Archive of Our Own

Less than an hour after the explosion, Stratt had a file with her name on it and a list of choices. On a notepad she'd been working on ever since the shock of the disaster wore off, notes and ideas were written in careful order.

None of them were Dr. Grace's, because she had not let herself write his name down. It was not superstition, nor a refusal to see his value. Stratt did not believe in pretending to ignore a fact to keep it from becoming true. In truth, leaving his name off the list of potential solutions was closer to the method of triage - you didn't spend your best option first, you spent your worst ones, crossed them off the list when you realized they wouldn't be good enough, going one by one so that when you arrived at the last name on the list, you'd know, with total certainty, that it was the only one left standing. That it was the correct choice.

And so, Dr. Grace's name was not on the list.

There were other names first, other ideas. There always were.

As she considered all the factors, everything at play in the mess the Project had come, she knew the choices she had to choose from were few.

1. Launch as scheduled - cross-train Yao and Ilyukhina into the vacated roles.

2. Delay launch - open a global call for qualified replacements.

3. Final option.

She looked at her finalized list of potential options for a long time. She ignored the last option, forcing herself to focus on the two above it, on the specific, careful search for someone, anyone, who wasn't the man currently sitting in a room down the hall, grieving the devastating loss of two colleagues and friends.

She picked up the pad and began working down the list from the top, in order, the way she worked through everything: methodically and without hope, because hope was something she'd long since learned not to trust with a decision this size.

01Launch as scheduled - cross-train Yao and Ilyukhina into the vacated roles.
02Delay launch - open a global call for qualified replacements.
03Final option.

The decision took an hour and two phone calls. Yao and Ilyukhina were already competent in each other's disciplines - both from the required cross-training for the bare basics of each crew role, and from constant exposure to the other's tasks during training exercises.

She briefed them together. Neither flinched when she broke the news that there would not be a replacement for DuBois and Shapiro. They knew what was at stake - they couldn't miss the orbitial window for the launch, and training a new science officer required far too much time. Time they didn't have.

Ilyukhina asked one question - was the ship's onboard system advanced enough to carry the analytical load DuBois or Shapiro would have, well enough to make up for what she and Yao didn't - and Stratt said yes, because the honest answer, probably, at least in the ways that could be anticipated when it came to a mission that was the first of its kind, would not have given either of them much confidence, and she needed them to get on the Hail Mary believing in their chances. The mission would be doomed from the start if they didn't have the confidence in their own and the Hail Mary's abilities to fill the gap DuBois and Shapiro left behind.

With the decision made, the remaining time before the launch was dedicated to extensive last-minute training on the science officer's role.

Even with the combined intelligence of Ilyukhina and Yao, Stratt knew the arrangement was inadequate. Inadequate was not the same as impossible, but she couldn't help but doubt that she was making the right decision.

The launch went cleanly, on the date it was planned for.

Stratt watched it with her arms crossed, Dr. Grace nervously rocking back and forth on his toes beside her as he craned his head back, and she permitted herself a few short seconds of something that was almost but not quite relief before returning to the next fire demanding her attention.

The Hail Mary mission would be a long one. And if they wanted any chance of surviving long enough for the beetles to return and the astrophage problem to be fixed before irreparable damage was done to their planet, they would have to make some difficult choices - starting now.

WAIT TO HEAR FROM THE HAIL MARY →

The years did what years do.

A decade passed.

Two.

Extensive studies had been done on how much food and life-sustaining material to send on the Hail Mary. It could be planned, to the day, how long those rations would last if two crew members were following the dietary plans set by NASA. How long if it was just one.

The date of food running out for two crew members passed.

And then the date for one.

The years went on and on, and throughout it all, the beetles never came home. All the while, the astrophage problem grew worse and worse.

The years went on and on, and the Hail Mary was never heard from again. Whatever happened to Yao and Ilyukhina - whether they reached Tau Ceti, whether they found anything, whether the silence was distance or death - Earth would never know. Did it make a difference?

Millions died in the years the silence lasted. Billions more stood next in line.

Stratt had sent two capable people into the dark, fully trained, fully willing, and forced nothing from either of them. They had been the most capable in their fields, the most prepared any human could have been for the mission. She had thought it would be enough.

Now a third of the world's population had died. The rest were simply waiting for their turn.

Stratt had made a gamble - and she had lost.

← RETURN TO THE LIST

They had to start from scratch.

Every remaining secondary-lab researcher, every allied-nation biologist who still had a pulse and a passable security clearance, was to be pulled, screened, and presented within seventy-two hours. She made call after call, and burned favors she had been saving for years. She did not care.

