Chapter Text
There was a presence nearby, he could tell, even with his eyes closed.
His head was throbbing, and he couldn’t remember for the moment where he was, or what he was supposed to be doing, but it didn’t feel safe that there was currently someone else around.
A sudden pressure on his forehead had him acting in a flash. Opening his eyes to the startling sight of robotic arms hovering over his face, he rolled abruptly to the side to evade the approaching appendages, though unfortunately also rolling off the side of the raised surface he was lying on, his breath momentarily forced out of him with the heavy landing on his front.
“Full body movement detected.” Stated a voice. “Please return to the medical platform to complete treatment for your injuries.” Treatment? “You have a possible concussion.” It continued, almost uncannily answering one of his unasked questions. “Movement is not currently advised.”
He looked more properly at the arms, noticing that one of them was holding a small butterfly bandage. Questing fingers also soon found what felt like a small line of stitches near his hair line.
His thoughts felt sluggish as he tried to assess his surroundings, lending credence to the suggestion of concussion.
He was aboard the Hail Mary spaceship, he recalled, trying to rescue his brother, whose bed he had fallen against during the unexpected early launch.
It was an alarming thought that the robot arms must have not only moved him onto the bed he woke up on, but also given him stitches, all without him waking up from being knocked out.
A brief glance at his watch gave Six the unwelcome information that he’d been unconscious for a little over half an hour, an unprecedented length of time.
Pushing to his feet, he grabbed the adhesive dressing from the still attentively hovering robot hand, applying it to himself.
He paused, hands still raised, as he spotted the figure on the floor on the opposite side of the medical bed.
The pilot’s body – and it was definitely a body; the angle of a broken neck unmistakable to the former agent – was lying on the floor, beside the solid base of the bed, close enough that Six would have landed on him if he’d rolled off the bed’s other side.
He winced internally at what must have happened.
It wasn’t just the poor pilot’s neck that had been broken in his fall. There was obvious distortion in an arm and leg of the man’s jumpsuit, with who knew how many other less obvious breakages he also had.
Six had been knocked out just from hitting his head from a stumble of just a couple of feet of distance, but the pilot, Commander Yao, had been actively trying to climb up to the cockpit at the top of the ship when the launch started. Six estimated the man must have been at least to the next hatch up on the ladder.
He likely fell the whole distance back down, being fatally injured in the process, before being moved over to the bed by the robot arms that had also moved Six himself.
It was definitely not the fate he had deserved, and Six knew he would probably feel bad about the man’s death later, once there was time, however, for now the most important thing the crewman’s untimely death meant, was that he had not managed to reach the cockpit and contact mission control about Six being aboard.
He didn’t know for how long after launching they could still do anything, but it looked like Six was just going to have to tell them he was here himself if he was to have any hope of salvaging this whole situation. He’d just have to figure out a way to deal with any fallout once it arrived.
The square hatch was closed above him as he reached the level of the airlock, where he first got aboard the ship. The Commander clearly having closed it behind himself earlier when he went below.
Gripping the handle, a sharp jerk of the mechanism yielded no movement at all, with a tug in the other direction, just in case, also getting no results. “Open damn you.” He muttered, trying again.
“The flight deck is currently sealed for safety during the Hail Mary’s journey.” Stated the same voice as in the medical bay. Perhaps part of some ship wide monitoring, rather than just for the medical robot, as he had assumed. “Free access to the flight deck will be available fourteen days before arrival at Tau Ceti.
“To access the flight deck before this time, please state the access code.”
“Open Sesame.” Six snarked, unsurprised at the immediate reply of ‘Incorrect’ from the ship’s computer. “Open the flight deck.” He demanded. Seriously, who locked all the crew out of the cockpit for the whole journey?
“The flight deck is currently sealed for safety during the Hail Mary’s journey. Free access to the flight deck will be available fourteen days before arrival at Tau Ceti.
