Project Hail Mary

Chapter 23

I came to the meeting on time. At least, I thought I did. The email said 12:30. But when I got there, everyone was already seated. And silent. And they were all staring at me.

For the time being, we had a media blackout about the accident. The whole world was watching this project—their only hope for salvation. The last thing we needed was for people to know the primary and backup science specialists were dead. Say what you will about the Russians, they know how to keep a secret. All of Baikonur was on lockdown.

The meeting room, a simple trailer the Russians had supplied, had a great view of the launch pad. I could see the Soyuz through the window. Old technology, to be sure, but easily the most reliable launch system ever made.

Stratt and I hadn’t spoken since the night of the explosion. She suddenly had to head up an ad-hoc disaster inquiry. It couldn’t wait until later—if the accident was caused by some procedure or equipment that was going to be on the mission, we needed to know. I wanted to be involved but she wouldn’t let me. Someone had to keep dealing with various minor Hail Mary issues being reported by the ESA team.

Stratt stared right at me. Dimitri fiddled with some papers—probably a design for a spin-drive improvement. Dr. Lokken, the fiery Norwegian who designed the centrifuge, drummed her fingers on the table. Dr. Lamai wore her lab coat as always. Her team had perfected a fully automated medical robot and she’d probably be in line for a Nobel Prize someday. If Earth lived that long. Even Steve Hatch, the crazy Canadian who invented the beetle probes, was present. He, at least, didn’t look awkward. He just typed away on a calculator. He didn’t have papers in front of him. Just the calculator.

Also present were Commander Yáo and Engineer Ilyukhina. Yáo looked dour as ever, and Ilyukhina had no drink in her hand.

“Am I late?” I asked.

“No, you’re just in time,” Stratt said. “Have a seat.”

I sat in the only empty chair.

“We think we know what happened at the research center,” Stratt began. “The whole building is gone, but all their records were electronic and stored on a server that handles all of Baikonur. Fortunately, that server is in the Ground Control Building. Also, DuBois—being DuBois—kept meticulous notes.”

She pulled out a paper. “According to his digital diary, his plan for yesterday was to test an extremely rare failure case that could happen in an Astrophage-powered generator.”

Ilyukhina shook her head. “Should have been me testing this. I am responsible for ship maintenance. DuBois should have asked me.”

“What was he testing, exactly?” I asked.

Lokken cleared her throat. “One month ago, JAXA discovered a possible failure state for the generator. It uses Astrophage to make heat, which in turn powers a small turbine with state-change material. Old, reliable technology. It runs on a tiny amount of Astrophage—just twenty individual cells at a time.”

“That seems pretty safe,” I said.

“It is. But if the moderator system on the generator’s pump fails, and there’s an unusually dense clump of Astrophage in the fuel line right at that moment, up to one nanogram of Astrophage could be put into the reaction chamber.”

“What would that do?”

“Nothing. Because the generator also controls the amount of IR light shined on the Astrophage. If the chamber temperature gets too high, the IR lights turn off to let Astrophage calm down. Safe backup system. But there is a possible edge case, extremely unlikely, that a short in this system could make the IR lights turn on at full power and bypass the temperature safety interlock entirely. DuBois wanted to test this very, very unlikely scenario.”

“So what did he do?”

Lokken paused and her lip wobbled a bit. She steeled herself and pressed on. “He got a replica generator—one of the ones we use for ground testing. He modified the feed pump and IR lights to force that crazy edge case to happen. He wanted to activate an entire nanogram of Astrophage at once and see how it damaged the generator.”

“Wait,” I said. “One nanogram isn’t enough to blow up a building. At worst it could melt a little bit of metal.”

“Yeah,” said Lokken. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So you know how we store tiny quantities of Astrophage, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “In little plastic containers suspended in propylene glycol.”

She nodded. “When DuBois requisitioned one nanogram of Astrophage from the research center’s quartermaster, they gave him one milligram by mistake. And since the containers are the same and the quantities are so small, he and Shapiro had no way of knowing.”

“Oh God.” I rubbed my eyes. “That’s literally a million times the heat-energy release than they were expecting. It vaporized the building and everyone in it. God.”

Stratt shuffled her papers. “The simple truth is this: We just don’t have the procedures or experience to manage Astrophage safely. If you asked for a firecracker and someone gave you a truck full of plastic explosive, you’d know something was wrong. But the difference between a nanogram and a milligram? Humans just can’t tell.”

