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Part 1 of Hail Mary, full of Grace (are you sure about this, Stratt?!)
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2026-04-13
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Between what is lost forever and what can still be known

Summary:

Ryland Grace is diagnosed with an agressive cancer while working with the Hail Mary Project on earth. This makes him a lot more at peace with the idea of his own death, but very reluctant to go on the ship for other reasons. Stratt is being oddly optimistic and sentimental about the whole thing.

Notes:

Hello! I know I haven't updated ANYTHING in like, a couple of years. But like, I have two teaching jobs, I am looking for a new position and another international move to who-knows-where, and I'm also thinking about going back into academia within the next couple of years, so I've got a lot on my plate and I'm suprised I wrote anything at all, but this book and movie grabbed me and shook me around like a dog with a rope toy, so c'est la vie or whatever. I would love to update some of my other stuff but I have no more control over my muse than I do over my students (zero control. I have zero control).

Title from Butchered Tongue by Hozier because I am, above all, a linguist.

Work Text:

Dr. Ryland Grace rarely swore.  That hadn’t changed when he’d been ‘recruited’ for Project Hail Mary, nor when he’d been high-velocity relocated to an aircraft carrier not-so-affectionately nicknamed "Stratt's Vat” without a moments’ notice.  It hadn’t changed even when Stratt had personally dragged him, ‘her science lapdog’ to Dr. Lamai’s office after he’d collapsed from exhaustion in the lab and she’d delivered the news that had upended his entire life even more than it already had been: cancer.  Specifically, Acute myelogenous leukemia.  Which, hey, wasn’t great, but it was pretty survivable, right? For his age group, about ⅔ with chemotherapy.  

Except, not so much.  His AML was unusually aggressive even for the most aggressive form of leukemia, they’d caught it late (blame a shirty employee health plan and the fact that he blamed his exhaustion on too much late-night grading and unhealthy sleep and dietary habits) and his five-year-prognosis was basically a 35% chance of survival even if he started chemo right away.  More than likely, he’d be dead long before even the astronauts on their suicide mission.  The universe was such a birch sometimes.  

He’d turned down chemo, at least for the moment.  Ryland Grace wasn’t a brave man, but he wasn’t a man to fight the math, either.  If he was going to be dead either way, he might as well do some good while he was still here.  For his kids.  He’d start chemo on launch day, when he no longer needed his brain to be in top working order and firing on all cylinders. Then, if he did beat the odds, he’d go back to teaching and try to shape the next generation to be ready and prepared to preserve their curiosity and their humanity in the quasi-apocalyptic world they were growing into.

Dr. Lamai wasn’t pleased, but one look at Stratt and Ryland could see by the slight softening of her impassive stare that he’d made the right choice.  He was good at studying astrophage.  He was the one who’d figured out how to make it breed.  He’d even named the darn thing!  As much as he didn’t want to die, if he was going to die anyways, he wanted it to mean something.  And then either the chemo would work and he’d get to go back to his life as a schoolteacher, or he’d die comfortably and with the knowledge that he’d used his time well.  

And weirdly, he was good at the rest of it, too: being Stratt’s glorified intern, breaking up squabbles between other scientists- who were really just like junior highschoolers in temperament, just with jobs and student loans- and even helping to do ‘damage control’ when Stratt’s abrasive demeanor seemed to get just a bit too close to starting a mutiny or other minor disaster that wouldn’t stop her but might slow her down and would definitely make her angrier.

Unfortunately, Ryland was the only teacher on the team.  And every project needed teachers.  He could teach others about astrophage- and he did, although he still seemed to be making constant new discoveries himself- but he was the only expert on this team who had both an encyclopedic knowledge on astrophage (as well as kind of… writing the encyclopedia??? Maybe not the best analogy) and the classroom-honed reflexes to stop safety violations before they started and catch a beaker that was flying through the air after being thrown by one lab tech to another because ‘it’s faster this way, and I definitely got the physics right’ (he did not, and it wasn’t). 

