Archive of Our Own

The following months were what I can only describe as bureaucratic hell.

I'd never been in that many meetings in my entire life—had never seen that much paperwork, for the matter. I'm pretty sure I was processing a square mile of forest in classified documents on a weekly basis. And I worked in junior high education, for cripes' sake. I was a TA once. I did my time.

Our average workday schedule on the carrier was full to the brim as it was, but I took to dropping by Little Russia whenever I could to check on whatever side project Dimitri and his Denizens were working on. I had my office, but I enjoyed having their excited Russian chatter in the back of my mind as I worked. It took me a while to figure out why. His workshop skewed younger than any other team on the ship, and while they were all far from children, it gave the group the familiar, firecracker energy of a responsive classroom. Since it was a place like any other to fill out administrative paperwork, I stayed. All I needed was a chair and something flat to write on. And if anyone asked, it was now my job to keep Stratt updated on their progress. Apparently.

Whatever. As far as I cared, our fields of expertise overlapped enough for our goofing off to be of extreme scientific interest. Dimitri agreed. It was worth it, even if it ate at what little free time we had.

And my scapula. Seriously, do all Russians clap you on the back like a modified Heimlich?

I finished the last of my coffee and balanced the paper cup on the soon-to-be-overflowing trashcan—I made a mental note to review the ship cleaning rounds for later. I gathered my documents into a neat pile and slid them into a plastic folder. When the elastic straps snapped closed, Dimitri looked up.

"Ah! You are leaving soon, then?"

"Afraid so. I'm finally done here." I sighed. "I'm gonna see this stuff in my dreams sooner or later. That, and I need a shower."

"Pity. You will miss stress test for our future, on-ship Petrovascope. Very fun experiment."

I stretched myself along the back of the chair until my lower spine gave a satisfying pop. I sighed in relief. Two younger engineers behind Dimitri turned to each other and giggled. Yeah, get your laughs in while you still can, it won't be long until life springs your thirties on you, too.

I wished I still had real work to do. Scientific work. Since ol' Embezzler Bob joined the team, he and his blackpanel farm pretty much solved the entire Astrophage breeding question. I mostly poked around after that, doing peer review for other labs' discoveries, signing off on whatever crazy idea was brought to Stratt's door. I was starting to feel more like an accountant than a scientist.

"Is this that edge case you mentioned? The one with the attitude-adjustment spin drives? You'll have to tell me about it later."

"Of course, of course." He grinned. "In our new break room!"

My eyes widened. I gasped. "Is it ready?"

"Yes!" Dimitri bounced back and forth on his heels. "It took less time than we predicted. We are holding small inauguration, for crew morale. There will be drinking. You will come, yes?"

"Gosh," I scratched my head. "I'll, uh, see how I feel about it. I might be too tired to join you, though. Stratt is running me ragged lately."

Someone to his side mumbled something in Russian and Dimitri barked out a laugh. I stared at him. In response, he just (you guessed it…!) slapped me on the back.

"That she is!" he said, while I righted myself from the impact. "That she is."

"Speaking of Stratt, do you know where I can find her? I need to drop this off."

I wriggled the folder for emphasis.

"Hm. Not sure. If she is not in Director's office you should try conference room, but be careful it is not in use." He snorted. "That, or she is in Geneva again."

"She's not, or she would have dragged me there," I grumbled. The whole pack of Russians laughed.

I was in the process of waving my goodbye when Dimitri called out again, "Grace."

"Yeah?"

He hesitated for a moment, then he smiled. "Tell Ms. Stratt about tonight. Could be nice for her to join us."

"Riiight. Sure."

I waited for the punchline. It didn't come. I stared at him with my mouth open "…Hang on, are you serious?"

"She approved our request for break room, yes? Only fair we invite her."

"Let me get this straight: you manage to convince the most despotic boss in human history to give you an officers' bar, and the first thing you want to do is have that same boss at the bar with you?"

Dimitri laughed, but the humor on his face left as quickly as it came.

"She is a woman too, Grace. Flesh and blood like the rest of us," he said, giving me a lopsided smile. "These are not kind times. For all of us. Camaraderie helps."

I considered his words for a moment.

"All right," I said slowly, "but don't get your hopes up. She's not big on this kind of stuff."