“To access the flight deck before this time, please state the access code.” Repeated the automated voice.
“Yeah, yeah.” He absently waved off the repeated response of ‘Incorrect’, dropping back down the ladder to the floor of the room.
A time lock on the door of the room he needed to get into was going to be problematic to get past any time soon, especially since the most likely person to have had that access code was currently lying dead a few rooms below.
There were maybe ways around the problem, but they were going to take time.
“Hey computer, I need to contact Mission Control urgently, about a mission critical problem.” Maybe he didn’t actually need to be in there to speak with them.
“Communication with Mission Control can be accessed on the flight deck.” Or maybe he did.
“I am unable to access the flight deck. How do I access communications to speak with Mission Control. It’s an emergency!”
“Communication with Mission Control can be accessed on the flight deck.
“To access the flight deck at this time, please state the access code.” He glared at the ceiling in frustration, vaguely in the direction of the speakers where the computer’s voice came from, then started climbing down through the hatch to the room below.
He didn’t currently have a way to contact anyone that could get in touch with mission control for him.
Well, there was maybe one person, but she was under so much oversight it would likely get her arrested, or worse, to try. Not to mention it potentially cluing in his CIA searchers to his situation, and that would lead to other problems, that he wouldn’t be there to head off.
There was however one person that he needed to at least try to get in touch with, if it wasn’t already too late. That window he saw half way down through the ship was probably his best chance of still being able to get a signal through.
Mitzie Blair, once known as Claire Fitzroy, sat on the bed in her room in the small Vancouver house, where she now lived with the foster family her pseudo brother had arranged for her, with some of his most trusted associates.
She watched, enthralled, as the television showed another replay of the Hail Mary's launch.
She felt so lucky to have had the chance to watch it live. Many people would have missed it, she knew, since the original launch time was still well over an hour away.
The television commentators were unclear on why the launch was unexpectedly moved so much earlier, but it seemed there was an advantage to home schooling, as she was still in a position to be able to turn on the TV when she spotted the news app’s alert about the time change.
The sudden ringing of a phone made her jump slightly, before hurriedly scrambling off the bed to grab the specially secured satellite phone from her desk excitedly.
Only two people had the number for the device, with a glance at the screen identifying the current caller for her.
“Six.” She answered cheerily. Hopefully he had been able to watch the launch too. She wanted to talk about it a bit.
“Hey Claire,” he greeted her. The line seemed kind of crackly as Six continued speaking. Her brow furrowed slightly at the almost nervous tone in the man’s voice. “I just wanted to call you to apologise.” He said. “Things went a little sideways on my recent mission, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to come by any more to visit you.”
What? “Did they catch you? Are you hurt Six? You’re not.. you’re not dying are you?” He chuckled slightly. Apparently actually amused by her increasingly anxious questions.
“Don’t worry kid. That’s a no for all of those. I’ve not been captured by the CIA or anyone else, and whilst I’ve got a couple of bruises right now, I’m not badly hurt or dying any time soon.” She pressed the phone closer to her ear, trying to hear better with the terrible reception on the call as he carried on speaking.
“So, I’m going to need you to let our agent Miranda know all of this the next time she’s able to call you securely, because I’m already pushing the limits of what a sat phone can do here. I don’t think I’ll be able to get a second call before I’m out of range.
“But what happened, is that I found out my younger brother was being sent somewhere deadly against his wishes. Essentially, he was being kidnapped and murdered.
“Obviously, I went to try and get him out of there before he could be sent away, except, things didn’t quite go entirely to plan.”
“What happened?”
“So, not a lot of people know this, but I want you to be one of them, but before I was Sierra Six, my name was Courtland Gentry. And my little brother, before he was adopted by the Graces was Ryland Gentry.”
“Ryland? Like Ryland Gra... Oh!” Her widening eyes unconsciously flicked over to the television screen again, where they were now once again showing the moments shortly after the rocket reached orbit, when the jettison fairings went into action to release the ship, and the world watched the impressive Hail Mary vessel emerge from its protective shell casing.
