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"Radio signal detected. Hail Mary Beetle 003: Ringo has entered the solar system." A message crackled through the comm systems at NASA. A woman snorted awake at the table, paper stuck to her cheek.
"Huh?" She blinked drowsiness from her eyes and looked at the screen.
"Radio Signal Detected. Hail Mary Beetle 002: Paul has entered the solar system."
"Holy shit! Holy shit!" She took a deep breathe. There was protocol for this. Ones that had only started to be covered in dust when the peak time for Beetle sighting had passed. She knew it well though. Regina had been a shy girl growing up, tiny and quiet and a shamed that she liked science and rocks instead of make up and barbie dolls.
It wasn't until she was 13 years old that she felt seen. She wasn't the only one in her year at Grover Cleveland Middle to get really into science. Her science teacher was the Dr. Ryland Grace. Not that she knew it at the time. At the time he was just goofy Mr. Grace that had what everyone chalked up to a mental break down one day and fled the classroom after saying everyone was going to die from the Astrophage.
Turns out he had been the one to coin the term. He ran out that day because he wanted to save them the heartache. A man that refused to use the staff elevator went up to space to save his students. She doesn't know if she could have done what he did. Sure the science part must have been a blast. He was a molecular Biologist with a PHD! Those labs must have been heaven after having to do middle school buoyancy labs every year. He pioneered the research on Astrophage!
"Radio Signal Detected: Hail Mary Beetle 004 John has entered the solar system."
Regina stood in a room of very powerful people. A lot of world leaders. The director of NASA, Theodore 'Teddy' Sanders. He was young, fighting his way up the NASA chain to become director. It was still his first year. Lucky man, to have the Beetles' return.
People will probably call this good luck for his continued rain of the space program. Not that he's been bad at it. It's just people have become very superstitious. Anything could turn the tide of the public's conscious these days. A war breaks out and dissolves too quick to feel anything about it any more. Fear of death has stopped meaning anything for a while. Charities went in and out of fashion depending on if the sun stayed out long enough to remember its shine.
Lastly, there was the Director of the Petrova Task Force. The mother of the Hail Mary, come to collect her babies. Director Eva Stratt. Regina tried not to stare at her tattoo. Prisoner for Life, crossed out. She was older than the last time Regina saw her in person. She was walking next to Dr. Ryland in the halls of Grover Cleveland Middle. She had been so pretty. Regina remembers Abby saying she was Mr. Grace's girlfriend.
She was the woman condemned for saving the world, and given freedom to do it again.
"You were the one to catch the signal?" Eva Stratt turned away from the bickering world leaders. She looked at Regina.
"Uh, yes. I keep a radio on the Petrova Task Force range just in case. I know the optimal years have already passed, but—"
"Good job. Everyone applaud, Ms…."
"Baxter."
"Ms. Baxter." The room applauded. "You said only three have been detected?"
"Yeah, I'm guessing it's George that's missing. Oh, and Ringo seems to be going a different Course. I had a friend look at it and he thinks its headed straight to Venus."
"Good. It means Commander Yao and his crew were successful. They found a solution and decided to deploy it straight to the problem." Stratt looked sad. Everyone around them seemed to rejoice in knowing the slow march of death was soon to start to back track. The Earth was still irrevocably changed. Nothing would bring back the millions that died. All the animals put on the extinction list. All the biospheres forever changed. The world her goofy science teacher saved was not the one he left behind. Still, Regina was grateful. She felt tears slip from her face.
"There is still much to do. When the Beetles arrive. I will have my team explore its contents."
"Hey now, it was NASA that got the signal. Shouldn't we be the ones to participate in this historic occasion. I'd like for my team to be entangled with your task force, Director Stratt." Director Sanders insisted.
"It was the world that paid for this project to even happen. Director Stratt. You do not have the immunities you once did." The Leader of China stated. "It was one of my men who is the Commander of that ship."
"It was my Engineer." The president of Russia said.
"But it was my scientist." The US President argued. "What could an Engineer and a glorified Pilot do without my scientist?"
"Enough. All Assets of the Petrova Task force represented the world, which includes Commander Yao, Engineer Ilyukhina and Dr. Grace. As Leader of the Task Force I will be representing each of your countries, so sit down. I will take Ms. Baxter along as the NASA representative. This is not negotiable. Ms. Baxter, come with me."
The Beetles splash down within the the next two days. It won't be long before Ringo makes it to Venus. Astrophage was amazing stuff. What was more amazing was the material used to contain the solution to the Petrova Line.
