Archive of Our Own

“This is Ryland grace, reporting from the Hail Mary, and I’ve figured out how to save Earth.”

A hush fell over the room, so utterly complete that Stratt’s pounding heartbeat felt deafening. She inhaled deeply. Exhaled.

This was it. Everything she had worked towards had culminated into this one, singular moment. She felt nauseous with anticipation for it.

When they received signal from the Beatles, she had been the first to hear. It was past midnight, but she had felt wide awake as she watched them touch down, as she counted and re-counted them.

Four. All four had arrived safely.

There had been cheering, and laughter, and tears. Finally, the fear that the Beatles would perhaps never arrive was lifted. Earth now had a chance.

The contents were checked, and the digital resources were found completely intact.  
The strange physical objects -samples of something labelled ‘taomoeba’, and many pieces of a strange metallic substance- were quarantined separately, where they would continue to tug agonisingly at Stratt’s curiosity until each piece of research could be properly examined.

Stratt watched each moment with the Beatles with a churning anxiousness in her gut, and only when it was deemed certain that each piece of the Hail Mary’s research was in perfect condition did she leave.

She had made many, many calls to make.

Within a day, she had collected each and every person whom she knew most needed to be present for this moment.
Scientists who had made the most important discoveries into the Astrophage issue were corralled, alongside engineers, climatologists, and more.
The list was short, cut down only to the people most vital. This was a moment that would be saved only for those who most needed to be present. They would know now, and the world could wait.

Waiting for everybody to be collected had been the most excruciating few hours of her life. She could hardly sleep, with thoughts whirling around her mind, thoughts of that odd metallic figure, and the many videos that she would not permit herself- or anyone- to glimpse before everybody was present.

Finally, after years of waiting, she was sat here, with her heart pounding somewhere between her rib cage and her throat. Everybody she needed to be here was here, to witness the salvation of humanity. 

And it was Ryland Grace, of all people, who she was watching on that screen.

“So. Uhm. I wrote some notes. Because you know, it’s pretty important I get this right!” He said.

This was going to be a long few hours.

For years, Stratt had seen Grace’s face everywhere she looked. His teacher’s profile picture from his school was quite prevalent, alongside a few scarce photos of him with those working on the Hail Mary mission.

She had never forgotten his face. Couldn’t. But she hadn’t expected what it would feel like to see him here; a small, anxious smile on his lips; the glow of a laptop lighting his face.

He was most certainly dead by now. There had never been enough food on the Hail Mary for its crew to survive until now.  
And yet, Stratt couldn’t help but thinking that he looked more alive than he ever had when she knew him.

“I’m not sure how many of these beetles will reach earth,” Grace began, “so I’m putting copies of all the most important information in all of them.
Uhm, I thought I’d give you a… a run-down of the mission first, so you know what happened, And… hopefully the rest of it will make sense afterwards.”

There was a collective clicking of pens as every person in the room prepared to take rigorous notes.

Grace huffed out a breath, and leaned further against the table at his back. Stratt recognised it immediately as being from the lab. Oddly, he was sat on the floor.

“I- should probably just get this out of the way; when I woke up on the Hail Mary, Yao and Ilyukhina were… dead. I’m not sure why, but, they had been dead for- for a long while.”

Anxiety convulsed in Stratt’s gut, forcing a sharp breath of air into her lungs.

That couldn’t be right. After all of her effort, all of the double, triple, and quadruple checks, the safety precautions, the nights spent agonising over semantics, how had two of the Hail Mary’s crew died?

Of all the people who could have survived the trip she was glad it was the scientist, but did it have to be Ryland Grace the scientist?

Stratt’s stress bucked furiously at her chest, rising within her like lashing waves. She could hardly hear a thing over her pounding heart, thrashing desperately against the crushing force of her regret.

What did I do wrong. What did I do. Why did this-

Doctor Grace, taking no notice of Stratt’s sickening emotions, continued his story.
“I jettisoned their bodies; tried to say some prayers, or something, but I couldn’t remember them, and-” Grace stopped, suddenly, and rubbed his eyes with a small groan. “I couldn’t remember anything, actually.. So, I didn’t know why I was in space, or what a petrova line was, or… yeah.”

Oh, fuck. Grace didn’t have memories; Stratt herself had ensured it.
What if he had gone insane, not knowing why this would happen? What if he had forgotten his mission, what if-

“Is he okay? That long alone in space…” One man said softly to his neighbour.

“Quiet,” Stratt snapped, barely above a murmur. The room was silent before she could finish the word.

“I kind of figured it out, though.” Grace said with a small smile.
Stratt’s heart gave an unsteady lurch at the sight, like it was trying to skip a beat but had forgotten quite how to do so with any elegance. As it was, she just felt more nauseous.

