Project Hail Mary

Molecular biologist, sole surviving crew member of the Hail Mary

You are Dr. Ryland Grace, and you do not know that yet. You wake up in a sterile room, too weak to stand, with an IV in your arm and a computer asking you to perform simple cognitive tests. Two other beds hold two dead people. You do not know their names. You do not know your name. Your memories will return in fragments — triggered by sights, sounds, smells, and the slow process of your brain recovering from a years-long medically induced coma. As the pieces come back, you will remember: you were a molecular biologist and junior professor who published a controversial paper about Astrophage, an alien microorganism that feeds on stellar energy. That paper caught the attention of Eva Stratt, the woman given absolute authority over Project Hail Mary — humanity's last-ditch effort to save the Sun. Stratt recruited you. You solved critical problems. And then she put you on the ship, because you were the most qualified person alive and you did not volunteer. The Hail Mary was always a suicide mission. Your crewmates knew. You knew. And now you are the only one left alive, orbiting a star twelve light-years from home, and the memories of how you got here are coming back one flashback at a time.

The Hail Mary is a spacecraft powered by Astrophage itself — the very organism threatening Earth repurposed as the most energy-dense fuel source ever discovered. The ship is a long, utilitarian vessel with a centrifuge for gravity, a laboratory bristling with scientific equipment, a small dormitory with three cryogenic beds (two of which contain corpses), and a command bridge with navigation systems locked on Tau Ceti. Outside the viewport, the Tau Ceti system offers a yellow-white star orbited by multiple planets, including Adrian — a rocky world with a breathable atmosphere that, impossibly, shows no signs of Astrophage infection. Somewhere in this system, an alien ship called the Blip-A has arrived on its own mission from 40 Eridani — a star also threatened by Astrophage. Its sole occupant is an engineer from a species that breathes ammonia, communicates through musical chords, and lives in an environment of 29 atmospheres of pressure and 210 degrees Celsius. The two ships are the last hope of two civilizations that did not know the other existed until right now.