"Noted. Later, my friend!"

I saluted and ducked away.

I jogged out of the lower hangar deck with the plastic folder in one hand while the other massaged my shoulder. I checked Stratt's schedule on my phone where I had it pinned in our text messages, but no use. She could've been anywhere on the ship. Weirdly, it seemed like I wasn't the only one stuck on accounting duty at the moment.

She wasn't in her office. She wasn't in her quarters. I spent a good ten minutes just poking my head around the aircraft carrier and flagging down members of the crew for information. Even after a few years I still didn't speak a lick of Chinese, but a single "Stratt?" was, unfortunately, all the language skills I needed this time. Every response was a shrug.

Finally, I decided to heed Dimitri's advice and try my luck with the conference room. If I barged in on Stratt and the King of Spain, well, that's what she got for keeping me out of the loop. I descended into the Carrier's Crypt of Corridors on my own. I knew my way around the ship well enough by now that I could probably do it with my eyes closed.

When I got to Deck 7, I stopped in my tracks. The door to the conference room was ajar, but I couldn't hear any sound coming from the other side. Carefully, I pushed it open.

Dimitri had been right. The cabin wasn't currently in use but it wasn't empty, either. Stratt stood at the furthest side of the room with her back to the door. She looked weirdly casual: simple, comfortable clothes, half-leaning against the wall. She had her hair down, for once.

What I especially wasn't expecting was the bottle of Dutch gin on the table, or the glass in her hand.

Her head jerked back to look at me. She straightened her posture.

"Dr. Grace?"

"Is this a bad time?"

"No, no, come in."

I closed the door behind me as quietly as I could.

"You have the construction plans for the medical center, I take it?" she said. She pushed a strand of hair out of her face. The gesture felt oddly genuine. I'm not sure why.

"All here."

"Good. I'll deal with the rest. You can go." She made a little dismissal gesture for emphasis.

My hand still hadn't left the door handle. I could've jumped on the dismissal and slipped out in two seconds flat and flown to get a well-deserved shower.

In the end, I just put my hands on my hips.

"Okay…" I said, "What's going on? Last time I found you stress drinking you were making the hardest choice of your life. And I'm quoting."

"Thanks for the concern," she said curtly, breaking eye-contact, "but I'm not stress drinking."

"Yeah, you just like your tea on the rocks, I'm sure."

She glared at me out of the corner of her eye as I took my usual seat. The conference table was, for once, miraculously clear of clutter. Only two folders lay towards the head of the table where Stratt usually sat. I dropped my own besides them and whirled the chair around to face her again.

"Is this something I can help you with?"

"No. It's not something that needs help, it's…"

She hesitated. "Personal, I suppose."

"Yeah, I figured that much or you would've called me over." I drummed my fingers on my leg and softened my voice. "Come on. I can tell it's weighing on you."

She paused. She stared down at the liquid swirling in her glass, clearly considering her options.

"Fine," she said, "I am… honoring something. Symbolically."

"What's the occasion?"

Stratt walked back towards the center of the room. "Ever heard of Concordia Station?"

"Kind of?" I said, straining my memory. The name was familiar, anyway.

After my unexpected promotion to Leading Astrophage Expert and my much less welcome specializations as Administrative Grunt Worker and Personal Science Lap Dog, Stratt went from keeping me updated on Astrophage-related discoveries to giving me direct access and authority over any and all results that got sent back to us from biology labs all over the world. Most of them were, like Stratt would say, "huge, national labs": Beijing, Milan, São Paulo, Tokyo, Madrid.

But not all of them. Once the Astrophage reproduction cycle was ironed out and we were no longer working with limited samples, every formally screened laboratory got its small, minimally explosive share of alien cake. The more the merrier, we reasoned.

Concordia Station was one of them. That's why I knew the name. The extreme climate conditions certain research labs had to deal with made for useful variety to the research pool.

"It's… one of the permanent research stations down in Antarctica, right? Like a tiny, European McMurdo."

"A condescendingly American way to put it," she said, "but yes. It's situated in-land on the Antarctic Plateau and run in a joint effort by the French and the Italians. ESA had a long-established medical program in collaboration with their researchers: they would study the physical and psychological effects—not to mention the logistics themselves—of living in such an extreme, isolated environment as a precursor to future space missions on Mars."