“I had remembered enough to know why I was there when the engines turned off, thank God.” Grace laughed to himself, though the sound was weak. “Hail Mary.”

A soft ripple of sound went through the room, a mixture of bitter laughter and long suffering sighs.  
A few whispered the words to themselves, their faces taught with distress.

“I turned on the petrovascope to sus things out, you know, and a part of Tau Ceti’s Petrova line was missing, somehow, so I got closer, and, well, it wasn’t missing, the Petrova line was just covered by- uhh.” Grace gave the camera a weird look, his lips pursing in thought for a brief moment.

“Look, there’s kind of no other way to say this… Uhm. Drumroll please?”
One man began drumming on the table. Stratt gave him a sharp look, and he stopped with a nod and an awkward bow of his head.
“I found,” Grace began, “an alien spaceship.”

At this, nobody even tried to cover their shock. Just about everybody was talking in hushed, rapid voices to their neighbours, with expressions varying from unbridled elation to disbelief to horror.

Oh god, he’s gone insane in space. Stratt thought, the corners of her lips tugging downwards.

“The Hail Mary called it the Blip A, and the aliens never named it, so Blip A it is! And they sent me- I’m pretty sure it’s here somewhere…”  
Grace had begun to reach offscreen, eventually ending up crawling slightly out of frame, bumping the camera, and saying something that sounded concerningly like; ‘freaking heck’.

He righted the camera, and in his hand was a strange, angular object, made of something that looked to be the very same material that the beetles had contained. “They sent me this,” Grace said, unscrewing the container with a level of confidence that made Stratt wince.

From it Grace pulled two models; one that she recognised immediately to be a model of a Petrova line, and another that looked like an odd collection of balls on strings.

“A Petrova line, and this,” He held the second model up to the camera, pointing to two of the balls, which were connected by… was that another Petrova line?
“Is their planet! They orbit the star 40 Eridani, so I’ve been calling their planet Erid. And they’re out here for the same reason as us.”

Grace gave the camera a half-smile, which felt much too comfortable with… all of this.

Nobody was talking now; the room was full of the sound of many scribbling pens. Stratt had planned to take notes on her tablet alongside them all.
She had not planned for this.

Instead, she had her hands in tight fists on her lap, as if that would stop their furious shaking.

“So, they made this tunnel between their ship and the Hail Mary, and I met one of them. Turns out, everyone on his ship died of radiation poisoning, so he’s the only one left. Like me.”
Grace sounded almost wistful, though the emotion was faint, like it had been present for so long it had now allowed itself to become nothing more than a well worn chip on his otherwise strangely happy demeanour.

Grace again reached out of frame to find something, which he helpfully held up to the camera. “We’ve been talking to each other through this. He speaks, and it translates what he says for me.”

This translation device appeared at first to be a simple monstrosity of tape, but upon closer inspection, Stratt could make out two screens, strapped crudely to one another with an ungodly amount of duct tape.
And was she imagining things, or did he have the word ‘arsehole’ entered in that software?

Stratt forcibly resisted the urge to groan.

“We’re really understanding each other now, even though he’s still pretending he doesn’t get human terms.” Grace smiled again, as if at some private joke.

“This is probably as good a time as any to say… he’s kind of… on the Hail Mary?” He said tentatively, and pressed a button on his tape monstrosity.

The second he did so, a second voice filled the room. A much more annoying, digital voice.

“Rocky can come, question?”

“Yeah, bud. Come on.” Grace replied, shuffling over in the frame to make room for… good lord.

The creature appeared to be some sort of rock, at first glance, though after a moment Stratt also noticed the… arms? Attached to it’s body. It had no face, merely a flat plane of stone that faced the camera.
And it was rolling about in some sort of angular glass ball, with the reckless abandon of a puppy who didn’t know -or didn’t care- how goddamn expensive that ship had been.

“You’re fucking kidding.” Stratt said under her breath, and for once, she didn’t care to quiet the eruption of noise in the room.

Intelligent aliens were real.

There was an alien aboard the Hail Mary.

Ryland Grace had made first contact with an intelligent alien life form.

Fuck.

“His name is Rocky,” Grace continued, and a reluctant hush fell over the room, as everybody made room for him to speak. “He’s an engineer, and he’s been helping me save Earth.”

“And Erid. Save Earth and Erid. Amaze amaze amaze!” ‘Rocky’ said, waving two (hands?) about in excitement.

“You said it, buddy.” Grace said, and gave the alien a resolute thumbs down, which it seemed pleased with, for whatever reason.
“He makes stuff out of xenonite; it’s a substance we don’t have on earth, but it’s crazy strong.” Grace said, holding up the models he had shown earlier. “His whole ship is made of it.”

