Chapter Text
So far, this cell was bound to be one of the nicer boxes she would know. The bright orange of her uniform contrasted harshly against her pale skin, the cheaply sewn seams near her neck scratching relentlessly with every step. Therefore, she did not move. She was considered too dangerous an animal to have cellmates, meaning there was plenty of room to stand still in. She would be foolish to find this a luxury, however. She was still in prison, out of power, and in limbo.
She could hear the shouts of unease from all directions, could smell the rancid evidence of overcrowding. The pounding of hands from her left and right, the stomping of feet from above, the punching of fists from beneath. There would be no making friends when she was a worm on a hook to the hardened convicts on every side. Her hands would be stained by the blood of her astronauts, but her palms beneath the crimson were soft, and here she was among rightfully angered inmates.
It would be nothing short of insanity to be unaware of what she’d done with Earth’s slowly dwindling resources for a shot in the dark of survival. Still, she’d change nothing, which is what made her Eva Stratt. Nothing warranted mercy for her name when it came to paving the Sahara, to leading an entire wild population of exotic class aves to extinction in paying due against the early frosts. Children would cry at her name when they’d clutch their penguin stuffed animals; adults would curse her name at every year that grew colder; and her beloved historians would tarnish her lineage for centuries to come.
The German did not bother with considering there could be an “easy” legal way out. Believing in such a childish possibility ranked close to the dreams her number two would have after counting sheep. Doctor Ryland Grace ought to have zipped himself into his big boy pants by now, would have bothered to lace up his shoes, and hopefully dried his face (knowing him); God forbid he was not in custody if all had gone well. Stratt knew she had done all she could to keep his name off every document possible, had erased his presence in all lab reports, had threatened enough high-ranking officials with dirt to make them hush up, and had made him an underground asset to the carrier and its crew.
Stratt carefully toed her way to the lower bunkbed to sit, ignoring the pains from hitting her head at first. She was getting careless, which was unacceptable. The skin where her neck met her collarbone itched and warmly throbbed from irritation; her own body couldn’t reject how quickly her past 24 hours had changed. Perhaps it was her own fault to have owned so many wool-made sweaters, knowing her outfit for the rest of her life was going to be so harsh. Blue eyes bore holes into a paint-lathered brick on the opposite wall. An icy draft sliced her clean open and refused to let up on making her shiver.
France had pounced on her the moment the Hail Mary and its crew were lost to the stars. Such a shame to Russia, who’d been a close second, followed by the Chinese. Despite the launch having been in Baikonur, the French had managed to snag her by the collar before the Russians, who’d missed their chance by mere seconds. Others who had not bothered to send their armies to retrieve the scapegoat waited impatiently in the wings, teeth bared and drooling at the smell of blood.
It was quite fitting for the countries of her brave scientists and commander to be the ones to sink their teeth first; Dubois had been American, as if that would change the slightly comical idea behind the French avenging him. It would feel better to be thrown into ice water than to admit how she missed the three so soon. At least they would be together in their mission till the end, while the rest of humanity waited with dying breaths. Stratt knew she had willingly stuck her hand into the bear trap, had walked straight into the hunters' grounds with no intensions of leaving.
She had ordered Grace to hide with his fellow scientist assets in the storage area on base, had trusted Carl to have dragged him kicking and yelling into safety. Within the coming days, Dr. Grace would be securely transported back to the Vatt, where she’d enlisted her most dedicated military (the Dutch and Japanese) to hold the craft in the name of the project. China would not be getting their carrier back, but she trusted the historical strain between Japan and China to be enough.
She’d feel more like a villain if her current role in taking the blame wasn’t making milligrams of her heart sour to the taste. But there was so much time and yet no time at all for bitterness, not when iron bars were eager to test just how much she loved her mother Earth. Her own parents had never been too keen on her stubbornness, had been beyond mortified when her classification-
No, that’s right. When her teenage years had proven her spirit to be headstrong, is all. Nothing more, nothing less.
Stratt did not miss her parents, and they would not miss her if they’d been alive to see their daughter now. Orange had never been her color, but silver had always gone well with her auburn, even now as cuffs squeezed her wrists and ankles, connected by the waving string of chain. The ripple of each link moving in sync was mesmerizing, reminding Stratt of Grundschule where she’d been quite the “entzückend” jump-rope champion. That had been shortly before she’d picked up a fight with an older boy over him pulling her hair; she’d won, too, with a lovely kick to his genitals.
Eva Stratt had always been a little feisty beyond her stubbornness, even now as she would have no one to tell of her childhood moments of headstrong will. Not like it mattered, really, in the face of humanity’s possible extinction.
No historian would bother to write down how her favorite animal had been tigers, decided at the age of four. No one would care that her opa had been the one to teach her how to ride a bike, had gotten her to bed most nights when her vater would “work” late into the night with another woman. Her mutter would at least seem happy to know she’d kept her rosary in her desk at Kazakhstan, right next to her favorite hand lotion, Grace’s packs of sour skittles, and other things she loved dearly. Her oma would’ve loved Grace, would’ve been the one to beg that she consider convincing the tollpatschiger Amerikaner to stay close as she grew old.
