Chapter Text
The sheer amount of airports anyone on the Science Lead panel had been in was, well, a lot . Granted, they could get through rather fast: they rarely had any luggage (for Stratt would never give them time to pack), and a mere wave of their Project Hail Mary or Petrova Task Force ID badges would get them through not only airport securities without further question but also really any door, ever.
It was relatively hard at first, especially when any of them were going alone. Signs were sometimes (or, in poor, monolingual Grace’s case, almost always) in languages the reader didn’t understand, and, though airports are generally pretty easy to follow in their design, getting lost on their way to their gate was not a rare circumstance at all. But as time went on, they learned they could just go with the crowd and flash their ID badge, and whomever it was they had to pass through the security check of would begrudgingly let them through.
This time, Grace felt that he was lucky in that the signs were in French (because, despite his having failed every French class he could remember taking, some words coincided with English, or the few French words he knew, or with his vague and really only scientific knowledge of Latin).
He, however, also felt helplessly un lucky in that he was travelling with Lokken .
She walked ahead of him, in a way that toed the line between walking and stomping, toward what she told him was their gate. Grace didn’t know if high-speed personal jets often landed and docked at huge intercontinental airports, but, then again, China doesn’t often give entire aircraft carriers to a mad woman running the world under the threat of extinction due to aliens, so…
Lokken stopped abruptly, and Grace almost walked into her. If he had been carrying luggage (which he wasn’t; he didn’t have time between when Stratt told him he’d be, once again, flying across the world and when he was shoved onto a plane), then he would have walked into her. He supposed it was good he didn’t have any luggage on him: he didn’t want Lokken socking him. Again.
“Keep up!” she insisted. That was followed by something in Norwegian that Grace had heard before. He didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded like “did swim”, and it sounded like an insult. She then turned on her heel, causing her long braid to swing around and miss thwacking Grace by mere inches, and continued stomping along. Grace walked beside her now, though in a more calm gait.
“Gate thirty, right?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
Grace looked up at the signs. Roman-Arabic numerals were seemingly the only recognizable and understandable things on most signs, besides, again, the occasional word that meant the same thing in different languages. The long hallway decided to, for whatever reason, fork. Gates one through twenty were straight forward, but gates twenty-one through forty were to their right. Lokken kept on marching past the fork. Grace stopped walking, trying to figure out how gate thirty could be straight ahead.
Lokken stomped a few more paces before turning around. She said something under her breath that included “Americansk” before stomping back over to him. “What’s wrong?” she asked him.
“Gate thirty’s that way,” he replied, pointing first at the sign, then at the indicated hallway.
“Right,” she said, followed by something Grace didn’t catch. “Well?” She waved him along. “Go.”
Grace followed the crowd through the airport, Lokken next to him. She had lost the stomping pep in her step, and was now walking like most normal people would. She righted a strand of hair that had fallen out of the tight braid, then she spoke, not meeting Grace’s eye.
“Why are you here again?” she asked.
“What?”
She huffed out a breath irritably. “Why are you here!?” she repeated.
“I don’t understand. Why are you here?”
“Because Stratt ordered me to be here.”
“So am I.”
“But Stratt actually listens to what you say! She consults you !”
“I… I guess so. Kind of. She consults and listens to other people as well, though…” Grace replied, a tad sheepishly.
“So why don’t you convince her to let you stay on the Vat and do your work?”
Grace shrugged, and they both veered over to the bored-looking flight attendant at the desk in front of gate thirty. She sat up in her seat, greeted them with one of the few words Grace knew in French – “Bonjour” –, and then she said something incomprehensible to Grace, but Lokken supposedly knew what it meant. She fished in her pocket for a moment; Grace pulled out his wallet. They both, simultaneously, pulled out PHM ID badges and showed them to the attendant, whose eyebrows rose.
“Ah,” she said. “Projet Dernière Chance, oui?” She adjusted her glasses, looked at their ID badges, looked at the computer in front of her, looked at them, and spoke disheartened words: “Votre aéro s'appelle ‘Stratt’. Bien. Vas y.” She gestured toward the connector-hallway leading to the plane.
“Merci,” Lokken said as she walked on into the hallway. Grace didn’t trust himself to pronounce it right, so he just thanked her with a nod and a smile.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, getting back to their conversation, “I don’t really mind it.”
Lokken looked at him as if he’d just insulted her mother or something. A lot of people working for Stratt held a strong dislike for her, but not for the same reason most people disliked her. No, they just didn’t generally appreciate being dragged to and fro across the world with no prior warning. Lokken was definitely one of those people since day one of working for Stratt.
“Well,” he corrected himself, “it’s certainly not ideal. But I’ve gotten used to it, I guess.”
“Hmph,” said Lokken. They entered the plane, and the captain, who had been talking eagerly with the flight attendant, greeted them, then went to the cockpit. The flight attendant closed the airplane’s door, then said something into a walkie-talkie.
“I don’t see why you wouldn’t just convince Stratt to let you stay behind,” Lokken said, picking the seat that could be the farthest from another, if the other passenger was to pick said seat. Grace dropped into said seat. But the plane was relatively small, and they were still well within earshot of each other, being some five metres away.
“I think you vastly overestimate how much power I have,” Grace said. “I’ve asked before, and she turned me down.”
Lokken snarled at the air, said something under her breath. Then she told him, “Just refuse to… you know until she lets you stay.”
“Just refuse to… what? Work? I do want Hail Mary to launch, despite it all.”
Lokken waved a hand at the air. “Oh, you know what I mean.”
Grace contemplated everything the “you know” bit could mean, but didn’t come up with any good answers. Finally, he just said, “I really don’t.”
Lokken said something in Norwegian. He was pretty sure she was invoking God. “I mean refuse to sleep with her!”
The flight attendant froze for a fraction of a second before going back to checking something in a cabinet Grace couldn’t see into.
Grace froze, too. But for longer, in his case. Finally, after multiple seconds, he said, “Pardon!?”
Lokken tilted her head to the side once, not meeting his eye.
“I’m not–! We’re not–! Ugh!” Grace gritted his teeth for a moment.
Lokken shrugged, looking out her window at the tarmac. “Well… You two seem like you…”
“We don’t!” Grace insisted.
A small smile grew on Lokken’s face. It was a smile of satisfaction, even of relief. “Alright.”
“You seem happy .”
“No. Just relieved that Stratt doesn’t have to deal with you.”
Grace glared at her, then crossed his arms and looked out his window like an annoyed child. He looked out the corner of his eye to see if his pouting made any impression on Lokken, who seemingly hadn’t noticed. She seemed happy, even. Her spirits were lifted at least an inch or so out of hell.
“Why are you happy about this?” Grace asked her again.
“In general? I’m not.”
“No, why are you so happy Stratt and I aren’t. You know…” A pause. “You’re not just relieved for Stratt.”
Her cheeks pinked just a tad. Grace assumed it was the shift in lighting as the plane took off in the sunset. “Sure I am.”
Grace rolled his eyes, looked out his window, and realised he had no clue where they were flying to. He took out his phone to text Stratt and ask, but he already had no signal. He settled in for the (probably long) ride as Lokken, in the corner of his eye, smiled at the sky.