Chapter Text
When Eva Stratt was seven years old, her father died.
She sat in the kitchen with the Politie, legs too short to reach the ground, as they waited for Mama to return from work.
Her mother was not a warm person, not like Papa. She liked to say it was because she was Dutch and strong and Papa was German and soft. She did not hug, and she did not coo, and she did not coddle.
But she knelt and enveloped Eva in a hug when she arrived home, smelling like salt. “I’m so sorry,” Mama breathed over her head, and did not let her go for a long time.
Eva spent the rest of the night with her hand clutched tightly in Mama’s. The house was quiet and empty, as if Papa was still on his business trip and simply hadn’t come home yet. Mama was mostly pretending like everything was normal. She brushed Eva’s hair, sent her off for a bath, and then sat with her before bed.
But Eva wasn’t able to pretend that her world wasn’t falling apart, like her mother could. Not yet.
“Why do people have to die, Mama?” Eva asked, arms laying limp over her blanket.
Mama sighed and looked away from Eva, hiding her face. Eva was secretly relieved. Mama’s eyes looked wet and red like the fat of raw meat, sunken into her head, and Eva didn’t want to see it anymore. “It’s the way of things, kleine.”
“But…why?”
Mama didn’t respond for a very long time, and then she spoke so soft Eva could barely hear her. “We aren’t supposed to know.”
To Eva that sounded ridiculous. “I don’t want you to die,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to die.”
Mama turned back to Eva and held her chin with warm, slender fingers. “Listen to me, Eva. Don’t worry about me. You just try to live a good life,” she instructed, “so that when your time comes, you don’t have any regrets. Do you understand me?”
Eva nodded slowly, and her mother released her.
She did not ask again.
—
Eva was sentenced to thirty four years in prison.
She would be in prison when Earth froze over, or she would be in prison when the beetles arrived with their salvation. Either way, she would watch the fruit of her labor blossom or die from the foot-square window in her cell.
She had always hated planes for the same reason she hated what she had to endure now: a complete and utter lack of control over the outcome. She despised sitting in a cramped seat with a manmade metal cylinder shaking around her, unable to do anything to ensure the plane landed smoothly. She could only wait.
And landing safely in a plane had better odds than interstellar space travel, which had no odds at all, since it had never been done before.
Within hours of the Hail Mary’s launch from the ISS, she knew she was living on borrowed time. There was some support for her privately demonstrated from the stakeholders she had worked with for years, but there was little public interest in any ends that may have justified her means. It didn’t matter either way. This was her role, after all. To make the hard decisions before launch, and to take the fallout of the sacrifices.
It would be twenty six years before the beetles could return. Even assuming that succeeded, there were still many people that would suffer over the next two and a half decades due to decisions she made.
She hadn’t made those decisions alone, but no other world leader was going to take any blame for it. Only her.
Eva was paraded around the world, assigned charge after charge, regardless of how much sense they did or did not make. Kidnapping, under Title 18, Section 1201 of the United States Code. Unlawful imprisonment. Assault. Manslaughter, for the crew that had not come home, would never come home, whose names she kept close to her heart. Theft of government property. Misappropriation of federal resources. Coercion of federal employees. Fraud. Then the international charges: forced conscription under Article 7 of the Rome Statute, unlawful seizure of vessels, violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Then each country added their own, slight variations on the same theme: grand larceny, trespass on sovereign territory, unauthorized commandeering of military assets. By the time she reached the European Union she had stopped listening and simply watched the mouths of the prosecutors move and thought about whether the Hail Mary’s passengers were still alive.
It had become apparent that the letter of the law was not what mattered to the people who wanted her far, far away from the public eye.
Her first and only lawyer was a favor from a friend of a friend, a quiet man named Frederick who spoke just good enough Dutch that she preferred they conversed in her native tongue. As they exchanged trial plans over the metal table of the meeting rooms, she could not ignore the cold stare of the security cameras, and couldn’t help but feel unreasonably exposed. She spoke to him in Dutch sounding just like her mother used to, stiff and weary, and he responded with an atrocious accent and hand gestures to fill the blanks when he forgot a word.
Before trial, he told her to plead not guilty to all the charges, and she agreed. When she stepped up on the stand, however, in a suit with a small hole in the seam because there was no time for a seamstress at the end of the world, she could only assign herself the blame.
She was to blame, after all. She was the lesser of two evils, a creature just like the astrophage, doing all she could to simply survive. She flew from the sun to venus, consuming everything in her wake, just for the chance to propagate her species.
In a way she felt kindred with the little cells, though she never brought it up to anyone.
Almost Ryland, once, but only almost.