“Eva Stratt.”
She, in question, looked to see two male guards now at her cell door. Hm.
“Il est temps pour l'examen medical.” The gruffer of the two spoke with finality, already unamused from dealing with her, no doubt. It was a familiar disgust, something that must’ve made the two men wish they could hit her over the head. Violence was surely on her horizon.
She recalled how Grace had frantically reminded her that she had rights, no matter which country got her first.
(“Lawyers! You ought to have hundreds, Stratt! Please, you can’t give up now!”)
The director had half the heart to consider scoffing at how desperate her second-in-command had been, as if he was clueless to her demise. He himself had asked what she’d planned to do for the next twenty or so years. Rolling her eyes now at the thought of his teary baby blues as Carl had hauled him away would serve no one, especially not while Stratt had two-armed guards before her. She was not giving up, but she was not stupid.
“Ce n'est pas optionnel.”
This was not ideal. Things were about to get much worse if this medical exam required a blood test. Opting out was not on the table, and Stratt was not in the mood to be sedated. She did not trust a single soul who would be examining her.
So, she was moving, acutely aware of the combined bodily strength just behind her as they instructed her through the facility. With every passing door, with every set of bars that allowed hands to wander, the multitudes of yelling and screaming joined into a migraine-inducing cacophony. Many were hungry to eat her up and spit her out for the next willing tormentor, whether they held government power or had committed a life-sentencing crime. She never had been great at introducing herself to her new neighbors. Her neck begged for relief from the consistent scratching. Her head pounded from the noise. Her heart was swimming in newfound concern at the approaching medical evaluation.
Eva Stratt would not go down with a fight, even if that meant denying the physician quick answers that would speed up the process. They must be eager to have her examined as quickly as possible to not withhold legal action. Why deny the hungry wolves their fill of the successful kill?
She had known these moments of discomfort and violation would come. The ESA, in coordination with the United Nations, had made it astonishingly clear upon choosing her that if she accepted (which was really no option at all, in retrospect), there was no going back. Not only had she taken the blade, but she had wreaked havoc for millions in the names of those they all would never meet. Herself included. Stratt knew part of being the one to wave the knife meant cutting her own hands.
Stratt found herself being shoved into a sterilized room, each surface carefully bolted down or nailed to the walls. A female doctor with two nurses -both appearing to be young, a man and a woman- flanked the physician at her sides, the three sets of eyes analyzing every breath.
It was time for her own personal hell to burn her alive.
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“Tu comprends l'importance de cette prise de sang?”
“…Oui.”
What a profoundly insulting question, she found herself thinking.
A different panel and prick of her finger had already been done to check for disease. Stratt was sure her recorded history of endometriosis was in there, that her tubes had been tied a long time ago on top of that; no records of STDs, a surety in the printed ‘LEDIG’ to signal she was unwed- nothing to raise concerns. She doubted they’d give much care to her obvious rosacea, to various doctors she had seen in Germany for her severe ovarian suffering. It was a fleeting thought of annoyance at the expensive serum she’d been forced to leave behind in Baikonur; a glance at herself from the cell’s metal bed frame had told enough of a flare-up. No written history of diabetes, no major surgeries ever conducted, no concerns for cardiac emergencies anytime soon.
Would they try to keep her alive in that last situation? Stratt rolled the possibilities around in her mind as she continued to ignore the doctor beyond her clipped “yes”. This practitioner must be able to read German. Or perhaps everything was in English for this copy of her medical history? Stratt did not care. Being bilingual or multilingual in any country other than the United States was not praiseworthy. She would know.
They were testing more than they would for the average convict. Sure, there had been no official trial to date, but she’d been guilty for years now. A trial would merely be for show, and each person in this room knew it. She doubted these extensive examinations were to encourage the medical staff to touch the chilled and aging skin of Mother Nature's forsaken daughter.
There was no fanfare at the needle plunging deep into her flesh. Dare she admit that the insertion had even hurt a smidge? Beyond the pain, this doctor must have been well seasoned for her duties: taking blood from guilty sacks-of-shit who were dehydrated and unwilling to speak. Her duo in armed anger stared her down from their places guarding the door, ready to tackle and absolutely throttle her if she dared to do anything. The two nurses spoke in science she was too tired to catch, many of the exchanged pieces containing numbers and information from her assumed ‘file’.
As much as she preferred to pretend a lack of sleep was nothing on her psyche, the current circumstances were making that falsehood harder to believe. Sleeping would be the least of her private fears come a few weeks from now.
As one of the nurses took charge of monitoring her stabbed forearm, the doctor stood before her, sizing her up as she sat stiffly on the exam table.
“Neutre?”
Her face must have given away that she was unamused.
