot government had arrested Stratt now it would only complicate things! Of course Stratt had taken steps so that her absence wouldn’t create a vacuum—that was the least surprising thing about this—but that didn’t make a potential arrest anything less than a colossally stupid move!

She ran faster, hoping against hope that this was all wrong. It was impossible—even in her panicked run down the hallways, Amira knew Stratt was too disciplined to have just fallen asleep at her desk and forgotten to cancel the email—but she had to hope for it! Any alternative was unthinkable, especially since Stratt had apparently chosen Amira of all people to take her place!

She burst through the door without even knocking. There was nobody there—no Stratt sitting at her desk typing away at her computer, ready to cock an annoyed brow at her at the unexpected interruption. Even the small cot in the corner, meticulously made up, was empty.

“Stratt!” Amira yelled, running across to the bathroom. She would apologize later if she burst in on a half-naked Stratt, but that was not important in light of that email. It was also empty.

Stratt was gone!

------------------

Translation key:

^{1 return to text ↩}

^{2 return to text ↩}

^{3 return to text ↩}

^{4 return to text ↩}