Pleading guilty may have saved her, actually, because there was no question if she had done any of the things, only the question of punishment. During her sentencing in America, Eva locked eyes with the youngest on the jury, a college-aged girl, and hoped that she would get the chance to marry and have a job and grow old. She barely heard the judge announce her sentence, too lost in her thoughts of the children who would soon live in a world without daylight.
She did hear it when the courtroom’s audience rustled, murmuring amongst themselves in their pressed suits and blouses. Snaps of the cameras strained to catch her reaction to half a life spent in a medium security prison, in another country than her home.
Her face did not change. She would not give them the satisfaction.
The years after that first trial were a blur.
Her first placement was not terrible. Her cell was small but tidy, with a small stack of books sent from her sister next to her bed and a slowly growing collection of trinkets made from extra fabric and wire. She could knit, thanks to her mother, and had been able to turn a fiscal profit through her creations. Yarn was seven dollars by the bundle upon special request, and her job as a bookkeeper in the library paid 1.20 an hour. So she either accepted the expensive price of yarn and some change, or she traded for other handmade items. She found that she had no use for money there, since delicacies like chips and chocolate mattered little and most of the books she could care for she read in the library, off shift.
She was supposed to be in a kinder institution, a New York prison mostly for financial crimes, but she had been transferred right before she was meant to go to prison, and had been given minimal info as to why. And everything went downhill from there.
Her first year, she’d managed to get in an altercation, which had gotten her head slammed into the table and her nose broken so hard she saw stars for weeks. It was still crooked, but it pointed in the opposite direction of her warped mirror so she could pretend it looked like it always had. That same fight, she fell hard on her left wrist, and though the in-house doctor had said it was fine, she couldn’t lift anything heavier than an apple with that hand.
She was well-versed in the politics of the world outside, but it was different inside this other world, with women who had shot their husbands or committed arson or grand theft. There were some who had organized into little groups segregated by race and age, and then there were others who were left entirely alone for good reason, and then there was her, whose face was still on the news every other week and whose accent had labeled her un-American and therefore not to be trusted.
And then they found out she could make hats and scarves out of yarn and wool, and winter in the Northern states was not a time to piss off one of the cheapest routes for warm clothing. She created a barter system that was mostly respected, and got what she needed and was generally left alone.
That had been the best of her time incarcerated. Eva had thought the nose fracture was one of the most physically painful experiences of her life, but looking back, it was only a scratch.
As was typical with international business, the United States got to judge her first, but then she was moved abroad to attend trial in so many other countries. First there was China. Then the Netherlands, who looked at her with disgust, the woman who was supposedly one of their own. France. Germany. Then it was the DRC, Angola, UAE, Egypt, Japan…everybody wanted to demonstrate their disapproval of the scapegoat. Russia was too busy fighting famine to care much about her, but that was one of the only major abstentions. She was shuffled around in planes and boats she used to command, sick from dehydration. She had to raise her chin high in front of judges and juries and priests and witnesses, the last of which always made her struggle the hardest because they told her just who they’d lost on the ground because she had her eyes set on the sky. They looked at her and cried for their sons and daughters and homes and cultures, so when they flagellated her she could do nothing but nod and take it. At some point since the Hail Mary ascended, she had become rather quiet, so when offered the chance to speak on her own behalf, she always declined.
It was difficult for world leaders to decide what to do with her, since she was a terrorist to so many countries that all wanted their own retribution. They didn’t care that what she’d done might have saved them all. They weren’t thinking long-term. Half of them were so old they would die never knowing if the Hail Mary ever made it.
She only got a few years of time from most countries she was tried in, but France and China, dramatically, both sentenced her to life in prison. It meant the time she was meant to serve in America became meaningless. She would die staring at the concrete wall of a prison cell in some foreign country. Delightful.
The Netherlands had no sentence for her. It didn’t matter. She would never step foot again on her home soil as long as she lived. This hurt more than anything else.
Some prisons in some countries did much worse to her than a broken nose. She spent over a year in confinement in France, malnourished and sickly. There she was able to negotiate her way into a group that protected her in exchange for her ability to convince guards to let things slide.
In Angola a soldier stepped on and broke her right leg like it was made of dry sticks off of a tree. She screamed so loud, cried, that they kicked her in the stomach and chest until she stopped making any noise at all. They didn’t set the fracture right. Even after avoiding walking for as long as she could, pain from the injury radiated up through her hip every time she took a step.
In Germany she was treated better, even given a temporary splint and pain medication for her leg, but was racked with a respiratory infection so bad she needed to be oxygenated for a day and couldn’t inhale deeply for months afterwards.
In another country she couldn’t remember, she was hit in the back of her skull with a guardstick when she moved too fast for their liking. She felt the crack through her entire head, the ringing so bad afterwards that her nose bled for days. When she had first been hit, she couldn’t see at all. Her occipital lobe was right there, so her visual pathways were damaged from the injury. It wasn’t just her vision, either. Migraines kept her mute and stupid for months.
