Work Text:
Marissa wasn’t stupid. She might not be the same type of brilliant that Ryland was, but she was also a lot more aware than he was about certain dynamics. Like why she was there, for example. She had a Masters Degree in Statistical Analysis and had worked as a middle manager at the DOE, analyzing standardized testing metrics and figuring out how to improve and propose new curriculum standards that nobody ever actually listened to or implemented. The fact that she was now being given a six-figure remuneration as a ‘data metrics consultant’ for the Petrova Taskforce was just a cover. She barely had any actual work to do; a couple hours of looking at spreadsheets and running equations on Excel was all that she was ‘officially’ here for.
Unofficially but actually, she was here for Ryland. Because Eva Stratt saw that he was happy when she was around and a happy scientist was a more cooperative and complacent scientist. And since he was now the world’s leading expert in astrophage, keeping him complacent was thus pretty high on Eva Stratt’s priority list.
Maybe she should be a bit insulted at the implication that she was essentially here as an ‘emotional support animal’. But if she were to flatter herself a bit- and she thought it would be fair to do so- she was also here because Stratt (correctly, in her opinion) realized that if they tried to separate her from Ryland, she would set herself to the task of becoming A Liability with great alacrity and enthusiasm. She was pretty sure the NDA she signed wouldn’t mean shit in an actual court of law, considering that they had been, in effect, kidnapped and brought to a place from which they could not escape before being coerced into signing it.
Sure, there were no guns trained on them or anything (and thank fuck for that; if she never saw a gun again, it would be too soon for Marissa. Sure, there were plenty on the ship, but with Ryland’s new importance to the project, she knew that Stratt had made keeping them out of his sight A Priority, and nobody near him or on his security detail carried them on their person). But the circumstances were effectively coercion regardless. Eva Stratt might have all the power in the world right now, but she was a woman on a glass cliff and it wouldn’t last forever and both of them knew it. So if they had tried to send her on her not-so-merry way, NDA or no NDA, she would absolutely have been making a stink to the press about it.
“I see no reason for you to get close to that woman,” Marissa told her best friend as she sat tucked away in a back corner of the lab playing Minecraft on her new work computer. “Just because she seems to like you doesn’t mean that you have to like her.”
“Why wouldn’t I like her?” Ryland asked, as full of ‘approachable teacher’ energy as he ever was even though there was nary a middle schooler within several hundred kilometers of their new nautical home/effective prison work assignment. “She’s good at this and she doesn’t seem to be abusing the crazy amount of power she’s been given for personal gain. Honestly, she kind of reminds me of you.”
Marissa wasn’t sure whether she should be insulted (because she personally didn’t like the woman) or touched (because she was incredibly competent and Marissa may have been able to even admire her if it weren’t for the fact that she considered her a threat to Ryland’s health, recovery, and autonomy). She chose not to focus on that quandary. Personal dislike aside, she knew, and she knew that Stratt knew, that as soon as the ship was in the air, all those pardons that she used with ruthless efficiency and impunity to pursue the goal of the Taskforce would be as useless as scrap paper. Apparently Ryland didn’t know this, and she didn’t want to hurt him by telling him. He had a very high justice sensitivity and a woman being arrested for doing what she was asked would rub him the wrong way. Personal dislike aside, she agreed with him to an extent. Then again, she did kidnap a recent shooting victim, and Marissa definitely held a grudge about that, noble goals aside. Either way, she’d rather not have her Ry making friends with the woman, in case it would end with him trying to keep her from falling off the glass cliff while the world governments descended with their hammers. She refused to see him as collateral damage ever again; once was nearly enough to break her.
Ryland, unaware of her churning dark thoughts, had turned his attention back to the lab table and Marissa’s head snapped up when his ‘teacher voice’ came out. “Okay, no Luke, that’s way too much- I said a picogram, not a nanogram,” he firmly told the lab assistant who was measuring the astrophage for his next test. It clearly frustrated him that his dominant arm was still out of commission for another month. The tech’s face blanched as he realized the magnitude of the mistake, but Ry talked the man through the error with the serious yet non-judgemental tone that would fit better in a middle-school lab than a high-stress environment where that kind of carelessness would blow them all to smithereens.
Though not cruel or loud about it, Ryland still impressed upon him the seriousness of accurate measurements, but Marissa doubted it mattered. From the look on Carl’s face as he realized what nearly happened to all of them, but especially the man he was charged with protecting, Marissa knew that the unfortunate intern would be off the carrier by nightfall. His hand was in his pocket, and he was probably texting Stratt about the error already.
A buzz from Carl’s pocket confirmed her hypothesis as he looked at the unfortunate recent graduate.
