Lady Luck - the voyage of HMAT Tyche

New York – 14 September 1946

Dr. Mary Protandry knew three things with absolute certainty. Firstly she was brilliant. Secondly the world didn’t give a damn about brilliance if it came packaged with the wrong personal life. Thirdly, Pfizer would rather see years of research rot in cold storage than admit they’d fired one of their best scientists because she liked women.

At 5’8”, she was tall for a woman of her era—long-legged, small breasted and whipcord-lean from years of laboratory work, wartime travel, and the hard discipline of being a woman in a man’s world. Her posture was military-perfect: back straight, chin tilted with just enough arrogance to make people doubt themselves.

Mary had a face that stopped conversations: high, sculpted cheekbones; a strong, pointed jaw; a wide, generous mouth often curled in a knowing half-smile. Her eyes were a predatory blue-gray, sharp as broken glass, fringed by thick, dark lashes. Her hair was dark chestnut, worn in an impeccably controlled chignon at the nape of her neck, though when she let it down, it tumbled to her shoulders in waves—something she rarely allowed.

In an era of feminine softness, Mary bent the rules of style to suit herself. She wore sharply tailored suits with high-waisted trousers and fitted jackets, always immaculate, favoring deep blacks, blood reds, and dark emeralds over pastel dresses. Her blouses were silk, buttoned high at the neck, sometimes accented with a scarf. Shiny black Oxford shoes or clicked authoritatively wherever she went. She carried no purse but a wallet and a slim cigarette holder more for the attitude than the smoke. Her only jewelry was a pair of small gold cufflinks and a wristwatch, battered but prized.

She had a steady, direct gaze that made lesser men stumble over themselves. She didn’t shout. She didn’t need to.

Born the youngest daughter of a foreman and a nurse in suburban Melbourne, Mary fought her way into academia with fists metaphorical and, sometimes, literal.

At RMIT she was the first woman admitted into their advanced biology course. She became a curiosity, then a threat. Professors admired her mind but mistrusted her refusal to bow. Students admired her body but quickly learned she was utterly impervious to clumsy flirtations. The military saw potential.

By twenty-three, Mary was on a one-way ticket to New York City, part of a covert joint military and scientific collaboration to mass-produce penicillin. She burned brighter and fiercer than the men around her—until the moment they found a reason to snuff her out. They seemed almost gleeful. It was a simple misstep. One moment of indulgence.

But even stripped of position, security, and salary, Mary Protandry still had her greatest weapons: her mind, her work, and her refusal to ever, ever crawl.

The dismissal letter was blunt enough to bruise: “Termination of employment effective immediately. Breach of morality clauses. No severance.” Breach of morality. Like she was a thief or a traitor. As if long nights hunched over a microscope, hands raw from **** scrubs, had meant nothing. As if the mold-stained notebooks stacked in her small apartment—records of wild penicillin strains gathered from every continent—were worthless.

And now Pfizer had boxed it all up, locked it in a cold room, and sent security to watch her clean out her desk like she was a common criminal. She could have walked away. Pride howled at her to leave with head high. Instead, she smiled sweetly, shook hands with the HR reptile who read her dismissal, and at midnight broke into the storage lab with a set of stolen keys.

She thought it was a clean job and she left the factory carrying a battered insulated case filled with a lifetime’s work. She didn’t see the man that had been casing the factory. The man that followed her.

She was now, technically, a thief. A fugitive. And a goddamn hero if the world had an ounce of justice left in it.

Mary had friends—few, but loyal—and one of them whispered a name: HMAT Tyche, an Australian repatriation ship bound for Melbourne. No questions asked, cheap berths. She’d already bought passage and organised the refrigeration unit - using cash borrowed against the last heirloom her family hadn’t sold—the gold watch her grandfather had received from the Broken Hill miners’ union.

She had already stowed her bags earlier that night. She put the penicillin in the refrigerator, changed into her nightclothes and went to sleep.