So, he thanked Dr. Lamai for her time, poured another coffee (three creams, two sugars), and went back to recklessly disregarding his health the same way he’d done since grad school while trying not to think about the fact that the consequences were a lot more tangible this time.  

______________

The only thing that really changed in the next few months was the way people looked at him.  Like they were grouping him in with Ilyukhina, Yao, and DuBois for choosing to die for Earth when that very much wasn’t the case.

“You’re choosing to die,” he told Olesya one night in the officer’s bar, running a low grade fever and staring at a beer he was currently too nauseous to drink. “My body is killing me whether I like it or not.  I’m not a hero.”

“You don’t get to choose that,” she told him, taking his beer to replace her empty vodka glass.  “You do brave thing.  People decide you are hero.  End of discussion.”

“I feel like a coward,” he confessed, the bruise on his arm from knocking it against the lab table that day far larger and darker than it should be, standing out in stark relief against skin too pale to be healthy.  “Like, I’m scared to put myself through chemo that probably won’t even work.  Maybe I just wanted an excuse not to.”

“Well then, you are lucky you have excuse for now.  Because as soon as we launch, Stratt is dragging your ass to chemo whether you like it or not.”

“Language,” he muttered reflexively, as her lips quirked upwards.

“Maybe others listen to you because of guilt, because you are dying.  But so am I.  We are dying together, so I will curse,” she declared, leaning back, forcing her chair to balance on the back two legs with an easy grace that Ryland would never have, despite his name.  “Fuck!”  She had a wide smile on her face.  Her joy reminded Ryland of his more exuberant students, and he also smiled despite his mood and his exhaustion.

Ilyukhina sobered as she looked at him again.  “Your motives don’t matter.  Your actions matter.  And your actions make people think you’re a hero.  You will have to live with that.”

“Or die with it, most likely,” he quipped, her Russian humor seeming to spread for a moment.  “But maybe don’t give that speech to LeClerc, considering that his recent actions were to nuke Antarctica for the greater good.”

“Okay, maybe not best example of my point,” she conceded.  “But if motives are good, and eventual actions are also good, then what is some nukes in the middle?”
“A serious climate catastrophe?” Ryland ventured, and the Russian merely shrugged.

“Not the worst catastrophe before it’s all over,” she remarked, more serious than she had been all night.  “If we are unlucky, maybe not even worst catastrophe before launch.”

_______

That weeks-ago conversation in the bar with Olesya was at the forefront of Ryland’s mind as he looked at the wreckage of the testing lab on the Kazakh steps, the droplets of vaporized metal weakly illuminated by the struggling rays of a dying sun.  Both of their science specialist candidates used to be in there, their billions-of-years-old atoms once again floating freely in the universe now that their entire bodies had been blasted into nothingness by a labeling error. 

“Fuck,” he said, with feeling.

___________

The next few days were total chaos.  Annoyingly, Stratt still had some lackey making sure Ryland ate and slept, even though he was her de-facto second-in-command and everyone was looking to him to keep things running as normally as possible.

“I’m not hungry,” he told the annoying Russian bodyguard who she’d tasked with ‘ensuring his well-being’ (which sounded extremely ominous, both when she typed it in her email to Grace regarding his duties to keep things running while she was doing damage control and investigation into the negligence that led to explosion, and when the burly Russian repeated the words to him in his scary accent).

“Soon will be famine.  Eat,” the man pressed, like Ryland was a kid who could be guilt-tripped into eating meatloaf with stories of “starving children in Africa”.

“I probably won’t live to see famine.  You eat,” he groused back, not even looking at the man as he buried his nose in another lab rotation schedule, occasionally glancing over to continue reading the latest data chart from his own breeding lab.

He nearly choked on the spoonful of borscht the man shoved into his mouth while he was distracted, coughing pink spittle into his white sleeve and glaring.

“Finish on your own now, yes?” the man asked, eyebrow raised but with an air of complete non-repentence.  “Nap in two hours.  Boss’s orders.”
Oh, to heck with Stratt’s busy schedule, he was sending her an angry email.

