Chapter Text
Eva's day started with the bleep of her alarm or with a shaking flight from bed to escape the menacing numbers that warped and walloped behind her eyes as she slept.
The climate projections, the budget numbers, the council nose count and vote count numbers, the crop plans the yield rates the sea coast measurements, the astrophage fermentation numbers, the Gansu personnel roster, the astronaut volunteer profiles, the estimates about moving modern infrastructure like power lines and eventually train lines under ground, or sheltering rail lines in order to keep freight moving when the weather got worse, the glaciation receded map projections, the most recent round of whining from the most recent budget begging sessions, the most recent complaints about how Grace had taken over the joint science team on the most tenuous of credentials, Grace's latest proposals for how to slow or abate the deep freeze. They all marched around her head as she slept, sometimes subconsciously but more often demanding her attention. Haranguing her, pushing her to debate her way through the reasoning and making her try to bring her force of will to solve them. Sometimes with dream logic she would think they had, if we just do this or that, if I just concentrate and then will it to be so, and she'd wake in excitement only to realize that it had been fantasy, based on nothing from the real world.
Those mornings were almost worse than the nightmares, but when the nightmares came they also sat heavily. She'd dream that it had all already come to pass, the deep dark freeze, that she hadn't been fast enough. That she'd gone away to a mandatory report and grovel session at the UN assembly and come back to find the ship gone, exploded in an astrophage accident while her back was turned, and no one would tell her if grace had been there, while she tried desperately and nonsensically to remember if he'd been with her in New York, how could she have forgotten if Grace was with her or not? And if he hadn't been, could he really be gone? and that had eclipsed even the realization that all their work was lost. After she started having that dream, she no longer left the ship without Grace by her side and started ordering backup fabrication and backup documentation to be kept at the land side duplicate work site they were developing on the steppe near the Cosmodrome for everything besides the astrophage work itself, so that there was a fallback position if something went wrong at sea.
Grace didn't understand why she took him everywhere, that much was evident in his bewildered expression the first few times she plucked him up and dragged him along, but he was compliant about it. Amused, even, and good company on the long flights, an affable and surprisingly confident ice breaker in difficult meetings once he realized that he was allowed to speak up. He referred to himself as her pet scientist and her scientific translator, and she was happy enough to let him live with those labels rather than have him realize that she had fallen prey to what was certainly superstitious paranoia.
Eva was afraid that she had cursed him somehow by bringing him onto the project and that if she left him unattended somewhere she couldn't get to quickly enough, the terrible fate that dogged them would come and snatch him away, as a specific sacrifice. She knew that this was a horrifically irrational line of thought, that would Grace himself look at her with the same pitying alarm as he displayed when a senator from the American congressional science committee session they'd attended had asked if there was a way to simply scrape the astrophage off the sun. The Senator had used the phrase giant heat proof squeegee and Ryland had made a noise like someone had stepped on his foot before exclaiming that no, they couldn't do anything to the surface of the sun. Her ridiculous certainty that her general proximity to Ryland was the only thing keeping him from a terrible end was probably, definitely in the giant heat proof sun squeegee area of unreasoning, but she hadn't been able to shake the feeling.
She hadn't been sleeping well, she knew that was part of the piercing nature of her worries. The thoughts on top of worries on top of paranoia grounded in the imminent disasters had compounded and she hadn't been sleeping well. Not since she'd taken on the mantle of director. Not since she was read in on the Petrova Situation. So often it was this stress sleep, not deep enough to escape and relax for very long before her exhausted brain went back to gnawing and gnawing on the problems of the day and the new sets of worst case scenario reports and food and budget shortfalls the UN Petrova Oversight Committee expected her to review, comment on, disprove, commit to preventing. Sometimes her sleeping brain invented reports that didn't exist just to confuse her, and project proposals from Grace that he hadn't come up with in real life. Sometimes she asked him to clarify his ideas as if they'd really discussed it, and sometimes he'd tell her that he hadn't come up with that but that it was worth looking into and other times he'd just give her one of his confused looks and shrug. He wasn't getting an awful lot of sleep either, and it was awfully easy to accidentally suggest he'd said something interesting or unlikely that he'd later forgotten about.