The label said Taumoeba 8.6, whatever that meant. Regina stands next to Stratt as she conducts her scientists to do what they will with it. She wonders if this is what is was like during the Hail Mary Project. Free reign under her gaze.
"They really stuck these guys on there."
"Can we retrieve any digital data?"
"It's all in a chip inside the Beetles, which the containers are glued to. And taped to, and strapped to, and I think that's resin. This looks like Ilyukhina's work. She was always more of the 'if it fits it sits, no need to be pretty' kinda Engineer." A few of the older people laughed. They were clearly some on the original task force.
"Well, it worked. Have we made progress in identifying the container?"
"Spectrometers keep reading out Xenon."
"That's a gas." Regina said.
"Yeah, we know. The thing is. I wouldn't be surprised if the good Doctor managed to make it solid. Guy was like some crazy genius. He figured out Astrophage in an afternoon between working with middle schoolers. Then took him two days and a trip to Lowes to breed the suckers. Teacher's budget saved the world."
"Hey, Stratt, didn't you use him to teacher-voice world leaders?"
"He was very competent at making people shut the fuck up and listen. He Lowes trip was tax payers dollars. He bought too many skittles to have come out of his own pocket. There was a stipend for his sugar-addiction." Stratt huffed.
"Was it higher or lower than your coffee budget."
"It was more annoying."
"You gotta tell us, Stratt. Were the Rumors true? You and good ole Ryland ever fuck?"
"No."
"Boo. You think you were too good for him?"
"Dr. Lokken will be pleased. She wanted to hate-fuck that man so bad. I swear they were going to too."
"Dr. Lokken was very familiar with his scientific paper."
"She hated that thing."
Regina didn't know how she felt. She was an adult, almost forty. She was older than her teacher when he went into space. It still was weird hearing sixty year olds talk her middle school teacher's supposed sex life.
"We have work to do. Get on with it. I would like to understand our late college's work before the ice melts, thank you very much." Stratt waved them off.
"Did you fuck my middle school teacher?" Regina couldn't help but ask. The woman looked at her.
"Your middle school teacher was an oblivious man with asexual leanings who got anxious on elevators, like a little purse dog. No, I did not fuck him."
"Got it!" Someone shouted, holding up the mutilated Beetle husk. "Here is your drive, Director."
"Let us figure out what happened to my crew."
The data is just a massive dump. No one on the ship cared to send the mission relevant date. They took every recording and reading and data point the Hail Mary collected, copy pasted it into theses drives and sent them back to Earth. To be fair, they also sent the physical cure to Venus, so it's not like they were on a time crunch to sift through to find the solution. This was just like a kid's diary, anything and everything was important and now someone has to determine for themselves if seeing Carol Dunbee fall of the swing was significant or not.
That task went to Regina and a few other people who Stratt deemed unimportant enough to shackle to a laptop and sift. Not that Stratt wasn't also there. She was in the back, doing her own thing, two coffees in hand. Sometimes she'd ask a question, most of the time no one had found an answer to yet.
"That's odd." Regina managed to find the manifest of the ship.
"Status of Hail Mary Manifest: Commander Yao Li-Jie: Alive. Engineer Olesya Ilyukhina: Alive. Dr. Ryland Grace: Deceased. Baby Grace: Alive. Rocky: departed mission."
"Oh, looks like Ilyukhina and Grace got it on." Micheal Foote leaned over to look at her screen.
"That is impossible. Everyone on that ship had been sterilized along with their appendixes removed." Stratt frowned at the screen.
"It looks like they were manually recorded four years after launch. Dr. Grace's death was three years after launch. It could be an error. Like Dr. Grace was superficially presumed dead and they had to find a way to log him back into the system?" Soairsa Sables mused.
"That would have to be the case." Regina agreed.
"Rocky was probably a test of the system?"
"It was recorded weeks after Baby Grace, and only kept on for what seems to be a month?"
"Probably just the crew messing with the system. Must get boring up there after a while. I know they were all in commas for most of it, but still. I get stir crazy being in my house for too long."
"Figure it out, and try to find what this Taumoeba 8.6 is." Stratt putts them back to work.
It's Micheal that gets them the next find that isn't just star charts.
"They wrote a translation program? I think?" A few buttons pressed and a musical monstrosity started to play. It wasn't bad perse, just not what Regina would consider music.
They didn't have the program to actively translate, but they have the back-log of saved entrees. A dictionary of sorts. It was pretty ranged with a lot of science terms, but also just every day chatting.
Each of the crew got a name and title, except for Rocky. Baby Grace, Commander Yao, Engineer Ilyukhina. They had put the Hail Mary as Ship Mary. Stratt was also put in the list of names. As well as an Armando, Mai, and Adrien.