It’s not as if only 12% of the population was anything other than Neutral. Statistically, the odds were in favor of calling her a Neutral. By American acronyms, her CATCH (Classified Attachment and Threat Coordination Hierarchy; what a mouthful) -which was located somewhere in her brain close to her nervous system’s defense responses- contained the “Average” proteins predominantly. There were smaller pools of the other two proteins, the “Career” and “Flourish” proteins, if she were going by the slang words for all three. Doctor Grace would have been beyond eager to explain the bells and whistles of the biology behind it all. She knew only what she must.
Quite frankly, this whole process was a ruckus. Stratt was starting to wish she had a say, as if she were the Director still in this suffocating room. The lack of recent caffeine was starting to rear its effects, with how her head began to pound once more, even with the loud noises being blocked by the heavy door of this room. All the doors protecting the valuable people -doctors, nurses, police, military- in this building must be heavy.
Without a recent stimulant to shock her system, Stratt felt her brain fog returning. This was even less ideal. However, nothing was left but to suck it up.
…But she didn’t want to suck it up anymore. Her ankles were sore from how tightly the restraints hugged her bones. Her left wrist was starting to blister from the repeated assault of the metal. Her lower ribs ached from where she’d been roughly slammed upon being taken into custody. Her big toe on her right foot still hurt from where she’d jammed it upon stumbling on the way here. Her hair was becoming disgustingly greasy and tangled. Her eyes stung from refusing to sleep within the last day or so. Her heart was heavy at the thought of her crew whom she’d sent to die.
Her mind was clouded by thoughts of- of-
“Eva Stratt?”
She glanced up through burdened eyelashes. The doctor had a sudden look of hysteria upon her face. Stratt peered to her left. The nurses stood close to a bolted countertop, the man repeatedly flicking a plastic vial holding her blood and some other substance (probably an agent for faster results), while the feminine nurse frantically glanced between a monitor and her … file. Stratt felt her fingers grip the edge of the table before she could school the action. It took a physical effort to stop her shoulders from hiking up high to her ears.
That behavior was supposed to have been curbed. It had been for close to two decades now.
Eva Stratt could suddenly feel herself returning to that moment, the night of finalizing her information for her application to the ESA. She returned to the bus stop she’d stood in during the pouring rain, having come straight from a night spent in her first apartment. That night had been viciously cold to boot when she’d exchanged bits of her recently inherited familial wealth for those documents. The transaction had been quick, as her singular university friend of the time had insisted it would be. The forged documents had given her the power to mail the perfectly layered application to the ESOC office in Darmstadt. Those documents had been the sole reason she’d been able to bury the truth on a larger scale as the years passed. By the time she was the ESA’s choice to lead Project Hail Mary, she was one of the most relentless and well-respected administrators (and Neutrals) the agency had ever seen.
From her twenties to her now mid-forties, she’d been unstoppable.
Such a shame it was never what it had been made to be. Those nearly twenty years had not been without pain when her mind had wrestled against the suppression. Too many times, she’d claimed her menstrual cycle was causing problems when really, it was the suppressing of her ingrained biology that was causing her to be short of breath and experience frightening heart palpitations on her bathroom floor. Her late twenties had been filled with horrifying, silent suffering. She’d swallowed it all down with illegal medications that made the issues disappear (to the naked eye). Evenings spent erasing nervous habits, mornings that had been wasted on unhappy tears, afternoons as an early ESOC employee had served as the grounds for shaping herself into what she should have always been.
Caffeine had been a lifeline in a world of increasing brain fog, one of the symptoms of keeping it all locked away. The limited studies on such a barbaric and unthinkable circumstance called it “Suppression Sickness”. She’d read from those papers to know that if she was fortunate, perhaps her own hardwired and heavily damaged system would kill her before any government would. She’d been right on time with that path… until now.
Stratt felt no remorse at seeing the doctor shakily call for various authorities on her two-way radio. Her pattern recognition was beyond exceptional to see this was about to be a huge mess for everyone involved, herself included. The rising panic in every syllable was grating to her ears.
Those days when she’d felt a similar anxiety were long behind her. There had been a few times she’d almost called home when the medications made things delirious. The times she’d wept over her landline, crazed from the buzzing of an offline phone. The worst had been when she’d- hm.
This time, when the two guards came to keep her in check, they merely took hold of the chains connecting her wrist and ankle cuffs. There was an evident lack of the rough treatment from before. More bastards in white coats rushed through the heavy door, and with them, other high-clearance personnel.
The doctor Stratt had been given the honor of panicking and sending into a frenzy signaled for the new medical staff to flock to her nurses. Seeing the warden shortly join the ensemble a few minutes later brought everyone’s worst nightmare to life. The warden was an older gentleman who’d been put together at his entrance, but he too succumbed to the shared dread. Suddenly many pairs of eyes glared at her, as if changing reality required a bit of shared eye-to-eye intimacy.
The damage was done, and no falsified documents were going to bandage this up. Stratt was almost twenty years past due for her quadrennial Classification Blood Paneling. The sharp plastic threads of her uniform collar scratched just right to where she could feel blood beginning to ooze.
“Le Directeur est un petite! Une Petite!”
And it was true. Eva Stratt was the world’s whipping boy, and the world’s biggest liar. Eva Stratt was a Little.