“So what did he do?”

Lokken paused and her lip wobbled a bit. She steeled herself and pressed on. “He got a replica generator—one of the ones we use for ground testing. He modified the feed pump and IR lights to force that crazy edge case to happen. He wanted to activate an entire nanogram of Astrophage at once and see how it damaged the generator.”

“Wait,” I said. “One nanogram isn’t enough to blow up a building. At worst it could melt a little bit of metal.”

“Yeah,” said Lokken. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “So you know how we store tiny quantities of Astrophage, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “In little plastic containers suspended in propylene glycol.”

She nodded. “When DuBois requisitioned one nanogram of Astrophage from the research center’s quartermaster, they gave him one milligram by mistake. And since the containers are the same and the quantities are so small, he and Shapiro had no way of knowing.”

“Oh God.” I rubbed my eyes. “That’s literally a million times the heat-energy release than they were expecting. It vaporized the building and everyone in it. God.”

Stratt shuffled her papers. “The simple truth is this: We just don’t have the procedures or experience to manage Astrophage safely. If you asked for a firecracker and someone gave you a truck full of plastic explosive, you’d know something was wrong. But the difference between a nanogram and a milligram? Humans just can’t tell.”

We were all silent for a moment. She was right. We’d been playing around with Hiroshima-bomb levels of energy like it was nothing. In any other scenario it would have been madness. But we didn’t have a choice.

“So are we going to delay the launch?” I asked.

“No, we’ve talked it over and we all agree: We can’t delay the Hail Mary’s departure. It’s assembled, tested, fueled, and ready to go.”

“It is the orbit,” Dimitri said. “It is in tight orbit at 51.6 degrees’ inclination so Cape Canaveral and Baikonur can get at it easy. But is also in shallow orbit which is decaying. If it does not set out within next three weeks, we have to send entire mission up just to re-boost it to higher orbit.”

“The Hail Mary will leave on schedule,” said Stratt. “Five days from now. The crew will have two days of preflight checks, so that means the Soyuz has to launch in three days.”

“Okay,” I said. “What about the science expert? I’m sure we have hundreds of volunteers all over the world. We can give the selectee a crash course in the science they’ll need to know—”

“The decision’s been made,” Stratt said. “Really, the decision made itself. There’s no time to train a specialist in everything they need to know. There’s just too much information and research to learn. Even the most brilliant scientists wouldn’t be able to glean all of it in just three days. And remember, only about one in seven thousand people have the gene combination to be coma-resistant.”