Chapter Text
It's been nine months, living on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean. Ryland's started to settle in a bit, by this point.
Humans are nothing if not adaptable.
He has a routine now. He has a cabin that's grown familiar, a mess hall he knows the right times to hit. His team are working well together, narrowed down to those most suitable and well-placed; with their roles established, they're making good progress as a team. They function by the highs and lows of breakthroughs and setbacks, challenges and successes.
It's almost like a regular job, some days. If he puts his blinders on and focusses on the work, on the grunt of day to day project management, Ryland can almost ignore the ultimate deadline they're fighting to meet.
There are worse places to be right now. It's an academic bubble of sorts, isolated tenfold on a military ship.
And they're on to something.
It's a silent, nerve wracking corridor, the sombre drip of people filing into a conference room already finished.
They're in there now, waiting, wondering what on earth the titleless event quietly added to their outlook calendars could be about.
Paused outside, Eva eyes the nervous form of Grace in front of her. One hand clutches a stack of notebooks and cords to his chest, the other holds a laptop by his side like an afterthought. He's staring at the door, his eyes flickering in thought.
“Are you ready?”
He glances sideways at the prompt, setting his jaw as he looks back; his heart’s beating too quickly in his chest, and he can feel the tug of panic at his throat. But he’s keeping them at bay, for now.
This is big.
After a hesitation he nods, taking a short breath.
“Ready."
Eva mirrors the motion, relieved. He sounds hoarse in it, too tense to form the word properly. But he's focussed all the same, the forced sense of determination settling in his frame.
This is exciting.
Her lips jump with a smile, moving to open the door for him.
“Good.”
Eva takes the lead, to begin. She organises the chatter, fielding questions and dismissing complaints. She makes room for Ryland to set up his slides, to prepare himself.
It's a distracted room. Everyone needs to grab Stratt for various issues of their own; she's a hard person to catch, and a free moment can't be passed up. So whilst they try and get answers to their own logistical problems, Ryland keeps his eyes low and repeats scripted points in his head, tries to release the anxiety clamping at his lungs.
They don't know yet.
He looks around, scanning the attendees. It's only the heads of departments right now, an amalgam of science and engineering personell. The rest of the people affected will be working as usual, quietly and diligently, unaware.
His own group will be waiting just as anxiously as he is, waiting for the response to this.
They're the only ones who know about the proposal, besides him and Stratt.
The room's set up with a horseshoe of desks pushed together. Lokken's here, sitting patiently on one arm of the arch. There's a nameless physicist talking to Stratt at the front, Shapiro standing beside them, trying to interject. Xi's sat on a corner, looking confused as to why he's here, as do the six astronauts spanning the back curve of the horseshoe.
Ryland skips his attention over them quickly, uncomfortable.
Dimitri's on the other side. Ryland lands on him with relief, only to find him already watching, something keen and solid in the look. He tips his head at him, and Ryland ducks away.
He doesn't think this is going to be particularly popular, to those who've spent the last year engineering the Hail Mary.
Elsewise, he recognises the rest of the room largely by face only. It's a collection of relevant department leads, all talking amongst themselves, ignoring Ryland completely.
"Everyone, please."
Addressing the room, Stratt motions with her hands for people to sit, and slowly the empty gaps in the desks start to fill.
In his anxiety, Ryland snags on the set-up. It reminds him of his classroom, of the teacher training courses he remembers having to slog through. A horseshoe arrangement was a useful tool to encourage group discussion, to ensure a clear line of sight to all participants.
“Thank you for coming," Eva starts, generic, giving nothing away, "and apologies for the short notice. We are here to discuss a significant development in the project."
Ryland's stomach twists with the introduction, a horrifying surge of nausea rising. He breathes evenly, staring at the floor, trying to force it away. His arms cross over his chest, hiding the fine thrill of shaking he can feel starting in his hands.
Across the room, Dimitri notices the action. He sits up straighter in his chair, elbows coming to the table.
It's been a long time, since Grace was nervous to present.
Something's happening, here.
"Dr. Grace and his team have been working on sequencing the genetic material of Astrophage," Eva continues, steady and serious. "They have been successful in their attempts, and the conclusions they've reached offer some promising pathways for us going forwards. So- Dr. Grace," she says then, gesturing to him. "Over to you, I think."