We were all silent for a moment. She was right. We’d been playing around with Hiroshima-bomb levels of energy like it was nothing. In any other scenario it would have been madness. But we didn’t have a choice.

“So are we going to delay the launch?” I asked.

“No, we’ve talked it over and we all agree: We can’t delay the Hail Mary’s departure. It’s assembled, tested, fueled, and ready to go.”

“It is the orbit,” Dimitri said. “It is in tight orbit at 51.6 degrees’ inclination so Cape Canaveral and Baikonur can get at it easy. But is also in shallow orbit which is decaying. If it does not set out within next three weeks, we have to send entire mission up just to re-boost it to higher orbit.”

“The Hail Mary will leave on schedule,” said Stratt. “Five days from now. The crew will have two days of preflight checks, so that means the Soyuz has to launch in three days.”

“Okay,” I said. “What about the science expert? I’m sure we have hundreds of volunteers all over the world. We can give the selectee a crash course in the science they’ll need to know—”

“The decision’s been made,” Stratt said. “Really, the decision made itself. There’s no time to train a specialist in everything they need to know. There’s just too much information and research to learn. Even the most brilliant scientists wouldn’t be able to glean all of it in just three days. And remember, only about one in seven thousand people have the gene combination to be coma-resistant.”

Right around then I got a sinking feeling. “I think I see where this is going.”

“As I’m sure you know by now, your tests came up positive. You are that one in seven thousand.”

“Welcome to crew!” Ilyukhina said.

“Wait, wait. No.” I shook my head. “This is insane. Sure, I’m up to speed on Astrophage, but I don’t know anything about being an astronaut.”

“We will train you as we go.” Yáo spoke quietly, but with confidence. “And we will do the hard tasks. You will be utilized only for science.”

“I just mean…come on! There has to be someone else!” I looked to Stratt. “What about Yáo’s backup? Or Ilyukhina’s?”

“They’re not biologists,” said Stratt. “They’re incredibly skilled people with a nose-to-tail expertise on the Hail Mary, its operations, and how to repair damage. But we can’t train someone in all the cellular biology they need to know in the time we have. It would be like asking the world’s best structural engineer to do brain surgery. It’s just not their field.”

“What about other candidates on the list? The ones that didn’t make the original cut?”

“There’s no one as qualified as you. Frankly, we’re lucky—lucky beyond our wildest dreams—that you happen to be coma-resistant. Do you think I kept you on the project for so long because I needed a junior high schoolteacher around?”

“Oh…” I said.

“You know how the ship works,” Stratt continued. “You know the science behind Astrophage. You know how to use an EVA suit and all the specialized gear. You’ve been present for every major scientific or strategic discussion we’ve had about the ship and its mission—I made sure of it. You have the genes we need, so I made damn sure you had the skills we need. God knows I didn’t want it to come to this, but here we are. You’ve been the tertiary science specialist all along.”

“N-No, that can’t be right,” I said. “There’s got to be other people. Much more talented scientists. And, you know, people who actually want to go. You must have made a list, right? Who’s the next candidate after me?”

Stratt picked up a piece of paper in front of her. “Andrea Cáceres, a distillery worker from Paraguay. She’s coma-resistant, and holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry with a minor in cellular biology. And she volunteered for the mission back during the first call for astronauts.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “Let’s give her a call.”

“But you’ve had years of direct training. You know the ship and the mission inside and out. And you’re a world-leading expert on Astrophage. We’d only have a few days to get Cáceres up to speed. You know how I operate, Dr. Grace. More than anyone else. I want to give Hail Mary every possible advantage. And right now, that’s you.”

I looked down at the table. “But I…I don’t want to die….”

“Nobody does,” said Stratt.

“It must be your decision,” said Yáo. “I will not have someone on my crew who is there against their will. You must come of your own volition. And if you refuse, we will bring in Ms. Cáceres and do our best to train her up. But I urge you to say yes. Billions of lives are on the line. Our lives matter little when compared against such tragedy.”

I put my head in my hands. The tears started to come. Why did this have to happen to me? “Can I think about it?”

“Yes,” Stratt said. “But not for very long. If you say no, we have to get Cáceres here in a hurry. I want your answer by five p.m. tonight.”

I stood and shuffled out of the room. I don’t think I even said goodbye. It’s a dark and depressing feeling to have all your closest colleagues get together and decide you should die.