“And ball, and tunnels.” The alien added in a helpful chirp.

“Oh, yeah. My atmosphere isn’t really ideal for an Eridian, so he’s built this thing out of Zenonite, too.” Grace said, tapping on the ball.

“Rocky set on fire in Grace atmostphere. Bad bad bad. Rocky nearly die. Rocky never leave ball again.” The alien chirped, waving his arms around in distress.

“Yeah, sorry about that one, Rock.” Grace said, wincing slightly.

The room was now a flurry of furious note-taking, and Stratt felt as if she had been paralysed in the midst of it all.

Her heart had settled, though she couldn’t be quite sure whether it was thanks to her being comforted by the sight of Grace speaking comfortably to an alien, or whether her mind had simply reached a point where it simply couldn’t take any more stress, and had simply decided to start from scratch.
She was inclined to guess the latter.

There was something else, though, tugging at her mind. It was hardly important enough for her to focus on, but it held stubbornly onto the sight of Grace’s smiles, his relaxed posture, the way he leaned comfortably and unselfconsciously into the alien’s ball, like he belonged there.

“Rocky and I took a sample of the Petrova line at the planet the astrophage were breeding at. I called it Adrian, after Rocky’s mate.” Grace smiled again to himself, and somebody in the room let out a breathy huff of a laugh. Stratt didn’t see what was funny.

“I checked the sample, and it turns out Adrian is full of life. And among all of it, there are amoebas that eat astrophage, like a predator.”

At these words, there was a resounding gasp in the room. A few biologists had hypothesised as such, that Astrophage was merely an invasive species, introduced into Sol’s solar system without anything to keep it in check.
Stratt forced her breathing to settle. It was done. This was their answer. She picked up her stylus, and began to write.

“We needed more of the Taomoeba, but the Hail Mary wouldn’t survive Adrian’s atmosphere, so Rocky made a sampling device that hung on a chain, so we could collect them at their level.” Grace continued. “It wasn’t the easiest flight of my life, I had to do an EVA to get the sampling device before we left Adrian’s gravity, and- it didn’t go well, to say the least.”

“Sarcasm. Grace nearly die. Rocky have to go into Grace atmosphere to save. Bad bad bad.” The alien chimed in, once again moving his limbs with great agitation.

“The fuel bays were broken, and Astrophage started migrating to Adrian,” Grace explained, “I tried to jettison them, but the gravity was too much, and I… passed out. Rocky was the one to fix it, and he dragged me to my bed, so ar- so the nurse robot could patch me up.”
He held up his arm, which was sporting a rough looking burn, still pink as it healed.

Again, Stratt felt her stomach lurch. How hot was that thing? Why was it allowed in the Hail Mary? What if it damaged the beetles? What if it tried to hurt the ship? What if, what if, what if.

“Rocky was out of it for a long time after that.” Grace said, staring down at the ground with a dismayed look. “Had to do all the hard work myself.”
He smiled, but nobody would have missed the way he quickly wiped his eyes, smudging tears across his rapidly reddening face.

“Anyway, I- I tried simulating Venus’ atmosphere to see if the Taomoeba would still eat astrophage there, and, well, they all died.” Grace continued, and somehow, Stratt’s heart didn’t leap with panic this time. Rather, it merely did a small jump.“Turns out it was the Nitrogen,” Grace said. “They can survive in virtually any temperature, but nitrogen is too much. So, I started breeding them to be resistant to it, and now, we’ve got Taomoeba that can survive an atmosphere of eight percent nitrogen!”

“Rocky wake up, as well,” The alien added.

Grace turned to the alien and laughed, a laugh so genuine and sweet that it felt out of place, for a moment.  
“I was getting to that bit, Rock. For something that lives for centuries, you’re very impatient.”

A small part of Stratt’s mind repeated the word centuries with incredulity.

A far greater part of her mind couldn’t stop staring at Ryland Grace’s smile.

“Rocky worried Grace forget. Humans very stupid; forget easily. Not like Eridians.” The Alien chirped, and Grace elbowed his ball gently, but didn’t acknowledge the comment otherwise.

“I’m sending Taomoeba samples back in the beetles, and all of the research I can. But there is… one other thing.” Grace’s smile turned giddy; almost disbelieving.
“The Eridians building the Blip A severely overestimated how much fuel they would need. So, he’s given some of it to me. Enough to fill the fuel bays. Enough to… to go home.”

“What.”

It took Stratt longer than was reasonable to realise that she had said that out loud, in this nearly silent room.
Blessedly, only a scarce few people actually bothered to glance at her, before turning hurriedly back to the screen.