Three days later the candidates arrived. They were brilliant, each one a potential candidate for the title of being at the top of their field. Some of them had written papers that made Grace's look like a middle-school science fair project. Stratt sat through the interviews herself.

The vetting took four months. Psychological screening alone ran six weeks per candidate. Medical testing eliminated eleven of the fourteen finalists outright. Background investigation eliminated two more.

The fourteenth candidate - a marine biochemist from a research station in Australia, who had the gene, whose psych profile was clean, who was willing to intentionally go on a mission with no return - was finally approved as "ready" on a Tuesday, almost exactly half a year after the explosion.

On the following Wednesday, the lead researcher from the climate modeling division asked for four minutes of Stratt's time. The man didn't offer her a chair - and that was the kind of detail that told you how bad news was about to be before anyone said a single word.

He told her the number they could expect this delay to result in. The increase in death toll, in global cooling, in permanent damage that could not be undone. The point of no return that their planet was rapidly approaching.

Stratt did not ask him to repeat it.

Millions of lives, spent on six months of diligence. Diligence had a price, and Stratt had, for the first time in the project's history, paid it in full and gotten nothing back. She had saved no one. She had only waited, ignoring the clear choice that had been in front of her eyes all along, and the waiting had a price, and the price had already been paid by innocent people who did not yet know that they would be paying.

← RETURN TO THE LIST

The third line on the pad still said what she'd written under it an hour ago: 3. Final option.

She had not filled it in with any details. She told herself that was for the same reason she'd left his name off the list to begin with, the same triage logic that made her spend the worst options first. But an hour was not a long time to spend not writing four letters, and she was old enough at this job to know when she was lying to herself about the reason for a delay.

She didn't want to write down the name that belonged next to the words Final option.

She ran the first two again anyway. Not because she needed to. Because the list demanded it, and she had never once let herself skip a step because she already knew the ending.

Yao and Ilyukhina, cross-trained. She didn't need six months to know how that one ended - she needed about four seconds, the length of time it took to picture the two of them alone at the far edge of the solar system, running procedures they'd absorbed under pressure instead of lived with for years. Competent. Willing. Not enough, and she knew it the way she knew her own handwriting, without having to check. It was a gamble dressed as a plan, and she did not have the right to spend two lives on a gamble when a surer thing was sitting down the hall in a room she hadn't let herself walk back into yet.

A global call. She didn't need a miracle candidate to exist yet to know what a real vetting process would cost in terms of time. She had run search committees before. She knew what four months of screening looked like stacked against a countdown that did not pause for diligence. Someone in climate modeling would eventually put a number on it, and the number would be worse than anything she was imagining right now, because it always was. Delaying the launch held a price they couldn't afford to pay.

Both options were crossed out in her head before her pen ever touched them on the page.

Which just left option three.

She looked at Final option for a long time. Long enough that the fluorescent light over the desk clicked off twice from her stillness, and somewhere down the corridor a door opened and closed, and neither sound reached her as anything but background static to the one fact she had been declining to write down since the moment she'd been briefed on the reality of the situation in the aftermath of the disaster.

She knew what was in that room down the hall. Blanket around his shoulders. Hands loose between his knees. A man who had spent years being useful to this project specifically because no one had ever asked him to be indispensable to it - who had been permitted, this whole time, to matter without being required.

A man who would never agree to a suicide mission that wasn't even guaranteed success.

That door was closing. It had been closing since before she'd finished crossing the grass this morning, and she had simply spent the last hour pretending the door was still open, pretending that she still had time, because pretending cost her nothing and the alternative cost her a great deal.

But Stratt couldn't pretend anymore.

She thought, with the flat clarity she reserved for facts she didn't want but was forced to accept: he has the gene. He has the years of proximity to the work that no crash course could replicate. He is, whether either of them likes it, the only name on this list that survives contact with the timeline.

She thought about the six people she'd already spent - trained, screened, two of them lost that morning, two more fated to die at their own hand alone in the stars - and understood, with something that was not quite guilt yet because guilt required her to stop moving and she had not stopped moving, that she was about to spend one more.

She picked up the pen.

She did not let herself hesitate over the letters the way she'd hesitated over the hour. She wrote it the way she wrote everything that mattered - fast, legible, final, no space left to talk herself back out of it.

Grace, Ryland.

She crossed out the other options, circled the final one, and then set the pen down. She did not look at the name again. After a long moment, she rose, gathering her papers and steeling herself for what would come next.

She had a meeting to attend.