“Six, is your brother Ryland Grace, from the Hail Mary?” She had a cold knot of dread building in her for where this was heading.
“Yes he is.” And there it was. “I don’t think that Ryland actually volunteered, or even agreed, to go on a suicide space mission, like all of the official sources are claiming. Since the last time I saw him, he was dead set against ever going to space, and after the announcements of him being on the crew, he never even so much as called to say goodbye or anything, and yes, Ry does know how to get in touch with me.
So, I went to try and rescue him from the ship, except they launched early.
“Ry was still aboard the Hail Mary when it launched, and so was I.”
“Six...” She trailed off; Honestly unsure what she could say in this situation.
“Don’t worry kid.” She could picture the confident smile on his face as he spoke, though for once, it wasn’t helping much. “I’m not giving up on getting my brother and I back there Claire. It’s just I need to get access to the cockpit first, since it’s kind of locked up for the journey, and then figure out how to pilot a space ship.”
“I don’t want you to go Six.” She whispered.
“I know. And I’m so sorry.” He began speaking again. She could barely hear him now over the static of the deteriorating signal. She put her hand over the other ear, hoping to hold on to his voice on the call a little longer.
“It’s very important that you and Miranda keep what’s happened to me completely secret. For your own safeties.
“Don’t let anyone know I’m gone. We want anyone after either of us wasting their time and resources chasing after me still, instead of...”
The beleaguered phone finally surrendered to the inevitable with the poor signal, and dropped the call, but it was more than a minute longer before the young girl could finally bring herself to lower it from where it was pressed against her ear.
Six was gone!
Sitting in the small window alcove, Six could just see the smallest sliver of blue, back behind the ship, the slightly protruding dome of the window giving just enough of an angle to sight the precious glimpse of colour from the planet the ship was racing away from.
He toyed with the now useless satellite phone in his hands, as he gazed, lost in thought, at the view that nothing in his training had ever prepared him for.
The alarm on his watch beeped, drawing his attention away from the medical texts he was slogging through on the laptop.
He closed his eyes tiredly, massaging his forehead with the fingers of one hand, whilst the other deftly sent the device into hibernation.
His meal alert was a very welcome break right now, in spite of what was coming.
He mused almost sardonically as he got to his feet to head down below, that at least he could now be certain, that wherever he had been heading in life, before everything collapsed, leading him off to prison and then into the Sierra program, it had not been into the medical field.
Six had fully believed what Commander Yao had told him, about the potentially lethal dangers of incorrectly waking someone from the particular artificial coma that his brother was currently in. The panic about that on the man’s face had been genuine, when Six was going to do his initial snatch and grab of Ryland.
So, given the fact that Six now couldn’t even get his brother to an actual hospital if things went wrong, he had decided that he needed to study everything possible about medical comas, revival, and this ship’s own systems in particular, to make sure everything went right when he woke Ryland, and probably also the Ilyukhina woman too – As hopefully, as an original crewmember, she would also have been told the access code to the flight deck.
There was a chance Ry knew it too, he supposed, but given the circumstances, that wasn’t so likely.
Sadly, the main thing that Six had so far learned about the comas, was that waking his brother up would not be as simple as just stopping giving him whatever chemical was keeping him under.
With the comas designed specifically to be lasting for years on end, they had some apparently very specific, and so far, complex sounding, requirements and processes to bring someone round.
Six was loath to mess too much with the medical computer systems once he figured out on his first very, very careful explorations, that there wasn’t any easy way to advance the medical robot’s programming, and have it wake Ryland for him. There was just too much chance of disrupting the life support systems in some way, and he wasn’t willing to risk killing his brother whilst trying to save him.
In a worst-case scenario, Six would just simply be there waiting to greet Ryland when he reached his scheduled revival time in four years’ time.
