She looked up as I entered.

“Ah. Dr. Grace. You look refreshed.” She gestured to her left. “There’s food on the credenza.”

And there was! Rice, steamed buns, deep-fried dough sticks, and an urn of coffee. I rushed over and helped myself. I was hungry as heck.

I sat at the conference table with a full plate and cup of coffee.

“So,” I said with a mouth full of rice. “You gonna tell me why we’re on a Chinese aircraft carrier?”

“I needed an aircraft carrier. The Chinese gave me one. Well, they lent it to me.”

I slurped my coffee. “There was a time when something like that would surprise me. But… you know… not anymore.”

“Commercial air travel takes too long and is prone to delays,” she said. “Military aircraft work on whatever schedule they want and travel supersonically. I need to be able to get experts from anywhere on Earth in the same room with no delays.”

“Ms. Stratt can be extremely persuasive,” said Minister Voigt.

I shoveled more food into my mouth. “Blame whoever gave her all that authority,” I said.

Voigt chuckled. “I was part of that decision, actually. I am Germany’s minister of foreign affairs. The equivalent of your country’s secretary of state.”

I paused my chewing. “Wow,” I managed to say. I gulped down the mouthful. “You’re the most high-ranking person I’ve ever met.”

“No, I’m not.” He pointed to Stratt.

She put a piece of paper in front of me. “This is what led to the Hail Mary Project.”

“You’re showing him?” Voigt said. “Now? Without getting him a clearance—”

Stratt put her hand on my shoulder. “Dr. Ryland Grace, I hereby grant you top-secret clearance to all information pertaining to Project Hail Mary.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Voigt said. “There are processes and background checks to—”

“No time,” Stratt said. “No time for any of that stuff. That’s why you put me in charge. Speed.”

She turned toward me and tapped the paper: “These are readings from amateur astronomers all over the world. They show something very important.”

The page had columns of numbers. I noticed the column titles: “Alpha Centauri,” “Sirius,” “Luyten 726-8,” and so on.

“Stars?” I said. “These are all stars in our local cluster. And wait—did you say amateur astronomers? If you can tell the German minister of foreign affairs what to do, why don’t you have professional astronomers working for you?”

“I do,” Stratt said. “But this is historical data collected over the past several years. Professional astronomers don’t study local stars. They look at faraway things. It’s the amateurs who log data on local stuff. Like train spotters. Hobbyists in their backyards. Some of them with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment.”

I picked up the paper. “Okay, so what am I looking at?”

“Luminosity readings. Normalized across thousands of amateur-generated data sets and corrected for known weather and visibility conditions. Supercomputers were involved. The point is this: Our sun is not the only star that’s getting dimmer.”