“You,” he said, not bothering to refer to Luke by name. “Your grandmother is unwell. A helicopter will pick you up in fifteen minutes.”
Marissa knew that ‘your grandmother is unwell’ was code for ‘your ass is fucking fired,’ but Ryland apparently didn’t.
“Oh no,” he sighed, clapping Luke on the shoulder. “I hope she feels better. Well, we’ll miss you around here.” The ‘nearly blew them all to smithereens’ was apparently already forgiven and forgotten by her affable friend.
_____
Stratt, in her office, was currently lamenting the fact that she’d apparently have to kidnap another PhD just to do the lab tasks Dr. Grace currently couldn’t with only one arm. She’d ‘hired’ him for his brain, and the dozens of groundbreaking discoveries he’d already made within less than a month on the project. ‘Keeping interns from killing all of them’ should not be part of his job description. Carl had suggested having Miss Levinson take over as his assistant, but she had a mathematical background, not one in biology. She knew from her research into Dr. Grace’s life that the two had met during a graduate-level statistics course that happened to be an intersection of their respective studies. She’d already taken enough of a risk bringing in one intern that only had a Masters’ Degree in molecular biology, and he’d over-measured the very volatile alien organism by 1000 times.
Actually, perhaps two PhDs- Dr. Grace could then spend less time double-checking his assistant’s work if there was someone else to do that for him. There were some promising post-doctoral candidates in Australia that might serve…
______
Dr. Lokken had been pulled from her very important centrifuge work to be Doctor Grace’s lab assistant until his new ones could be flown in. Honestly, it was insulting! She expressed as much to Stratt.
“It’s just for the day,” the director replied, utterly unmoved. “I need someone competent doing this. His new assistants will be here tomorrow.”
“I am very busy,” she protested.
“Yes, with the centrifuge. For a ship that will not have enough fuel to turn on the centrifuge without Doctor Grace’s work. Hence, your temporary reassignment. Off you go now; I’ve already indulged 27 seconds of unnecessary complaints.”
As soon as Eva Stratt was done saving the world, Lokken was going to push her off the nearest fjord.
_______
“Alright, where is he?”
Marissa startled at the abrupt greeting. “Hello, Freya.” She never called the woman ‘Dr. Lokken,’ partly because it clearly irritated her, and partly because she found her first name rather ironic for the surly scientist, and she’d take her joy where she could get it these days.
“I’ve been pulled away from my own work to handle his pipettes and do his measurements, and he’s not even here?” the woman grumbled, not acknowledging Marissa’s greeting.
“He had an asthma attack and used the last of his inhaler. Carl took him to the sick bay to get a refill.”
Lokken had the decency to look slightly guilty. “I did not realize that Doctor Grace had asthma.”
“It wasn’t super serious and hadn’t bothered him in years, but then some asshole shot him in the lungs, so now it’s pretty bad again,” Marissa spat. “He shouldn’t even be here.”
“Shot? I did not realize Dr. Grace had been shot,” Freya replied, taken aback. She had assumed his broken arm to be a result of his very clear natural clumsiness. “He is irritating, but not to the point that I could see someone reacting quite that strongly. Who shot him?” She wracked her brain for anyone in the scientific community who could have hated his immature little paper to that degree and came up empty.
Marissa looked at her like she was mentally defenestrating her, her lips pressed together so tightly that the color leached out. However, instead of the yelling that Lokken expected, she typed something on her laptop and then handed it to Lokken with an article from the San Francisco Chronicle already open. Freya’s eyes scanned it quickly.
“Oh,” she replied. Now she understood why Levinson hadn’t yelled at her. The article was a far bigger gut punch and made her feel worse about her insensitive remark than a lecture ever could have. “I did not realize that Doctor Grace was that kind of man.”
“That was stupid of you. You’ve met him; you should have realized he’s a great person. Let’s hope you’re better at measuring the fucking aliens than judging people’s characters or you’ll blow us all up.”
“What’s this about blowing us all up?” Ryland poked his head back into his lab a little sheepishly, as if he felt guilty about interrupting (even though it was his lab). Marissa scanned his face. It was a little flushed, but his breathing seemed fairly even, if a bit faster than she’d have liked.
“Oh, Lokken’s going to be assisting you for the day until your new lab techs arrive,” Marissa answered. “I was just reminding her to be careful.”
“I’m sure she knows,” Ryland said. “She’s good at her job even if she is wrong about the Goldilocks zone.”
“Ugh, here we go again,” the woman muttered, but with significantly less vitriol than Grace was expecting.
“Anyway, could you prep a slide for me? The ones in that tank over there should be mid-mitosis, and I have something I wanted to check up on.”