I checked my watch—12:38 p.m. I had four and a half hours to decide.

The spin drives of the Hail Mary are incredibly overpowered for its current mass. When we left Earth, the ship weighed 2.1 million kilograms—most of it being fuel. Now the ship only weighs 120,000 kilograms. About one-twentieth its departure weight.

Thanks to the Hail Mary’s relatively low mass, the scrappy little beetles are able to collectively give me 1.5 g’s of thrust. Except that the ship wasn’t designed to have a bunch of thrust coming in at 45-degree-angle force pushing arbitrary EVA handles on the hull. If we fire up the beetles at full power, they’ll just rip free of the handles and ride off into the Tauset.

Rocky was mindful of that when he zeroed out our rotation. Now we have that under control and I can do EVAs in zero g like God intended. I 3-D print a model of the Hail Mary’s internal skeleton and give it to Rocky for his perusal. In under an hour, he not only has a solution but has fabricated the xenonite struts to implement it.

So I do another EVA. I add the xenonite supports to the beetles. For once, everything goes according to plan. Rocky assures me that the ship can now handle full thrust from the beetles and I don’t doubt him for a second. The guy knows engineering.

I type in a bunch of calculations into a complicated Excel spreadsheet that’s probably got errors in it somewhere. It takes me six hours to put together. I finally come up with what I think is the right answer. At least, it should put us close enough that we can see the Blip-A. Then we can fine-tune our vectors from there.

“Ready?” I say from the pilot seat.

“Ready,” Rocky says in his bulb. He holds the three control boxes in his hands.

“Okay…John and Paul to 4.5 percent.”

“John and Paul, 4.5 percent, confirmed,” he says.

Sure, Rocky could have made controls for me to use, but this is better. I have to watch the screen closely and pay attention to our vectors. Best to have someone give their full attention to the beetles. Besides, Rocky’s a ship’s engineer. Who better to run our makeshift engines?

“John and Paul to zero. Ringo to 1.1 percent,” I say.

“John and Paul zero. Ringo 1.1.”

We make numerous tweaks to the thrust vectors bit by bit to angle the ship roughly the direction I want. We finally achieve what I hope is the right direction.

“Here goes nothing,” I say. “All ahead full!”

“John, Paul, Ringo 100 percent.”

I’m thrown back into my seat as the ship lurches forward, with 1.5 g’s of gravity taking over as we accelerate in a straight line (maybe) toward the Blip-A (hopefully).

“Maintain thrust for three hours,” I say.

“Three hours. I watch engines. You relax.”

“Thanks, but no time for rest. Want to use gravity while I can.”

“I stay here. Tell me how experiments go.”

“Will do.”

I’m shooting for another eleven-day transfer. It takes 130 kilograms of fuel to make that happen—about a quarter of what the beetles have aboard (if you include George, who is sitting on the lab table full of Astrophage). That should give us enough left over to correct whatever idiotic mistakes I made in my trajectory math.

We’ll get up to cruising speed in three hours, then we’ll coast for most of eleven days. I don’t want to deal with spinning up or spinning down the centrifuge. Yes, it can be done—Rocky proved it when he zeroed us out before. But it was a delicate process with lots of guessing and opportunities for spinning out of control. Or worse—getting the cables tangled up.

So, for the next three hours I have 1.5 g’s to work with. After that it’ll be zero g for a while. Time to hit the lab.

I climb down the ladder. My arm hurts. But less than it has. I’ve been changing the bandages every day—or rather, Dr. Lamai’s medical marvel machine has been doing it. There’s definitely scarring all over the skin. I’m going to have an ugly arm and shoulder for the rest of my life. But I think the deeper layers of skin must have survived. If they hadn’t, I probably would have died of gangrene by now. Or Lamai’s machine would have amputated my arm when I wasn’t looking.

It’s been a while since I had to deal with1.5 g’s. My legs don’t approve. But I’m used to this sort of complaint at this point.

I walk to the main lab table, where the Taumoeba experiments are still in progress. Every part of them is firmly mounted to the table. Just in case we have more unexpected adventures in acceleration. Of course, it’s not like I’m short on Taumoeba. I have a bunch of them where my fuel used to be.