"Or Tau Ceti," I said. She nodded.

"Yes, that also became a point of interest. Until we settled on the coma technology, in any case. That's not what this is about."

She flipped open one of the folders and pushed it towards me. The title read Project M.A.N.N.A in a large, clean-looking font. I immediately started flipping through it out of habit. I felt Stratt pull back the chair beside me and sit down.

"Did you know that no complex animals or plants can survive more than a few tens of kilometers from the coastline?" she said, "Some bird species manage to fly over the continent, but there'd be nothing for them but snow if they landed anywhere. Antarctica is unfathomably inhospitable to life. There's a reason it's not-so-jokingly called White Mars. Human beings manage to survive, obviously, through collaboration, determination and technology, but there are limits."

She opened the other folder—the one labeled Project Azrael. No need for introductions there—and pulled out a map. It showed a rough schematic of Antarctica and the research stations active to this day.

"The problem is contingency. Permanent stations are almost completely cut off for around eight to nine months every year, and they have to overwinter under total resource autonomy. That means energy, water, scientific and medical supplies. It means medical experts. It means food."

"Sounds terrifying."

Stratt shook her head, "Mostly, it's not. These are professional scientists and technicians with training comparable to ISS astronauts, if not people with astronaut experience themselves. They're clever, self-sufficient and well prepared. Chances of serious complications have been historically low since the turn of the millennium.

"But scarcity still dramatically limits the scope of the work they can do. And it always leaves very little room for error. You know how I feel about unnecessary risks," she said. "That's where MANNA came into play."

I readjusted my glasses back on my nose, squinting at the page. "Modular Antarctic Network for Necessities Allocation. Okay, what am I looking at?"

She smirked. "A supply chain. In the most literal sense of the word. Instead of just one enormous re-supply season each year, stations would also receive smaller but regular deliveries throughout the winter. The logistics behind it were an undertaking to say the least. Aircraft can't normally operate where temperatures habitually fall below -70°C. The sun never rises, and darkness lasts for months. It makes mechanical failures nearly catastrophic, especially on a manned convoy. So how do you make it safer? You unman it."

"Hooray for women," I mumbled. She didn't laugh. I cleared my throat. "Sorry, did you say they would unman a supplies convoy where mechanical failures are critical? How's having no one to fix things more reliable?"

"We already have unmanned vehicles designed to be remotely operated in extremely harsh environments."

"You mean—whoa," I raised my eyebrows at her. "You really weren't kidding about White Mars."

"There you go," She rested her chin on her hands. "I'm sure you heard about NASA's plans for space exploration. We collaborated often, as did Roscosmos. But we had some original missions of our own."

"Good ol' Juice," I said, "But none of us were going to stop at fly-bys."

"Exactly. Which meant that working in the Antarctic solved several problems at once. A solid network of provisions for researchers on Earth, and a complex testing ground for future exploration vehicles outside of Earth. Both required massive leaps in electronics if they wanted their instruments to survive the cold. We secured funds for the development of cold resistant technology that will be quite useful in the coming decades."

"Three birds with one stone." I raised an eyebrow at her. "You seem to know your way around this stuff."

She smiled in a way that didn't quite reach her eyes.

"I should hope so. I was head organizer on the project for nearly a decade."

"Yeah, I can tell."

Stratt blinked. "Oh?"

I leaned forward and tapped the title of the folder as I slid it back to her.

"From the Exodus. Manna was gathered daily rather than stockpiled," I said. "Corny religious project name? It's got your hands all over it."

To my surprise, she actually laughed. She cocked her head to the side and gave me a slow, quizzical look.

"Good catch."

I shrugged. "My mother was Jewish."

"Yeah, I know."

She stared at me and I stared back. We both chose to ignore the few seconds of silence that followed.

"Anyway, the project never left the drawing board. Which was, of course, intentional. The level of international cooperation it required was almost unthinkable before the Petrova problem. MANNA would've caused several amendments to the Antarctic Treaty, which would only be possible after 2048, and since the project was conceived in parallel with the future exploration of Jupiter's moons, any development that came before Juice and the Europa Clipper's reports would put our cart before the horse.