Grace was speaking again. Stratt could hardly hear him.

She felt sick to her stomach, but she couldn’t tell why. She couldn’t force her mind to still for long enough to pick apart a single reason for her to feel this way, she could only sit amongst the whirlwind of her thoughts, gasping in air as if that would do anything but make her feel more unsettled.

She was, in some instinctual, thoughtless way, happy. She couldn’t not be, though she also couldn’t quite determine if the relieved joy she felt was true, or merely a lizard-brain response to the words, desperately trying to form even a shred of something that felt normal.

Beyond that, she was… afraid. Relieved. Anxious. Always anxious.
She dreaded the sight of him, she realised. It had been far easier to believe him long dead, because then it didn’t matter what she did. 

If he was dead, then this had all been a means to an end; a mission that was doomed from the start.

If he was alive, however…

The memory of him running flashed in her mind. She had never forgotten it.

Couldn’t.

It was that image that kept her awake at night, that image that caused her to wake in a cold sweat as the dim sun rose over the horizon.

Stratt watched numbly as Ryland threw an arm around Rocky, as he wiped away a tear, as he explained his plan.

She couldn’t bear to speak to him. She couldn’t bear to look him in the eyes, and explain herself. She couldn’t-

She couldn’t watch his blinding, disbelieving joy at the idea of coming home. She couldn’t think about how happy he was, how comfortably he hugged the alien’s stupid hamster ball.

She couldn’t wonder if she had ever seen him so happy on earth.
She couldn’t wonder what it all meant.

———————

Once the video ended, there was a brief, taught silence as everybody glanced around for confirmation that everybody else had seen the same thing.

It was downright ludicrous. For as long as humans had existed, the existence of some other intelligent life had been puzzled over, and now, they were in a room with all of the twenty or so people who knew for a fact that they were real.

And Grace. Stratt’s mind supplied, unhelpfully. He knows, too.

“Well,” she said finally. She attempted to stand, and found her legs weak beneath her. Both hands flew to the table, so sudden that she very nearly fell.  
She gathered her balance -and her composure- quickly enough that nobody questioned it.

“Doctor Grace also included many other digital documents, which I am sure you would all like to look over.  
Firstly.”

She turned to the section of the table on which she had seated her best microbiologists, which were all watching her with wide, shining eyes.

“If you are given a sample of this- taomoeba, do you think it would be a viable solution to the Astrophage issue?” She asked.

The silence in the room was heavy. Nobody dared to say anything that might disrupt it, this moment which was, in every way, the make-or-break of humanity itself.

“Well… if the samples are healthy, and they do behave in the way Doctor Grace claims…” one began, hesitantly.
“Yes.” 

———————

The next few hours were a blur of excited activity.

The images of Rocky, of the planet Adrian, of the Blip A, had inspired awed exclamations from the room, alongside the furious curiosity of many, many people who couldn’t bear to be sitting idle, while there were so many things to be done.

Grace’s notes on Eridian biology and customs had been a particular point of interest, naturally, though many had difficulties believing it all.

Stratt had long since lost the energy to be surprised. She watched the proceedings with dread simmering deep within her, though eventually she grew exhausted enough that she could hardly even remember why she had felt as such.

That was, until the very last video.

Grace was bathed in red light, his voice panicked.

Taomoeba leak.

Rocky’s ship.

I can’t do both.

I’m not coming home.

———————

Stratt had left the room calm and collected, promising to send copies of the videos and documents to each person in the room, and that the Taomoeba samples would be distributed and sent to Venus as soon as possible.

She had left the room as it was in a flurry of conversation, claiming that she had people to contact with this new information.

And now she was kneeling on the floor of the smallest, dimmest bathroom she had ever been in, vomiting up bile.

Relief, was the word that came to mind. It didn’t feel right, but it was the only thing that made any sense, so she clung to it, the same way she clung to the cold porcelain of the toilet seat.

She would never have to see Ryland Grace again.

Because he had decided to save an alien, rather than return home. 

Which didn’t make any sense.

He had never wanted to go on the Hail Mary. He had begged to stay on Earth, to look after ‘his kids’.
He had run.
He had said he was being murdered. 

Why, then, would he choose to not go home?

Stubbornly, unhelpfully, her mind supplied the image of him smiling with Rocky.

He had never been that happy when she had known him.

Perhaps he hadn’t been that happy ever.

The thought slid into place in her mind easily, and she didn’t have the strength to examine it.

And, like so many things, she pushed down the memory of his smile, the way that a small part of her burned to know if she might ever have been able to see it directed at her.

Eva Stratt stood. inhaled shakily.

At some point between one hour and the next, she had forgotten that she had ever felt such a way.