Then there were the made up words. Xenonite and Taumoeba.
"This is unhelpful, we need to find the video logs."
Regina found the medical records first. Major events were flagged, which made scrolling past the years of coma treatments a breeze. The first flag was on the same day the Manifest deemed Dr. Ryland Grace dead. It didn't give a reason, just proclaimed him deceased and ended his treatments. There was a scare with Ilyukhina and Yao with their feeding tube, but the Med-bot seemed to have fixed it. Next was the day Yao and Ilyukhina came out of their coma. Then there's a note of the med—bot being deactivated and stored.
It was reactivated almost a whole month later.
"Oh fuck."
"What did you find?" Stratt glanced up.
"Something happened. I don't know, but it appears the whole crew sustained major injuries."
"Make note of the time-log and we will cross reference it when we find the video logs."
"What, does that say Amputation?" Foote gagged a little.
"Who?" Stratt asked.
"It's under Baby Grace, so I'm assuming Dr. Grace. He also sustained major burn wounds and there's a note of needing to be resuscitated three times. His body weight and height are wrong, but I'm sure it's just a bit of degraded code from traveling so far in space."
"No other code looks messed up. Only Dr. Grace's information."
"Dr. Grace was a last minute tertiary candidate of Hail Mary. His biometrics were put into the system at the last day before launch. I'm sure that the haste is the reason for so many inconsistencies." Stratt explained.
"Right, that bunker blew up three days before launch." Sable hummed.
"Killing are first and secondary science officers."
"Hey, I found the video feed!" Foote fist-pumped the air.
Stratt didn't know what she expected to come back from the Hail Mary. When the Beetles didn't arrive at the optimal time, she had worried she had made a mistake. She worried Ryland had proven her wrong, and decided to let the world die once he remembered his less than voluntary means to space. When she got the news of the Beetles finally coming back, she found herself out of her cell and back into action. She was given pardons for her past actions, and new albeit limited immunities.
It was easy to reestablish the Petrova Taskforce.
She expected a lot. The Taumoeba (and that name had Ryland Grace written all over it) tanks—made with an unknown material—was not so out of the realm of reality that she wasn't prepared to handle. Space was large, they've been chasing the unknown for years now with Astrophage. What was more alien discoveries?
Then they found the video logs. The Hail Mary was built with a surveillance system. Not to spy on the crew, but so they did not have to stop what they were doing to actively record data and procedures. They had the option to make personal video logs, but it was unneeded.
Stratt wanted to know why the Ship had declared Dr. Grace deceased first. It was the earliest recording of something abnormal anyway, so it just made sense.
Baby Grace made much more sense.
"I'm going to throw up!" Foote lunged for the closest trash bin.
Stratt leans forward and stops the feed.
"Ms. Stratt?" Baxter asks. She's ignored. Stratt is already on the phone, talking to the head of her security to bring over three NDA forms, and a barricade to the room. Nothing else in or out.
"I will make this very clear. Nothing about these videos other than what I deem necessary will be given out to the public. If anything is leaked, I will come after each of you. Am I clear?" Foote and Sable nod, they already know the drill of having been inducted into the taskforce. Baxter looks alarmed. She's from NASA, who are only able to hold information for 24 hours before handing it off to the public. This was a culture shock for her, but Stratt made sure she understood that she was working with Petrova Taskforce material and only here to get NASA out of Stratt's hair.
The video's continue. It's damning. Grace remembers everything. He spends a while disparaging Stratt's name. He threatens to sabotage the mission once he figures out a way out of the crew bay. She is lucky the ship has marked him deceased. She's sure if his name were still active he would have done something irreparable.
"He is mad at you. Though I guess I would be mad at the director of the project that shrunk me down to the size of a child." Baxter laughed. Stratt ignores her. That wasn't the reason he was angry. It wasn't the only reason.
At some point he pivots and starts using his energy to find a way to survive. Eventually he does make it out of to the rest of the ship, but the angry wind is taken out of his brat sails. He's pretty resourceful on his own.
He had wanted to stay on Earth to help the next generation learn to adapt and survive the on coming Global Cooling. Stratt had thought it was a thinly veiled excuse to appease her and stay on Earth. Maybe it wasn't. He was going pretty well for himself.
"Oh, he Castaway-ed the mop. That's sad." Foote said.
"It's alarming how young he's acting, right? It's like he's actually a child."
"Isolation can do a lot to a person. It is the reason we decided to put the crew in comas. So they didn't go crazy before reaching Tau-Ceti." Stratt remembers that conversation well. It was one of the many times Dr. Grace gave her the kindness of making a decision. So much of the Hail Mary Project was on her shoulders, it had been nice to have someone by her side to handle the weight for just a moment.