She spent time in other places, with brief interludes with her hands cuffed tightly behind her back like she could fight back even if she wanted to. Everything blurred together into a sickly shade of yellow, memories of the sun overhead sliding into her vision, as fragile as hallucinations. Inevitably, depression seized her without a way to alleviate its crushing weight.
Eva was eventually moved back to America, a pale ghost of herself. She still had twenty-nine years left on her sentence. After she finished serving, she would return to France or China to serve her life sentence.
Her new home was a new prison complex, a blend of all the prisons in Pennsylvania. Co-ed, it was unwelcoming and unkind, and adjusting to her head and her leg was incredibly difficult with little support or medical assistance.
She learned quickly that her right field of vision was much, much worse than her left, and though she could recognize that things were happening on that side, she couldn’t identify what those things were. Her headaches were smaller now, but still easily triggered. The noise of the prison kept her secluded in her room, flinching when loud conversation got too close to her door. Even with her bad vision, she could see the leers, how she was a target. She knew she was slower than she used to be, weaker than she used to be, and there was nothing she could do.
It was easier to crawl inside of her head, distance herself from the cold against her skin and the pain between her eyes. When she removed herself from her environment and sat alone with her thoughts, it was almost…pleasant. Peaceful. Externally she was silent and placid, and internally she thought of her favorite books and of the Hail Mary and of her few fond memories with Grace and the crew. These thoughts were much kinder to her than the world around her.
She knew what this coping strategy was called, what it meant. It didn’t matter to her that it was supposedly unhealthy; it kept her lucid and alive. So she didn’t try to stop herself from slipping away. Sometimes she’d do it for hours. Eventually, the easier it got, she left for days.
One day she went away, and when she came back, she was in a concrete cell with nothing but a cot. No window, no place to sit, no common space. Just her cot and a toilet with a tiny shower head attachment on the wall. In the center of the cell was a rusting drain. She was essentially sitting in a shower with a cot crammed inside.
And she stayed there for sixty-something days.
One morning, with no warning, the door to her cell clanged open. It was the first direct human interaction she’d had since she woke up there, and it scared her shitless, scrambling to sit up from her hazy nap.
“You got a gift,” the guard grunted, holding the door open. “Let’s go.”
Given no time to even properly change out of her sleep clothes, Eva stumbled behind him silently, cuffs tightened to their tightest gear yet still loose around her wrists.
She was taken into an interview room with a harsh white light overhead. She squinted as she entered, and sat in the only available chair. Where there was supposed to be someone else’s chair, on the other side of the table, was instead a TV stand.
It was playing a news channel on mute. She leaned forward as close as she could to read the capital letters scrolling across the screen, ignoring the pounding in her head.
She immediately forgot about the pain. She forgot about the cell, she forgot about her hunger. All she saw was HAIL MARY LANDS IN ARCTIC. ASTRONAUT SURVIVED. ASTROPHAGE CURE FOUND, looping again and again in her vision.
“What is this,” she gasped, craning her head away to look around the empty room. There was a one way mirror but she couldn’t tell if there was anyone behind it.
She slowly turned back, struggling to breathe. This wasn’t possible. It wasn’t—it just wasn’t possible. They were supposed to still be halfway to Tau Ceti.
The channel was rerunning a series of clips from people filming near the drop—the ship seemed to have gotten much too close to civilians off the edge of a Russian port, but even through the blurry cameras you could see the Hail Mary doing something it was never intended to do: return. Around it, four Beetles bracketed its descent.
She watched from the harsh metal chair, fingers white-knuckling the edge of the seat, as the orange blur plummeted towards the Arctic Ocean. There was a silent impact, a mute roar of the ocean spray that she could almost imagine soaking her with its salty water, and then there was nothing for ten very long minutes.
But by now, she was no stranger to waiting.
The coast guard and the Russian boat approached the Hail Mary capsule with white trails in their wake. The drone moved closer to capture the shaky footage of the large, quadruple sealed door, the exact moment it opened, and Ryland Grace’s stupidly happy face popped out of the darkness and grinned at the Russians.
Hi, she could make out him saying, I come in peace. Take me to your leader!
A sob erupted from her lungs. She pressed shaking fingers to her lips, covering her mouth from saying a thankful prayer. She only thought it, bowing over her knees. She didn’t have a deity to send it to. She just directed it towards Grace.
Thank you, thank you, she thought fiercely. He had been the only survivor. To Yao, to Ilyukhina: I am sorry. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
And she thought that it was all right that she would live in prison for the rest of her life, and she would be grateful for it, because at least humanity would persevere. Her job was done, and the rest of her life didn’t matter in the grand scheme.
She could finally rest.