"So we reached out to researchers. We gathered interest. We made national agencies and companies and scientists all over the world sit at the same table to discuss what could be done. But I was never going to live to see it happen."

"And yet," I said, "I'm guessing that wrangling that kind of multinational project to begin with got you more than your share of useful connections."

She showed her palms in response. And now I'm here.

"Is that how you met Voigt?"

"Oh no, we go way back. But it is how I met my husband."

I stared at her, startled.

"Wait a second, you're married?"

Stratt half-smiled into her glass. "That hard to believe, eh?"

"Look, I didn't mean it like that."

She raised an eyebrow at me.

"Okay, it was exactly like that," I conceded, "but I mean you're… you! It's pretty hard to imagine you as the walking down the aisle type. I don't think I've seen you do anything other than work on the project since we met."

She smiled a thin, flat smile. "And you wouldn't be the first to think that, Dr. Grace."

I opened my mouth. When her words fully registered, I closed it again.

"…Oh."

"Yes. Of course, I already knew it would end this way. I suggested we split on good terms the moment I was asked to lead the ArcLight program."

She let her head fall back to stare at the ceiling. "Humanity needed a dictator. All member nations of the UN and their representatives unanimously, anonymously agreed I was the best candidate for the role. I accepted to take on that responsibility at the cost of my own privacy, personal ethics and life. There was no practical reason for my partner to do the same."

"Anyway. He told me it was a sacrifice he was willing to make by my side." She shrugged. "It didn't last."

"Gosh…" I rubbed the back of my neck, self-consciously. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It was the right choice. I made my peace with it."

I shifted in my seat. I'd never seen her so introspective before and something about it really unnerved me.

I tried to lighten the mood. "If I knew this would be a Talk Crap About Your Ex kind of night I would've put the soft-serve machine to good use."

"Good idea," said Stratt, deadpan. "We can paint our nails while you tell me about Dr. Scyther in Denmark and watch Alien vs Predator 2."

I groaned. "You know, you could at least pretend you don't have a CIA file on my entire life. Also—seriously?! Predator 2 is too low-brow for you but the crossover sequel gets a pass? What the heck is wrong with you?"

"Yes, yes, I'm sure he always forgot your birthdays and you're better off without him."

"Jesus—Okay, enough." I rubbed a hand across my face while she buried another smirk in her glass. "You know what, I'm not even sorry for the schadenfreude anymore."

"Schadenfreude?" she repeated, not-so-subtly correcting my pronunciation.

"Yeah," I said. I gave her a look over my glasses. "Now I'm not the only one who blew up his entire career."

Stratt just stared at me in horror. My face fell as I realized what I'd just said.

"That's—Oh God, no. That's not what I—"

Stratt shut her eyes and pressed her lips together. She blinked up at the ceiling a few times before she looked down again.

Our eyes met for three seconds flat. There was the smallest twitch at the corner of her mouth. Then we broke into laughter.

"Christmas Eve, I'm sorry. That was beyond inappropriate." I rubbed my eyes. She could have grown a second head and it would've been less weird than this.

"Yeah, maybe it was." She shook her head, her smile was tense but she was, at least, smiling.

I passed a hand through my hair. "Stratt, what are we doing here?"

"Saving the world, one would hope."

"Right. I'm sure giggling like idiots in a stuffy Chinese aircraft carrier cabin with a bottle of gin that costs more than my yearly salary fits into that plan. Somewhere. Heck if I know, you're the boss."

"Don't be dramatic, it's not that expensive. And—"she pretended to toast at me"—personally undoing ten years of my life via ecological destruction seemed like the sort of thing worth commemorating."

The laughter dripped out of our voices pretty quickly after that. I scratched my nose and shrugged, trying to remain positive.

"I mean… okay? But Concordia is nowhere near the coast, right? Sure, Project Azrael will disrupt operations for a while, not to mention the ecosystem, but that doesn't mean all this work is going to waste. They'll be back. And they'll need provisions like always," I smiled. "You make it sound like this is the end of Antarctic research as a whole."

This time Stratt's face fell for good. She sighed. "That's because it is."

"Why's that?"

"Because I'm ordering a complete evacuation of the entire Antarctic continent."