_________

He was only a paragraph into his angry email about his scary Russian nanny (with said nanny looking over his shoulder and offering his opinions on Grace’s word choices, mostly to the tune of “what is fudge? you should just curse”) when Stratt herself came into his office.

“Hey,” he told her, looking up and closing his laptop, dropping his complaints when he saw the deep bags under her eyes, a crack in her stoic facade.  “I’ve booked the jet to go get Cáceres.  It’s leaving for Paraguay at five.”

“Cancel it.”

“What?”  He looked at her, mouth hanging open, teeth and sleeve still pink with borscht.  “She’s our best option!” 

“No, she’s not.  Finish your soup and meet me in the conference room in ten minutes.” She turned to the Russian.  “Make sure he eats his soup.”

“Да,” he agreed, once again brandishing the spoon menacingly in Ryland’s direction.

_____________

Lunch was not sitting well by the time Ryland finally made his way to the conference room, his fingers fluttering with nerves.  He’d cancelled the jet, feeling like they were making a mistake, but trying to take a deep breath and remind himself that Stratt had gotten them this far.  Whatever her plan was, it must be solid and practical.

________________

Ryland stared at Stratt, sure that the cancer must have moved to his ears, because there’s no way that she’d just suggested something so risky.  Eva Stratt, who had Lokken design and install a centrifuge on the Hail Mary at the cost of literal billions of dollars instead of taking the risk and using lab equipment that hadn’t been tested and proved to work by thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of times, for decades, Eva Stratt who still used Excel spreadsheets and wouldn’t let even the whisper of new-fangled AI tech onto her aircraft carrier where it could have even the slightest chance of messing up their data or giving false information, Eva Stratt who pirated all of human technology and basically told every company ever to ‘deal with it’ when they tried to sue her over it… that Eva Stratt would never hinge humanity’s chances of survival on Dr. Lamai’s already-risky coma bot to successfully give him chemo and cure his cancer on top of keeping him alive while in a coma.

“What…” he finally squeaked, for lack of a better (or any) word.

“Well, the robots were originally intended to help cancer patients,” Stratt pointed out calmly, as if she hadn’t just successfully rendered a middle school teacher without anything to say.

“Yeah, to keep them in comas while doctors give them chemo,” Grace eventually gathered himself.  “Even on earth, my chances of seeing my kids graduate high school is like, a third at best, and now you want to risk humanity’s chances on me being able to survive cancer in space? Even without cancer, I’d be a terrible astronaut!  I’m like, an astro-NOT.”  Great, he was making stress puns!

“It’s not ideal, but you are humanity’s best and only chance,” Stratt continued, calm as ever.  It would be infuriating if Ryland’s gasts weren’t so flabbered (as his students would put it).  “Everyone except for Dr. Grace, Engineer Ilyukhina, and Commander Yao may leave the room now.”

Everyone scrambled to follow her orders, and Ryland distantly noted that the scary Russian nanny carefully placed him in a chair before leaving.

“I admit, I share Dr. Grace’s reservations,” Yao added, once the door had shut and they were alone.  “Not about his competence, of course, but about his condition.  The coma technology is already one of the riskier aspects of this mission.”

“Your reservations are noted but ultimately irrelevant.  The bot is being seen to as we speak, and Dr. Lamai and a team of the world’s top cancer specialists are currently modifying Dr. Grace’s treatment plan for the voyage.”

“Since when do I have a treatment plan?” Ryland asked, dimly wondering why, out of all his concerns, that was the question that exited his mouth.

“Don’t be stupid, Dr. Grace.  I was going to have the world’s best doctors on your case the second the Hail Mary reached orbit.  Now it’s just a matter of adapting the plan to work on the ship instead.”
“Yes, on ship.  Where there are no doctors,” Ilyukhina added, clearly skeptical.  “As much as I would like to die with my friend in space, I am less enthusiastic about waking up where be forced to immediately throw his body out of airlock.”  Relativity was easier than relative clauses when one was worked up like this.