The lack of his sleep was partly her fault, but she didn't know what to do about it. He'd become a vital part of her morning routine.
Step one was wake up shivering with adrenaline and try to let go of that morning's stress dream. Pace the small but graciously appointed director's cabin while shaking off the chill and reminding herself what was done and undone, reasoning out fact from fear. Calm down enough to stand the sensation of water falling on her skin and shower, and then scrub the bitter taste of adrenaline from her mouth.
Get dressed. Check emails and memos while losing ground on the compartmentalization of fact, fear, and rage. Sort the list of needed replies in order of urgency, to do later when she was sufficiently composed.
Take her tablet and walk a brisk lap of the task force housing decks to burn off her nervous energy and ground herself in the list of concrete tasks for the day.
Go to Ryland's door and knock as a courtesy before letting herself in. Clear the discarded shirt and sweater from his desk chair and move it to his bedside before waking him and showing him the models and projection that were plaguing her most that morning. Then he would tell her in a groggy voice about why the math was bad or why the science wasn't solid or some reason that the fabrication shortfall wouldn't matter or why nothing she showed him really meant that they were all going to be dead in 10 years or less. He'd stumble over some of the subjects and look a little pale and grave himself at times but then he'd rally and smile and list off things to look into and double check. Things she hadn't considered yet, or at least remind her that none this was guaranteed until it actually happened.
Sometimes he'd take her stylus and make teacherly corrections on the screen, or doodle little emoji faces rolling their eyes and sticking out their tongue to emphasize his dismissals and to make her smile and shake her head. Sometimes he'd take her hand and wait until she looked up from the screen and just smile at her with this serene assurance that somehow made her believe that she was still keeping pace with it all.
"We're working on it," he'd say, "We just need to keep working on it."
After that the day would feel more real and the tasks more like a normal itinerary instead of an impossible scaffolding balanced on thin air. Then she would leave Grace to get dressed and go have breakfast while she sought coffee to compensate for the adrenaline letdown and probably then walked through the first conference call of the day, smooth and unruffled, with a firm grip on her patience.
Grace didn't seem to be bothered by her morning visits. It had happened almost accidentally the first few times, as she came to collect him to walk him to the lab in the mornings. His sense of direction was not his strongest suit and the Gansu was a warren of dead ends and up or down stairs between decks that defied logic so she hadn't minded walking him in those early days. Their quarters were on the same corridor after all, it was just easier. Plus he was more relaxed with her, and nervous as a cat with anyone else besides Carl. Who had plenty of more pressing tasks as head of security.
She was easier with him as well, she'd found, and the day went more smoothly if they touched base before setting out, not least because she knew his itinerary better than he did in those days. But he'd taken a while to adjust to the timezone on the Gansu, which meant that half the time he wasn't up yet when she showed up for their arranged meet time, and then it was easy enough to go over some things on her tablet with him while he was getting ready. Before long it became a routine, and a sanity preserving one.
Only as the size of her responsibility and her task list grew and grew, her start times drifted earlier and earlier. She knew that she was dragging Grace's start time earlier as well, and that he needed his sleep to function and also that most people had some kind of hard limit on stress tolerance and patience that she would find eventually. Though for man who'd made half his reputation with his temper, he'd been more forgiving and flexible than most she'd dealt with. And he did have breaks from her, sometimes because sometimes her international meeting schedule meant that the morning routine was abandoned, and sometimes she was exhausted enough to sleep all the way to her alarm, or past it.
But the days that began with these conversations, her and Grace bent over her tablet in the light of his bedside lamp, while he broke down the issues into smaller pieces and more cohesive reasoning nearly always made the rest of the day go better, even if she could only spend 10 minutes with him before having to move on. This helped the project over all, and since he didn't seem to mind too much, she didn't try very hard to break the habit.
Which meant, of course, that when a disruption did come, the results were all the more tectonic.