"Two-out-of-Three isn't bad."
"When the one is the Science officer, yes it is." Stratt glared at Foote.
"I mean, we know how this ends. They do find a cure."
"We only know they think they found a cure. We do not know if they have actually been successful. Skip to the flagged scare with Ilyukhina and Yao."
It's a disaster. Her whole crew was almost wiped out because of build up in the feeding tubes. Foote throws up again at Grace's injury. Sable follows his lead when they realize how Grace was going to fix himself up. Baxter doesn't look much better, white-as-a-ghost sitting stalk-still.
Guilt isn't a feeling Stratt likes to hold onto. She didn't regret sending Grace into Space. He was still the best person she had on hand to go. If she could have prevented any of this, she would have, but even her plans and redundancies were useless in the eyes of how little they actually knew.
No, it was not guilt, she was feeling. She felt like a fool. A fate much worse. The universe laughed in the face of her effort to save the world. Plans nothing but a tightrope in the circus of the stars, and Grace fumbling his way along it.
Yao and Ilyukhina finally wake up. Things start to go smoothly. They put away the med-bot to keep Grace happy. They treat him like a child to keep him complacent. They meet an alien.
Stratt has to sit down. Sure they have technically meet aliens before. Astrophage was just one big alien problem. But this alien was an intelligent being. It had its own language, which they had a dictionary for.
"I want to know what he is saying. Does the data dump include the programming. They are clearly using a translator in real time." Stratt looks at her three scientists. It takes three hours to find and download.
Day five of reviewing the videos, and Regina looks at Stratt in a new light. Sure the NDAs and guards keeping them trapped in this room was concerning. The fact that this was classified documentation now. Regina was sure Stratt would be forcing her to retire from NASA to be one of her underlings at some point. The woman hadn't just been the director of some space program or company. She had been—for a not insignificant amount of time—the literal dictator of the world. For all Regina knew, she was one again to a certain extent.
"You kidnapped my middle school teacher and shot him into space." Regina said. Watching the six year old version of her goofy eight grade science teacher start hallucinating Stratt to the point he had an actual mental break down and revealed he had been press ganged into space.
"He was my only option. No one else was qualif—" Stratt fell back as Regina slammed her fist in the bitch's face. She got up, spitting blood from her swollen face. Regina wanted to hit her again, but her knuckles hurt like hell. "Are you done?"
"Unfortunately." Regina hissed.
"Good, don't do that again." Stratt turned. "You may go back to your posts.
The guard looked ready to tackle Regina gave a curt nod and stiffly left the room again. She hadn't even noticed him come in.
"If I could have sent someone more willing, I would have, but morally I had an obligation to—"
"Shut up. Just shut up. Okay, what's done is done. I wish I never meet you. I wish you had never came to our school. I hope you get sent back to jail and rot for the rest of your life." Regina snarled. "But I have a feeling, this is going to also be considered classified."
"I promised Dr. Grace he would be known as a hero. If people found out he was unable to outweigh the entire world against his own life. It would put doubt in people's minds."
"Sure, and it's not your own cowardice to face consequences." Baxter jammed the play button, ending the conversation.
Eventually they are let out of the room. Foote, Sable, and Baxter make plans to go to a bar and drink heavily.
She can't get the sight of Grace dragging his mutilated leg through the ship. She can still hear the blaring alarms.
They've trauma bonded and can talk about it to no one in fear of whatever Stratt can do to them. Considering she's abducted someone into space; anything was on the table.
They tell the waiting scientists that the solid material really is Xenon. It's called Xenonite. They follow the instructions from Yao's personal log on how to open it. Or well, it was under Yao's personal logs, but its actually Rocky giving the instructions. Another classified subject in a long list. They make sure the tanks are open in isolation chambers, so they don't infect the world with the micro-alien organism.
They answer the questions they can. It's mostly about the Taumoeba. It's only about the taumoeba. When asked how the crew made Xenonite, they shrug. When asked how they got the original sample, they shrug. No one asks what happened to the crew. It's assumed they killed themselves.
A paper is published "posthumously" under the crews name of how they solved the Petrova Problem. Regina doesn't know who Stratt got to write it. It was dense with scientific jargon that kept looping back to found a predator, breed it to be compatible to Venus's atmosphere, sent it on its way. Which was technically not wrong, but it spoke nothing of the trials that got them there. The heartache, the pain, the actual sacrifice.
Regina wished she had punched Stratt again when she had the chance.