I stared at her in shock. I searched her face for any sign of irony but she just looked right at me, unmovable.

"What?" I said, slack jawed.

"It's currently the middle of winter in the Southern Hemisphere." She tapped the folder for Project Azrael. "Casualty predictions from current weather disruption rise exponentially every month, which means we can't wait until the warmer season. Pulling this off now will take a massive effort, and the research currently being done in the Antarctic just doesn't justify the cost of returning to normal operations when summer comes."

"Are you kidding? Why?! That's beyond overkill."

"I'm not taking any risks. Human lives have to come first."

"You're—Stratt, we're knocking a few chunks off of the western coast with fusion bombs, we're not splitting the gosh-darned continent in half. You could fit the entirety of California between the detonation site and Amundsen–Scott station, what even is the point of all this?"

"That's not the only reason." She rubbed her eyes. "Even if they remained in use, governments all over the world are going to dramatically restructure their economies for maximum resource efficiency once the Hail Mary launches. Picture the strictest war rationing in history and then make it ten times worse for good measure. Specialized, geographically-remote, high-maintenance scientific programs like these will be the first on the chopping block. It's just not worth it."

"You're anticipating funding cuts by shutting down an entire continent of scientific research! Come on, Stratt. You're throwing a full orphanage out with the bathwater."

Suddenly her tone turned sharp, "I don't need to anticipate anything, Dr. Grace. Not when I've had the resignation requests of eighty percent of their personnel on my desk for the past three months."

"Eighty—"I gawked at her"—you mean at Concordia?"

"Eighty percent collectively," she said. "Every station, with some small variation in percentage, depending from one to another, but never below seventy percent at their lowest."

I passed a hand over my face. None of this felt real.

"Since when do you care about resignation letters?" I huffed. The protest felt whiny even as it left my mouth. "Half the people on this carrier got drafted onto the project. You gonna tell me any of us could give you our two-weeks notice and you'd respect it?"

"Oh, believe me, I wouldn't. Your work here is crucial to the success of Project Hail Mary. But I have no practical reason to keep a bunch of researchers confined to the South Pole against their will unless strictly necessary. I'm more than happy to let people go back to their lives once their work is done."

Stratt glared at me. The look said You should know that better than anyone so loud it could've echoed. I cringed a little under her gaze. All right. Point taken.

I looked for the right words. "But… why? Why now? Isn't it really random?"

"Is it?"

I hesitated.

"Dr. Grace, do you remember what Dr. Leclerc told us during our last meeting?" She held up her hand. "And no, I don't mean his predictions for the coming years."

I drummed my fingers on the table. "He… mentioned there'd been odd weather patterns all over the world. Something about snow in Vietnam, and tornadoes in Europe?"

"In Europe, that's right," she said. "Now allow me to be a little more specific."

She leaned forward and laid her hands on the edge of the table. "The sudden heatwave from North Africa destabilized the atmosphere over the central Mediterranean, spawning a long-lived supercell complex. Several communities along the Tyrrhenian coastline were struck with giant hail, destructive winds, and flash flooding within hours."

Her index finger struck the table with a loud clack. "Local authorities report 46 dead, 312 injured. Tens of thousands evacuated."

She went on. "The persistent, extreme heat also accelerated glacier melt across the Alps, filling glacial lakes well past what artificial and natural dams could withstand. The floods that followed swept through valleys in Switzerland, Northern Italy, Austria, and Southeastern France, destroying several transport corridors that would've allowed rescuers to arrive."

She struck the table again. Clack. "593 dead, 2,184 injured. Another 218 are still reported missing."

"Same thing happened along the Tian Shan range. Search-and-rescue operations were hampered by the landslides. Three villages at least were completely wiped off the map. I had to authorize military intervention for additional support."

Her hands balled into fists. Her knuckles were blanched white against the wood.

"We're still waiting for the casualties report. It's estimated to be well into the thousands. I haven't even mentioned the water shortage and political unrest that blackpanels are causing in the Sahara's geopolitical area. Should I keep going?"

Her voice was eerily calm and collected as she spoke. She placed her words down on the table like a line of bullet cartridges between us. Each and every one of them was leaded and heavy with death.