“Please have a little faith in Doctor Grace, Olesya,” Stratt scolded mildly.  Ilyukhina started at the mention of her given name.

“Doctor Grace does not have faith in Doctor Grace,” Ryland interrupted.  “Doctor Grace has faith in Cacéres, who is both coma-resistant and not actively dying.”

“Cacéres works at a distillery; she’s basically a glorified brewer, and she hasn’t used English- the crew’s only shared language- since she was in school.  Where, may I remind you, she only got a Bachelor’s degree, and only her minor is in the right field.  She knows nothing about astrophage.  Whereas you have a doctorate and are the world’s foremost expert in said material.”

“I am also full of aggressive cancer,” Ryland pointed out, wondering how she kept overlooking that part.

“And you will survive, because I told you to and I believe in you.  This is already our Hail Mary.  We’re already making a risky gamble.  I hardly see how hoping for a little more grace will make any difference.”
“Okay, first of all, a pun? And seriously, you believe in me? Who are you and what have you done with Stratt? Stratt is never this sentimental!” Ryland demanded, voice rising an octave.”

“You take that back,” Stratt demanded.  “It’s not sentiment, it’s practicality.  You’re a teacher.  If anyone can teach Yao and Ilyukhina everything they need to know about Astrophage before launch, it’s you.  It will be basically the same as teaching Cacéres, anyway.”

“Cacéres has a degree in science,” Ryland argued.  “Not that Olesya and Li-Jie aren’t intelligent, but we need a science specialist.” 

“Cacéres is hardly a specialist.” Stratt’s nostrils flared derisively.

“Stopping after her Bachelor’s degree doesn’t make her a troglodyte.” Ryland pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, although with his current condition, even that bit of pressure would likely bruise.  He felt like he was telling off one of his students teasing another for not being as quick to get a concept.

“Well, it hardly makes her a specialist.  Best case scenario, you survive the trip, find a solution, and save humanity.  Worst case scenario, you’ve taught your crew members everything you could have taught Cacéres anyway.  I’d rather take the gamble on you surviving with your vast knowledge and expertise, because if we win, we’d be in an infinitely better position than if we send her.  And if you don’t survive, well, we’re still not much worse off than if we had sent her.”

“Look, if I wasn’t sick, I’d probably have to be dragged onto that ship kicking and screaming, but I would agree with you logically that it would be the best decision.  But that’s a moot point, and if I’m going to die anyway, I’d rather die on earth after like, a Rootie Tootie Fresh and Frootie from iHop or something as my last meal,” Ryland sighed.

“Oh, will you eat iHop?  We will get you iHop before launch,” Stratt declared.  “If that was the solution to your appetite issues, you should have told Ivan sooner.”

Ryland assumed Ivan was his scary Russian nanny, but that wasn’t his top priority.  “You would not send a jet to get me iHop, because that would be a momentous waste of resources.  Just like sending me to space would be,” he lectured.

“I’m the boss here, don’t talk to me like I’m one of your students,” she demanded.  “Look, do you think this is what I want to do?  Lose literally the only person who has ever been even close to a friend to me in my adult life?  Do you think I want to do that?  If it were up to me, I would keep you here on Earth and force people to figure out a way to cure your cancer come hell or high water, and then I would keep you as my little pet science teacher until we saved the world.  If it were up to me we wouldn’t have nuked Antarctica or destroyed the Sahara’s ecosystem either! But it’s not about what I want.  It’s about what will save the world.  And you will save the world.  If I can’t have my friend, then I will have faith, and I have faith in you, Dr. Grace.  So you’re going.”

“We have to agree, don’t we?” Ryland turned to his new crewmates.  “She will have all three of us sedated and forced onto that ship if she has to, won’t she?”
“Yes, I will,” Stratt answered for them.  “Besides, I’ve just talked about my feelings in front of you, so I would definitely launch all three of you into space even if the world didn’t depend on it.”

Ryland thought he deserved one more fuck, but Yao of all people beat him to it.  Can’t have shit in space.