Stratt's Vat

Stratt's Vat, originally the Chinese aircraft carrier People's Liberation Army Navy Gansu, was the mobile headquarters and primary laboratory for Project Hail Mary. Operating in the South China Sea, it was the site where Eva Stratt assembled an international team of scientists and engineers to develop the Astrophage-powered interstellar mission, and its isolated location was chosen to contain the catastrophic risk of accidental Astrophage detonation.

Origin and Purpose

The vessel was lent to Stratt by the Chinese government after she requested an aircraft carrier for her work. The ship's crew and the international science team began calling it "Stratt's Vat," a nickname that stuck despite objections from the sailors aboard. Stratt chose to operate at sea because the experiments involved breeding and handling Astrophage, a substance with immense energy density. She explained that if even a couple of kilograms of Astrophage were accidentally activated, the resulting explosion would be larger than the largest nuclear bomb ever made—the Tsar Bomba, a fifty-megaton device created by Russia. The carrier's remote ocean location ensured that any accident would not eradicate cities.

Key Activities and Experiments

Stratt's Vat housed the initial Astrophage breeding efforts. Ryland Grace's first breeder prototype, a thirty-foot-long metal pipe with control equipment, was built and tested on the carrier, successfully generating a few micrograms of Astrophage per hour. The ship's nuclear reactor provided the heat needed for the breeding process, though it could not generate enough to speed the reaction further. The carrier also hosted the first test of the spin drive, conducted by Dimitri Komorov. The test used twenty micrograms of Astrophage and released 1.8 billion Joules of light energy in one hundred microseconds, melting a metric ton of silicon metal. The entire science team, including Grace, Stratt, Komorov, Dr. Lokken, and Dr. Lamai, worked aboard the carrier, and it was the site where the crew of the Hail Mary—Commander Yáo Li-Jie, Engineer Olesya Ilyukhina, and Science Specialist Martin DuBois—first met Stratt and the project leads.

Legal and Operational Authority

Stratt's authority extended to the carrier itself. When the Intellectual Property Alliance sued Project Hail Mary for copyright infringement, Stratt appeared in a U.S. federal court and presented an international treaty granting her personal immunity from prosecution for any crime anywhere on Earth, as well as a preemptive pardon from the President of the United States. She stated that she had the U.S. Army at her disposal, and armed soldiers entered the courtroom to escort her out. The carrier was also the site of the decision to use nuclear weapons to release methane from Antarctica, a plan devised by climatologist François Leclerc to buy time for the Hail Mary mission. Stratt ordered 241 nuclear weapons buried along a fissure in Western Antarctica, detonating them simultaneously to melt ice and release trapped methane into the atmosphere.

Significance

Stratt's Vat was the physical and organizational center of the global effort to save humanity from the Astrophage crisis. It was where the key technologies—Astrophage breeding, the spin drive, and the mission's crew selection—were developed and tested. The carrier's isolated location, its transformation into a floating laboratory, and the absolute authority Stratt wielded aboard it all underscore the extraordinary measures taken under the pressure of an existential threat. The vessel itself became a symbol of the project's scale and the willingness to operate outside normal legal and political constraints.