I check the Venus experiment first. The cooling mechanism whirs slightly, keeping the inside temperature correct for Venus’s extreme upper atmosphere. I originally intended to let the Taumoeba in there incubate for only an hour, but then the lights went off and we had other priorities. So now it’s been four days. If nothing else, they’ve had plenty of time to do their thing.

I gulp. This is an important moment. The small glass slide inside had a one-cell-thick layer of Astrophage. If the Taumoeba are alive and dining on Astrophage, light will be able to get through. The more light I see through that slide, the fewer Astrophage are still alive on it.

I steel myself, take a deep breath, and look inside.

Jet-black.

My breathing becomes unsteady. I fish a flashlight out of my pocket and shine it from behind. No light gets through at all. My heart sinks.

I sidestep over to the Threeworld Taumoeba experiment. I take a look at the slide in there and see the same thing. Completely black.

Taumoeba can’t survive Venus or Threeworld’s environment. Or, at the very least, they aren’t eating. The pit of my stomach feels like it’s going to melt.

So close! We were so close! We have the answer right here! Taumoeba! A natural predator to the thing that’s ruining our worlds! And it’s hearty too. It can survive and thrive in my fuel tanks, obviously. But not in Venus or Threeworld’s air. Why the heck not?!

“What you see, question?” Rocky asks.

“Failure,” I say. “Both experiments. The Taumoeba are all dead.”

I hear Rocky punch the wall. “Anger!”

“All this work! All of it for nothing. Nothing!” I slam my fist to the table. “I gave up so much for this! I sacrificed so much!”

I hear Rocky’s carapace clunk to the ground in his bulb. A sign of deep depression.

We’re both quiet for a time; Rocky slumped in his bulb and me with my face buried in my hands.

Finally, I hear a scrape. It’s Rocky pulling his carapace off the floor. “We work more,” he says. “We no give up. We work hard. We are brave.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

I’m not the right guy for this job. I’m a last-second replacement because the actually qualified people blew up. But I’m here. I may not have all the answers, but I’m here. I must have volunteered, believing at the time that it was a suicide mission. Doesn’t help Earth, but it’s something.

Stratt’s trailer was twice the size of mine. Privileges of rank, I suppose. Though to be fair, she needed the space. She sat at a large table covered in papers. I could see at least six different languages in four different alphabets on the paperwork before her, but she didn’t seem to have a problem with any of them.

A Russian soldier stood in one corner of the room. Not exactly at attention, but not relaxed either. There was a chair next to him, but he’d apparently elected to stand.

“Hello, Dr. Grace,” Stratt said without looking up. She pointed to the soldier. “That’s Private Meknikov. Even though we know the explosion was an accident, the Russians aren’t taking any chances.”

I looked to the soldier. “So he’s here to make sure imaginary terrorists don’t kill you?”

“Something like that.” She looked up. “So. It’s five o’clock. Have you made your decision? Are you going to be the Hail Mary’s science specialist?”

I sat opposite her. I couldn’t meet her gaze. “No.”

She scowled at me. “I see.”

“It’s…you know…the kids. I should stay here for the kids.” I squirmed in my seat. “Even if the Hail Mary finds the answer, we’re going to have almost thirty years of misery.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“And, um, well, I’m a teacher. I should teach. We need to raise a strong, solid generation of survivors. Right now we’re soft. You, me, the whole Western world. We’re the result of growing up in unprecedented comfort and stability. It’s the kids of today that’ll have to make the world of tomorrow work. And they’re going to inherit a mess. I can really do a lot more by preparing kids for the world that’s to come. I should stay here on Earth where I’m needed.”

“On Earth,” she repeated. “Where you’re needed.”

“Y-Yeah.”

“As opposed to on the Hail Mary, where you could be instrumental in solving the entire problem because you’re completely trained for the task.”

“It’s not like that,” I said. “I mean. It’s a little like that. But look, I’m no good on a crew. I’m not some intrepid explorer.”

“Oh, I know,” she said. She clenched her fist and looked to the side for a moment. Then back to me with a burning gaze I’d never seen before. “Dr. Grace. You’re a coward and you’re full of shit.”

I winced.

“If you really cared so much about the children, you’d get on that ship without hesitation. You could save billions of them from the apocalypse instead of preparing hundreds of them for it.”

I shook my head. “It’s not about that—”

“Do you think I don’t know you, Dr. Grace?!” she yelled. “You’re a coward and you always have been. You abandoned a promising scientific career because people didn’t like a paper you wrote. You retreated to the safety of children who worship you for being the cool teacher. You don’t have a romantic partner in your life because that would mean you might suffer heartbreak. You avoid risk like the plague.”