"The reason this is not random, Dr. Grace, is that it doesn't matter whether it's because the sun's output is weakening, or if it's by our own hands while we try to hopefully, God-willingly, send three people off to die on a star a dozen light years away to look for a solution while we try not to starve. The point is that we're finally at the stage of the Astrophage crisis where civilians start to die.

"People—normal, everyday people—are losing their homes. They're losing their lives. You think those scientists want to stay holed up at work south of the Antarctic Circle until something hits a little too close to home?"

And just like that, like someone untied the string that kept her wound, she deflated. She sank back into her chair with the bridge of her nose pinched in one hand. She let it drop into her lap after a moment and fixed her eyes on the ceiling instead.

I looked away too. My eyes were stinging. I blinked hard and bit the inside of my cheek.

"It's the end of the world, Grace," I heard her finishing, her tone low and flat. "People want to be with other people."

"All right." I sighed. "All right, I—I get it. I know."

"Do you?"

I flinched like I'd been slapped. I jerked back, my mouth already open on a half-formed Now what the heck is that supposed to mean?, before I met her eye and stopped.

I could've thrown back the barb. The accusation was clear in her eyes. But there was no heat behind it.

It suddenly struck me that she wasn't a particularly tall woman. She didn't need to be, so I'd never paid the fact any mind. Stratt always had this air of effortless authority, a level of confidence and purpose to her gait that made people either fall in line behind her—or beside her, out of her way. But I couldn't help but notice it now. Sitting in the chair next to mine, with her hands linked around the glass in her lap and her neck barely holding her head upright. For a brief moment she just looked small, and human, and very, deeply tired.

It just looked so wrong. It made something clench in the pit of my stomach.

"I think…" I licked my lips. My tongue felt cotton-y, and uncomfortably dry. "I think, it's a bit late for all of this, isn't it?"

"Meaning?"

"Reminiscing? Drinking, mourning the past—you know, this," I waved a hand around us. "I mean, you said it yourself. I'm pretty sure we passed the Point of No Regrets the moment we had a fourth of the Sahara Desert covered in blackpanels. Or when you decided kidnapping scientists around the world was on the table, but, uh, I might be a teensy bit biased on that front."

She didn't respond.

I sighed. "Look, I get it. The whole throwing away your life's work thing. Been there, done that. It sucks. But… hey, at least you have a goal! You knew from the beginning that you'd have to make these sorts of hard decisions. Just because this time it's something personal to you doesn't make it any different."

Her jaw clenched. I looked away. I could feel her search my face for something, but I was struggling to place her expression in turn. Was she confused? Offended? If I didn't know her better, I might have mistaken it for hurt.

I softened my voice. "Yeah, people are dying. And they'll keep dying—that's pretty much the one constant we can know for sure. The Hail Mary is the only thing that can do something about it, and we're already on that case. You can't memorize every death toll of every tragedy from here until touchdown day. It won't get you anywhere. Looking back all the time like this…"

I shrugged. "It's just not like you. That's all I'm saying."

I took a chance and risked another look, but her eyes were closed. Predictably, it didn't make her expression any more readable. Her hands flexed open, closed, open again like someone working through a cramp. Then she took a deep breath and let it out in a hiss between her teeth.

When she finally opened them again, her eyes held a familiar clarity. She gathered up the folders and unhooked a pen from the collar of her shirt. Once she had both open, she signed them in short, sharp strokes.

"You're right," she said, tapping the pen on the table. "I'm letting this get away from me. What's done is done. Dr. Leclerc can deal with the rest."

She nodded at me. "Thank you for your time, Dr. Grace. You can go."

I looked at her, "Is… is that it?"

"Yes. Unless there's something else you need to tell me?"

She was staring me down. I stared back. If it hadn't been for the bottle, I could have thought I imagined everything in the past twenty minutes. It was like she'd just flipped a switch and here was Commander Stratt again: head held high, back straight. It all happened so fast it was honestly a little disturbing. Her eyes dug into my skull sharp and clear like glass.

A lone strand of hair fell down across the bridge of her nose. She pushed it away.

Oh, what the heck. I plucked the bottle of gin from the table and poured myself some. Not much, just a thimble. It sloshed at the bottom of the glass like liquid gold.