Still away off to the side, Ryland looks up, and he holds her gaze for a moment.
This is big.
He steps into focus, lifting a hand briefly in greeting to the room. He's met with a neutral scatter of faces staring back, and he clears his throat, looking to the screen behind him.
In weak, washed out light is his title slide - an SEM micrograph of an Astrophage cell. It looms on the slide a pristine sphere, artificially coloured to highlight the strange, quilted pattern of the surface.
"Right," he says, collecting himself. "So- quick recap of the last few months," he begins, nodding to himself as he finds his footing. "On the wet lab side of things, we’ve developed protocols for extracting and amplifying Astrophage DNA. It's made of the same fundamental building blocks as our own, and we've been able to adapt this prep for both first-generation and high-throughput sequencing with a good rate of success."
He pauses: this in itself is a miracle of skilled biochemistry and agonising troubleshooting. He's met with blank, empty silence however, one that forces him to hide a wince. He's reassured that the biologists in the room look interested, at least; every one else, far less so.
"To handle that second generation data," he continues, resigning himself to the disinterest, "we’ve built an analysis pipeline to process the outputs, and a reference database to compare reads against. Basically," he tries to sum up, looking at the still-unimpressed expressions of the physicists and engineers in the room, "we’ve replicated earth-based sequencing pathways, making them suitable for Astrophage."
It's the culmination of months of hard labour - hours of trial and error, the intense focus of careful repetition and frustrating problem solving. It's a melding of human and alien chemistry, an entirely new programming approach to make sense of the data.
A whole team of specialists working near-round the clock, to produce this workflow.
All met with silence.
Ryland looks around the room to the faces staring up at him, feeling remarkably like he's back in the mundane slog of university academia again; he forgets, that it's often like this.
Months and months of brilliant, finely-tuned developments, distilled down to a sentence or two that sinks into a room with tepid interest.
It almost works to ground him. This is familiar, he thinks wryly. This is research.
He clears his throat, clicking to the next slide. It’s a diagram of an unrelated region in fungal DNA, borrowed from an online textbook.
"On earth, we largely use these sequencing approaches for species identification. They amplify a short, non-coding target region of the DNA, enough to define the species and infer phylogenies, but not a lot else. We've assigned a similar barcoding region in Astrophage, but it's not particularly useful for us by itself - all Astrophage are genetically identical. We know what it is."
He clicks again. A Circos plot spans the screen, a large, colourful circle of segments and connections, bright and cohesive. Ryland grins at it, pleased to see the tidy figure in action.
"The important part is that we figured out a protocol to sequence it. Now we can start trying to put together its genome. This is trickier," he explains, holding back the urge to explain the technical aspects they've been sunk into for the last few weeks. "You sequence a lot of small segments, and stitch them all together," he sums up instead. "We've had some success, and we've patched together what we can. Enough, at least, to find a region we're interested in."
Another click. The colourful circle becomes a simpler, cleaner diagram, zooming in on a segment within it.
"We've identified a coding region for a photoreceptive protein in the cell membrane. The photoreceptor's the start of the downstream energy production. It's where photons are absorbed, and IR photons are emitted."
He clicks, and the SEM image pops up again. This time, the neat array of protein units embedded in the membrane are especially highlighted, the image bordered with further angles and colourings to pick them out.
"This is familiar to us," Ryland continues, gaining momentum now. "Plants absorb photons, as do cones and rods in our eyes. We have a background here, to work from."
He takes a breath, looking briefly around the room again, trying to judge the reception. There's still a general lack of interest in the air, largely from the faces he doesn't recognise.
There's movement, on Dimitri's side of the room though. Ryland watches as he sits back in his chair, arms crossing over his chest as he thinks. There's a small, sharp sort of grin on his face.
Ryland plants himself more firmly.
"Photoreceptors are delicate," he carries on, emphatic. "They're proteins, for one, and we know a lot about what makes those tick. Their production will be similar in Astrophage to other eukaryotes - we already know they have the organelles for transcription regulation, same as us. It's DNA, RNA, ribosomes - things we know how to manipulate."