I stood up. “Okay, it’s true! I’m afraid! I don’t want to die! I worked my ass off on this project and I deserve to live! I’m not going, and that’s final! Get the next person on the list—that Paraguayan chemist. She wants to go!”

She slammed her fist on the table. “I don’t care who wants to go. I care who’s most qualified! Dr. Grace, I’m sorry, but you are going on that mission. I know you’re afraid. I know you don’t want to die. But you’re going.”

“You’re out of your darn mind. I’m leaving now.” I turned to the door.

“Meknikov!” she shouted.

The soldier deftly stepped between me and the door.

I turned back to her. “You have got to be kidding.”

“It would have been easier if you’d just said yes.”

“What’s your plan?” I jerked a thumb at the soldier. “Hold me at gunpoint for four years during the trip?”

“You’ll be in a coma during the trip.”

I tried to dart past Meknikov, but he stopped me with arms of iron. He wasn’t rough about it. He was just monumentally stronger than I was. He held me by the shoulders and faced me toward Stratt.

“This is crazy!” I yelled. “Yáo will never go for this! He specifically said he doesn’t want anyone on his ship against their will!”

“Yeah, that was a curveball. He is annoyingly honorable,” Stratt said.

She picked up a checklist that she’d written in Dutch. “First, you’re to be held in a cell for the next few days until the launch. You’ll have no communication with anyone. Right before launch, you’ll be given a very strong sedative to knock you out and we’ll load you into the Soyuz.”

“Don’t you think Yáo will be a little suspicious about that?”

“I’ll explain to Commander Yáo and Specialist Ilyukhina that, due to limited astronaut training, you were worried that you’d panic during the launch so you elected to be unconscious for it. Once aboard the Hail Mary, Yáo and Ilyukhina will secure you into your medical bed and start your coma procedure. They’ll take care of all the pre-launch prep from there. You’ll wake up at Tau Ceti.”

The first seeds of panic started to grow. This lunacy might actually work. “No! You can’t do that! I won’t do it! This is insane!”

She rubbed her eyes. “Believe it or not, Dr. Grace, I kind of like you. I don’t respect you very much, but I do think you’re a fundamentally good man.”

“Easy for you to say when you’re not the one being murdered! You’re murdering me!” Tears rolled down my face. “I don’t want to die! Don’t send me off to die! Please!”

She looked pained. “I don’t like this any more than you do, Dr. Grace. If it’s any consolation, you’ll be hailed as a hero. If Earth survives this, there’ll be statues of you all over the place.”

“I won’t do it!” I choked on bile. “I’ll sabotage the mission! You kill me?! Fine! I’ll kill your mission! I’ll scuttle the ship!”

She shook her head. “No, you won’t. That’s a bluff. Like I said, you’re fundamentally a good man. When you wake up, you’ll be good and angry. I’m sure Yáo and Ilyukhina will be pretty mad about what I did to you too. But in the end, you three will be out there and you’ll do your job. Because humanity depends on it. I’m ninety-nine percent sure you’ll do the right thing.”

“Try me!” I screamed. “Go on! Try me! See what happens!”

“But I can’t rely on ninety-nine percent, can I?” She glanced at her paper again. “I always assumed the American CIA would have the best interrogation drugs. But did you know it’s actually the French? It’s true. Their DGSE has perfected a drug that causes retrograde amnesia that lasts for long periods of time. Not just hours or days, but weeks. They used it during various anti-terror operations. It can be handy for a suspect to forget he was ever interrogated.”

I stared at her in horror. My throat hurt from yelling.

“Your med bed will give you a nice dose of it before you wake up. You and your crewmates will just assume it’s a side effect of the coma. Yáo and Ilyukhina will explain the mission to you and you’ll roll right into getting to work. The French assure me the drug doesn’t erase trained skills, language, or anything like that. By the time your amnesia wears off, you guys might have already sent the beetles back. And if not, my guess is you’ll be too far invested in the project to give up.”

She nodded to Meknikov. He dragged me out the door and frog-walked me down the path.

I craned my neck back toward the door and screamed, “You can’t do this!”

“Just think of the kids, Grace,” she said from the doorway. “All those kids you’ll be saving. Think of them.”