I resisted the urge to apologize. I raised a toast instead. "I guess… to yesterday?"

Stratt stared at my hand for a few drawn-out seconds. She didn't reach for the bottle. Instead, slowly and methodically, she raised her empty glass in turn and clinked it against my own.

"For tomorrow," she corrected.

"Right," I said, downing it in one go and trying not to choke—Wow. That even burned expensively—"Sure. To tomorrow, then."

-

Halfway through the walk back to my bunk, I suddenly remembered my promise to Dimitri.

"Dang it!" I groaned to myself. "Man, that completely slipped my mind."

There was no way I could pop back into the room and say, Oh yeah, by the way, we're all getting hammered in the new break room, you want in? Ugh. My brain kept replaying the last bit of my conversation with Stratt. I've never been good with people, and even I was pretty certain I'd bungled something pretty badly by the end of it. But at least she didn't sound angry? Whatever. She was never going to come anyway, and she'd evidently had her share of alcohol for the day.

I blinked the exhaustion out of my eyes. Yeah. Yeah, so did I. I mentally apologized to Dimitri and decided to call it a day. No big deal. We would have a thousand other chances to hang out.

Standing your friends up has unexpected benefits sometimes. By a mutually honored but unspoken agreement, the original crew of the Gansu and the rest of us scientific interlopers tried to hit the showers at different times of the day. And since the majority of my colleagues were presently getting very drunk in celebration, I blissfully had a section of the showers all to myself. I stood under the running water for a long time. Probably too long. Having wet, naked people stare at you while you're also wet and naked can be surprisingly effective at minimizing water waste.

Later, I sat on my bunk, phone in hand. I hadn't dried my hair properly so strands of it kept sticking damply to my forehead. I took a deep breath and opened the search engine.

I scrolled through the Chronicle. I passed over articles about murders, misappropriation of city funds, a few think-pieces against anti-homeless architecture, art gallery openings and several lists compiling the best ethnic restaurants in the Bay Area. I opened a new tab and went through the SF Standard in much the same way. Then the Frisc. Then a couple other minor independent newspapers I'd never even heard of before, with God knows what political party behind them. For a while I just squinted through the mild headache behind my eyes and read.

Nothing. No natural disasters, no major catastrophe, no deaths other than the ones you unfortunately come to expect when you have a million people living close together. San Francisco was still standing exactly where I'd left it. Maybe a little different, but intact.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd looked up news from the city. Would I even notice if anything big happened while I was away? Would Stratt even tell me? Did she think Ishould know at all?

I opened my text messages and temporarily ignored any new alerts. When I'd officially joined Project Hail Mary I was given a military grade phone—a bulky, waterproof, indestructible brick—and with it a new phone number. National secrecy. Or International, I guess. Anyway, it meant that my contacts from my life as a civilian didn't get transferred over. No old colleagues, no old boss, no old friends. No niche independent food restaurants you had to text to reserve a table that I never returned to on my own because the waiters had a weird vibe. Just the essentials. So I tried not to let it sting when I hit the bottom of my message history in one single swipe.

Most old friends. I guess being with the DOE lets you jump through a couple of hoops and strong-arm a few others. I stared at the bottom of my message history for a long time. I bit the inside of my cheek.

Another notification pushed itself onto my screen. I tapped it and landed on Stratt's contact. A text from half an hour ago read:

Schedule for next week. Will let you know if there are any unplanned meetings. Leaving physical copy on your desk tomorrow morning. Bring me Leclerc by 15:00, I need his approval for a few technicalities.

And underneath it, just a couple of seconds ago.

Thank you.

I stared at the message. I had absolutely no idea how to read that. Maybe I didn't make as much of a fool of myself as I initially thought? She seemed to cheer up, back there, for a moment. Maybe that was enough.

I pinned the schedule to our important messages and started typing.

You're welcome|

Got it|

No problem|

Any chance we'll ever get steak on this ship?|

👍🏻|

I backspaced through all of them and turned off the screen. It's Stratt. Seeing that I'd read the message was enough for her. I lay down on my bunk, placed my phone face down on the floor and closed my eyes.

It took me a while to fall asleep. When I did, I dreamed of icebergs crumbling like chalk along the shore of Baker Beach.