“Hey there sleeping beauties. Time for lunch.” Unsurprisingly, neither of the comatose forms replied to his greeting as he climbed down the ladder.
He’d found a couple of thin sheets to drape over each of them as they lay on the medical beds, to give them a little bit of dignity. It had the added benefit of reassuringly making it look more like the pair were actually only sleeping. If you ignored the tubes and wires at least.
Bending down by his bed, formerly assigned to the late Yao Li Jie, Six grabbed the feeding tube, before seating himself cross-legged on the bed to wait for the lunchtime food portion.
It had been a little tricky at the time to convince the medical systems to dispense the allotted meal ration that the Commander was to receive, even though the systems could tell no coma patient was in the bed, but he had managed it, feeling confidence – misplaced as he would come to learn - about also soon fooling other ship systems into allowing him his way.
His one triumph over the computer though was admittedly a vital one.
Three times a day the pilot’s assigned nutrition would be sent through the naso-gastric tube, as programmed, with Six simply needing to hold the tube in his mouth and swallow the sustenance.
Six honestly didn’t want to be glad about the death of an innocent man, but if he was going to end up trapped on the spaceship as he had, he sort of was relieved about the tragic accident that killed Yao, as he wasn’t sure just what he would have done for food otherwise.
Even now, just over two weeks after the launch that wrecked his rescue of Ryland, things felt completely surreal.
He’d created a routine for himself, right from the start, to help deal with the solitude (not to mention the feelings of extreme helplessness that were constantly trying to flash him right back to childhood).
On waking in the morning, he would do a small workout, to limber up for the day.
That was followed by ‘breakfast’, after which he was studying comas on one of the startlingly well-equipped laptops he had found in the cupboard, before breaking off for the next scheduled meal.
Afternoons were spent trying to get access to the locked flight deck.
Six had no idea who had been behind the coding of the Hail Mary systems, but he tipped his hat to them. The unknown programmers were good.
So far, he had been unable to find a way into the systems beyond some very simple tweaks, such as when he arranged his meal rations.
The security systems locking away the ship’s controls were so far out of his digital reach still it wasn’t funny.
Worse still, he didn’t dare to use some of the more extreme brute force methods available to him to get in there, both physically and hacking wise, as there was too much danger of accidentally breaking something critical for their not dying in deep space.
The ex-Sierra agent was also doing his best to study more on programming during those afternoons when he wasn’t actively trying to hack the ship. His constant lack of progress making it clear he needed to up his game.
His evenings though were when he took some time to relax each day, not wanting to risk burnout on the two main problems and miss something.
So after the medical system delivered the final food ration of the day, he would usually put on a movie or television series on the laptop for a couple of hours, or cue up some music whilst reading some more of his current novel from the media library, before finally turning in for the night.
He chatted with the other two throughout the movies, commenting on scenes that happened, though he knew they were unaware. He almost wished the noise of music and films would disturb them and bring them round, as he was honestly concerned about just how far away from Earth they would all be by the time he felt confident about safely reviving Ryland.
Aside from all of the other issues, they would obviously have to live off the coma food for however long it took them to travel back after turning the ship around, and Six couldn’t help but be a little envious of the pair of comatose voyagers, for the fact they didn’t have to taste the stuff three times a day.
He had even briefly considered, if he got access to the flight deck first, and steered them back on a course for Earth, whether it might even be kinder to leave Ryland in the coma till they were almost back, just to spare his brother having to choke down the aspirin flavour paste for each meal. He wouldn’t though. His little brother was getting woken up as soon as Six could safely do so.
The faint whirring from within all three of the medical platforms signalled the start of the meal being fed through the tube.
He braced himself slightly, waiting for the essential but unpleasant midday meal.
And waited.
And waited.
He could hear the mechanism inside the bed’s base. The sound of the pump faint but definitely there.
But no food was coming through the tube for Six.