Getting a sudden kick of nerves as the groundwork builds, Ryland glances to Eva then. She looks back, unreadable, and he carries on.
"If we stopped that photoreceptor working," he says, turning to the room again, "we stop Astrophage making energy. We stop it harvesting light, and it stops reproducing."
Finally, it has an effect. The room turns suddenly intense, a metaphorical leaning forwards in the air. A wave of surprise passes around, a ripple of muttered reaction. Ryland's lip quirks, pleased to see it.
"Even if we could knock down the efficiency of Astrophage absorbing these photons," he carries on, determined not to lose the attention, "we could slow their population growth, buy ourselves more time."
It's gone silent again now, but a different kind - it's silence born by shock, by uncertainty. Someone makes a motion to interrupt, but Ryland clicks the slide, continuing on over him.
"We've found where the protein is encoded," he says firmly. "It's conserved - there's no variation between cells. It has start codons and stop codons, short promoter regions. These are all things we're familiar with, things we know how to study. How to target."
From her seat to the side of the room, Eva eyes the tidy diagram on the screen, a neat, horizontal plot labelled with unfamiliar abbreviations. She's seen it before, when Grace first presented this to her.
It's a singular, dizzying rush, to consider the pivot they could be making here.
"We don't know the best route we could target it with yet," Ryland continues, clicking to a patchwork of different diagrams put together. "Whether we try and manipulate the genes themselves," he says, pointing to a cell with a dark clump of something in the middle of it, "or we disrupt transcription somehow, cause the protein to misfold," he says, pointing to another, this one with a lot of wiggling lines and floating segments. "Elsewise," he shrugs, turning to the room, "we know there are pathogens that target photoreceptors. Prions, for one. Maybe we hijack those, use them to target Astrophage."
Encouraged though he had been by the increased interest, Ryland's confidence starts to wane as the unhappier portions of the audience begin to gain ground. A low-level whispering is starting up now, muttered conversations between engineers with narrowed eyes, sharply gesturing hands.
"The point is-" he tries, turning the clicker over nervously in his hand, "we have the foundations we need to make a deterrent, of sorts. Something we could disperse in Venus’ atmosphere," he suggests, starting to wish he'd nailed down some firmer details to offer here. "Something that could neutralise Astrophage, stop it from breeding. Eventually the populations would die off," he says, shooting another brief look at Eva before he adds, "and we could avoid launching all together."
It's a ringing silence, this time. Profound shock. Ryland stands in the centre in it, another swell of nausea pitching at his stomach.
"You want to cancel the launch?"
It's Xi who asks it - something Ryland's grateful for. He sounds confused, but there's no anger in his question.
"Not right away," Ryland hurries to dismiss, sensing the room prickle with the finality of the idea. "We'd continue on as we are," he says, "but the hope would be that we find a biological solution, before we reach the point of launch."
As it sinks in, there's an unavoidable drifting of heads towards the back of the room, to the desks where the astronauts sit. Ryland can't help but follow the attention, startled to find them staring back at him, wide-eyed.
Again, he has to look away.
“But we still need Astrophage as fuel,” Dr. Lokken says then, also calm, her pen paused above her notes. Ryland's attention lands on her with another surge of gratefulness. "Even if we sent something to Venus, that would be Astrophage powered as well, no?"
“Yes," he replies, hoping this lack of escalation holds out. "Which is why the engineering departments are here," he says, nodding to Xi. "It would- we would need to design-”
“You want this concurrent with the Hail Mary?"
That's not calm. It's spoken harshly by an engineer Ryland doesn't recognise, beyond the fact that he'd tried to interrupt him earlier.
The man continues, unbothered by the entire room turning to stare at him.
"You want a whole new system developed?" he pushes, his voice belaying his scorn for the idea. "For some biological whim you haven't even formed yet?"
From her seat off to the side, Eva's eyes narrow at the tone: it's not the first time she's had to fight back an eye roll, dealing with him. Dr. Aled Pritchard was a world-renowned expert in aerospace engineering - one of NASA's best, and reluctantly useful, despite being consistently difficult to work with.
She shifts, ready to step in. But Grace continues under the push of it, holding his own.