______
A Twizzler hung from Dr. Grace’s lips as he waited for the DNA sequencer to finish its current work (he’d named her Rosalind, because of course he had. Marissa had rolled her eyes the first time he’d spoken to it). He was using his one good hand to peck out a lab report on the results he’d just observed about astrophage mitosis, and Lokken stared at the red candy with a look of utter disgust.
“That’s not even close to anything resembling liquorice. I’m afraid they’ll revoke my Norwegian citizenship for being in the same room as the stuff,” she sniffed haughtily.
“You guys eat stockfish so dry it’s basically tree bark and your liquorice is like salty black tar, but sure, go after my Twizzlers,” Ryland grumbled good-naturedly. The smile he gave her was so bright her breath caught in her chest, and for a moment it felt as though she were the one with the weak lungs.
Well, she thought to herself, looking at her coworker, this is going to become a problem.
————-
“Why would I test Doctor Grace for the coma gene?” Lamai asked, a stethoscope to Doctor Grace’s chest. She was grimacing strongly, looking even more displeased than she had earlier when he’d removed his shirt and she’d gotten a glimpse of the red, shiny, puckered scars on his torso from bullet wounds and emergency surgeries. “Even if he wanted to go into space, no medic in their right mind would ever clear him after the permanent injuries he’s sustained. Anyone who was stupid enough to sign such paperwork would have their MD removed for malpractice before the ink dried on the form.”
“It’s procedural. Everyone on this ship is getting tested, including myself,” Stratt replied.
If Ryland had known she would have insisted on being here for this physical, he would have taken Marissa up on her offer to come along.
“Well, procedural or not, it will have to wait,” Dr. Lamai all but harrumphed. “He had-” she stopped to check his charts, “seven blood transfusions less than 120 days ago. The donor blood is still in his system.”
“Sugarbears- seven?” Ryland cringed. He was O-; he must have done a number on the stock at the hospital. He made a mental note to do a blood donation once he was back in San Francisco.
“Frankly, Director Stratt, I don’t see why you can’t make an exception to procedure for this particular case. The poor man’s been through enough medical trauma already. If I had any control over the situation at all, he wouldn’t be allowed to work on the project.”
“Uh, the poor man is right here, and actually really likes this job,” Grace piped up. Stratt silenced him with a hand.
“Unfortunately, he’s the most competent man for the job. I would also prefer it if he weren’t full of holes, but we must manage with the hand we are dealt.” she told the good doctor.
“Uh, not holes anymore, technically,” Ryland protested. Both women ignored him. He rather felt like he was 13 again, watching social workers and doctors argue over his treatment plans while he watched in silence. He pushed himself up from the exam bed with his good arm.
“I’m going back to my lab now,” he announced, and Lamai gave him a tight nod as she made notes in his chart.
“Please get a proper night’s rest today, Dr. Grace,” she called after him. He hummed non-comitally.
——
Stratt looked at her own results and tssked in disappointment. No coma gene for her. Ahh well- someone had to take the fall for her actions, and all the better if it were her.
She wondered if Dr. Grace was coma-resistant. A feeling in her gut told her that he would be, for all the good it would do. But… she could still keep him as a secret tertiary, doctor’s orders be damned. In an ideal world (well, as ideal as it could be when the sun was dying) he’d be her primary. But he was neither healthy enough nor likely to agree to such a thing. If it came to it, well… his long-term survival wasn’t exactly the priority; he’d just need to live long enough to complete the mission.
She hoped it didn’t come to that- for all that she thought he’d be the best choice for the job, she did sort of like the man. She even respected him, despite how annoying she found his constant self-deprecation. She knew he didn’t consider himself brave enough for this sort of mission, but he was a rather different kind of brave. No particularly strong collectivist tendencies to speak of, and deeply prone to overthinking. But for a face in front of him, and on instinct?
He’d proven his ability to launch himself into the line of literal fire out of a deeply-ingrained sense of protectiveness. She could use that, if she had to. There was a reason she was content enough that his friend had insisted on remaining attached to his side. His emotional well-being was certainly part of it, but in the worst of worst-case scenarios, she knew that she could use Levinson as collateral. A faceless collective on the tracks? He’d never tie himself down willingly. The face of a loved one? She wouldn’t even need the ropes; he’d welcome the careening trolley without flinching. She hoped it never came to that.
Still, best not to get too close to the man, just in case. She couldn’t have sentiment clouding her judgment.
As the man himself cheerfully popped his head in with two coffees because “I thought you looked a little tired in the med-bay, Stratt,” she realized that such a thing would be easier said than done.
Fuck.