"It would be a massive undertaking, yes-"
"This is ridiculous-" Pritchard interrupts again, undeterred. He scoffs, looking at Stratt as he gestures to Grace. "What the hell sort of meeting is this?" he demands. "You drag us halfway across this ship to listen to some idiot's wild goose chase-"
“That's enough."
It works to cut Pritchard off - he goes instantly quiet with the order, with the clear warning in Eva's voice. The room looks to her collectively, waiting, but she sits back after the fact, not speaking again.
Ryland clears his throat, trying to get them back in track.
“It’s not a goose chase," he starts again, making sure to stay steady in it, to de-escalate things as best he can. "It’s a promising avenue worth exploring," he explains. "Alongside continuing with our original plan."
"Promising," Pritchard mutters. "This is soft-science speculation," he says, talking directly to Stratt again. “You think a microbiologist-”
"Molecular biologist-" Ryland interjects dully, automatic by now.
Pritchard looks at him something sharp. From the other side of the room, Dimitri stifles a grin with the back of his hand.
"Molecular biologist," he corrects, condescending in it, turning back to Stratt. "You think he can single-handedly re-write this project?" he presses. "Undercut all of our work, this last year?”
At the suggestion, Stratt regards him openly, unflinching. She's still sitting back in her chair, her legs crossed, a tablet balanced loosely on her knee.
"I hope so, yes."
She says it calmly, though there's a steady thread of threat to it all the same. Ryland marvels at her ability to intertwine the two.
“This is not about undercutting efforts," she tells Pritchard, the rest of the room clearly addressed with it as well. "This is about the quickest way to save our world, and all the people on it," she continues. "Astrophage is a cell - if we can attack it like one, with the technology we already possess, then it is an option worth our attention.”
It seems to crowd out Pritchard's opposition, at least in the moment. He sits in quiet fury, beginning to whisper with the colleague beside him.
He can't tell if it's because of Stratt's intimidation or an actual response to his findings, but looking around the room now, Ryland thinks it might be more of an unsure energy from the rest of them, rather than directly against. He counts it as encouraging, either way.
"What about the rest of the stars?" Dr. Lokken asks then, re-focussing them, speaking as if Pritchard hadn't interrupted at all. "If we save our own, great," she says. "But every other star- bar one- is still infected."
Stratt nods. The meeting moves on readily with it, and Ryland reminds himself to deepen his breathing again.
"Another problem," she concedes, addressing Lokken without any hint of her previous coldness. "But one with less of a threatening deadline for us," she shrugs. "We will think on it, still."
Lokken nods, making a quick note. And then Eva's standing, signalling the meeting to wrap up, any further opportunity for discussion cut quickly off. Ryland's heart skips at the action.
It's over.
This had been part of the plan, he remembers now - no questions, this time around. They were to let the idea sink in, let the novelty and outrage wear off for while before they circled back to collaborate in the next few days.
"Dr. Grace will not be working singlehandedly," she starts in summary, moving to stand at the front of the room as well. "He will take on a new role as scientific lead for this project, with a team operating directly under him. Both projects run," she says clearly, "and let us all hope the Hail Mary never has to launch.”
She says it swiftly, firmly, leaving no space for argument. The room hangs silent for an awful moment, and then it erupts into noise. Ryland winces at it, a maelstrom of questions and objections and concerns, people standing, gesturing angrily. Others stay silent amongst it, thinking hard, brows furrowed in concentration.
Eva heads for the door in the chaos. Belatedly, Ryland realises he should probably be making himself scarce too.
As he unplugs his laptop and scoops up his notes, he risks another look to the astronauts at the back.
They're talking amongst themselves, their heads bent together, oddly still in their shock. At Ryland's lingering attention, however, Yáo looks up to meet his gaze.
He assesses Ryland sternly for a moment, a severity to him that Ryland can't hope to withstand. He ducks out from the intensity, grabbing the last of his things, making for the exit.
He walks a random route through the corridors, picking directions on a whim, anything to get him out of the area. His neck pricks with sweat, his heart hammering in his chest.
Either this stunning idea of his will save those astronaut's lives, or he'll come up short. If he can't deliver, he'll rip that hope away with his own hands, condemn them to their fate all the same.
Gritting his teeth, Ryland takes another corner at random.
This is big.